Views from the Ivory Tower - September 2007

VMWare, Macmini, iPhone bills and AppleWorks

By Ted Bade

Wow this has been a very busy period for Apple fans. First the release of the iPhone, then another seemingly very robust application for running Windows (or any Intel-based OS) on your Mac, and finally updates to Apple’s consumer desktop computers. We will look at all these items and some other interesting things.

A company called VMWare, released a new product that gives an Intel Mac the ability to run many different operating systems. The product is called VMWare Fusion for Mac OS X and it looks like it will become a very serious competitor in the Virtualization market.

Here is a blog about the product created by the producers, which gives your some idea of what it can do. I had the opportunity see some information about this product and I was impressed.

I was really impressed with one particular feature that lets the Windows based App run on your Mac OS X desktop, Really what they are doing here is very similar to what Apple did with Classic applications when we moved from OS 9 to OS X. The OS is running, but those parts of it that display the desktop environment just don’t show. So it appears that you are running a Windows-only application inside of Mac OS X. Very slick.

I expect that macCompanion will provide a full review of this product in the near future. Stay tuned.

Apple had their own little announcement event in early August, which was good news for Macintosh users. They showed us that “computer” hasn’t really left Apple! You probably heard that they updated the iMac, iLife, and iWork. We’ll leave the full details of these improvements for a real review. One very noteworthy aspect of the iMac update was Apple’s move to more recyclable materials. It’s display is now glass faced (rather then the less recyclable plastics previous) and the body is now aluminum, again a very easy to recycle material. Great job Apple! Now keep it up. Let’s show the world that we can have lots of electronics and a clean environment too!

Apple also quietly released updates to their MacMini line at this time. I think the Mini is a great solution for a variety of situations. We had been hearing rumors of its demise for the past several months. I just couldn’t believe that Apple would consider dumping this excellent machine. The newer versions are the same as the last version with slightly faster processors. If you are the type who like to look at performance, take a look at this benchmark page concerning the MacMini.

We have been hearing all types of information about the iPhone. It didn’t take very long for people to figure out how to dump the “phone” part and begin turning this device into a very elegant PDA.

A very humorous aspect of the iPhone are the bills. Apparently AT&T includes excessive amounts of information about what you did with your iPhone in their bill. Take a look at this article concerning the bill, apparently every time the user got data from the web, it was listed in 101 pages of billing information. (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070811).

Apparently AT&T not only itemizes Internet usage, but does the same thing for text messaging. If you haven’t seen this uTube video about a woman and her 300-page bill, you’ve got to see it! Yes, it’s real!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdULhkh6yeA

In the mean time, environmental groups are up in arms about this blatant waste of paper. And they should be. There is no excuse for this. People don’t need and apparently don’t really want all this detail. If AT&T needs to provide this information, perhaps they can send virtual billing information, via the... iPhone! It’s really funny. Years ago, the Feds broke up Ma Bell. (In case you are young enough not to remember that there used to be only one really, really big phone company in the USA). Perhaps now that Ma Bell is back (as AT&T, who is slowly but surely becoming a really really big telephone monopoly), it’s the same old Ma Bell. With those 1950 attitudes towards pollution and environmental concerns, as it, they didn’t really exist back then! ☺

Well, whatever the case, it has been fun reading these articles on huge bills. The iPhone is an elegant device that is helping to bring some humor back into the world!

Fare thee well Appleworks - Apple has always offered some program that offered basic features such as a word processor, spreadsheet, and even a database program. Back in the old Apple ][ days, this program was called AppleWorks. It died a quiet death along with the Apple ][ series of computers back in the early 80’s. It was replaced by a program called ClarisWorks for the MacOS. ClarisWorks was with us for a long while. Apple spun off a company called Claris Software that offered ClarisWorks, and a soon to be very, very popular program called FileMaker.

FileMaker was so popular that Claris dumped the ClarisWorks suite of programs to be come FileMaker Corporation. Apple took the ClarisWorks suite of software back into the fold and changed its name to AppleWorks.

Well in mid August Apple quietly killed this product. Announcing to vendors that it would no longer be supported. It was to be expected. Apple released an update to iWork, adding a spreadsheet application and changing Pages so that the user could easily change from page layout program controls to more traditional word processing controls.

We will miss you, AppleWorks, you have served out community for a good long time!

Until Next Month, keep on enjoying your Mac!