Comments on: Mac Fiddling

By: Naquada

Naquada — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 12:53:34 +0000

it seems that you don't have to physically disable the Dashboard, just remove all widgets from the heads up display, as I have detailed here

By: Roo

Roo — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:37:41 +0000

Wow. Kyb, Andy, John: you’re all a bunch of geeks. In a good way.

By: Andy Piper

Andy Piper — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:59:34 +0000

I still have a RISC PC, but it hasn’t been booted in years. All my university essays were written in Ovation Pro on the A4. I suppose I might need the Windows version, if I want to get at them one day. I’m reasonably certain that there’s an A3000 in my mother’s loft, too.

By: John Scott

John Scott — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:30:12 +0000

I always wanted an A4 but ended up with a RISC PC. I find it amazing how many British programmers I meet who cut their teeth on ARM machines.

I still miss programming in ARM assembler.

By: kyb

kyb — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:24:26 +0000

Actually, in a fit of nostalgia triggered by your comment, I just installed Ovation Pro for Windows. It looks a bit clunky in windows, and perhaps a little unfinished, but wow, it’s fast, after MS Word and Open office, it’s like a breath of fresh air.

By: kyb

kyb — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:52:55 +0000

You had an A4? Cool. I broke the demonstration NewsPAD at it’s Acorn World debut. I was playing with it and a bit broke off….

By: Andy Piper

Andy Piper — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:37:25 +0000

Yay, kyb is an ex-RISC OS user too. I used to write RISC OS software, and my Acorn A4 got me happily through university.

That’s some serious customisation. I have admit I rarely use Dashboad, so I’m quite tempted to disable it now too.

ecto is not as good as WLW, agreed, but it’s OK. I am going to take another look at MarsEdit, too.

Lightroom. Lightroom. I’ll have to give you a hands-on tutorial.

By: kyb

kyb — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:18:18 +0000

On my old Acorn machine, I used to have all sorts of utilities along these lines, which would increase the boot up time, but would make no difference to the performance of the machine in use.

I’d hesitate to install any of these kinds of utilities on a windows machine (well, I can’t get by without strokeit, giving me gestures in explorer), because for some reason it seems like background tasks in Windows always end up going wrong and chewing on your CPU cores. (ITunes and IPodService.exe are by no means exempt from this). Perhaps that’s just because there are so many of them, and manufacturers seem to think you need at least 100 of them that you’ll never use. And why does realplayer or Dell think I need a customized “MessageCenter” task running the whole time?