I was an early adopter of Mozilla Firefox. I started using it on Windows before there was a version 1.0 and have stuck with it till now, on my Mac.

Back then there was an undeniably huge feature gap between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. There were a few other web browsers that never really caught on; I used MYIE2 for a while, tried out Netscape and Opera but finally settled on Firefox. Through the years, Firefox has not ceased to impress me with a slew of smart new features that make everyone’s browsing experience so much more efficient, and in turn enjoyable. Their market share grew rapidly, and more and more of my friends switched to Firefox from the piece of shit that was Internet Explorer.

For obvious reasons, Microsoft realized it needed to do something to stay competitive and released Internet Explorer 7 but I have so far not heard of a single person who uses Firefox that switched back to IE 7, therefore I consider it to be a failure. It was better than IE 6, don’t get me wrong, but Firefox’s open-source nature made it a clear winner in the web browser war over the past few years.

Continue reading ‘Safari 4 Beta’

I currently use a Mac. Yes I do. But I’ve used Windows my whole life. I have my gripes about Windows, but I’m not arrogant, nor am I a fanboy. I know that most games are made exclusively for Windows and it doesn’t take a genius (or a fanboy for that matter) to figure out why. Windows XP has actually become quite a stable OS after all the service packs and the 7 years it’s been out. And even though the primary partition on my MacBook is OS X, I have Boot Camp and Windows XP installed for some programs that I just can’t run in OS X.

Like what? Like TVU Player. You see I don’t have cable TV and I’m a guy who likes to watch international live soccer (football) matches. When I was still only using Windows (about a year ago) I set out to find a way to watch these matches online. I knew about live TV channel streaming websites/applications but most of them had limited channels and usually not the ones I wanted (NASA TV isn’t really all that exciting after all). Somehow, I came to know of TVU Networks’ TVU Player, a sort of revolutionary global online streaming TV channel software. What a mouthful. And TVU had the channels and live games that I wanted to watch so badly, albeit having to stay up in the wee hours watching them (time zone differences) was still rather… um… tiring.

So I was happy and everything was cool. And then, after 1 or 2 years of wanting one, I bought a Mac. I instantly fell in love with Mac OS X for its simplicity, stability and power as an operating system. The applications that I most often used (except games) were all available on OS X in one way or another so that wasn’t really an issue for me. In fact, a couple of programs that I often used on Windows had no equivalents on the Mac. That is, anti-virus programs… OK sorry, that was a bit mean to all you Windows users. We all know why us Mac users don’t have to deal with viruses, so I’ll stop. And then, there were a number of Mac-only programs that I quite liked and which didn’t have equally powerful Windows counterparts. The iLife suite for example (although I barely have a use for it now), Adium, Delicious Library and Leopard’s Time Machine.

But the Mac had nothing like TVU Player. I perused Google for hours looking for a Mac alternative but to no avail. And this was all happening while the English Premier League was in full swing. Fortunately for me, there was Boot Camp. Not only would Boot Camp allow me to watch my live football games but I would also be able to play FIFA 07 (and later 08) on my laptop instead of on the home desktop PC. So I installed Windows XP on my MacBook and literally had “the best of both worlds”.

Recently, I discovered VMware Fusion. This small application allows you to “seamlessly run Windows, Linux and other PC operating systems on your Intel-based Mac.” And the program does what it claims very well. I won’t bore you with the features and instead “show off” a bit here in a more graphical manner (more pictures after the break).

TVU Player owns, now on Mac too thanks to VMware Fusion

Continue reading ‘Macs do Windows even better with VMware Fusion’

When I was buying my MacBook (in June of this year) I was thinking that I could get the Pro but the extra 500 or so USD I would have to pay kind of put me off. I thought that I wouldn’t be gaming much and that beside the graphics card, the MacBook Pro did not have much else of use to me.

The backlit keyboard is a cool feature but I can live without. The bigger, brighter screen didn’t really matter to me as I would have an external monitor if I would ever need a bigger screen. The audio capability of the MBP is definitely better than that of the MB, but I can always use external speakers. And the DVI-out port, well, I have the $20 Apple converter. RAM and CPU wise, the MBP and MB are pretty much equal.

So when I made my final decision to buy a MacBook I realized all the MBP would do for me is let me play new games. But in June the only games I played were FIFA 07 and Civilization III which were not graphics intensive at all. I completely ignored the future and the fact that I would have this computer for at least 2 years and ended up saving 500 dollars and in a way a lot more because of all the games I wont have to buy anymore because I can’t play them. A good decision?

Not quite. So I bought the high-end 2.2 GHz MacBook with 1 gig of RAM and an Intel GMA950 integrated graphics card six months ago. But there is also a problem that I have now. After a few months I started liking to play other games, namely, first person shooters. And that was when I realized the GMA950 is not built for gaming and that my thinking half a year ago was very shortsighted. So I moaned and groaned and wished I had bought the MBP but realized I was stuck with it. So a few days ago I decided to live with it. This was after talking to friends in university who say they don’t even have time to play video games, which I guess I also will not in uni.

And now I shall get to the point of this post, which games can you play on the MacBook? I have scoured the internet and looked many a forum for hints and warnings and these have helped in my game-buying decisions. And without further ado, here are my personal results with the notebook I described earlier.

Games that work

Call of Duty 2 (Mac) – works great with 1280 x 1024 and max graphics, there is sometimes lag when there is lots of action but definitely more than playable.

Civilization IV (Mac) – just bought this one and it was an interesting situation. I installed the game and the patch and was greeted with a message saying my computer’s hardware could not handle the game in the in-game menu, clicked OK, and the game has been working great ever since. Slight lag, but not noticeable and does not impede enjoyment of the game. I recommend this game for anyone with a high-end MacBook or any Mac for that matter.

Civilization III (Windows) – works like a charm, but I don’t think the game has a widescreen resolution option so it’s only slightly stretched.

SimCity 4 (Windows) – works but at full graphics and highest resolution, gets laggy when moving around and building. Not recommended.

GTA: San Andreas (Windows) – Works quite well at 800 x 600 with max graphics but gets annoyingly laggy at times. Playable but not enjoyable to the point of being extremely fun like the GTA series is on the PS2.

FIFA 06, 07, 08 (Windows) – all work great at max settings but somehow the graphics do not look as good as they do on my PC with a 256 Mb GeForce 5500. I personally like FIFA 07 the most out of those three.

Madden 06 (Windows) – works great at max graphics at 1024 x 768 (widescreen). It wasn’t a very addictive game for me though.

NFS: Porsche Unlimited (Windows) – works awesome, obviously. It’s like 8 years old.

And all of the older games I’ve tried. So if you don’t mind playing slightly old games, the MacBook’s video card is good enough for you and even some relatively newer games work.

Games that don’t work

NFS: Underground (Windows) – doesn’t initiate after install, didn’t bother to research into it.

Juiced (Windows) – too laggy to be playable at all.

Battlefield 2 (Windows) – nope.

Call of Duty 4 (Windows) – this is my dream game and I have no machine to play it on. The sadness.

The Verdict

The MacBook is definitely not a gaming machine. That’s what the MBP was made for. I guess that’s why the MacBook page on apple.com does not feature a “Graphics” tab like all the other Macs. If you like playing new, graphics intensive games, do not buy a MacBook, go for the Pro (you should still buy a Mac though) but if you’re like me and can live (at least somewhat) with older FPS titles or not-so-graphics-intensive-games then the MacBook is an affordable solution for a portable computer. But don’t get me wrong, the MacBook is a great computer with great specs, the only thing it’s missing is a good graphics card.

By the way, the new MacBooks (revamped a few months ago) feature a new graphics card, the Intel GMA X3100 with 144 Mb of shared RAM. I have not read anything about this new card but I would guess it is somewhat better.