Ecto started acting up on me lately. It may be because of new hardware, new version of WordPress, whatever. It’s just not a smooth as it once was. I’ve also been looking around and reading other reviews about blogging software on the Mac – and one term keeps resurfacing when it comes to Ecto: Abandonware.
It shows. There haven’t been many posts about Ecto, no new versions, even their support forums are down (due to technical error, but still..)
It’s been awhile, but I decided to take up this subject (yet again.) Although I do still have access to Safari Online, a friend of mine lent me his copy of iPhone SDK Essential Training DVD from Lynda.com for comparison. I spent the last two days watching the video. It’s just under 7 hours, but I spread it over two days because I was watching Tebow get his butt handed to him against the Patriots (sigh, I was hoping for more.)
The video in a word is Awesome.
I’m totally shocked and amazed by some of Microsoft’s latest offerings. If you are a Mac user, do yourself a favor and check out some of the Microsoft offerings. They have been quietly been making advances on a number of fronts:
Windows Live Office -> Windows SkyDrive: I signed up for the Windows Live Office when it first came out because I was testing all sorts of cloud based apps at the time. Microsoft has recently decided (for better or worse) to closed out Live Office and migrating all accounts to SkyDrive. While there seems to be some complaints online about this move, for the limited uses I have found for Live Office, I’m just happy about going from 5GB of free disk space to 25GB!!
Office 2011 for Mac: OMG – that pretty sums it up. Awesome features, very similar to Office 2010 on PC (which is actually a good thing for those of us who have to use PCs at work.) Connects to SkyDrive and SharePoint! I’m still playing with it and I’m pretty impressed so far with the overall functionality. I’ve delved into a little VBA coding and i’m trying to decide if I should try out the Outlook client. The only negative to adding this software to my machine – it doesn’t have anything to do with the product itself, but more my comfort level — I re-installed ClamXAV. Yeah, I’ve been burned too many times in the PC world. Now with this product (with VBA) being on the Mac, time to start thinking about security again.
Silverlight 4.0: Okay – in the past this was always a pain to install. However, I’d like to personally thank the install wizards for finally changing the install script to:
`/usr/sbin/system_profiler SPHardwareDataType -xml | grep “PowerPC”`;
Yup.. that’s right. It’s not looking for Intel chips anymore. It’s looking for PowerPC chip before erring out. Latest version installed without any hacking. Woohoo!
-JT
The last couple of days been just gorgeous outside. Now that I have a newly hackintoshed Dell Mini 9, I’ve spent the last couple of days outside with it instead of indoors with the big machine. I have to say that, for my needs, the device has worked admirably as a stand in for the big machine. It blows my mind the number of negative reviews there are out on the internet about the device.
Yes, it’s underpowered. Yes, it does have a small screen. Yes, it doesn’t have a large hard drive. Yet, these are the things are also it’s strong points. Having such an “underpowered” machine makes you really think about what you’re going to be able to do with the machine. It forces you to make compromises – which in the end, doesn’t really affect the quality of your work, but may end up saving you a ton money.
I finally got my Dell Mini 9 that had I ordered last week!! Spent a few hours setting it up last night and a couple of hours this morning tweaking it to mimic the functionality of my desktop. In short – this is the best thing ever! (I’m posting this blog entry using Ecto on the Mini 9.)