Factors in Buying a Laptop

First, remember that a laptop is one of your more personal working items. A laptop is even more personal than a paper notebook. You use it everyday, for many hours per day.
Consider the price of a laptop, divided by the days it is used, and you will see that it is one of the cheapest items you use.
For example, suppose you use a laptop for 3 years, which is standard for a Mac. This is more than 1000 days. This is less than two dollars per day, even if you buy a $2K laptop.
Two dollars per day, on the other hand, is less than the cost of a sandwich.
What do you think is more useful, a $2 sandwich that will keep you for a few hours, or a working tool that you will use during the whole day?
Also, notice that the laptop is useful everyday, even on weekends…
Looking from this side here are a few features that I consider more important:

• quality of screen
• easy of use
• quick service on case of damage

While the advertisement by MS makes sense on the surface, when you stop to think about the factors, it really doesn’t add up… What do you think?

Thankfully, there is also no better platform to use outliners than the Macintosh. Since its inception, creative people of all professions have used Macs. This being the reason why there are so many great outliners for the Mac, as compared to other operating systems such as Windows.

In this article, I will talk mainly about the most well known outliner of all, OmniOutliner (from the Omni Group). Many of the options on OmniOutliner, however, are available in other products, which Iwill cover with more datail in the future.

Using an Outliner

The basics of an outliner such as OmniOutliner is to create an structure, that can later on be filled with real information. Think for example on the relationship between a book and its table of contents. While a book has lots of information, it also has a clear structure that is present on its table of contents. An outliner can be used to create the table of contents and transform it into a full book, with details filled for each section.

The main interface of the OmniOutliner allows users to create main topics, subtopics, sub-subtopics, up to the contents of each division.

OmniOutliner allows one to use a graphical interface with buttons for these common operations. It also provides several keyboard shortcuts, that allow very fast data entry and formatting. OmniOutliner is not only useful to create outlines, but it also helps in visualizing data. Sometimes we have data that is structure in a hierarchical format, such as for example an XML document. With an outliner, we can visualize the elements of such a hierarchy, by looking just at the elements that are of immediate interest.

A good outliner also provides many export options, so that users have the freedom to transform the data they created into one of several output formats. OmniOutliner provides a large number of export options, so that users can translate their data into the required output format, such as a MS Word document, for example.

Conclusion

Outliners have many applications, and can be used as personal organizers, digital notebooks, or just as a place to joint down random ideas. However, a good outliner is essential to hold data and organize information. It is really great that Macs have a good number of outliners, from which OmniOutliner is just a good example.

Related Posts

• Mac versus PC, a comparison
• Making your old Mac run a little faster

In the past it was difficult to do any direct comparisons between Macs and PC, mainly because the processors used were so different. People always complained about comparisons that would show processors with the same speed, and not accounting for the differences in architecture between PCs and Macs.

Now that Apple has moved to use Intel processors on its whole line, it has become much easier to draw more meaningful comparisons. And they are starting to appear. For example, see this one from popular mechanics:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/reviews/4258725.html?page=1

After matching two pairs of Macs and PCs, they reached the not-so-difficul-to-draw conclusion that Macs are much faster to start up and shut down, and perform much better in a set of stardard tasks.

Moreover, their tests show that Apple machines run Windows faster then similar PCs.

Still, this is not the ultimate test that is going to convince the hard-core PC followers. However, it shows that is becomming easier to make this kind of comparison, and the reality will eventually become clearer for everyone.

A solution for you may be at hand: look for used Macs on sell at eBay. EBay is by far the most famous place to sell used technical equipment. It allows users to contact sellers directly, and this makes life easier for everyone.

Here are some advantages of using eBay to locate your new Mac, fully loaded with Mac OS X:

• It is much easier to get information from sellers. With direct connection to the current owners, you can get the information you need about each equipment on sale.
• Large selection: In a traditional store, you have only a limited number of options. Even at the Apple store you will have only access to the latest models, although some of the older models could work just as well for your application.
• Better prices: since there is a large variety of Mac computers on sell at eBay, you can also find bargain prices, from people that want to sell fast. It is much easier to get bargains from owner than from stores, anyway.

So, if you desperately want that Mac but don’t feel you have enough money to afford, you should always take a look at eBay. It can very possibly make your shopping experience much better and cheaper.

Do you have any experience buying Macs on eBay? If yes, leave a comment describing it…

The iPhone has numerous features that set it apart from the competition. The great user interface has made people to think that it is the most technologically advanced phone on the market.
However, nothing of this matters if it is not usable from the start. That is why it is important, in these initial days, to verify how usable is the iPhone user interface.
The main element of this interface is clearly the keyboard. Other cell phones have integrated keyboards that can be used very predictively. The iPhone, however, has not fixed keyboard. Who guarantees that users will be able to learn how to use the keyboard?
Some people in the blogsphere have started to dissect this very feature of the iPhone.
For example, this post provides a discussion of how the iPhone keyboard interaction might be. The keyboard system will probably have to very smart to avoid confusion when users type of the screen.
In fact, according to Steve Jobs, the iPhone has a sophisticated system that can predict, or correct, what users are typing in order to avoid frequent mistakes. He has also said, however, that users might take some time to get used to the style of the new on-screen keyboard, with keys that auto correct all the time.
It remains to be seen if this very feature of the iPhone will not be one of its major weaknesses. If that happen, then users will enjoy the visual of the iPhone, but will have to stay open to more traditional options such as the Blackberry and similar systems.

This can mean one of two things:

1. Apple is doing a worse job of creating new versions of its operating system; or
2. The mac is getting so much attention that crackers are starting to spend more time on it. As a result, we should expect viruses in the coming months…

I hope this can be, in fact, the result of a third option: the mac OS is not getting worse, and this was just another opportunity for the media to focus on bad news for Apple. What do you think?

Link

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, security

Apple had been running its “chat now” feature as an experiment in the educational store for some time, giving potential customers the option to chat with a live sales representative about various Apple products before purchasing and relieving those educational customers from making a blind decision.

Link

Technorati Tags: Apple

According to Shaw Wu:

“Time to market is not certain to us as it appears to be in the development phase,” Wu wrote in his Nov. 20 research paper. “We believe this product is [Apple's] ’smart phone’ and could be branded as ‘iChat mobile.”

Link

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, gadgets

The Coca-cola web site features a new section to the European community, called music.coca-cola.com. It will probably involve giving away songs from iTunes as a promotional campaign.

Link

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, music

In Japan, an incident with a PowerMac has lead to the local authorities requesting action from Apple. A laptop has been reported to catch fire due to overheating.

According to chron.com:

Japan’s trade ministry ordered Apple’s Japan branch to report on its findings and measures to prevent future troubles by Sept. 5 or it could face a fine of up to 300,000 yen ($2,570) under Japan’s consumer safety laws.

Link via Chron.com

Technorati Tags: Apple, Computers, Mac, Gadgets