Doozla Contest Winners

I recently reviewed Plasq's excellent children's drawing application, Doozla. The nice people at Plasq agreed to give away a two licenses so we had a contest judged by my children. The winners have been chosen!

Monette - Age 5

Sara - Age 7

Congratulations to the winners and thank you Plasq for your generosity!

Pzizz Review

This week I’m looking at, of all things, napping software. I have to admit, when I first heard about Pzizz, I was a bit skeptical. Sticking an audio file on my iPod that is supposed to help me get to sleep seemed like just a bit of mumbo jumbo. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of research concerning the benefits of napping so I decided to give Pzizz a try.

Pzizz installs as a simple application with up to three modules for an energizer nap, sleep, and meditation. The interface is simple to operate and could easily be managed by even the sleep deprived. The built in settings work just fine but you can add your own preferences. I’ll tell you more about that later. You can easily select your module, its length, and either play or export files to iTunes.

So what exactly is in the magic audio file? According to the Pzizz developers, it has lots of high tech concepts like “binaural beat”, and “theta brainwaives”. I’m not exactly sure what that means. What I heard when using Pzizz was some interesting music, soft nature and synthesizer sounds, and a coach getting me to relax.

The thing about Pzizz is that it works. I’m an early riser. I’m very productive in the morning but by the afternoon I start to fade. For the past month I’ve been sneaking away when I can for a 20 minute Pzizz energizer. I’m not really sure how it works, but for me it made a difference.

So there are the basics. After you use Pzizz for awhile, you’ll want to customize it. That is done through the preferences. For me that involved reducing the amount voice interaction. I created my own preset that puts the voice in only at the beginning and the end. Hearing that voice in the middle of my energizer was definitely crimping my zen. I also turned the voice volume down.

If you are having trouble sleeping, you may want to look into the Pzizz sleeping tracks. I tried it and it worked fine but, to be honest, I usually fall asleep pretty quickly anyway. They also now have meditation tracks.

You can buy either the sleep or energizer modules for $29.95 or the set for $49.95. You can look at that as a lot or a little depending on how important napping and sleeping are to you. If you are having trouble sleeping, you should definitely give it a try. They have a money back guarantee and a free lifetime upgrade policy. You can find it at Pzizz.com.

You can listen to this review on Surfbits Episode 183.

Path Finder 5.0 Released

I reviewed Path Finder awhile back. It is, essentially, a supercharged Finder. Today the developers released their new version 5.0 which is very Leopard friendly and sports several new features including a dual pane window. I'll be reviewing it in detail later but for now head over to the developer site and check it out.

Napping 101

Here is an excellent guide to recharging in the afternoon. I'll post more on this Saturday with this week's feature review.

Apple NetBook and iPhone Keyboards

Yesterday during the financial call, a question was asked about Apple getting into the growing netbook space. In case you didn't know, netbooks are the very cheap, very small laptops that are cropping up. According to AppleInsider, Steve responded explaining:

We're not tremendously worried. As we look at the netbook category, that's a nascent category. As best as we can tell, there's not a lot of them being sold. You know, one of our entrants into that category if you will is the iPhone, for browsing the Internet, and doing email and all the other things that a netbook lets you do. And being connected via the cellular network wherever you are, an iPhone is a pretty good solution for that, and it fits in your pocket.

I would have to generally agree with Steve there. I don't feel a tremendous need for a netbook so long as I have my iPhone in my pocket. If he really wants to sway me however, he simply needs to make the call and tell the iPhone software team to turn on the switch to allow use of a bluetooth keyboard. I've asked for it and even written haiku about it. This wold be a game changer when combined with a good AppStore word processor.

We know the iPhone has a bluetooth radio. We know just about every other smart phone has an external keyboard solution. So what is taking so long?

Apple Tax? Really?

Judge me by my price do you?

My good friend, Darren Rolfe, pointed me to a Technologizer article comparing the pricing of the new MacBooks with a similarly configured PC. The author concludes:

The MacBook is close in price to the laptops I looked at which it resembles most closely, all of which target what I think of as the low end of the high end of the notebook market; if there’s a Mac Tax here, it’s not worth worrying about.

While this article is very good, I think it misses a very large point with respect to bundled software. Specifically, the inclusion of the iLife software and exclusion of crapware you find on most new PC's is another huge selling point in my mind.

Mac Roundtable Episode 51

Over the weekend, I was fortunate to participate in recording the 51st episode of the Mac Roundtable. As always, it was a lot of fun talking with fellow Mac geeks. We covered the new MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Allison's tale of woe when she wiped out her brand new MacBook Pro with a magnet. In the picks I covered PGP Whole Disk encryption which will get more attention here at MacSparky in the not too distant future.

Selling the MacBook Pro

Funny how these ideas develop. It has been bugging me that since I got the MacBook Air, I never seem to take my MacBook Pro off my desk. I've slowly come to the realization that an iMac would be much better suited to the way I am using the MacBook Pro. As a result, I'm toying with the idea of selling my MacBook Pro. It has the following specs:

* 17" MacBook Pro (circa April 2008)
* 2.6 ghz
* 4 gig Ram
* 320 Gig HD
* AppleCare through April 2011
* I'll also include a Rain Stand, case, and extra power supply.

This is the current MacBook Pro but I'm sure it will be replaced with the new model shortly. If any readers are interested, I'm selling it for $2,200 plus shipping. I'm not sure if I am being silly switching to an iMac but I'm going to put it up and let fate decide.


********* Update ********

I actually had a guy call me and offer my asking price but in the end I got cold feet. When the MacBook Pro needs to be replaced in a few years, I'll probably do so with a desktop machine but for now I'm going to stick with it. Thanks everyone for the ideas and notes.

The SE/30 Workhorse

MacMommy twittered today about this excellent article where James Wages explains how useful his SE/30 is to him. He uses it to write, play games, and surf the web. That is right ... surf the web even though the web didn't exist when this machine was manufactured. This is particularly exciting to me since, thanks to the generosity of a reader, I'm about to come into possession of my very own SE/30. More on that to come.

The Rumored Snow Leopard New Finder

Apple Insider today ran an article about Snow Leopard including a complete rewrite of the Apple Finder. I started using Macintosh computers in 1985 and the Finder really hasn't changed much since then. I'd love to see someone scrap the Finder and start from scratch but I have my doubts.