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So the iPad has been out over a week and I’ve had mine for just about a week.

During that week I’ve tried out many different apps, but wanted to post about one of my favorites; the Wordpress app.

Not only is it one of my favorites, but I’m also using it to write this review.

As with most things on the iPad it’s beautiful, elegant and dead simple to use.
When you first launch you’re greeted with the typical setup screen where you enter your site address, username and password, then…. Well, then that’s it.

Assuming everything was entered correctly, you’ll connect to your blog and be greeted with a list of your articles as well as the main edit window (see screenshot).

From this screen you can edit your existing posts or create a new one. When creating a new post you can save it as a local draft, draft, pending review, private or publish it.

In the right corner you have three buttons, the first is settings, then a button that allows you to add pictures, a preview button, to see how your post will look and the save button.

That’s really all there is to it. There’s not a whole lot of formatting options (well none really), but it’s dead simple an easy to use for mobile blogging.

As many other people have been, since it was announced, I’ve been obsessed with reading everything I can on the Palm Pre

With the Pre comes the whole new WebOS, a completely brand new operating system.
Among many other things the OS treats applications as ‘cards’ that can me shuffled, flicked off the screen to close and represent your currently running application.

Well, a little bit ago my iPhone died so I’ve been using my friend’s Treo 650, so that’s how I came accross TealOS.

TealOS is a WebOS-like launcher for the Palm that kind of gives a glimpse of a portion of what’s coming with the upcoming Palm Pre.

Loading the launcher is just like any other application, you just install the prc, through HotSync, on your Treo or Centro and launch it.

When you first run it, it will set itself as the default launcher, but that can easily be undone through the ‘Tool’ Menu

On initial launch you’re greeted with the main launcher window that has status at the top such as; Time, mute icon, bluetooth status, signal bars and battery status.
Along the bottom is a quick launch bar that has, by default; phone, Contacts, Messaging, Calendar and Launch window.

The application buttons launch directly into those apps, where the launcher icon brings up the full screen launcher. You can also access this launcher by swiping up from the bottom of the screen to the top.

What about the ‘wave’ launcher that’s on the Pre?
Yep, it’s there too.. animated and everything and it looks beautiful.

The great thing is that all of the launcher options are 100% customizable, in that you can add whatever apps you want to the launchers!

When you launch an app it launches as it normally would, then when you exit the application it shows as the ‘cards’ like on the pre / WebOS.

Once you’re at the card window you can move them around, move back and forth between them and flick them up to close the app.. all the cool stuff you saw in the Palm Pre videos.

I’m using it on a Treo 650, so it’s a little sluggish at times, but it’s still a VERY well done launcher and they put a lot of time into the design and customizations; there’s menu items for just about everything.

There is a downside:
Palm forced teal to stop selling the app so, as of March 30 2009, you can no longer buy it.

It can, however, be found out on the net if you know where to look, but you’ll have to figure that one out yourself.

I’ve been using OSX for a few years now and LOVE it.
Recently I put together a ‘Hackintosh’, just to see how reliable it could be, and dual booted a trial version of Vista Home Premium (using my friend’s disk with no serial gives a 30 day trial).

I absolutely love Vista, so much so that I think I’m going to use it as my primary OS for a while to see if I miss OSX.

Regardless of if I do end up using it as my primary OS, I’ve done some digging and found some equivalent software of OSX software I’ve been relying on.

I’m not going to list all options, I’m only going to list the ones that I found a best match.

iLife equivalent apps:

• iPhoto – Adobe Photoshop Elements 7. I tried Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery and they’re both very limited, compared to iPhoto and A.P.E.
• iMovie – Adobe Premiere Elements 7. This blows away the newest iMovie, as well as Windows Movie Maker
  • You can buy the two Elements apps, as a bundle, for about $100 right now. It’s VERY MUCH worth it, they’re both more feature rich than iPhoto and iMovie
• iTunes – iTunes
• Garageband – Acoustica Mixcraft. This application is just plain awesome! I don’t know if it’s BETTER than Garagemand, but it’s at least as good.

Other Apps

• Panic Unison – Newsleecher
• Mac The Ripper – DVD shrink

There ya’ go.. that’s what I’ve found so far.

Up until about 3 years ago, my entire 10(ish) year professional career was in PC support of some kind… either desktop or server.

I was so sick of dealing with support issues all day at work, then having to mess with my PC at home because my wife couldn’t print, it wouldn’t start up, it was slow, had another virus, etc…

One day I got an OLD mac and loaded a version of this new OSX operating system on it and absolutely fell in love!
I put and upgrade card in that Mac, then bought and old iMac, then a PowerMac G5, then when they switched to Intel I got the iMac I have now.

All that time I always had a Windows machine around, there are some things that aren’t available for the Mac and I do like a good game every now and then… but I never considered using it as my primary OS again.

So now I’ve been looking at the OSX86 project and have successfully installed Leopard on my Acer Aspire One . That went so well I decided to go buy some parts and build my own “Hackintosh” desktop machine (I’ll be blogging about this when it’s done).

I decided I wanted to dual boot Vista and Leopard so I got the parts, bought a copy of Vista Home Premium and another copy of Leopard (PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE buy the OS if you’re going to do this project, it REALLY is worth the money).

I hacked everything together and installed OSX.. it runs GREAT!
Then I realized it’s easier to do the dual boot if you install Windows first, so I booted up the Vista disk, formatted the drive and installed.

After a painless install I was presented with the desktop, but with default graphics since it didn’t have drivers for the video card I got.
I thought ‘Wow, this is pretty fast’.

So I installed all the updated drivers and, just for the Hell of it, turned on the Aero graphics and… this thing SCREAMS. I hate to say it, but on this machine, Vista seems much faster than Leopard, even with full visual effects.

I had tried Vista in beta and when it was first released and I can tell you it wasn’t like this!

I don’t think I’m ready to switch back to Windows from OSX, but for the first time in about 4 years I’m considering it.

A couple of years ago I sold my PowerMac G5 and purchased an Intel iMac, the Power Mac was just too much machine for what I was doing and I wanted to run Windows and MacOS on the same machine.

Shortly after I got it, I picked up a copy of Parallels and used it through version 3. It was useable and reasonably fast, but I still found myself switching to Boot Camp (starting with the beta version) when I wanted to do anything with video or graphics.

About a year ago I found out about VirtualBox.
VirtualBox is a free, cross platform virtualization application that worked at least as well as Parallels 3 did. I’ve been happily using that for close to a year now.

Then I read some articles about Parallels 4 and how it has smooth video, supports some 3D games and is 50% faster than previous versions.

I downloaded the demo of it and found that has a conversion program to convert from other apps, including VirtualBox.. sweet!

I ran the program and it converted my VirtualBox PC just fine and I was able to boot in it. During the conversion it asks to install the Parallels tools and I thought it was odd that it took a REALLY long time to install them, but just let it go while I watched some TV.

Coming back about an hour later, it had just finished up so I loaded up my machine to check out the new speed and… it was REALLY slow.
I loaded up some video and it darn near locked up the machine it was so slow and jerky, dropping frames all over the place.

I did some research online and tried some tweaks that improved things a bit, but not much.
Not willing to write off the software just yet, I reloaded XP from a fresh install, installed the tools and… same exact thing as before. I’d have to say the software is slower than the previous version on my machine.

There are none of these issues with VirtualBox.
I don’t think I can play 3D games on in Windows in VirtualBox, but I never have a problem with speed or framerate in my virtual machines… plus I that’s what I have my Wii and Xbox360 for.

My advice, if you’re thinking of upgrading or purchasing Parallels 4, is don’t. Save your money and go download a copy of VirtualBox