Lots of new stuff to talk about…
- DS Browser
- I picked up the Opera web browser for the DS a couple of days ago. It’s an odd mixture. I think they’ve done an excellent job of tuning the experience for the DS’s two small screens + pen. However, it can’t handle a lot of content (Flash, PDF, etc.) so it’s still closer to being a “mobile” browser than a real one. It’s no fun entering data on the tap keyboard either; I haven’t tried using the character recognition. Over all, it’s an acceptable tool for light browsing in the bathtub — yes, I do this — but that’s about all.
- Level 70
- Last night, while helping Heila grind some quests, I ding’ed 70. I’d love to say it was at the end of some extremely heroic effort, but it happened while killing yet-another-Ogre. Heila didn’t even notice until I pointed it out when we were logging off. 🙁 Oh well, time to start saving for my flying mount.
- Missing Sync
- I sprung for Version 6 of Missing Sync for Palm OS last night. It has a few nice tweaks that together added enough value to make it worth the upgrade for me. The highlights are mostly new features for Treos: video import and export, call logging and SMS message history. The biggest win for me is the new Notebook app, which finally gives us Note import/export on the Mac.
- Parallels Desktop
- I have been using Parallels at work for a while now, so that I can run Lotus Notes on Windows, but use the Mac for everything else. There’s a new version out which again adds some nice tweaks, plus one huge win: 3d acceleration. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but my friend Pookzilla has tried Half-Life 2 on it and claims very positive results. I’m going to have to grab some of my back catalog of old games and try them out; It will be interesting to see how compatible it is.
I’m interested to see the DS browser; Sammy’s birthday is coming up next week, and he asked for it, and … I hope he gets it. wink wink. I don’t suppose it supports LEAP, so that there would be some hope of using it inside IBM; wouldn’t that be hoot, taking a DS to web surf doing a meeting with my VP!
w/r/t Parallels; the Mac version of Notes 7 works quite well; there’s really no need for a VM story just to run notes. I’ve been playing with VMWare’s beta for the Mac, which I like better than Parallels for using Linux, since it has the ‘toolbox’y kind of goodies – transitioning the mouse, etc
There was no evidence that it supported LEAP. I am running 128-bit WEP at home. To connect I typed in the hex digits of the code. I don’t know if it supports other authorization methods.
When I tried Notes 7 for Mac here in Ottawa, the Notes validation tasks that get run every night caused me to get locked out of the server twice in a row because I was running an “unsupported client”. Rather than fight, yet again, with the NotesAdmin to fix the problem, I just switched. To be honest, I’m quite happy with the solution: The Windows version of Notes is *much* snappier than the Mac version, both in startup time and responsiveness. Of course, it’s still the ol’ Windows L&F, but I can live with that.