Barefeats has some speed tests and things are looking good for gaming, though I would like to see some Premiere Pro and After Effects Speed tests (especially with the Quadro 5000K in the tests).
Now if only Apple would allow more than 2GB of RAM (yes I know the QUADRO 5000K has 4GB of RAM, but you still have to hack your mac to get a PC NVIDIA card to run that has more than 2GB of RAM).
Electronista has a rumor that it may happen this month, though I am not holding my breath. I am betting on the WWDC, whenever that is. And I am also betting it won’t be as much as we want in a replacement.
Yes, I was a backer of the Pebble Smartwatch Kickstarter Campaign and got a black Pebble when it came out. And they can now be ordered for $150, though through Kickstarter I got it for less. It is a pretty impressive watch, with the ability to display notifications from your iPhone or Android, though it is still a little buggy, with me having to reset Notifications on my iPhone a few times a day.
Overall I enjoy it, and like that the SDK is now out so third parties will be able to write there own watch faces and applications.
Still it needs to get better. The RunKeeper application has not been included yet, even in Beta for iOS (though Android users have been able to try a BETA), and my biggest complaint is battery life.
Not only does having it on, and bluetooth in use drain my iPhone 4 very quickly (we are talking down to 20% by the end of the day), but the old school bluetooth in my iPhone 4 really drains the Pebble quickly. In fact while it has gotten better (it used to not last 24 hours), but now with the latest firmware 1.10 I would say it lasts more like 36 hours without a charge. Still not so good. And even worse is what happened last night. I connected my Pebble to it’s charger and left it. It was still connected to my phone, so vibrating, and somehow managed to unconnected the power. So today my watch is on it’s last legs, and not likely to even make it through half the day because it disconnected itself last night! Certainly not so good.
I am sure the battery life would be much better if I connected to my iPad 3, but since I don’t currently have cellular hooked up to it, that would only work when near a wifi connection, so not all that often. I am sure it would be better if I ever got an iPhone 5, or 5s when that comes out, but I find that unlikely right now!
Overall I really like the Pebble. I like being able to see my e-mails and preview them, so I know when I really need to check e-mail, as I am usually editing on other people’s computers, so I don’t have a dedicated e-mail program open and must stop and check to see if I got e-mail. Of course it can also get annoying, as some times my watch is buzzing allot, and it sucks that you can only see your latest message, especially when you get a bunch of messages at once!
I am looking forward to RunKeeper and other 3rd party applications, and better battery life would be great!
Mark Christiansen at the Pro Video Coalition has a good article on running a Hackintosh instead of a MacPro. Well worth the read, and I especially like the ending.
Let’s be clear: the situation with Apple and the Mac Pro right now is identical to what was going on with Final Cut Studio in the years between its final version and Final Cut X.
In other words, there’s no reason for Apple to be stealthy or mysterious with its plans, unless they are likely to upset a large set of Mac users
Or dislike it, but agree. If Apple really is going to release an amazing new MacPro that will please professionals, why not just talk about the damn thing. Sure they won’t sell any more MacPro’s, but the ancient machines can’t be selling too well as is, and has already been pulled from Europe.
It would be so nice to know if it is time to move to windows (ugh, I do really hate Windows 8) and be able to run inexpensive but powerful NVIDIA cards to propel Adobe programs to insane speeds.
Apple has better make the announcements at the WWDC rumored to be in June or it will be time to really think giving up on Mac all together, no matter how much I don’t want to!
Apple has Updated Final Cut Pro X to 10.0.8
They are continuing to update with unpaid updates, but I still don’t see FCP as a professional software even if it has professional underpinnings.
Arstechnica has an interesting article on problems of working with Apple’s iCloud.
It is really interesting to hear that developers are having so many problems with iCloud, since as a user I have completely given up on iCloud because I have found it to work so incredibly badly.
My first issues were with bookmarks and iCloud. I use X-marks to sync my bookmarks between browsers, since Chrome (and formerly Firefox) is my browser of choice, and I don’t use Safari at all, but since Safari is what syncs to my iPad and iPhone I needed it to have my bookmarks.
And every time X-Marks overwrote them it worked fine and they were correct until they went to the cloud. The cloud ones had become corrupt and would overwrite not only Safari on my mac, but also on my iPhone and iPad. And there is no way to get rid of the bookmarks! Now most companies would create a way to overwrite either on your computer or online, but not Apple. Their simplified iCloud bookmarks have no way to get rid of the bookmarks from iCloud, so I had to turn off iCloud syncing and just do a direct sync via itunes, which directly brings Safari’s bookmarks to my iPad and iPhone.
My Second issue cropped up when I moved from an iPad 1 to an iPad 3. I had been a Mobile Me user, so I got 25GB of space on my iCloud (necessary to backup an iPad, and not enough for both my iPad and iPhone), and had 3 months previously moved to iCloud backup. When I attempted to move everything to my new iPad, it would not work. None of the apps would install. They started to download, and then stopped there, for days! And I could get no help on the issue, so I ended up going to my 3 month old previous backup on my home computer and have been syncing with my computer every since.
Why should I even try putting stuff on iCloud when I have no control over it? And it does seem to get corrupted often! So why not just leave everything on my Mac and use Dropbox or Sugarsync or box.net or even my Synology NAS to sync to. They all actually work and don’t seem to screw up all the time, like iCloud does.
iCloud at the very least needs basic controls to allow overwriting of items on the cloud or on your computer (though they could probably get away with just overwriting iCloud, since that is where the glitches happen!).
A great article on why you should use OS X spaces. I love it personally, though I think you had more control with older versions. And it is especially great for laptops, but I use it to separate power apps on my macpro and couldn’t function without it at this point.
It is now part of Mission Control (though should be it’s own thing). It makes your mac have a virtually bigger space, as if you have a bigger desktop and are only seeing part of it and can set individual apps to different spaces.
Dare Dreamer Magazine has an article on using compound clips instead of projects to make new sequences, since new projects take up a lot more hard drive space.
Sounds interesting, though it does just further highlight the continued issues with FCP X. Not being able to share renders between Projects (which are sequences in FXP X) seems ridiculous, and not very power user friendly.
Still just can’t see myself every trying FCP X again, not when Premiere Pro CS6 and AVID Media Composer are out there.
Appleinsider has heard rumors of Apple working on 2 GB SSD’s for the new MacPro with a standard SATA connector.
And while that would be awesome, at least for a boot drive, the cost would be so prohibitively expensive that it would be useless! And the fusion drives scare me as if one drive goes you lose everything (though you should be backing it up anyway). Still the most hopefully thing out of this is that maybe we will be getting a new MacPro soon. I SURE HOP SO!!!
Worth Checking out their results. I am sure this makes PC users wish they have the full ProRES suite!