> rm -f_

Brandon Paddock, a Microsoft Employee, posted on his blog the list of new hotkeys for Windows 7 Beta. I decided to test out some of these hotkeys on my Windows 7 box at work.  Here are some of my findings.

The zoom command, Win++, is just clunky.  Why not implement a similar zoom interface as OS X? Why have it launch an App that takes upwards of five to ten seconds to launch?  Win+Space is just useless.  It provides you a peek of the desktop, but you can’t interact with the desktop at all.  Win+D already hides all open applications, why the need for a peek?

There are a few hotkeys worth mentioning though, starting with Win+P. This will be extremely useful for those with Notebooks. Instead of searching for the function key (which is different on each brand of notebooks), you can now decide how you want to display the desktop when connected to an external monitor with a standardized hotkey. Finally, Win+Shift+Left/Right allows you to switch between multiple displays. Previously with multiple displays, if you have your windows maximized, without any third party solutions, you would have to: resize the window, drag to desired monitor, and then maximize it again. Seems petty, but when you do it a lot, it gets annoying. Those are just a few of the new hotkeys, which ones do you like so far or look like you will use in the future?

Just the other day I ordered a Western Digital WD10EADS 1TB Caviar Green Drive from Newegg. Today Western Digital announced the first 2 TB internal drive, it will sell for $299. Specs include 32MB of cache, a four-platter design (500GB per platter), and 400Gb/in2 areal density. A hands-on preview can be found at Hot Hardware. Keep in mind when planning to purchase a drive of this capacity, you should really consider purchasing a second for redundancy.

For those of you who have been waiting for iLife ‘09. It looks like it will be shipping tomorrow for $79. A family pack (5 Licenses) is also available for $99. If you purchased a Mac on or after January 6th, you can upgrade for $10.

Working on a few things, it’s been a pretty busy week. Hope to have a few posts up soon, new to all this blogging stuff. At work we went over this years projects, and it’s finally happening. We’re finally going to start integrating the Macs with Active Directory. So there is that going on… I’ve also started studying for the Apple Certified System Administrator certification. Not sure what’s taken me so long to get started on that. Oh and yesterday I started reading up on Python, fun times indeed. 
Andy Hertzfeld
25 Years of Mac

I’ve always had a hard time keeping track of all my projects and my daily to-do’s.  That was until I started using Cultured Code’s application Things.  Things is based on GTD (Getting Things Done), an action management method.  GTD’s basic principle is that you need to move tasks out of your mind and capture them to an external source.  Thus, the mind is free to focus without distraction. read more »

I started using Google Chrome when it was first announced and I remember be a bit put off by the fact that they did not release it for OS X.  According to this article, the Mac (and Linux) version of Chrome are in very early stages, but should be out before the end of the first half of 2009. Keep your fingers crossed! You can sign up here to be informed when Google Chrome for the Mac will be available for download.

Today I decided to download the beta of Windows 7, Microsoft’s next major Operating System.  The download process was quick and simple, I only waited about 30 minutes for the download to complete.   One side note, I did have to do the entire download process on my PC under Internet Explorer – it wouldn’t work any other way.   After the download completed, I began to contemplate which machine I wanted to install Windows 7 on.  I decided to go with my MacBook Pro and to install it under VMware Fusion.

I know that VMware doesn’t fully support Windows 7 yet, but I didn’t want to install it on my main PC at work or home.   Parallels just updated their software for Windows 7 (Experimental), however Fusion is still my choice for virtualization on the Mac.   After launching Fusion I chose Windows 2008 server as my Operating System and started the install.  The installation process could not have been easier.  The entire install took roughly around twenty minutes, though I didn’t really keep track of time when the install was running.

So I’m done with the install and Windows 7 is now running on my Mac via VMware Fusion.  Make sure to install the VMware Tools, otherwise the VM will act up.  It looks like all the necessary hardware devices were installed properly. I have to say even as a Virtual OS, 7 seems much faster than Vista does.  I’ll write more on my findings in a few days, after I spend more time with Windows 7.

Palm announced their new phone at CES today, called the Pre and it’s looking pretty good so far. The Pre is running on a WebKit based OS called webOS, which allows you to integrate all of your web services into one location. All apps written for the phone are based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript so it should be pretty easy for people to create apps for it.

Initial appearances are very simplistic, however that changes once you expose the slide out QWERTY keyboard. The user interface is touch based, a finger swipe will activate pre-programmed actions. It also looks like they’ve finally abandoned the stylus!

Probably the most intriguing aspect of the phone is what they call Synergy. The Pre gathers contacts from all of your sites and organizes them into a single list. It has dupe checking, so you won’t have multiple contacts (does the same with your calendar). So far it looks like Palm has made a decent phone, but why Sprint? You can view hands-on videos here. Oh yeah, it also charges wirelessly via an optional dock!

As I’ve said earlier, I’m really looking forward to using iWork ‘09 and iWork.com. I have moved completely away from using any Microsoft applications for my day-to-day routines. Ever since Office 2008 came out Pages, Numbers and Keynote have slowly taken over my dock and knocked Word, PowerPoint and Excel out. read more »

I have to say that was probably the worst Keynote I have followed in a long time.

Things I Liked:
1. iWork ‘09
2. Battery Concept for 17-inch MacBook Pro

Things I did not Like:
1. I don’t care about the new iLife features
2. Non-removable battery in the 17-inch MacBook Pro
3. NO NEW MAC MINI!!!

More thoughts later on…

UPDATED:
I’m really starting to think that the Keynote was underwhelming for a reason. Apple stated that this would be their last Macworld keynote, and that they will be moving to town hall events for future announcements. Could there be an announcement just around the corner? Could they have bored us to death with iLife updates because they want us to stop discussing and wondering why they no longer want to do large keynote presentations? What do you think?