Mike Cohen

27" iMac

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I ordered the 27″ i7 quad core 2.8GHz iMac last week. It still hasn’t shipped – the order status still says “Ships: November”. A lot of people who ordered them earlier are starting to receive them, and from early reports, the performance is outstanding.

For the last few years, I’ve been using laptops with 15″ or smaller screens & speeds of 2.5 GHz or less exclusively, so this will be a nice upgrade. I’m really starting to feel the limitations of the MacBook Pro when running a Windows 7 VM and trying to do useful work like XCode builds in OS X with 4GB of RAM.

I’ll be keeping only the 13″ MacBook, since I prefer it to the 15″ for traveling.

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links for 2009-11-16

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Plans for PicSlide 1.1

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I’m starting to work on enhancements for the next version of PicSlide. The major change is that it will now count the number of moves as well as the elapsed time.

I also plan to add a scoreboard and a way to share your best scores online, most likely with FaceBook Connect.

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$10

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I’m joining Jonah Grant in a protest this weekend by raising the price of ICanHasCheezburger Pro & iDjembe to $10 and removing ICHC lite from sale until Monday.

You’re surfing through the App Store and come across an awesome app, and then you see the price tag, $.99. What do you think? Way too expensive? Should it be free? or are you willing to pay the price for a great piece of software?

This is the biggest problem in the App Store. People these days are so used to seeing a cool app and then downloading it for free and then they get used to it, not paying developer for their work. They don’t understand that these cool little things take time and money to make, yet they still don’t pay for these utterly cool products that people devote time and money to.

Parallels still beats VMWare

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Parallels Desktop 5 and VMWare Fusion 3 were both released in the last week, and as usual I tried both. I find that Parallels is noticeably faster running Windows 7, and it doesn’t slow down my MacBook Pro like VMware does.

When running a Windows 7 VM with 768M RAM allocated, VMWare uses 1GB of physical RAM and at least 20% CPU most of the time. Parallels uses around 632M and almost no CPU time when idle.

Parallels Coherence mode still looks a lot cleaner than VMWare’s Unity. Parallels starts up cleanly in Unity, while VMWare can’t switch to Unity until the virtual machine is fully booted & the VMWare tools are loaded. Dragging windows in Unity tends to be ugly, with desktop artifacts appearing, while dragging seems faster & cleaner in Parallels.

Parallels 5 adds a new crystal view, which resembles Coherence plus it makes the Parallels application disappear completely, with an icon added to the menu bar that lets you launch Windows applications.

Choosy is even more awesome than I realized

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I use Choosy so I can switch between browsers easily. Instead of having to set Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, or some other browser as my default, if I have one browser open, links will automatically open that browser. If more than one browser is open, Choosy will let you pick which one to open a link in.

Today I discovered that it’s even more awesome than I realized: It not only lets you choose Mac OS X browsers — it also supports Windows browsers running under VMWare Fusion 3 (I haven’t tried it with Parallels yet, but I suspect it will work as well). If you have both a Windows and Mac OS X browser open, Choosy will show both of them in its menu and let you open links in either one.

The 27" iMac looks very tempting

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I’ve been using laptops exclusively for several years. I now have both a 13″ aluminum Macbook, which I bought late last year, and a 15″ unibody MacBook Pro, which I won from DriveSavers at Macworld Expo earlier this year. I use the 15″ as my desktop system at home, since it has better graphics performance and a nicer screen for editing photos, but I prefer the 13″ for traveling, since it’s lighter, more convenient, and has better battery life.

Although the 15″ is an excellent system, it’s still a lot less powerful than a dedicated desktop machine like the new 27″ iMac. In particular, I’ve been getting very annoyed with the slow virtualization performance, since it’s limited to 4GB RAM and I need to run both XCode and a Windows virtual machine, as well as Mail & Safari which max out the RAM.

I’ll most likely get the i5 quad core iMac and upgrade the RAM to 8GB.

Check your app release dates!

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When I checked my app store stats for the first day, I noticed that the only PicSlide sales were from my blog & promo codes I gave out. On further investigation, I discovered that it suffered the same fate Craig Hockenberry described here: the release date was set to Sept. 24, which is the day I submitted it, rather than yesterday, when it was approved. As a result, it wasn’t listed as a new application.

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I went into iTunes Connect and changed the availability date to tomorrow, which will probably cause it to disappear until then, and hopefully be listed as a new application. If you want it now, leave me a comment to get a promo code.