Monthly Archives: September 2010

iTunes 10

I’ve been using iTunes since iTunes 4 or so, before the days of the iTunes Music Store! It’s certainly gone through a lot of changes and additions, and of course several interface tweaks. The latest is no different, there have been quite a few interface changes in iTunes 10. I can’t say that I was too happy at first, but they have grown on me. Let me work my way through some of them.

One of the first things I noticed was the change in the colour scheme. iTunes 9 had the coloured icons, but iTunes 10 has changed this to graphite coloured icons, giving it almost a black and white feel. The normal close, minimise and resize icons (on the Mac version) are now stacked vertically in the corner, rather than lining horizontally. I didn’t quite like this, it takes away from the standardised interface of applications across the operating system.

As for the graphite icons, they seemed quite dull at first. But I liked the consistent colour scheme throughout the application. The text colour, checkboxes and columns in the main windows have been tweaked to follow that colour scheme too, giving a very consistent look and feel to the whole application window.

I’m not sure if this was a one-off, but I certainly hated the addition of checkboxes in every view. Maybe for other people who use them in Shuffle, or when syncing to iPhones or iPods, it may be useful. However to me, they are completely useless and unnecessary. I was over the moon to see that there was an option to remove them again in the Preferences window. I feared that with iTunes 10, Apple may have put it in without a choice of removing it, however that wasn’t the case.

One thing I really love is when plugging your iPhone/iPod in. Gone are the tabs along the top when viewing your iPhone/iPod, and now there are just small text tabs, almost like hyperlinks from a webpage. This looks a whole lot neater than before. A problem I used to have is that I like keeping my iTunes window non-maximised, and with the tabs before it would mean that they simply wouldn’t fit with the addition of Books and what not. I like how now the interface does appear more streamlined and neater with this tab style.

I’m not a hardcore iTunes user, and therefore I prefer a simple interface. I think iTunes 10 has actually streamlined a few things and made the interface a fair bit cleaner. I haven’t used it extensively, but from what I have used, it’s a pretty nice experience.

More Peggle Less BioShock and a working netbook!

Well, work has been fairly busy recently, and when I come home I’m usually too tired to do much. Now, you may say playing a video game is a perfect way to unwind, but I’ve just been way too lazy for that and end up web browsing and watching The Simpsons. Productive to say the least.

The only bit of real gaming remains to be on my iPhone during the commutes to work. And that game would be Peggle. I’ve finished the game itself but I’m working through the challenges, which as the name suggests are quite challenging indeed.

I have spent a bit of time however tweaking a netbook that I’ve had sitting around for some time. It’s an Advent Milano, probably the least famous netbook around. Not sure why it’s not marketed much, PC World had it as an exclusive netbook so it didn’t get much coverage. Even if you try to Google it, it doesn’t come up with many proper results with articles about the netbook.

I did find out however that the netbook is actually a remake of a Taiwanese model instead. I found this out quite painfully, when I formatted the laptop and was searching everywhere for drivers. I was testing a few different operating systems and seeing which ran the best on this netbook. Previously, I had Windows 7 installed on it. I quite like Windows 7, I think it’s one of Microsoft’s best operating systems ever and a much needed one after Vista. However, it did run a little slow and I think it was draining the battery life on this netbook.

I then tried out Ubuntu Netbook Edition. It’s quite a nice distribution of Linux, specifically built for netbooks. Installation takes a little longer than I would have liked, however there is a pretty cool feature for the OS to run off a CD or USB to test it out and see what it’s like. I did a proper install instead though to give it a real whirl. It’s pretty decent, and comes with quite a bit of preloaded software, however it didn’t recognise my Wireless device so I had to tweak around quite a bit to get that working. For those who haven’t used Linux, let’s just say installing stuff like drivers isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do!

Finally, I gave Windows XP a try. I never really used XP on this netbook before even though it came preinstalled with it. I straight away went to Windows 7 since I had a free version from university. Coming back to XP however was a great choice. It’s extremely stable with the updates, and runs really fast. On top of that, the battery life has been given a much needed boost and I don’t need to worry about installing drivers! Woohoo!

So for now, I’m using the netbook with Windows XP since it seems to run the best. It also gives me good compatibility with software, such as Microsoft Office (which is pretty needed for work purposes) and a few games here and there, such as Peggle World of Warcraft Edition! I do plan to do some programming on here and have installed IntelliJ Idea 9 Community Edition (basically the free one) as my IDE of choice. I used to always go for Netbeans, but my job really changed my choice on that!