Some Tech Stuff

I’m going to do my best Mark Grabbe or Sam Fee imitation and offer a few observations about technological changes over the past few weeks.  These are essentially random, but maybe someone will find something of interest amidst my tech ramblings:

• I’ve upgraded to the new Lion operating system on my MacBook Pro. For those of you who fear change in all its forms, fear not!! While I do notice changes, they are not so overwhelming to have disrupted my basic, daily workflow. More importantly, so far, the upgrade was pretty painless.  The revised spaces might well become useful as I tend to have too many applications open at the same time. I am sure that I’ll eventually find uses for things like the Launchpad (or I will stop using it).  The only real disruption so far is that installing Lion seems to have made my spellcheck in MarsEdit 3.x to stop working in the Rich Text Mode. So I have to check my spelling in the HTML editor mode.

• I get that the new operating system is also designed to work seamlessly with their new cloud services, and I am approaching that with an open mind, but the truth is that my use of the cloud is spread pretty widely right now (Dropbox, Amazon, Mediafire, Google, et c.), and I can’t really imagine moving to a single cloud service – even a dreamtastic one integrated fully with my Mac’s OS. One the major issues here, of course, that I am not a 100% Mac person . I still depend on my PC for certain specialized applications and some of my more mundane day-to-day tasks.

• One little issue with OSX Lion.  I am a bit disappointed that Front Row went away. I use a Mac Mini to power my home entertainment system. Primarily I use it as a music server (run through a Cambridge Audio DacMagic D/A converter) so I really got to like Front Row.  I know that there are other options out there, but as this post probably shows, I am not much for change.

• Along similar lines, I was surprised that the newest Mac Mini will lack a built in optical drive. I saw this coming, of course, but for people who use their Mini as a media server and still have some commitment to physical media for music (although it’s waning), it will be annoying to have to buy an external CD drive to rip music to the Mini. I know, Apple is not interested in catering to tiny subsets of the Mac-user community, but it is remarkable how many people use Mac Mini or other Apple products to run their home stereo systems. The lack of Front Row is not a big deal, but the lack of an optical drive may make me consider other options.

There were two other big tech-news stories over the past couple months that I guess I should say something about:

• Google+. Like many of my colleagues, I can already imagine ways that Google+ can work in an online teaching environment. Creating a circle for a class would allow me to easily push out notifications to students while keeping them separate from my day-to-day drivel. I could even imagine things like the video Hangouts to have meetings of, say, my Digital History Practicum, or small groups of students.  Close integration with the YouTubes (which, frankly, can integrate with almost anything) could provide another interesting way to bring together content in various media seamlessly. (One wonders whether Google+ will incorporate some of the features developed in Google Wave.)  Some similar points are made here (h/t Sam Fee).  The only thing I’ll eagerly await is a good way to integrate Google+ with Twitter.

• Spotify. I listen to a ton of music. All the time. And Spotify has blown my mind. In fact, it blew my mind so quickly that I ponied up the $10 a month for the Premium version and can now stream “high-quality” music to my office. While my ears are pretty sensitive to compression, the quality from Spotify is certainly adequate considering my sound system in my office is pretty modest (a miniwatt N3, Energy C2 speakers, and my MacBook Pro (no DAC yet)).