Arthur Lockman's Blog

Adobe Releases Connect Pro for iPhone

2010-02-24T22:56:05Z

Ever since Adobe went public with the information that Flash CS5 would publish to iPhone, they have been promoting the impending appearance of Connect Pro for iPhone. Well, that day has finally arrived! Today, Apple approved and posted the download for ACP for iPhone, which you can access by looking for "Adobe" in the app store. What will this mean for web conferencing? Well to me at least, this tells the other web conferencing companies (WebEx, especially) that they no longer have the only web-conferencing solution on the iPhone. Connect is much more versatile, and now anyone can use it from anywhere.

All for now!

Interesting Site Usages

2010-02-13T19:28:00Z

While perusing my site usage today, I found something interesting in my Mac OS usages. Check this out.

Look at the very bottom of that chart. PPC 10.6. My first thought was "What is that? Snow leopard is intel only!" Then I remembered something. For the brief moments that we had our PowerPC XServe set up as a leopard server, it reported itself over FTP to be a 10.6 machine, long before 10.6 came out. Even now, with Tiger server, some components report to be 10.5 components. So, whatever google analytics is looking at on these PowerPC XServes, that component is a small part of Snow Leopard. If you see this, it is possible, so don't think someone has made a PPC port of Snow Leopard. It hasn't happened.

All for now!

Migrating from VirtualBox to Parallels Desktop

2010-02-13T18:23:08Z

Image via Wikipedia

So, this has been my past 24 hours. Migrating from VirtualBox to Parallels desktop. You'd think it'd be easy, right? Well, you'd be wrong. I first installed Parallels 4, which the website said could import a VirtualBox VM. Well, it lets you select the VM in finder, but says that the .vdi disk is unreadable or has no OS installed on it. I know that that's false, because VirtualBox boots from it just fine. So, I tried to use VirtualBox to export a OVF device, which Parallels also said it could import. No such luck. So, after several hours of looking, and an hour of exporting, I still had nothing.

My only solution was to migrate to Parallels 5. I installed this, and it imported the .vdi disk just fine. No problems, and no questions asked. As far as I could tell, everything was going swimmingly. That was until I started up windows in Parallels.

I turned on the VM, and immediately had problems. Windows was deactivated, and it wouldn't come back to life because it said that my windows key had been activated too many times. Well, there's an easy fix for that. Call the Activation Hotline, and tell the computer that answers that you went through a major hardware change. It reads out to you a new activation confirmation code, and windows activates just fine. And then, Parallels installed Parallels tools automatically and everything just worked.

Bottom line is: If your happy with VirtualBox and have no reason for switching, save yourself the trouble and stick with what works. But, if you have the strong urge to have that shiny new and speedy Parallels 5, then go for it. But don't blame me if things break; you have been warned of the troubles it can bring.

All for Now!

It would appear that...

2010-02-08T20:58:28Z

I just today upgraded to MT5. The dashboard takes a little getting used to, but other than that, it's almost exactly the same as MT4. There's just one thing that I don't like about it. So far as I can tell, the Keywords field is gone. It's just not there. Plus, they moved the publish button, and all the tags and stuff. I'll post a better review when I start to look deeper into it, to look out for more!

All for Now!

Does the iPad cost too much?

2010-01-30T22:08:06Z

So, despite the Flash debate over the iPad, there's been other questions floating around. One of these is "Is the iPad worth what I will be paying for it?" Well, according to this little chart, if you need to do anything other than eBook reading, the iPad has the most "bang for your buck".

iPad vs. Rock

2010-01-30T19:12:04Z

I just saw this on TechCrunch, and thought it would do my readers justice to see it, if they haven't already.

iPad - First Looks

2010-01-27T21:17:49Z

I'm going to start this one off by saying this about the iPad.

"Big Ass iPhone"

There is no doubt though that this is the coolest thing that Apple has released in a long time. However, there are a few things that I would have liked to see in it that would make me go out and buy one now.

1. Front Facing Camera

2. Flash Player (Really needs to be there)

3. Mac OS (I'd really like to be able to run Mac native apps on there, rather than iPhone apps. Like Photoshop. That would be good to see on it)

4. A camera at all, really

5. An SD slot without an adaptor

Aside from those things not being there, this is still a really cool device. I don't know how it is performance wise, but I'll talk more about it once I actually get my hands on one. Who knows when that will be, but when it is, I'll go try it out. All I can say about this is that when it was released, I was a little underwhelmed over the features it had. Some things were there, but a few things (FLASH PLAYER!!!) were not there. Oh well, there's always next release.

All for now!

BumpTop for Mac

2010-01-24T23:41:47Z

Well, it's no secret; BumpTop is out in the wild for Mac! For me at least, it has replaced Finder for the short term if not for the long run.

At first look, wow. BumpTop is great. And you'd be right. It completely replaces finder on your mac, and integrates all the functionality of it. you can still access all the features of finder; QuickLook, spaces, and any other features that you rely on. They all work. Opening a folder opens a Finder window on top of everything. Amazing. However, there are a few great features that I'd like to highlight for everyone.

The first of these features that makes BumpTop so much better than Finder is the ability to stack items on top of each other. You can select a whole pile of items, and turn them into a stack, just as you would on a regular desk.

In the Pro version, you can use the two-finger scrolling on your trackpad to flip through the stacks. If you don't have pro, you can double click the stacks and they will open in a grid view that looks very similar to the grid view in Mac OS when you open a dock stack. Soo much better than finder, for so many reasons.

Another great feature that I'd like to highlight is the ability to control the size of items on your desktop. you can click on an item, and grow or shrink it depending on its importance to you, just as bigger documents would be on a real desk. You can grow and shrink them to make them suit your needs.

The last thing that I'd like to highlight is the walls that you have to put things on. You can double click on any of the four walls to move the camera view to that wall, on which you can pin stuff, like a real wall. This gives you that extra bit of desktop real estate when ever you need it.

The one feature that I would love to see built in is the ability to span multiple monitors. It is not currently there, but I'm sure it will appear in the future. I highly recommend BumpTop for mac and windows, even with its $30 price tag.

All for Now!

Happy birthday to the Mac!

2010-01-24T21:25:05Z

Today, we say Happy 26th birthday to the Apple Macintosh! Count 'em! That's 26 Years!

On January 24th, 1984, Steve Jobs pulled a 128K Mac out of its case in front of a crowd of reporters, turned it on, and let the computer introduce itself to the world. The rest, as they say, is history.

Over its 26 year history, we've seen our favorite computer go from an awkward infancy, to almost dying in its teens, and now being a profitable prodigy in adulthood. It has spawned the iPod, iPhone, and a whole host of other machines to go along with its streamlined coolness.

But just look how far we've come! From this...

To (with the help of BumpTop) this!

So everyone wish a happy 26th birthday to everyone's favorite computer, and here's to another 26 more!

All for Now!

Adobe Kills the Flash CS5 Public Beta

2009-12-17T20:14:30Z

I got a letter from Adobe today that contained some sad news. I had added myself to the list to be notified when the Public Beta of Flash Pro CS5 came out on the labs website. They sent me a letter today that said that they will no longer be opening the product up to public beta users. That's too bad. Among other things, I was excited to have it do iPhone development, but I guess I'll just have to wait for the full release. The text of the letter is below.

All for Now!

Google Begins the Countdown to the End of the world

2009-12-13T00:23:11Z

I'm not sure if anyone has seen this yet, but if you go to Google right now, and click the "I'm feeling Lucky" button with no search terms entered, a strange thing happens. Watch this...

What is it counting down to? The Google Code Freeze? The end of the world? Or is it just the new year.. You decide.

All for now!

Google,New Year,End of the World

Happy in Paraguay

2009-12-06T16:26:21Z

Okay, so this has to be one of the funniest videos that I have ever seen in my life. Props to Day Job Orchestra for making it.

All for Now!

Weekly LOL,Funny,DJO,Day Job Orchestra

WriteRoom. The Distraction Free Writing Environment

2009-11-11T00:56:09Z

First off, I have to give a big thanks to the folks over at MacHeist for giving me this great piece of software absolutely free. Thanks guys! Well, WriteRoom is a great little application for writing. It doesn't do anything fancy, it just produces either Rich Text or plain text format. It can save into many different formats, and can integrate well with Word. It provides a simple interface with absolutely no distractions. In fact, when the application is on, you can't even access the dock. It just won't show it. I find it great for writing just about anything, especially documents for school. I highly recommend this app.

WriteRoom,MacHeist,Shareware Apps

Snow Leopard Breaks Media Encoder Hard

2009-11-11T00:49:58Z

As you all know, I was one of the many who went out on Snow Leopard day and installed the system upgrade. So far, there have been two updates, and I am relatively pleased. However, more recently, I discovered a problem that really puts a damper on my Snow Leopard enthusiasm.

After installing Snow Leopard, I installed Adobe Master Collection CS4. Up until now, I haven't really had a reason to use Media Encoder at all. However, when I needed it, it failed on me. On my laptop, Media encoder refuses to boot. I don't know why, but it works fine in Leopard. I've heard about similar problems, but never not starting. I have reported this bug to Adobe, however I am not expecting any updated before the release of the next Creative Suite. Oh well. I guess I'll just have to use Final Cut Express instead of Premiere for a while.

All for Now!

Snow Leopard,Media Encoder,Adobe Media Encoder,Problems,Bugs,Adobe Bugs

Gotta Love Photoshop!

2009-11-10T20:57:50Z

This weekend, I used my point and shoot camera to take some picture on top of Bradbury Mountain in Maine. These picures were in a panorama, and I needed to stitch them. Who do I turn to? Well, Photoshop, of course! One click, and I had this.