k42

Mohammed, 21, Kuwait. I play videogames regularly, I watch movies casually and I drink coffee constantly. To extend upon this, my favorite game of all time is Super Metroid, my favorite movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey (directed by Stanley Kubrick) and my favorite type of coffee is Nescafe. When I'm bored of life and games I'm usually reading in my bed, sipping through my own cup of misery. I work in a very dull environment surrounded by some very dangerous equipments that could blow the country to pieces. I dream of creating an 8-bit game with some interesting gameplay mechanics in which I already planned. But that's not gonna happen. That's why it's called a dream.

Feel free to contact me anytime regarding any subject; colorization [at] gmail [dot] com (this is to prevent spam).
Mar 31
Permalink

Mac, 2

I think I’ve been climbing up all this time; surprisingly, from the “I’m not sure I’ll be comfortable with this system” to “this is wheel re-inventing all over again”. No, seriously. Screwing with my Mac for the past week, I came to the conclusion that Mac is like heaven on earth. An incredibly versatile system that you will tinker and love for each and every minute you spend with. I never loved a machine before as much as I’m loving my Mac, and it’s not because of the huge investment, because I paid well over 800$ on my Limited Edition MGS4 PlayStation 3, and god knows how much I hate the console. Money is never an issue, not to me, not to anybody else. If you’re not comfortable with a system, console, hell —even a car, you’d be hating it no matter how thousand of bucks you wasted on it.

One of the very first things you will notice when using a Mac is its extreme responsiveness. Everything is juicy and fluid, there is no blocks that cuts your way, no unnecessary lag that crumbles your enjoyment. None. It’s a 100% unmatched creativity. You will learn to love your system. And it will love you back, with all its great applications and the ease-of-use of literally everything. I think that the Macintosh operating system gets the best of both worlds —the secure, solid code of the UNIX system, and the streamlined use of the Windows. Now, mix this up with the great minds at Apple’s, and you have the perfect recipe for the perfect operating system that ever graced human mankind. (Hyperbole?)

In these past days I’ve been using some great applications that I would like to share my experience here with my readers. Now I know, if you’re a Mac user, you probably heard of them, so I’m sorry if I’m not giving you any notable informations.

Xtorrent (25$): All my life, I never thought about the day I would pay for torrent applications. If you told me about this one year ago —hell, 20 days ago, I would have laughed so hard at your face. I still can’t justify this purchase, because there are tons of free software. Good software. But I didn’t want a good torrent application. I wanted the extreme. The best. Xtorrent was (is, still and forever) shockingly amazing. I never had files that rack up a speed of 200 Kb\s before. But that’s not the only reason. It also have a very good looking and user-friendly GUI that’s very entertaining to navigate your files in. And with a built-in search engine, the fun will never stop. If you don’t mind paying 25 bucks for a torrent application, then I highly recommend getting it.

EventBox (15$, get it legally for free!): This must be installed in every Mac system. A great application that keeps records of all your Twitter, Face Book, Google Reader and Flickr activities. This will halve the time needed to do all those mentioned above without the headache of going through individual applications that handles them. Fortunately, MacHeist are offering the application for free at their site. Just scroll down a bit and you’ll notice its banner.

iWork ‘09 (62.99$ @ Amazon): This application is a work of genius. Speaking Gates, it’s Word, Powerpoint and Excel. Which are, respectively; Pages, Keynote and Numbers. I only tried Pages for my weekly report, and it was fascinating. Microsoft Office is spectacular, there’s nothing against it. But there’s something about iWork that makes it entertaining to work with. I seriously never had fun building a report as much as yesterday. Weekly reports are boring, believe me. You do the same work every single week, with different statistics and math. However, the lovely UI and the amazing templates was enough to make me build a very stylish report that isn’t too stylish, if you know what I mean. It’s simple, but clean and organized very well. Sure, you can do everything with Microsoft Word, but personally I’m preferring Pages. This is a definite purchase for me; I tried the 30-days full-trial yesterday, and I just placed my order @ Amazon (with the new shuffle ;-) for my daily walks). Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

CandyBar (29.99$): This is a delicious application. It makes you replace your icons and dock with some new and clever ones, sporting hundreds of fantastic designs. Nothing much to say about it except that it’s a must-have application for graphic junkies. Checkout my new desktop, you’ll like it ;-)

I’m also planning to pick up Transmission and maybe Statto and Desktastic later. In a nutshell, yes, I’m glad that I bought a Mac system. My digital lifestyle has been completely revamped. PCs for games, Macs for everything else. I’m super cool and you’re not, huzzah!