Head over to MacMall.com before 28th August and get Snow Leopard for USD 24.99 (with shipping to South Africa for USD 30.05).
Snow Leopard will be released on 28th August and currently there is no official word from Core (the South African Apple distributor) when Snow Leopard will be available and how much it will cost. Rumors indicate a local release around middle of September and you will certainly not be able to get your copy for under ZAR 250,00.
Microsoft released the latest Office:Mac update. It includes a number of improvements (especially speed and stability) for Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
The horrible Exchange client, Entourage, is still not capable of properly managing calendaring and synchronizing events with an Exchange server. This will be probably my last update to Office:Mac as come September, Snow Leopard will support Exchange out of the box and therefore will allow me to also switch over to iWork ’09 which pretty much does everything M$ does, but just cheaper.
I missed that Logitech released the latest version (7.6) of their Harmony remote software for the Mac.
I have not updated my Harmony 895 and remote extender in a while (must have been 6 months) and did notice that the firmware on both was bumped up (probably to support the PS3 bluetooth remote extender). This was also the first time, that I was able to update the firmware and settings without a glitch (no more safe-mode requirement on the remotes)
Microsoft just released a new update for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac which included numerous fixes to stability & performance. This is almost a mandatory update as it addresses significant bugs in almost all Office components.
Users experiencing crashes in all Office applications will be glad to know that this has been fixed across the board and Microsoft has also fixed a date issue in charts displayed in Word & PowerPoint.
Six issue areas were corrected or improved in Word 2008 specifically, many of which are conversion-related (between various Word versions) and one involved a macro-glitch may have had a nasty impact in a multi-platform shop (as it lay waste to VBA macros in some circumstances).
Eight groups of issues in Excel 2008 have been addressed including a formula bug that you may not have even noticed (formulas were not executed properly under a few scenarios). PowerPoint 2008 is not nearly as sluggish as it has been and you can more confidently sleep/wake your Mac with Entourage 2008 running.
Apple has released Safari 4.0 for download. Compared to all other browsers, this must be the fastest browser in the market.
There are no major differences compared to the beta version. Most annoying part is, that Apple introduced the tab-bars at the top of the browser during the beta and now reverted the tab-position back to it’s original Safari 3.0 location (below the bookmarks).
This will be the most annoying part for people testing the beta, as it took time to get used to the new tab-location and now reverting back to the original one. Nonetheless, with Safari 4.0 movies on Youtube seem to play better (without hogging the CPU) and the coverflow functionality is awesome (especially when searching through the history).
If you are one of the many users who have followed my guidelines “OS X: Time Machine backup to Synology DS107+“, I strongly urge you to revisit the article.
A number of users reported some issues which require your attention:
In the digital age I have accumulated hundreds of music CDs which landed up ripped on my media server and iPods. Many songs don’t carry the proper ID-tags and carry the wrong artist, album or album art.
Having accumulated over 1500 songs results in a daunting task to sort out a media library. This is when I stumbled across Jaikoz which automates the tagging of your music collection in a smart way.
Continue reading “Automatically tag your music collection” »
Apple has just released 10.5.6 which includes a number of fixes – get your download (between 190MB – 390MB) from here or via the SoftwareUpdate.
The main fixes include:
In a previously related post. I detailed my “journey” into the getting no broadband anymore. iBurst’s service is still degraded.
Due to all the download issues and retries I eventually exhausted my 5GB-bundle and my 3.5GB top-up and was forced to topup by another 3.5GB last week to just make it through the month and be able to work. The 5GB are generally sufficient, but the last 30 days I spent downloading the same 120MB (non-resumeable) file 13(!!!) times as iBurst disconnected the network and download-speeds had been below 200kbps (this is KiloBits, which is 25KB/sec — compare that to 400KB/sec on ADSL or 250KB/sec on 3G).
The call-centre will find any excuse (check your MTU settings, have you rebooted your computer, did you install the latest Windows service-pack) for not helping you. They will then also send you to their own speedtest site, which shows a sugary-picture:
It’s just a pity, that I never download anything from iBurst’s website and a real-life scenario shows a picture like this:
Yes, most downloads, news etc originate from US and Europe, and this is where iBurst does not deliver broadband. Before we blame it on international traffic being congested, how come that ADSL- or 3G-users don’t have this problem. Clearly points out that iBurst is in trouble.
The recent site visit from the iBurst engineer, also did not prove an issue on my end of the wireless internetlessness. My signal quality is 100%, no frame-errors, perfect throughput on modem and router, but still speed issues.
During a further Speedtest this morning I noticed a brief improvement of speed (lasted between 6:00-6:30 and fluctuated between 300-500kbps) – after 6:30am however it was back to the previous state. Also still experiencing the same disconnects and fluctuation in speed.
iBurst speedtest: Upload 464kpbs / Download 138kpbs
Speedtest – Johannesburg: Upload 509kpbs / Download 253kpbs
Speedtest – Capetown: Upload 362kpbs / Download 123kpbs
Speedtest – NY: Upload 272kpbs / Download 92kpbs
You will notice, that the further you get away from your connected location the more speed drops. In contrast, this is not the case with other connection types. Hell, even pairing my Nokia N95 via Bluetooth on 3G is faster than iBurst. Still waiting for a resolution, as the problem is currently looked at by the network team. It has been confirmed during the site-survey, that the issue is not on my end though!
Update 2009-01-01: I had cancelled iBurst with 1st December 2008 and have been on ADSL (4mb) since November. iBurst did not really care addressing the problem and customer service is just horrible. Moving over to ADSL (via Webafrica) is the best thing I could have done. Downloads are coming in at 400KB/sec – not comparable to the 40KB/sec on iBurst.
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