David Pitkin

I installed Vista this weekend, it did not live up to the hype as all reports have said.

I had a return love affair with my Macintosh. I either found or used all these new applications and features the next day with very pleasing results:

BluePhoneElite Version 2 Beta ! Now with Symbian and great SMS and support. This app integrates my mobile phone with the laptop, for example I can type SMS messages on the keybaord and send via the phone (so replies are easy for the recipient), it pauses iTunes when the phone goes out of bluetooth range, and flashes the address book entry on the screen when someone calls resulting in a very pretty caller-id, more features I am sure are in there.

Timezone support in iCal: I am scheduling a meeting today with people in Melbourne, Australia and California without access to enterprise calendaring and scheduling. I found the check box in iCal preferences to turn on Timezone’s! This puts a drop down menu in the upper left corner to pick what time zone you are viewing the calendar. It is a great feeling when I want an application to do something smart and I go search and it is there and better than I could have imagined, the opposite is more often true.

Coda I help a friend put up pictures on his business website Kenney Land Care Coda a new Panic app is great for just that. Added bonus it imported my Transmit bookmark, nice because they are the same company. Small gripe the ssh client does not use my terminal ssh keys.

Twitterific There is a little check box to “update IM status” with your latest tweet, I use Adium and not iChat. I would have expected the dialog box to ask what IM client so that different ones would work with the feature, I checked it anyway. Nope it just works with both.

• FlickrMate Last I installed this TextMate bundle which lets me easily insert my flickr pictures a document without a switch to a web browser, very slick.

Now for some perspective, when I installed Vista ULTIMATE using the retail dvd the next thing I did was put in the Office 2007 ULTIMATE dvd. It was not recognized, I thought the dvd could be bad so I put it in my Mac and it read it just fine. I figured out that the dvd burner I used to install Vista is not supported/recognized. Wait you say, I installed from it? Somehow the installer has more or better drive support than the system itself, I don’t understand that at all, guess it is good I can reboot back into XP.