Archive for category Software
Windows 7 to the Rescue!
Officially being released tomorrow (October 22, 2009), Windows 7 provides users with many reasons to rejoice. However, upgrading charges isn't one of them.
Personally, I still use Windows XP and thought Vista was pretty much what you’d call a failure. And being honest, I’m really looking forward to this next major release from Microsoft. After taking a spin around defeat, things like search, navigation, and stability have been repaired and hopefully are now up to par. Coming out soon (if not out by the time you’ve read this), plenty of big-name companies have gotten the opportunity to try out a pre-release version of Windows 7 and so far, its been smooth sailing…
Upgrading looks like a breeze (if you use Vista already… if not, your going to have a little harder time getting all your precious data straight over to Windows 7), and system performance looks incredible! “Noticeably faster” is a comment many reviewers have used and I think its well deserved. Now I won’t rant about features because I personally haven’t gotten to use this new OS. Putting it simply, there is only a few things I really look for in an operating system: performance, stability, and simplicity. Unfortunately I can’t fill out Microsoft’s grade card quite yet as I haven’t even used it yet!
In preliminary judging however, performance looks better than average, and the simplicity of the machine is improved but not perfect. And stability in my books, is judged based on how well the machine will run overtime. For example, if 3 months into use, the machine still runs as fast as the day I installed, I’ll be impressed.
In conclusion, its a nice “clean-up” to Vista and should hold out until Windows 8 (which is already being developed). I personally believe the pices for all three versions are outragous compared to what they should be. Seriously… Vista failed and Microsoft still expects us to pay full price? Not cool. On another note, iIt still doesn’t stack up to Leopard in my opinion, but it nears the Mac OS X Tiger region… still leaving it behind in terms of innovation, but thats okay. I’ve been using XP since I can remember and any Windows OS better than XP is going to make it feel like a huge improvement.
iMovie 09 “Save” Function Missing
Apple's latest installment of the iMovie family left many dissatisfied as the ability to downgrade to iMovie HD from iLife 09 was dropped.
I have my own fair share of rants about Windows computers, but I notice that I do tend to have more positive comments to the Mac I have. Well it wasn’t until this weekend, when I actually opened up iMovie ‘09 for the first time, that I realized the one major flaw it has. I have never used any previous versions of iMovie, but I did hear that when Apple “completely redesigned” iMovie ‘08, it was so different that Apple actually let users downgrade for free. For me, I hoped that the 2009 version would have fixed what was wrong, because they did drop there support for free downgrading with iLife ‘09.
Well, it was a good 4 hours later when I had finally finished my first very important video. The program had run smooth and steady the whole time, even with constant video adding, editing, etc. But when I started it from the top to quickly review my production without rendering it, iMovie decided to “unexpectedly quit”. And it wasn’t until I reopened the program that I learned that iMovie ’09s claimed Auto-Save is all but real. Don’t get me wrong, the video clips I have imported were there, but the hours upon hours of work putting them together meticulously was not there.
In my conclusion, I’ll let you know in the process of creating over 5 short-films, iMovie crashed a total of 12 times for me, all for unexpected reasons. So I just have to ask Apple why. Being honest, the program and its abilities are just shy of professional video editing software, but the fact that I cannot manually go to: File > Save, to keep my progress every now and then is flat out ridiculous. If there’s one thing that needs to be in iMovie ‘10, it better be the ability to save, cause it sure isn’t there.
I’ve yet to discover a work-around even after reading elsewhere that you can manually save the file via drag and drop through the finder, but that is not the case. I’ll let you know if I ever figure this out. Leave a comment if you think you’ve figured out how to fix this, cause I know I’m not the only one!