Download in iTunes

ZATV Guide (link opens iTunes), is the best South African TV guide for the iPhone. And I’m not just saying that because I’m the developer. It’s true. The others are painful. One only shows you the free-to-air channels, and the official one is just a guide and nothing more. Which I guess is what was expected it should be.

But you know, this is an immedia app. And we just don’t do mediocre. We started the app well before the official one was accepted into the store, and finished it before we left for WWDC (San Francisco) in June. We didn’t submit it until 23 June because Apple themselves had a bug in SDK 3.0 (which I pointed out to them in one of the iPhone labs at WWDC).

Being the avid TV show-loving geeks we are at immedia, we realised that a guide shouldn’t just be a damn guide. We wanted more from it. ZATV Guide is the premier South African TV Guide for iPhone. It lets you favourite your favourite TV shows and channels for quick one-touch access. More than just that, it also tells you when repeats of your favourite shows are airing. And the icing on the cake? Search. Yeah, a simple thing like search makes a world of difference in a TV Guide. No more hunting around to find your shows, just search for it.

If you have an iPhone and love TV like we do – enjoy ZATV Guide – another proudly South African free app with love from immedia.

Approved apps in the iPhone App Store: two. And counting.

Ground breaking indeed, but the reality is that the percentage of doctors polled leads to rather misleading figures. According to the results released from the poll, 2484 of the roughly 7000 doctors in the public sector voted. Question is could have the 4500 that didn’t vote alter the so called mass opinion determined from the polling? The latter part of that question isn’t a Nerd Boys consideration however we are concerned with why more than half of SAMA’s members didn’t vote.

Could it be a case that they weren’t informed of the vote? Although this point might carry some weight, it cannot be justified as all intentions of the electronic voting process would have been clearly indicated on the SAMA website, and so in my opinion lack of information and all subsequent excuses based around this theme would be a direct result of technophobia or even techno-ignorance. Clearly then the computer literacy program thats in place needs to be extended to all sectors of South Africa even to established individuals.

Its no doubt that’s the electronic opinion factory is just beginning, be it in a poll, a status update or tweet. Now considering the various manners in which opinions can be expressed, I am forced to raise another question. Was the manner in which the results determined secure, could this have been hacked in any way?  The probability of this statement being true is rather minimum but is a consideration that must be taken. Recently we learnt of various twitter accounts being hacked and previous to this a story emerged of a famous political figure having their email account hacked. I say this again the chances of the SAMA poll being hacked are close to nil but for the purpose of this article and future meaningful electronic voting this thought must be raised.
 
The simple truth about this weeks events is that South Africa as yet again taken a step forward and will continue to do in months to come but as the importance of all things online grows so does the associated treat.

Data Detectors in Mail

Take this event for this example: “tomorrow for lunch.” Mail knows that that is in an event and will automatically allow you to add that event to iCal with the subject as the event title, and it will also scan the email for a respective time and add that in too.

This video shows you how easy it is to make use of data detectors in Mail:

Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard"

Here at NerdBoys we loves our Operating Systems just as much as we loves our Gadgets. And, we also loves playing with our Operating Systems while they’re still in development – I’m talking pre-beta version! Yeah, we know, we’re hard-core right? We’re always running or testing out the latest beta or RC of Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Windows and iPhone OS on our production machines and they haven’t failed us yet (touch wood!).

We were at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco last month exploring and experiencing all the magical goodness that’s Apple has created for us developers. We were also fortunate enough to get our hands on a developer preview edition of their latest, greatest super-OS, Snow Leopard (10.6). Apple supplied all attending developers with a 2-DVD version for it in both Server and Desktop flavours. It makes sense for them to distribute these editions now as they plan on developers to start developing for this new OS as soon as they possibly can so a wealth of awesome, optimised, applications are available when Snow Leopard hits the stores.

So what exactly is so different about Snow Leopard? Well for starters it’s entire OS is pure 64-bit. Everything from the kernel to the screensavers, to preference panel widgets has been compiled for 64-bit computing. It’s also the first OS from Apple to ship with none of the older Carbon framework, this version is filled with all of Cocoa’s goodness, baby.

Snow Leopard, apart from looking almost identical to Apple’s current stable OS, Leopard, functions in pretty much the same way. Last year at WWDC when 10.6 was announced, it was said that the only Snow Leopard “feature” will be native support for Microsoft’s Exchange server, and while fundamentally that may be true, there are a ton of brand-spanking new visual goodies and behind-the-scenes developer treasures (most of which I’m not allowed to speak about because of the current NDA).

The demoes and videos we all saw (either on the net or at WWDC) showed off Snow Leopard’s amazing new speed (and I mean, holy-s**t that’s fast) were all on Apple’s latest mutli-core Mac Pros, but how does it really stack up against a normal, consumer-grade computer? I’ve been running 10.6 on both my MacBook Air and my iMac for a month now and wow! The different sure is noticeable. Everything is snappier, prettier, and man is it faster! Everyone knows the Air notebooks aren’t known for their super performance, and my 1st Gen Air with its Intel-based graphics card used to sometimes struggle when running multiple simultaneous applications, but now due to the major OS enhancements, it’s so smooth.

The real benefit though will come much later though, after the OS is released into the market and when software vendors use the all new, awesome speed enhancements whilst developing their apps (like the new super-easy multi-threading techniques).

In case you were wondering, I don’t have the Air’s SuperDrive unit. I used Disk Utility on Leopard to image the DVD onto a USB flash drive and boot off that to install 10.6 on my Air. Worked like a charm.

Previously, Apple’s preview OS’s were all in the form of downloadable disk-images that needed to be burnt onto a dual-layer DVD to try out. This was also the case for Snow Leopard up until the developer preview they released at WWDC (and available to ADC Select Members online). Since that preview release all OS updates now happen using the friendly Software Update application. Albeit large (the last two were 650Mb and 1.22Gb respectively) it’s much better than downloading and re-installing the OS time after time.

All-in-all, Snow Leopard looks like it’s going to rock. Can’t wait to try out the Server version next!

To answer these questions or part thereof lets first consider the latest browser usage stats in South Africa provided by Stats Counter. Currently Internet Explorer has just over 67% of the market share, followed by Firefox with nearly 25% and Chrome with 4.05%. We can immediately say that the web user population has open their minds towards using Firefox and and at present it is this browser which poses the closest treat to the Microsoft flavour. This trend will definitely grow as the South African government increases their interest in the open source community projects for both schools and government offices.

As far as Chrome is concerned, this too is rather interesting, and sooner or later the power of continuous, redundant advertising of the product will brain wash the online community into remembering the name of Google Chrome. The most promising browser platform in that of Safari hasn’t seem to have an effect on South Africa as yet, perhaps interest will grow as the IPhone (and all things Apple) further penetrates the market, interestingly tough the IPhone has some 0.06% of the cell phone share in the country.

All in all, as one considers web usage in South Africa, the truth is that Internet Explorer is slowly but surely losing ground in market share, and ,by whatever means, as the names of various competitors are learnt, South Africa will eventually mimic the European market.

Oh, and it reduces the wait for books to release hour… even if I am half-way across the world… which means i have zipped through about 14 books since Kindle for iPhone was released about a month or so ago.

But imagine my delight when I found myself experiencing the novels in well, a novel new way… Google Street View!

I first fired up Google Maps and glided through (WiFi glides, 3G grumbles) the locations and venues in the book I was reading which was a biography of The Beatles. Although Liverpool has changed completely since the sixties, it was still a thrill to virtually explore the towns and venues in the book.

You can see the roundabout in Penny Lane (or rather off it as you discover) where the pretty nurse sold poppies from a tray. You can virtually walk across the zebra crossing at Abbey Road – you get the picture.

I realised this was becoming a habit when I decided to zone out over the weekend with a pulp thriller – a doomsday novel called One Second After about an electromagnetic pulse which destroys all electronics in America in the space of an instant.

The deterioration and collapse of society is a fairly gripping read if you ignore some of the politics and will have you heading out to the mall to stock up on baked beans about 5 minutes after you put it down.

The story is centred in a small North Carolina town called Black Mountain and centres on the townsfolk who have to deal with death, disease and refugees from a neighbouring bigger city. Somewhere along the line, the town has to deal with a marauding militia who are looting everything they can lay their hands on and the town and surrounds becomes a battlefield – it’s all very Jericho like.

It brought a whole new dimension to the experience to be able to follow through Google Earth and Street View the locations and venues in the story and I found myself constantly exploring throughout my read. Now sure you could do this right now on your computer, but a rich device like the iPhone really brings these possibilities alive since the modality of the experience totally suits the armchair traveller – ie. you don’t have to get up and go to your computer or fire up the laptop.

Clearly reading is about to get a lot more fun and maybe authors will start embedding easter eggs for us in their stories to find on Street View.

Go on, give it a try with your favourite book (preferably contemporary) and see what I mean…

No biggie really, I just setup my Telkom Billion router up as the default gateway. Brilliant router by-the-way, the only Telkom router that I think is actually worth purchasing. Anyways, I did intend to restore my PC eventually. So today I downloaded the latest beta of Ubuntu’s Jaunty Jackelope (version 9.04) and wrote it to my USB flash disk to do a USB-install. I had to download the alternate CD version because that gives you advanced options like upgrading your current setup or installing a fresh system and configuring your partitions yourself.

I downloaded UNetbootin for Windows and wrote the ISO image to my USB flash drive (Mac OS X is a bit fussy when it comes to writing iso9660 images to a block USB device). Everything seemed to go well and my PC booted straight into the installer and started doing its thing. Then… it tried to detect the CD-ROM drive and failed (obviously) since there is nothing inside it. Really bad foresight on the Ubuntu install team to not get this working right. After much googling, it seems this problem is pertinent to the alternate CD version of the distro and the normal LiveCD installer works no problem on a USB flash disk.

There have been patches and work-arounds to get the alternate version working using a USB disk but that really shouldn’t be the case. I’ve even tried mounting the ISO from an external hard-drive to /cdrom and that works… up to a point until it complains about not knowing which release it is.

Eventually I gave up and wrote the damn ISO to CD and booted off that. It installed perfectly (as it should) and afterwards when it tried to reboot for the first time, it just… stalled. My guess is that it can’t find the bootloader on my first hard drive (this PC has four drives) so I’m going to attempt a rescue. Back to square one.

My faith in desktop Linux has diminished over the past few years. I used to consider myself a huge open source advocate. But after using and enjoying Mac OS X for the past two years, I can’t say I’d ever switch back to Linux for the deskop. It is however still my Number #1 choice as a Server OS as I favor it’s speed, simplicity and usability. But in a desktop environment… it’s just not as easy or as pretty as Mac OS X.

In Quarter 1 of this year figures indicate that globally IE were still leaders in market penetration followed some distance behind by Mozilla.

Similarly these figures reflect almost the same market penetration in South Africa.

With the rollout of more web applications and Microsoft’s reluctance to embrace both the javascript race and CSS 3 it’s only a matter of time before IE’s percentage decreases.

A full install of CS4 with every single option took well under 10 minutes to install, a process that easily take over an hour on most hardware. Granted the test system was no slouch, but breaking the tape in sub 10 mins is eye-popping.

The attached video gives you an idea of what performance can be like using the SSD… basically it shows VMWare launching, unsuspending a Win 7 virtual machine, clicking around in it and suspending and quitting the app… all in seconds. Those of you who use Parallels or VMWare will see the point if your eyes haven’t popped.

Now, I did cheat a bit since what you see in the video is a “warm” start, in the sense that I had opened VMWare earlier to do something, so a cold start will be a bit slower, but with a generous helping of RAM (the test machine has 4GB), this is the kind of responsiveness you can expect to see.

The other part of the speed equation is Intel’s new virtualisation support in their Core i7 architecture. This makes a dramatic difference to VMWare Fusion in particular (since version 2.02 takes advantage of the i7 advancements). If you are thinking of buying a new 2009 Mac Pro, this is the kind of virtualisation performance you can look forward to. FYI, the CPU being used is a Quad Core i7 which supports threading, so the OS sees it as 8 cores.

SSD tech is very dependent on the brand and the intelligence the manufacturer puts into the SSD controller. So not all SSD’s are created equal. Intel’s X25 series is the currently performance choice but it’s getting a lot more competition this month from OCZ and others who are racing to deliver capacity and performance.

In certain applications, a case can be made, even at the current very steep prices, for an SSD over more and more RAM. The SSD performance is compelling enough that for the last 2 weeks I have found myself unable to give up the test system… walk over to another machine and your first thought is, “what’s wrong with this machine, why is it soooo slow”

However the most groundbreaking facet about this product is in fact their commercial, with the sly use of an Apple Laptop and their not-so-sly line “Microsoft huh, So it’s pretty easy to use?” at 1min 57.” All of this adds up to a pretty valuble viral marketing campaign and for that I applaud you Microsoft.