The
meeting on April 7 covered a few new items and an update on something Jeff showed
us last month.
Among the several news items (which included NO news of Apple’s Tiger
release) was the update of the excellent beta website for Google’s mapping
service. While the site has yet to be finalized, they’ve added a
fantastic new feature which will show satellite imaging of the map if the photos
are available. Corpus Christi, for instance, has been photo-mapped in
separate sessions and the downtown/central area is in older and lower resolution
than the north and south sides of town. But with the areas which are in
the higher resolution, fantastic images show identifiable landmarks and detail
which will be useful for a great number of business or personal purposes. And
the satellite images are just as drag-able as the map images themselves. Searched-for
landmarks which might be ‘pinned’ by the Google search engine will
maintain them on the photo images and if you had the service give you directions,
the drawn line retains its position on the photo images. It’s a fantastic
update to the Google service. And it’s in beta.
Adobe
Acrobat 7
My
main intention for demonstration for the evening was to bring a scanner up and
show off what Acrobat can do with scanned items. Unfortunately, as I found out
early in the day (and a point I made strongly about the Mac mini) 256MB of RAM
is not enough to really run OSX and that is all we have currently in the ibook.
So, I had to explain what Acrobat could do. I was disappointed in that
because I’ve used the feature many times on my home Mac (which has over
1G of memory) and didn’t consider what a RAM limit could do. At
any rate, Acrobat remains the premier PDF or Portable Document Format creation
application. What is PDF? It’s a fairly universal format which can be
opened by any computer which has a recent PDF reader and these documents maintain
their formatting and text stylings on these other computers. Acrobat Reader
from Adobe is the most common and best reader I’ve used and the recent
upgrade to 7.0.1 makes it even better and faster.
Acrobat has OCR capabilities which allow you to make your PDF’s searchable
by keywords or phrases and if you’re one who has created a long doc or
catalogue in PDF format, this can be a great time saver. PDF documents are also
great for distribution of newsletters, contracts and any other document you
want to ‘lock down’ and keep unalterable. With the Pro version of
Acrobat, ‘live’ documents can be made with ‘fill in the blank’
formatting which allows for a person to fill out a form, print it and then have
in a very neat version for usage. Reader 7 allows for these types of docuements.
There is MUCH more that Acrobat can do and I hope to delve further into
that after I’ve upgraded the RAM on the iBook. You can check
it out yourself at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/main.html.
Griffin Technologies RadioShark
Second on the table was a not-exactly-new item from Griffin Technologies. A
small shark fin-shaped device which connects via USB and provides AM and FM
reception through your computer. The RadioShark is very useful in that it is
a radio for live listening, recording and even time-shifting of broadcasts.
With the software that comes with it:
one
finds a virtual radio placed on the desktop. With the station slider, it’s
like tuning an old fashioned stereo and the sound comes from your speakers as
you move across the band. Presets are easy to create and there’s
no apparent limit to the number of presets you can have other than the available
stations in your area. The seek button sends the station slider to the next
perceived station to the right of previous position.
Recording is simple: click the record button to start, click again to stop.
In the preferences, you can determine whether to save the recording in
AIFF or ACC (mp4) and where you want it saved. It’s also optional that
the file be saved into your iTunes library automatically. With the schedule
select, a panel opens which shows if you have any scheduled events and allows
for the creation and editing of new events. The EQ button opens another panel:
Which
shows a graphic display of frequencies active in the audio and also the equalizer
where you can tweak the sound to your liking.
Lastly, the time-shifting feature is like Tivo for the radio. Once enabled in the preference, your broadcast is then recorded to temp files on your hard drive. And the controls drop below the ‘radio’ interface to give you control of the features:
After
some audio is recorded, a slider which did not appear in this screenshot for
some reason will progress across the panel. You can slide it backwards to hear
previous audio or you can click the pause button and stop the sound for answering
a phone or talking without interruption. When you’re ready to listen
again, click play and the audio takes up where you stopped it and the live broadcast
is still being recorded for you to listen to as you can. You can use the
slider to move through commercials recorded and ‘catchup’ to live
sound again if you want to.
I got the RadioShark at CompUSA for about $70 and use it frequently for recording
live sound and then burning to CD for listening at home later. The recorded
audio is compatible with any audio editor which can manipulate ACC files (Amadeus
is excellent for this purpose) and Toast can burn the audio on the fly (converting
it to AIFF for you.)
Are there any drawbacks? A couple. One, the device does not ship with any kind
of external antenna and Griffen does not currently have one for sale. They recommend
plugging in a headphone extension and the wire will act as an antenna...not
very elegant for such an elegant device. Secondly, the reception is not as good
as a good home stereo. AM is very susceptable to device positioning and it has
to be rotated for best pickup on some stations. But for the convenience
and utility it provides, I feel it’s well worth the money.
The Mac mini vs. a budget Dell
At the last of the meeting, I did a Keynote presentation about the comparisons
between the new Mac mini and the cheap Dell Dimension 2400. While the
Dell definitely had the price advantage, once the extras stripped away and box
vs. box were compared, the Mac showed to be a much better overall bargain thanks
to the feature rich software and better hardware design. The Dell’s
only distinct advantages were that it had a desktop hard drive and it had 3
PCI expansion slots. But the question arises of who buys a budget computer with
the idea they are going to expand it? The mini had better video, firewire, and
it was basically a wash on the processor comparison and RAM.
But when you ignore the hardware, what’s the software? The Dell had WordPerfect
(while most would prefer Word) and limited or trial versions of Adobe Photo
Album, Paint Shop Pro Studio and they even tout including Acrobat Reader!! That’s
FREE! The mini includes iLife ‘05, AppleWorks 6, Quicken 2005, a
couple of games and all of it’s complete...no trial versions. The software
alone is worth more than 1/2 the hardware of the Dell! And comparing OSX
Panther to XP Home doesn’t wash. XP Home users will have to upgrade to
Pro to get all the same networking features to compare to Panther and that will
run them another $200 for that upgrade.
Comparing the Mini to the Dell just isn’t fair for the Dell.