Welcome to the blog
of Gareth Parker.

I decided to get an iPad, first impressions.

Ok, so this weekend was mental. I took the chance to visit my parents after spending most of Friday contemplating wether or not to get an iPad. I decided against it on that day and took a moment to think, ask a few friends in America who’ve had it for a few weeks what they thought and make my judgment.
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Flash and the HP Slate

I don’t want to get in to a massive argument about the iPad / iPhone not supporting Flash, the Nexus One video shows that Flash Player 10.1 is a massive improvement on 10.0 and shows that it doesn’t kill the battery like everyone thought it would. It seems the guys at Adobe are really starting push the Flash Player forward, not only on the Desktop but also Mobile devices. See for yourself.

There’s an app for that…

Just recently I’ve had a few debates with a couple of colleagues about iPhone’s app’s and Mobile web sites, originally I started off saying how apps can have nicer user interfaces and usually give the user a more one -to-one feeling with whatever they’re using it for. However, over the pas week I’ve come to change my mind in some ways as well… I’ll try to explain why.
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Snow Leopard vs The Flash Player plugin…

There is no hiding that I’m a massive Mac freak, and recently seeing the new shiny 27″ iMac’s arrive in the office Its just made me want one at home even though I don’t need one.

I have an early 2008 MacBook and a late 2008 iMac both with Snow Leapord on since it was released, and ok there was a screw up with the flash player released with it, but that was rectified, however I know I wasn’t the only one to notice how utterly terrible Flash player was in Safari, the tweets were flying about fast. It seems The plugin now functions as a plugin and if Flash falls over Safari looks down on it as if to say “get up you bloated bastard”, which is fair enough, why should the whole Safari app crash just because the Flash Player did.

This was happening often though, and sites were running as if they were set at 12fps. I couldn’t go to a web page on my MacBook without it sounding like it was going to burst into flames from the fans going like mad, and the animation looking like it was streaming on a 28k connection, so I opened activity monitor, only to see:

Flash Player (Safari Internet plug-in) %CPU 121.1
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OSX and Windows Side by Side

I am a massive Apple and Mac fan, I use Mac’s day in day out at home and in the office. Although I know Mac’s are not perfect by any means, I don’t think I could go back to a Windows based machine, or at least it would take a lot of persuading. However recently I have found myself wanting to try new things. The beauty of the Mac is that it has Bootcamp, which for me tops everything off. I’ve used it since I purchased both my MacBook and iMac. However the whole booting thing becomes a pain sometimes ( Or maybe it’s me becoming lazy ). I only really boot Windows once every few months to update and then switch back.
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