Friday, February 29th, 2008
by George Appiah
In case you didn’t know, I run a little toy called GhanaBee for you news junkies to receive the latest Ghana news headlines on your cellphones. Every 30 minutes, this little toy steps out to automagically grab the latest news headlines from major Ghanaian news websites, and renders them for proper display on mobile devices. It also sends free SMS alerts via the Twitter API. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first and only website of its kind out there.
I have a small but loyal (and growing!) users, and I’ve received really great feedback from these folks. But the funny thing is that I’ve never owned a phone capable of accessing the Internet before! So I’ve relied on various cellphone emulators to optimize the display.
Anyway, today I discovered this little free software called iPhoney which brands itself as a “pixel-accurate” iPhone emulator. This is how GhanaBee displays on the iPhone. Cool, huh?
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
by George Appiah
This morning, after a cup of hot coffee, I successfully upgraded my MacBook’s keyboard firmware. This fixes a nasty problem where the first key press is ignored if the computer has been sitting idle. This was really a quick and easy update.
In other news, I’m getting more and more Firefox crashes now, after the first. But I can’t live without my plugins, so upgrading to Firefox 3 pre-release version is NOT an option for me.
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
by George Appiah
No, I’ve not been involved in any accident, and I’ve not had a crush on any girl. But this is even more important to me: on the 21st of February 2008, at exactly 13:56GMT, I witness an application crash on my Mac for the first time. The application? Firefox 2.0.0.12.
But before you jump on Firefox, note that I really live in my browser, and that’s the application I’m working with about 80% of the time I spend behind my Mac. It’s also likely some background services may have been crashing and restarting “automagically” — who knows?
To paraphrase Victor Cajiao from the Typical Mac Users Podcast: No, it’s not perfect. It’s just way better than anything out there.
Sunday, February 10th, 2008
by George Appiah
For most of yesterday, besides meeting a couple of really interesting people, I was flirting around with my new found love - my new Apple MacBook. So far things have been surprisingly easy-going between the two of us.
The biggest issue I’m grappling with now is how to quickly UN-LEARN my PC habits accumulated over the years. And I think I’m doing such a great job at that, being being the nerd I am. Here are some of the surprises I’ve been dealing with:
Unboxing and Plugging: After I unboxed the baby and inspected everything inside the box, I took the beautiful power adapter and looked all round the computer searching for where to plug it in. Before I could think “this must be it”, I felt this pull, and BAM! - the thing plugged itself in! No kidding, the damn connector plugged itself into the computer! At this point I started thinking: this Apple thing must be damn good — I’ve never been treated like an idiot like this before 
(get the gist?).
Anyway, I pushed the power button to start the baby. After a few clicks I was up and running with my user account, and the baby politely asked for my permission to connect to the WiFi in the room.
But it seemed like something was missing. Where is the right mouse button? Actually Macs have “right-click” functionality … except there’s no right mouse button — there’s just one mouse button! The “right-click” menu is, you go CTRL+Click. Apple must have a design philosophy behind this, but I’ve not had made time to read on this yet. Trouble is, I keep clicking on the right side of the single button and waiting for something to happen.
The Control (Win) / Command (Mac) thingy: Back in the PC environment, many keyboard commands and shortcuts are done with the control key plus some other characters (eg. CTRL+A - for select all, CTRL+C - to copy, CTRL+P - to Print, etc). There’s something similar in the world of Macs too, except this is the COMMAND key. But here’s the thing: There’s CONTROL key in addition to this COMMAND key, and the Command key is in the wrong position :-). So as you’ll expect, I keep hitting FUNCTION+something, and always getting the wrong results.
Installing & Uninstalling Applications: I’m yet to read on the RIGHT way to install applications. Sure, I’ve installed a bunch of applications already, but it seemed so easy that… I’m left thinking… there has to be something else I’m not doing. How can Apple take me to be such an idiot that they’d make things so easy to do round here?
It’s already Sunday morning, and I’ve not had any sleep within the past 48 hours. So I’m off to catch some sleep now. More love stories tomorrow.
Saturday, February 9th, 2008
by George Appiah
I’m so full of life now, thanks to a brand new love I’ve found. I now have a spanky yanky pretty little brand new girl in my life: pretty and prim — but not too slim; with heavenly eyes — and just the right size; very smart … and she just can’t ever be bothered by any of those silly things I do.
She’s from the city of Appleland, the tribe of MacBooks. Vital stats: white, Intel breed 2.2GHz processor, 1G RAM, 120GB storage… and all the usual excellente goodies of the Apple MacBook tribe. But I’ve not been able to find a cool enough name for her yet. So why don’t you suggest a name for my new Apple MacBook?
