As a student, writing is a large part of what I do on a daily basis. Whether it be essays, reports or just homework, I’m always typing away. The internet is a distracting place as you are well aware, and the temptation to sneak a look at Facebook or the internet window behind your document becomes too great a lot of the time. Thus, I am always looking for new ways to focus my attention on my work.
Enter ‘Ommwriter’. The weird name comes from a meditation exercise in which the phrase ‘omm’ is hummed in an effort to clear one’s mind. Following this philosophy, Ommwriter’s soul purpose is to create a serene, tranquil environment in which to write until your heart (or essay word limit) is content.
Once you realize that Ommwriter isn’t a word processor, but a writing companion, you begin to see its true value. Its minimalist, and flaunts it. You’ll find Ommwriter amazingly simple and clean, offering only three fonts, three font sizes and three background images. Even the scroll bar is only a few pixels wide. What you won’t find it any formatting options, fancy graphics, imaging or even headers. There isn’t even a spellchecker built into it. Why? I guess because all of those features add clutter, something which Ommwriter goes out of its way to reduce.
“Find, it looks really boring. What else?” you may ask. Well before you jump to conclusions, Ommwriter has a few cool and unique tricks that set it apart from other writing programs like WriteRoom. Ommwriter has a series of ambient music tracks and key stroke sounds built in to bring you into your writing frame of mind. Seven of each for you to explore and enjoy, each beautiful and relaxing in its own way.
Of course, some people will find the sounds dreadfully annoying and will go out of their way to avoid it. But for me, Ommwriter provides a soothing, calming and distraction free environment. As a writing companion, Ommwriter is fantastic. It knows its place in a person’s workflow, and neatly fits into it, molding itself perfectly into the roll.
Ommwriter is currently in beta, and you can pick up a copy from their website. I don’t know when the final version will ship, all I know is that I can’t wait!
Snow Leopard! Yay!
My concerns about Apple not having any in stock were totally unncessary. There were tons in the store. In short, Snow Leopard is great! Well worth the AUD$40.
Amazingly, it shuts down in about 3 seconds!
Should Our School Get Macs?
7:48 May 28th, 2009 | Notes
Here it is! My latest article for the school newspaper! Enjoy!
***
By now you all probably know that Macs are slowly making their way into more and more of the school. There are sleek, shiny iMacs creeping into computer labs in each of the campuses. This raises the question? Should the school get more Macs?
Personally, and from a completely bias perspective, I believe we should. Macs just work better than PCs in a school environment. Lets be honest, no body likes having to wait for all of the random pop ups to finish doing their thing and wait for firefox to open before they can start doing their work on the current PCs*. From my experience using the Macs in the music center, none of this stuff happens, allowing you to get down to work right away.
Macs also have features that save time when working. On a PC, if you have multiple web pages, documents and other files open, the task bar (the blue bar down the bottom) gets cluttered very quickly. This makes it hard for you to find the window you are looking for without dragging windows all over the screen to finally uncover the right one. On the Mac, there is a simple way to see all your windows at once and quickly select the one you were after. No hassles. All the Mac users will understand what I mean when I say “It’s the button on the keyboard that makes all the windows fly around”. Get what I mean? It’s features like this that make using a Mac very quick, painless and more efficient in getting you work done.
It’s also valuable to look at the trends in what computers students are buying. Last year the highest selling laptop in the high school and university student market was the MacBook. If computers are all about making life easier and simpler, the school’s buying habits reflect the students’ decision to move to a more user-friendly and painless computer. By that I mean the students recognize Macs are easier and are buying them, therefore the school should do the same for their own peace of mind. After all, peoples’ pockets don’t lie.
The computers at school are running a version of Windows that is getting close to eight years old. That’s decades in computer years. No matter what happens, in the next few years the school will have have to upgrade the computer as the life of Windows XP comes to an end.
What do you think? Should the school continue the trend of Mac purchases? Would you like to see Windows Vista in the library computer labs instead? Would you rather we wait for the release of Windows 7 before buying new computers?
***
*Note: Our school is using Novell which throws out tons of pop ups at login. Bleh!
Note: Article has been edited to maintain anonymity of my school! Yay civil liberties!
Note: Sorry for using so much italicized text.
Dual Booting Windows 7!
11:18 May 23rd, 2009 | Notes
I’ve been meaning to dual boot the Windows 7 RC for a while now, but never got around to it for one reason or another. So this morning I decided I finally would.
Let me tell you, it takes a whole freaking day.
I went into this foolishly thinking that it would take a hour, two hours at max. Boy was I wrong. I began by clearing out my Mac of all the crap I’ve acumulated over the years to get me 50GB of space. I planned to devote just 20GB to 7, because I won’t need that much space. With the space cleared out, I ran Boot Camp Assistant a clicked partition.
“Partitioning Failed”
Crap. I eventaully learned that my drive was too fragmented to create 20GB of continuous space. Here’s where I jumped to conclusions: the Mac doesn’t have defragmentation software built in, therefore the Mac doesn’t get fragmented/it defragments on the fly.
WRONG!
What!? My drive is more fragmented than the chinese government!? NO! How do I fix it?!
Searching around the internet I found a few programs that claimed to defragment my hard drive… for $20. Since I don’t have a card that works on the internet, that idea went out the toilet. So I did the only logical thing, reinstall OS X. It took hours to get my Mac back to it’s original state. Wiping the drive, installing Leopard, partioning the hard drive, migrating my Time Machine backup, installing over a gigabyte of patches. THEN, I installed Windows 7.
The amount of driver problems I had was fairly minimal. The only big problem I had was getting the right driver for my graphics card. Windows Update got it right, then the Boot Camp Assistant installed another driver over the top of it and broke it! System Restore, Unintall Driver, Install Updated Driver.
OK done!
Finally, after about 10 hours I have Windows 7 installed on my Mac. Despite all the pain of going through all of this crap, some more good stuff came out of it. I have a partition I can install anything to, I have Windows 7 installed (duh) and it has speeded up my OS X install by quite a bit!
In the end, all I really have to show for it is that I have a pre-release version of Windows on my Mac.
I feel unclean…
Ooooo Windows 7 RC!
Amazingly, it’s still good! I thought that Microsoft might stuff it up or make it bloated and slow, but I think it’s actually faster than the beta! If this keeps up I might actually buy a copy!
Wait, what am I saying? *shiver* Okay, calm down James. Breathe, Breathe. Think of Steve, think of Steve. Ahh there, much better.
Right, I <3 Mac!
That’s better.
No MacBook Mini? I'm Sad!
7:34 Apr 30th, 2009 | NotesIt seams like my dream of a Mac netbook is becoming less and less of a reality. With all the rumors now revolving around this ‘media tablet’ I might as well give up and just buy the HP netbook.
So no Apple netbook.
And after all that time I spent fantasizing about carrying one around as well!
