My first personal Mac was a 12″ Powerbook. It was purchased for testing purposes but it quickly became my computer of choice for the majority of work. The only reason for keeping a PC was my requirement for Domino Designer. I loved the 12″ form factor. The size was perfect for travelling and it had a full size keyboard. The new MacBook Air is it’s natural successor
I’ve purchased the base 128GB 11″ model. I did consider the 4GB version or the 13″ model, but I’m buying this purely as a travel companion (along with an iPad) and it’s not meant to be a replacement for my 17″ MacBook Pro. After playing with one in an AppleStore it seemed far more responsive than my current travel computer, a Window 7 based Samsung netbook. It didn’t feel like I was compromising like it usually does when I use my netbook, it did feel like a laptop. I managed to play with a few applications in store. Powerpoint (Office 2011) and Keynote, worked with out any issues and didn’t feel slow. Editing photos in iPhone didn’t appear to cause the base model any issues and the most surprising thing, it was even responsive editing small video clips in iMovie. So as a travel companion, it should be fine. The only thing I couldn’t test, was Domino Designer running from a Window bootcamp partition. So hopefully this will be at least as quick as my netbook for those times when I need to fix something back at work.
As you would expect from Apple. It looks and feels amazing. The aluminium uni-body design exudes quality and class. It feels strong and I’ll have no issue throwing this into a bag.
This thing is amazingly thin. In fact, it’s not much thicker than an iPhone.
But despite it’s size, it manages to pack a full size keyboard, two usb ports, and display port, a full track pad and an iSight/Facetime camera.
It doesn’t include a SD slot, but this isn’t a negative for me, since my SLR uses Compact flash. But I know for many, this is a negative for a product this expensive.
So far I’ve only used it for light use and it’s been very responsive. I’ve yet to install Aperture and I need to create a small Windows partition for Domino Designer. But I’m very happy with it. The only issue I’ve experienced so far is a problem connecting the Air to my ‘N-spec’ network at home and I’ve had to switch it back to ‘g’. But I guess this will be fixed with improved drivers.
Neil Armstrong
Sun, Aug 26th 2012 6:13a Paul Hudson Most of us fail to make any indelible mark on history. A small selection become a footnote in a history book. A very very small number become a historical nexus, the beginning of a new phase of human history. Neil Armstrong is one of these individuals. Neil’s name will be known to the end of human history as the first person to step on another world. In millennium to come, there will be children who know his name who have never seen Earth. I truly believe that this will happen. I have to, [read] Keywords: facebook
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Privacy in the modern connected world?
Fri, Jul 20th 2012 4:09p Paul Hudson For the last few week signs have been appearing all round campus that include a ‘no photography’ symbol.
In the modern connected world, with the ability to instantly grab and share photographs with all your friends, I think the instant reaction from most of us was ‘is this realistic?’. But I think this opens an interesting debate about the future of our right to privacy when just stepping out in public has the potential to undermined an individual’s privacy.
As you [read] Keywords: development
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Olympus XZ-1
Sat, Mar 17th 2012 1:13p Paul Hudson Cameras for me, are like handbags are for many women. You need the right camera for the occasion. An iPhone for everywhere, a compact for gigs, a mirror less camera for times when I’ve got a small rucksack with me, and a SLR for quality. (I’ve recently upgraded my SLR to a Sony A77).
For the last 3 years my I’ve been using a Panasonic TZ-5 as my compact of choice. I bought it because it was a super zoom and I thought it would be great for capturing the stage from further back i [read] Keywords: exchange
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The new iPad
Sat, Mar 17th 2012 10:10a Paul Hudson I bought the original iPad on the UK day of release and have used daily ever since. I was at SXSW last year when the iPad2 was released but decided against buying one in the ‘pop-up’ shop, Apple set up for the conference.
Clearly the iPad2 was much better than the original iPad. It was quicker, featured a front facing camera for video conferencing and was smaller and lighter than the original iPad. But despite all these advantages, it wasn’t enough to justify my buying one. The [read] Keywords: apple
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Apple Reinvents Education
Mon, Jan 23rd 2012 2:11p Paul Hudson … no really it has. It’s come up with this fantastic product, the electronic book. It’s so much more than ‘book v1′, it’s interactive. ‘Books v2′ is so much better for the current generation of students. Apple thinks our current generation of students are too stupid to understand words and need pictures and too stupid to understand diagrams, so they need videos. Seriously Apple, is this meant to ‘change education’?
The announcement happ [read] Keywords: ibm
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Moo cards
Tue, Jan 10th 2012 7:11p Paul Hudson I usually don’t have much call for business cards. Internally they’re not much use, and I don’t get to many conferences. But it’s always a bit uncomfortable at business conferences when you don’t have cards. So at the last minute I decided to get some for Lotusphere. But rather than having the hassle of sorting cards out through work I decided I this was the excuse I needed to play with Moo.com, a service that allows you to create personal business cards through the [read] Keywords: lotusphere
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Unable to reliably deploy XPages using XSCD
Tue, Dec 20th 2011 5:11a Paul Hudson We’re late to the XPages game and it’s only in the last few weeks I’ve felt confident enough to push XPages into our system’s templates. I only allow new Domino tech to be deployed when I’m confident that the technology works because we run on a very constrained 32-bit Solaris Domino install. I was ready to use XPages on 8.5.2 but we ran into issues pushing out a XPage Single Copy Design to websites. I tried using standard Domino single copy design templates but whe [read] Keywords: domino
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My gigs of 2011 ‘Storified’
Fri, Dec 9th 2011 5:10p Paul Hudson One of the things I liked about SXSW were the Accelerator sessions where web startups pitched their ideas to a room full of investors, press and the paying public. The winner of News Accelerator was Storify, a website that allows users to curate tweets, photos, videos and web by dragging them into a single stream of information to tell a story. It’s a bit like gathering news headlines in a scrap book. It’s been used during some of the big events of 2011, such as the ‘Arab Sprin [read] Keywords: development
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Sony A77
Sun, Nov 27th 2011 3:12p Paul Hudson Sony recently released a new camera that may turn out to be a game changer, the Sony A77. This new 24 Mega pixel APS-C camera is a DSLT camera. Instead of using a standard mirror like a DLSR. DSLT cameras use a fixed semi-translucent mirror. 70-80% of the light passes through the mirror while the rest is bounced up to an auto focus sensor and because there’s insufficient light for an optical viewfinder, the main sensor is used to generate a live view on an Electronic Viewfinder.
The new we [read] Keywords: mac
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Unresponsive iPhone4 button
Sat, Nov 26th 2011 6:13a Paul Hudson For the last few months my iPhone’s home button has been unresponsive. Double clicking would often take me to the search pane and not the multitask bar. This is getting to be very annoying. I’ve been hoping that the button would hang on until the iPhone 5, next summer, but in the last few weeks it seems to have got worse. So much so, I’d even started to use the assistive technology in the iPhone to by-pass the requirement of using the home button.
Doing some research this mo [read] Keywords: apple
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