It’s out already. It is not showing up on the microsoft autoupdate yet. Go to here, click office for mac 2008, then it should be right there. 

To my surrpise, Cover Stream updated to 2.0 on the 9th of May. I first heard about this application from TUAW from its 1.4 update, but TUAW seemed to have neglected its 2.0 release. The price of Cover Stream went up from USD$14.95  in March to €14.95(coversutra is also marked at this price) now for a lifetime update. Who knows, maybe it will be the next Coverflow which was acquired by Apple and integrated into their Operating System. Cover Stream is a hifty software that allows you to breeze through your iTunes library with the gorgeous coverflow interface without bringing to front the iTunes software itself. 

How does it compare to software of its kind, like Coversutra?

Memory usage

On my 101gb iTunes library loaded with 5272 songs with a larger portion of them in apple lossless format, Cover Stream uses 215.96mb of real memory and 499.61mb of virtual memory. It might seem a lot, but it still response quite quickly, despite some lacks when showing the currently playing album artwork after pressing the next track button. 

With Coversutra, it runs on a 40.58mb of real memory when idling and 369.58mb of virtual memory. Though I have not used more accurate measures to gauge the hit these 2 applications have on the hardware, it is pretty much self-evident upon a trial run. Coversutra recently updated to 2.1.2, before that it never crashed or lagged, given its small footprint and updates are more directed towards the user-interface rather than functionality. 

GUI

While the new application icon of Cover Stream looks much better than in the 1.4 version. I found one from macthemes2.net that might fit better as a replacement in terms of integrity on the menubar icon design.In Cover Stream 2.0, users see a more sleek GUI overall. The album artwork on the desktop looks very much like the other application only with  a more blurred display of album art. Not sure if this has to do with the fact that the album art is shown in profile and recedes into the screen itself a bit thus causing a distortion on the album art.

The animated transition between various clicks such as song selection, info display and song change notification lack a little bit but give the application a more advanced look compared to its last revision. Users can now choose to keep the browser window floating on top. One glitch is that after entering the preference pane with the browser floating, it would be gone once you close the preference pane. It will not come up again unless you uncheck and check the “Float on top” option in the menubar. 

Functionality

With the newly integrated search function, users can now see what they are typing in the Cover Stream window. And search result pops up almost instantly. One very frustrating aspect is that if you were shuffling songs in your library and for some reason you wanted to listen to one particular track, you will be stuck in that album after the track finished playing. Cover Stream would keep shuffling songs from that album only instead of your entire library. To solve this you have to go back to iTunes and delete the Cover Stream playlist, then go back to Music and select any track. The developer explained it has something to do with iTunes’ architecture rather than Cover Stream itself. 

In iTunes we could see the current song playing by pressing Command+L. For Cover Stream, The browser window does not always correspond to the currently playing song. And pressing command L does not seem to do the trick anymore than in the previous version. 

If you are not always importing songs to your iTunes library, it might be wise to turn off sync with iTunes at startup, this way it seem to take up less system resources. One other possibility is to uncheck “show icon in Dock”. 

Conclusion

This is a rather brief review. But it is obvious that Cover Stream is a great app for Coverflow oriented control of iTunes, as the developer intended in the first place. Though it still requires a bit of work to iron out the glitches, it is making great progress in challenging the place of better known album art display programs. It certainly is a keeper! 

The latest laptop release form Apple, dubbed Macbook Air, is a great thinnovation. I was going to get one as my secondary laptop. But on second thought, I guess I am going to wait and see by how much has Apple’s hardware QA improved. 

This post is a cautionary tale for those who are contemplating about buying a macbook pro. I for one as a switcher fell for the Core Duo Macbook Pro for its design and  many features. But one thing bothers me more than anything – the battery does not deliver. And calibrating the battery just doesn’t help Symptoms include:

1. Quickly diminishing Full Charge Capacity (from  5500mAh to 1500mAh within 2 months)
2. Erratic reading of the battery level as shown in the menubar
3. Random shutdown at various battery level
4.  upon removing the magsafe cord, it would shutdown even the battery is charged to 40~50% 

The purchase date of my mac is 25th Sept, 2006. Within one short month, I saw erratic behavior – the battery level on the menubar indicates it drained from 100% to 70% within 10 minutes of use, all with minimal usage as witnessed by one of the Apple Staff in HK. Seeing is believing I guess, he double checked there was “not too much apps running in the background”, only safari with one tab, dashboard with 2 widgets, brightness tuned to lowest, wifi on. If he told me running these things are too much, that these are the cause of the erratic battery behavior, I would have believed him. But the funny thing is the system profiler says “Full Battery Capacity” is only 1500mAh, as opposed to 5500mAh for new laptops(mind you, it had only been used for 1 month or so). Then it was within another 5 minutes that the menubar says only 30% battery’s left. And all of a sudden the meter would say it has 60% left, then it would automatically go into sleep, without prior warning when it still has 50% battery. Well, it’s not that I am those geek who pay close attention to these numbers. The point is that the battery could only power my 1 month old laptop for 1 hour or so, with minimum usage as agreed by Apple’s Staff. A replacement battery was clearly necessary. So I went home with a new battery, which I thought was a small victory.

That was not the end of the story.  I have long suspected that deep discharge(discharging the battery from 100% to 20% or so), however rare, could harm the battery. I am aware that on paper, mbp battery is immune to memory effect. My paranoia remains and I tried to plug in whenever I could find one. It’s hard, believe me. After 1 year of careful use, the RSD is still evident. Though not as serious as before. Apple had released a fair share of battery updates to mbp users:Battery Update 1.3 (released 3rd October, 2007)Battery Update 1.2 (released 28th April, 2007)Battery Recall Programme?  No joy for me, as all my faulty batteries were not covered in the recall programme, yet Apple had offered to send replacements 2 times already. 

Off we go with the latest development. About using the battery for after a year or so, it started acting weird again. Same symptom as last time: it would shutdown when the battery meter says it still has 20% of power. Yet it has only been used for less than 75 minutes. A quick search at Apple’s Discussion Page indicates this symptom obviously takes time to manifest itself, ranging from at few as 2 months in my case to 1 year(see here and here), both core duo and core 2 duo mbp machines are affected. An email to Apple got me to one of their executive relations officer and a technician to provide support on the next working day. The technician, who was confident enough not to ask about the battery’s serial agreed that the battery is faulty and offered to send in a replacement. When asked if he had seen a lot of similar cases, he paused and answered, ” I can only say you are not the first.” Well said…A free replacement battery sounds like a great deal for mbp owners as it’s not warranted by Apple once you are outside of that 1 year Applecare, same for Applecare Protection Plan as well. As the executive relations officer said, “it’s a consumable parts”. It boils down to this, what would you think if you are the one having to live with a short-lived battery that requires replacing at a cost of HKD $950 every year (if you are lucky).  

Feel free to add your voice. 

Remember during the Macworld keynote, Steve demonstrated to us the new cool visual effects and features to be included in iChat 4.0? Like the wireless Time Machine, this has been pulled out of the final release as well.    

In case you forgot, it was actually Phil on the camera. Anywayz, instead of mourning for our loss, folks at the mac rumors site are kind enough to make this work for us. Not only is the holographic effect available to star war fans, with a few more clicks, you could turn yourself into the invisible man as well. Enjoy. Oh, in case you are wondering, this works in photobooth as well, sweeeet! Kudos to Ice-Cube & elbows! 

Yes, it knocked on my door this morning. It didn’t take longer than 15 mins to install on my core duo machine. More less the same time it took to install Tiger.  You of all people should know what is the rest looks like….  I will be posting an upgrade T-1 hour… see you again soon. 

Over at the green bay, it looked as if the GM has been leaked.Confirmation note of the leaked version being 9a581 could be found here. Interestingly the author’s remark on the machine running this seed changed from “on a private mac” to “a developer’s pc”, a snapshot over here.My oh my… mac users are debating if 9a581 is the exact version on the Leopard DVD to be released on the 26th. Is apple’s legal team going to do something about that build? Better yet, will this rumored build expire on Leopard’s official launch date? Like when Apple pulled bootcamp off its download page?What’s new on the GM?From a report by appleinsider, the 3D dock should retain its old 2D look when it’s been placed on the side. Is Apple hearing our prayers? doesn’t sound like much to me. So much for last minute surprises? We will soon find out. As always, Don’t Steal Software.

I want it NOW.

6 more days to go.