Holiday 2009 Gift Round-up


It’s that time of year, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday behind us, and Christmas fast approaching, that the mind turns to gifts. I have assembled a few ideas for you – products I have either been reviewing for MyMac Magazine or that I have bought for myself over the last twelve months.

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NewerTech Voyager Q Hard Drive Dock – Review


The ever falling price of hard drive storage means that we can now own and manage terabytes and terabytes of space if we wish. But the ongoing increase of capacity and fall in price leads to a new problem – if you are anything like me, you will have a shelf littered with external drives, surrounded by a detritus of data cables and multiple “wall wart” power supplies. Mine act like a series of time capsules – the further back in time you go (based on when I bought each one), the smaller they become and the more disparate the type of data we retain.

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Mercury Pro 8x Blu-ray Writer – Review


It is always a pleasure to try a brand new technology on the Mac. There is something satisfying that comes with using a computer or gadget in a way that you have never experienced before, and the pace of technological development is such that there is always some new feature or bauble on the latest hardware or software to play with and coo over. Most often, this is something fancy and new that Apple has built in to their products, but in this case it is a Blu-ray writer from Other World Computing that is under consideration.

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Seagate FreeAgent Pro/Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini hard drives – Review


The twin drivers of mass market economics and corporate consolidation have lead us to a cornucopia of cheap, high performance electronics that would have been unimaginable only ten years ago. Back when you were dropping up to half the price of a small car on a laptop, it was always felt to be worth paying extra for a name brand. Build quality and service meant that Apple hardware commanded a premium price.

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Adobe Acrobat 9.0 Professional – Review


Adobe Acrobat 9.0 is the latest version (I was looking at the Professional variant – Standard is also available), and once you fire it up it is clear that Adobe has embraced the challenge of adding value with relish. A clean interface provides a series of drop-down buttons for the Acrobat workflow – starting with creation of new documents, and ending with commenting of existing PDFs.

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IRIScan Executive 2 – Review


The advancement of technology is a wonderful thing, particularly in the field of consumer electronics. Not only do devices get cheaper and more functional as time goes on, but they develop wonderful new capabilities.

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Fenestration 43 – Wind of Change



Ever since Steve Jobs got up in front of the World Wide Developer Conference and announced “yes – the rumours are true!” and thereby ushered in the Intel Macintosh age, many of us were tantalized by two diverse possibilities – running Windows natively on a Mac and running OS X on ordinary PCs.

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LAbesace Lime Drop MacBook Laptop Bag
Review


With out wishing to stereotype the typical MyMac magazine reader, let me ask you a question. Have you ever shopped for a handbag? If not for yourself, perhaps accompanied a loved one or friend? It is a frankly bewildering experience. They come in so many different shapes, colors, sizes and prices that I had no idea how my wife was ever going to be able settle on just one.

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Fenestration 42
Data Exchange in the Clouds


For users straddling the Windows PC and Mac worlds, the question of seamless data interchange between the systems can be a challenging one. Of course, with the capabilities of OS X, the rise of USB and the availability of flash drives and external disks it is probably easier than it has ever been to pass data, but nevertheless there are still considerations of disk formats, file formats and application versions to consider.

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