It was always bound happen. Tomorrow I’m finally getting myself an Apple Macbook Pro. After watching the unveliing of the new Macbook Pro family at the WWDC on Tuesday, I had to get one, and soon before Apple do yet another refresh.
This is going to be my first Mac, and I’m pretty excited about it. I posted an article about my admiration for a Macbook a few months ago on my college years blog, and finally I’m making the switch. Its gonna take a while to get used to, I know, but theres never been a piece of technology I’ve been dumbfounded by. And by the way, people say Mac’s are easy. I think I deserve a bit of that, after 9 months on the Clonmel Campus.
I’ve decided on getting the 13″ MBP. There are multiple reasons, but the main ones are
- Its portable yet powerful.
- Its one of the cheapest, and as I am a new Mac user I’m not sure if I will like it, so why gamble big bucks on machine I might not like.
- 7 hours battery life? Pretty hard to say no to that.
- It’s such a good looking piece of machinery.
- I’m a student, and therefore I get a discount..
Seeing as Apple love to rip off their loyal customers, I’ve decided to get the base model, and upgrade afterwards. Takes a bit longer but well worth it in the long run.
I will be doing a post-macbook post (hopefully on the Macbook itself), with video and image unboxing. Honestly Apples packaging is just as impressive as the actual product.
I’m not abandoning Windows totally either. My XPS M1530 will sit alongside my Macbook on my desk. Now all I have do to is make some room.
I know if I forget about this again, I’ll never come back to it. So…
Live.com, Microsoft’s previous search engine, was never going to penetrate the dominant force of Google. It did things slower, gave less accurate results, and really brought nothing new to the table. Even with Microsoft trying to make it the default search platform through their desktop live applications, they never really went anywhere with Live.com
Bing.com is the successor to Live.com, and its actually quite impressive. The search items page is less cluttered, the ads on the right are less obtrusive. The logo could with a bit of work, but maybe Microsoft may be onto something with this.
Some of its features include:
- A video search that gives a preview of the video (with sound!) in the search engine itself.
- If you cant find what you’re looking for it will give quite relevant search queries that match the current one.
- Find out what search strings are popular with xRank.
- Search images and video be date , length , size etc..
- Categorised Searches
- Gives previews of each search item.
- Inline image search so that you don’t get lost
- Searching for cheap flights is easy with their travel page (which was hidden in the UK version of Bing)
I think Bing is an excellent alternative to Google, it mixes the computational power of Wolfram Alpha, with the search capabilities of Google. Things that are missing are that there’s no localised Bing for Ireland which means many of the useful features that I want, aren’t available to me. It current doesn’t give you an option add the search to Firefox, but this addon will, and it will use their search suggestions
Overall, Bing is surprisingly good search-engine, especially for one that is currently in Beta. Microsoft are currently on a roll, with the Xbox 360, Windows 7, and now this? I want to see how they market this thing, because hopefully they wont use Matthew Perry like they did when introducing Windows 95.