Terry White on the New MacBook Pro and other links….
Terry White: “The new MacBook Pro’s trackpad is completely redesigned. The separate “click” button is GONE! The whole trackpad (actually most of the lower section) is a button. This has it’s pluses and minuses too. Unfortunately it has more minuses than pluses. It’s just sometimes awkward to click and drag objects. Speaking of clicking, this trackpad is the loudest I’ve ever heard. When you click it, everyone around you will know! This includes your sleeping mate that is lying next to you while you work late. I could deal with this if the darn thing just worked consistently. It seems that depending upon where you click (for example the center vs. the sides, you may get a click you may not.”
“Most users don’t office in the cloud: 1% use Google Docs”
Jacqui Cheng: “…68 percent of the Google Docs group still reported having used Word at least once during the six-month period. Comparatively, only 26 percent of OpenOffice.org users made use of Microsoft’s apps. This tidbit of data is particularly telling, as it shows that most users still don’t see Google’s offerings as a standalone option even if they prefer it.” After years of observing how this word-processing issue had played in the press, I am actually surprised about the low numbers for Google Docs. For any person with some kind of Bill-Hill appreciation of typography, literacy and human glyphics, Microsoft Word is still the preferred environment. I just cut and paste my CleanXHTML into the hip new Web 2.0 word-processing crap and the bulk of the writing takes place in Word.
“What is Grasshopper?”
“With Grasshopper, you can use your favorite development environment from Microsoft to deploy applications on Java-enabled platforms such as Linux. … Grasshopper 2.5 is a plug-in for the Visual Studio 2008 development environment and provides full support for ASP.NET AJAX, including Microsoft’s ASP.NET 2.0, the AJAX Extensions, and the AJAX Control Toolkit. In addition, version 2.5 supports new language features for C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9, such as Local Type Inference, Object and Collection Initializers, Anonymous Types, and Auto-Implemented Properties.”