Glen Scott - Keeping it simple, since 1977

I’m really happy with my iPhone, but I must admit I was initially tempted to upgrade to the new 3G version which is released this Friday. However, after thinking things through I’ve decided to stick with the “old” version. Why? Well, with the free OS 2.0 upgrade, I will get these features for free anyway:

• Native applications
• Cisco IPSec VPN support
• MobileMe
• Improved mail client
• Enhanced contact management
• Better battery life

and more.

Meaning the only differences between my iPhone and the 3G iPhone is:

• 3G
• GPRS

So it boils down to whether I want to pay £99 for these two features. And I don’t: they are nice options, but far from essential. 3G is faster than EDGE, but for general browsing of websites I don’t think it will make a huge difference, especially because many sites serve up optimised iPhone pages already. Furthermore, enabling 3G on the phone will zap the battery faster than when using EDGE. And GPRS, while a nice idea, is far from essential in my day-to-day usage of the phone right now.

iPhone 3G

A classic example of an application that started off performing a simple, useful task (i.e. displaying PDF documents) and has grown to an overly complex, slow, hulking beast of an application.

I got scared off by the 251Mb disk space the installer claims that it needs:

I’ll stick to Apple’s Preview.app, thanks.

Useless Mac Applications #1 : Sherlock

Okay, so there are not really any Mac specific virus threats, but there are tonnes for Windows… and you don’t want to be passing these on to your PC owning friends right? Best be safe…

• Download and install ClamXav
• Launch ClamXav application
• Go into preferences and click the Folder Sentry tab
• Drag your Downloads folder from the Finder to the Folders Being Watched pane
• Check the Launch ClamXav Sentry when you log in to this computer option
• Log out and log back in to your account and you will see a new item in your menu bar indicating that Sentry is monitoring your Downloads folder
• The Sentry uses Growl notifications if it finds anything suspicious

Good deal from Mac Heist: get Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac, half price. Be quick, offer ends today!

Mac Heist

code_swarm is a fantastic application that visualises software projects over a period of time by analysing their code repositories. It aims to show in a graphical manner the users working on a project, and the number of files committed. Some great example videos are available, including a video of the Apache webserver project.

code_swarm

Using Firefox 3 is really a different experience from using OS X. It’s not Windows, it’s not OS X and it’s not Linux. It’s something else.

• Firefox 3 brings Ugliness to the Mac
• Firefox 3 download

John Gruber on the iPhone upgrade dilemma:

So what it boils down to is whether you think it’s worth $199 up front — plus $15 extra per month for the new data plan with SMS — for faster cell network data.

The iPhone 3G Upgrade Question

I have one invite to the Fire Eagle beta to give away. Just leave a comment if you are interested.

What is Fire Eagle? From the site:

Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online.

Fire Eagle

Buried deep inside the press release announcing the Yahoo-Google search advertising deal, is an interesting point about the company’s respective messenger clients:

In addition, Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users.

I’ve installed a new Wordpress Theme to freshen things up a bit. It’s called Spotlight and I think it’s a nice minimalist design, with enough flair to keep the page looking interesting.

Let me know what you think!