The launch in Cape Town was an experience to remember. The theme was the Ama-zing Race and we were told to find clues along the way and follow them. We were all given Nikon cameras along with our first clue and the key to a fancy Mini Cooper. The clue was simply to find which Mini was ours and I’m pleased to report we got the convertible.

Our next clue, inside the car, told us to explore the sights of Cape Town and take as many photos as possible along the way. Along with our cool, bright-red cabrio we each had a padkos bag filled with SA-only goodies and an iPod jacked into the Mini which, yip you guessed it, only had South African artists on it.

Adele and I drove for well over three hours in the basking sun, snapping away like German tourists all the while taking in the pleasures of Cape Town.

When we returned to the iStore we were tasked with creating a photo book from our pics using only iPhoto and the built in software. I must admit, after zipping around all day in a Mini, this wasn’t the easiest thing to do but the software did simplify our lives. Sadly our photo book didn’t with the super cool iPod but about three days later we received a hardcopy of the book which can be seen below.

The good news is that anyone can enter this cool campaign and win prizes along the way. Read the A to Z of SA website for more details on how you go about doing this.

This was an awesome day where I got to explore the beauty of Cape Town and I think this new campaign by Apple is one of positivity and hope which we should all get behind. If any of you would like to attend one of the upcoming Ama-zing Race (Jo’burg and Cape Town) where you too can experience a day similar to this – please let me know. You can post a comment below or email me directly justin@hartman.me and I can get you onboard.

It’s no secret that I love Apple and I’ve owned many of their computers and accessories for the last six years and to be honest I simply don’t see the issue with pricing in SA. I also have to concede that the Core Group have actually done a fantastic job at distributing and growing the Apple market share in South Africa.

With the advent of the Internet and more recently the adoption of Social Media many people would have forgotten or are not contextualising what it was like six years ago in the SA market. I remember when Beeld bought an Apple computer for almost R500,000 because it was the super-computer that would take them to a new level in production. Today, however, pricing of Apple products have dropped considerably and the company has positioned itself away from publishing and graphic design to the more lucrative consumer market.

I also remember a time when the Core Group had a lot of competition. Many years ago Apple granted multiple licenses to companies in South Africa yet despite this open market the only distributor to survive was the Core. At that time gaining market share was near impossible yet despite it they’re still around to tell the tale hence why Cupertino decided to award the Core Group with the sole-distribution rights to South Africa.

Granted that the Core Group have benefited by Apple’s overall positioning and mass global adoption but irrespective they have seen the best and worst of Apple and stuck to their guns.

So what’s the point of all of this I guess you’re wondering? Well the point is that not everyone is Social Media hates companies or are out to hurt reputations. I’ve sat in countless meetings with potential Adgator clients where I’ve explained that when a blogger takes the time to write something bad about their company it generally means only one thing – they care about you.

In fact not only do they care about you but they’ve taken the time to write something about you in the hope that you will respond. Most of the time, no one ever does.

It is because of this that I encourage people to engage users, no matter how tough it may seem, because by turning a negative response into a positive you start to create brand champions for your company. These brand champions will take your company a lot further than any marketing initiative could ever accomplish because quite simply put, people value their friend’s opinions more than they value yours!

From my experience, dealing with the negative responses in the right way is sure to change perceptions however the issue is that most companies have no idea how to go about this.

The Core’s situation is a case in point. RJ van Spaandonk retaliated, via Twitter, to the angry lynch mob which really just fueled the fire even further. While he tried to highlight similar pricing strategies from countries outside of SA it wasn’t handled in the right way and his strategy, or lack thereof, backfired badly.

The bloggers now hate the Core Group even more and RJ van Spaandonk is now recommending that companies stay far away from Twitter, bloggers and Social Media in general. In the end everyone has lost.

Had I been the Core I would have sought help from professionals before publicly making statements and retaliating. If you don’t know how to deal with this medium, ask for help – there are many professionals today who can help and advise you on the right Social Media strategy and how to mitigate negative responses around your brand(s).

For any company the message is simple. People are having conversations about you all the time and you really can’t afford to not be apart of it. Seek help, build a good strategy and above all – #DLFS*!

* Don’t Look For Shit! (this is Afrigator‘s corporate motto and we stick to it, religiously! We learned our lesson the hard way.)

Based on the email below it looks like you now get a chance to be pre-approved which means they will now credit check you and if you qualify then they’ll offer you a massive package. Anyway, I’ve applied. Let’s see what happens.

Here are the release notes for this version:

• Fixed = iCal bug message saying “no data was added to iCal” thanks to Jon Milan.
• Added = London timezone support thanks to Ryan Hunt.
• Added = West Coast USA timezone support thanks to Ryan Hunt.
• Added = Tallinn timezone support thanks to Ryan Hunt.
• Added = Asia/Muscat timezone support thanks to Steve.
• Tests = Now confirmed to work on Leopard 10.5.1, 10.5.2, 10.5.3 and 10.5.4
• Tests = Now confirmed to work on all Apple computers.

Installing

If you’ve never installed this fix before then please read the detailed installation instructions found over here. If you’re upgrading from a previous version please read the detailed upgrade notes below.

Upgrading from version 1.1

1. Delete the folder /Applications/iCalFix/ in Finder.

2. Download this Upgrade Script to your computer and extract the contents from the ZIP file. The folder contains a Shell script (install.sh) which sets everything up for you.

3. Right-click on the install.sh file, select Open With and then click on Other.

4. Click on Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal. If you can’t select Terminal from the Open dialog then select All Applications from drop-down list below.

5. Terminal will open up and the install script will run. When you see the message “Installation Complete.” you can close Terminal.

6. You can now check if the bug fix was installed correctly by navigating to /Applications/iCalFix/ in Finder. If you see two files installed in that folder then installation was successful.

7. Done. Sit back and enjoy.

Justin from WantItAll alerted me to the iPhone Configuration Utility which allows you to create custom profiles for your iPhone.

What I didn’t realise and what became clear when I played with the iPhone Configuration Utility is that Apple created the functionality for corporates to have customised profiles on an iPhone that have pre-configured settings for their network and by using this tool you could in theory change APN and other settings thereby bypassing the default ones set by the network.

That was the theory but I just couldn’t get the Configuration Utility to work properly and it also required some technical know-how which I couldn’t really be bothered to understand so I decided to search for something simpler.

In so doing I stumbled across an APN Changer website based in New Zealand called Unlockit.

Unlockit provides a simple tool for changing your APN and other settings by creating a custom profile for your file which you can install. It’s an identical method to Apple’s utility just much simpler and easier to use. Here’s the steps I took to get my iPhone back on the Vodacom EDGE network.

Step 1:

Visit http://unlockit.co.nz in Safari on your iPhone.

Step 2:

Click on Set Custom APN.

Step 3:

In the APN text box type internet and then click on Download Custom Config.

Step 4:

Safari will close and you’ll be asked whether or not you’d like to install the custom profile file. Just click Yes and once the file has installed you’ll be back on the EDGE network.

In order to run this hack you’ll need to be connected to a Wi-Fi network. I also suggest that you read Dion’s post on how to reactivate the Cellular Data settings in the Network settings tab. Dion’s solution is a more complicated but once done you’ll be able to change the settings as and when you need to.

I upgraded Colin’s iPhone on a Cell C network and none of the localisation functions had kicked in like it did on my Vodacom phone. The real bitch in all of this is that EDGE/GPRS doesn’t work on my iPhone while it does on Colin’s.

The new version 2.0 firmware no longer has a menu to set you APN key like on previous versions so I decided to see if I could manually change this in one of the preferences files on my iPhone. Look at what I discovered in the XML file:

The APN key has now been set by the network as iphone.vodacom.za and nothing I do can change this setting as it simply overwrites the string each time.

The result of this is that each time I try connect I get an error message saying “Could not activate cellular data network: You are not subscribed to a cellular data service”.

Seeing as Colin’s Cell C iPhone connects to EDGE without any problems I have to believe that Vodacom are going to enforce a data package subscription when the iPhone is officially launched in SA. I also bought a data bundle from Vodacom to see if this would work but I still get that pesky message.

The fact that my iPhone is completely localised, as opposed to Cell C’s network, is interesting to say the least. It’s a little scary though because as a Vodacom subscriber I can see I’m going to have problems with an unofficial iPhone down the line.

This new version jailbreaks and hacks any 1st or 2nd Generation iPhone so you now have the ability to run the latest iPhone firmware 2.0.

When I tried to hack my version 1.1.4 iPhone with the PwnageTool I couldn’t get the damn application to pick up the latest 2.0 firmware file. It turned out that I had downloaded the 3G firmware instead of the 1st Gen firmware and this great tutorial from iClarified really helped seal the deal for me.

The hack took about 25 minutes and was easy to do once I had all the correct files and I’m now officially running firmware version 2.0 (5A347) on my Vodacom SIM card without any problems.

A couple of interesting observations about the new firmware:

• Under the Phone settings you can now use all the forwarding, call waiting and caller ID functions.
• Under that same menu is a Vodacom4me link… I wonder if this in preparation for iPhone launch in SA?
• All my settings were localised to South Africa – and this was before I set the phone up in iTunes.
• AppStore is awesome and I have Google, Apple Remote, Twitterific, Facebook, iYardage and Last.fm apps downloaded and running.
• Install.app is no longer available in 2.0. Instead, Cydia is the new “illegal” application manager and it runs off Debian Apt – VERY NICE!
• Google Maps actually works!!!! It pin-points me to my current location (which is a little inaccurate) and I don’t even have the GPS on my iPhone. It must use the Vodacom cell towers for this but I am super impressed that it works for the first time.
• You still can’t forward an SMS…….. and there is no copy and paste functions. Have Apple learnt nothing about basic phone functionality?

That’s it for now. Not sure if I’m the first SA hack but I’m loving it nonetheless.

While we’ve found many a work-around to get email up and running using Apple Mail there remains this irritating bug that prevents Exchange iCal events from syncing correctly with Apple iCal.

The reason this bug exists is because Exchange doesn’t use standard compliant timezone information while Apple does and as a result iCal can’t figure out what the correct timezone is from Exchange iCal invitations. Here’s a quick example of the South African timezone differences between the two.

Exchange uses this format:
(GMT+02.00) Harare/Pretoria

While iCal uses this:
Africa/Johannesburg

This means that when a meeting request comes in from a Windows PC, iCal can’t read data beyond the GMT+02.00 and it simply adds on 2 hours to the event. So a meeting sent from Exchange, scheduled for 14:00 actually appears in iCal as 16:00. We’ve missed many a meeting as a result!

Over the last few months I’ve spent countless hours trying to find a fix but no one has managed to get this issue resolved – not even Apple. I’ve now resorted to creating my own bug fix which I’m releasing publicly this morning.

How this bug fix works

The install script downloads all the necessary files from my server and installs both an AppleScript and Shell script to a folder called iCalFix in your Applications folder.

The AppleScript is then assigned to a Mail Rule and runs whenever an iCal invitation is received. The AppleScript downloads the iCal file to a temporary location and the Shell script then runs on the temp file and replaces any incorrect timezone information.

Once completed the new iCal event is then imported to iCal with all the new timezone data in place. The beauty of this fix is that you don’t need to edit any of the package files for iCal and even your original iCal invitations are left untouched. This means that you can upgrade iCal at a later stage and you should be safe from any data corruption.

Installation

1. Download this Install Script to your computer and extract the contents from the ZIP file. The folder contains a Shell script (install.sh) which sets everything up for you.

2. Right-click on the install.sh file, select Open With and then click on Other.

3. Click on Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal. If you can’t select Terminal from the Open dialog then select All Applications from drop-down list below.

4. Terminal will open up and the install script will run. When you see the message “Installation Complete.” you can close Terminal.

5. You can now check if the bug fix was installed correctly by navigating to /Applications/iCalFix/ in Finder. If you see two files installed in that folder then installation was successful.

Setting up the Mail Rule

The last step before you can begin using this fix is to setup an email rule that calls the AppleScript file. Click on Mail –> Preferences –> Rules and create a new rule that looks identical to the one below.

If you’d like to read detailed instructions on setting up this particular Mail Rule then make sure you read the readme.txt file located in the Install Script package.

All done!

After completing the above steps any new iCal invitations sent from an Exchange server will automatically be converted to the right formats and you will never have an excuse to be 2 hours late for a meeting again!

I suggest that you test this fix out by sending an iCal event from an Exchange server to see if all is working correctly. If the fix isn’t working for you then your exchange server is probably using a different timezone format and you’ll need to read the section in the readme.txt file on customising timezone support for your country.

Caveats

• NB: Make sure you open the readme.txt file in the Install Script folder. This readme file contains important information which isn’t included in this post.
• This fix has only been tested on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.1 and 10.5.2 and there is no guarantee that it will work on previous or future versions.
• We’ve only been able to test this fix on three MacBook Pros and while it worked on all three YMMV. We’ve now tested it on about 10 Macs now and it has worked on every one we’ve tested thus far.
• Before installing or running this fix make sure you backup your iCal first. In iCal click File –> Back up iCal… and save a backed up version to your computer.
• When you recieve an Apple iCal invitation there is a message that pops up in iCal saying that “no data was added to iCal” but when you click OK the iCal event is loaded to iCal anyway. I’m not sure why this happens with iCal but I’m working on a fix for that.
• I can’t provide support. If you want help in setting up a unique timezone regular expression then I’ll assist with that but any other queries I cant’t respond to – I just don’t have the time, sorry.

This is something I’ve wanted to do for some time now and once we had the standard mobile site completed, integration for the iPhone version was simple.

I think this makes us the first website in Africa to launch an optimised version for Apple’s highly successful devices but I stand to be corrected.

It is unclear how successful the penetration is of the iPhone and iPod Touch in Africa but it’s going to be interesting to see what sort of uptake we have on this new platform.

Here are some screenshots of the interface and you can view a whole bunch more over here.

These browsers are able to run on Linux all thanks to the Open Source implementation of the Windows API called Wine which acts as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. It has been very useful in the past for checking websites for compatibility across the different browsers and I’ve long hoped for a Mac OS X derivative…

Finally it seems some clever person has ported this application to Mac and it’s quite aptly called ies4osx.

Installing ies4osx was relatively simple and as with the Linux derivative it requires a Darwin-based installation of Wine called Darwine. Once everything has been installed you simply open up the browser you want to test on and the results are just awesome.

ies4osx runs off Apple’s X11 implementation and is able to install Internet Explorer versions 5, 5.5, 6.0 (SP1) and 7.0 BETA but it remains a little buggy. The stability issues all relate to the Wine implementation as I had similar stability issues using ies4linux. This is a great step for Apple users and now I can finally uninstall that dual-boot Windows XP from my MacBook Pro.

And here’s my advert of the week…

The good news however is that I managed to get a SIM from overseas that un-bricks my iPhone and now I have a fully functional iPhone working on the Vodacom network. (More details on this to follow)

And this is the result after hours of deliberation. Well worth the effort if you ask me!

On Wednesday I had a meeting with Rutger-Jan van Spaandonk who is the executive director and shareholder of the Core Group. In case you don’t know Core Group are the official distributors for Apple, Nintendo and Tom Tom in South Africa.

RJ is an interesting man and he gave us a full status quo of where his products are placed in the SA market which was fascinating. What was more interesting though was when he told Gregor, Carly and myself that Microsoft owns a small stake in Apple Inc.

The big Apple vs. Microsoft war seems rather pointless after news of this so I decided I wanted to quantify this statement with some facts.

Turns out that at the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into partnership with Microsoft. Included in this was a five-year commitment from Microsoft to release Microsoft Office for Macintosh as well as an investment of 150,000 shares of Apple Series A, nonvoting, convertible preferred stock worth $150 million.

Steve had this to say to the audience.

If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that’s great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody else’s fault, it’s our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software.

Microsoft found themselves in a monopolisation legal battle and Bill Gates recognised that if Apple failed Microsoft would have no case that there were other, alternative operating systems available to consumers. It was a win-win situation for both companies.

The 150,000 shares were convertible by Microsoft after August 5, 2000 into shares of the company’s common stock at a conversion price of $8.25 per share. During 2000, 74,250 shares of preferred stock were converted to 9 million shares and in 2001 the remaining 75,750 preferred shares were converted into 9.2 million of Apple’s common stock. All 18.2 million shares were sold by Microsoft in 2003.

Currently, Microsoft owns about 0.0046% of Apple through a Private Capital Management fund and Apple owns about 0.39% of itself the same way so whether Microsoft ever held any power in the company is questionable at best.

It didn’t disappoint and after meeting some cool Apple people I purchased my copy of Leopard and raced home as quickly as possible so as to install this marvel of an operating system. Now most of you who didn’t do the Geek thing and haven’t yet upgraded from Tiger to Leopard will have read tons of rave reviews about the new OS and rightly so. I figured though that I’d take a look at some of the pitfalls of Leopard and what to look out for when upgrading.

Time Machine

This is by far Apple’s flag-ship of the new OS and they’ve punted this new backup solution as the best new feature yet. I am unfortunately not overly impressed.

Time Machine is really the first humanised backup solution to find its way to a personal computer and while the interface and simplicity is just awesome I’m still not convinced about it.

The fundamental flaw in Time Machine is the disk space required to run backups efficiently. What surprised me is that Apple have decided not to compress backed up data using Time Machine so this effectively means that if you’re using 60GB of your hard drive you need at least 60GB on a backup drive to cover the first backup that Time Machine creates.

What happens to each subsequent backup thereafter is a form of incremental backups. Time Machine backs up data every hour (assuming your external drive is plugged in) so any change to a file, application or preference will be written to the backup drive as new files. Now this creates a major problem as I’ve got a 120GB drive in my MacBook Pro and I’ve worked out (very roughly) that if I want to keep 6 months worth of backup data I’d need at least a 750GB backup drive to come close to this time line.

If your current backup drive gets full Time Machine starts deleting the oldest backup information from your drive and seeing as I currently only have a 80GB backup drive I can realistically only keep 1 weeks worth of backups on the drive at any given time.

I’m sure this feature is going to evolve as the OS matures but right now this non-compression and the lack of preferences for Time Machine, i.e. ability to change backup frequency, ability to backup online or via iPod, overwriting versus new file backup, make it a solution that falls a little short in my opinion.

Besides which, what am I supposed to do with a 750GB, bulky, external hard drive anyway? I have a MacBook Pro for mobility and now I’m forced to carry a heavy piece of lead around with me just so I can backup…

Spaces

Now this is a feature that I’ve really been looking forward to in Leopard and for the most part it delivers beyond my expectations. One of the best features of Spaces is that you can pre-define which space to open an application in when you launch it from your Dock or the Applications folder. So, like the very organised individual that I am, I setup my Spaces as follows:

• Space 1 = Productivity apps (Word, Excel, etc.)
• Space 2 = Internet apps
• Space 3 = Development apps
• Space 4 = Graphics apps and other stuff I don’t know where to put

The amazing part is that as soon as I open Safari (for example) I’m redirected to Space 2 and when I open Word I’m redirected to Space 1. Simple, beautiful and efficient – my desktops are now organised.

Sadly in the last 24 hours this has all stopped working. For some unknown reason opening up apps no longer appear in the pre-defined Space that I’ve configured but rather in the current Space I’m working in and I just can’t understand what went wrong.

Software Compatibility

I’ve hacked my Mac by installing my own versions of Apache2, MySQL5 and PHP5 so I was very worried about what an upgrade would do to this. I asked PJ at the launch what would happen and he told me that Leopard would delete it all. Despite this I decided it was still worth upgrading so I did it anyway and the great news is that after the upgrade all of my Linux hacks (including subversion) were still in tact and were left untouched by the upgrade. That said, YMMV!

So far so good and after the upgrade all appeared to be fine with the software installed on my machine but there were two issues. The first was an app I use called CSSEdit which just kept crashing however the developers of this app already had a 10.5 patch which I downloaded and installed and it has been perfect ever since. The second was an Apple Mail task bar plugin that notifies you of new mail as it arrives but this just had to be deleted and I haven’t bothered to try to find a new one.

In true Microsoft style I’ve now discovered some issues with Word and Excel. While I can use these two applications they do tend to crash a lot and typically Microsoft have not yet released any patch to combat this issue in Leopard.

Gregor has reported that Cyberduck is broken (I use Transmit) but his entire Adobe CS2 suite of software appear to work perfectly under the new OS.

Overall I’m exceptionally impressed with the compatibility of software after the upgrade and I wouldn’t let this area hinder your upgrade to Leopard.

Command + Tab

One of the most used keyboard shortcuts I use religiously is switching between applications using Command + Tab. Now this hasn’t broken but if you’re using this shortcut to switch between applications on different spaces there is a really weird bug that seems to have crept in.

Switching apps using this shortcut in the same space is fine but between different Spaces you find that instead of selecting the application straight away you now have to click on the application to make it active. This means that I tab to my app on another Space and then I have to use my mouse to select the current window so I can use the application.

It’s not a deal-breaker for me but definitely something that needs to be addressed.

Final Thoughts

With 300+ new features to Leopard (excluding all the other older ones) I am only mildly displeased with 4 of them. If I were you I’d buy a very large external hard drive, get your Leopard DVD and get on board for the ride.

I am still blown away by Leopard every time I use it and I’m really pleased with the innovation Apple have created with this release. I do get an impending sense that with the new Cover Flow integrated into the Finder we’ll soon see a Mac computer that is completely touch screen and keyboard-less.

More to be revealed from Cupertino I guess!

Ever since I got my MBR I’ve been getting small electric shocks from the body casing of my computer while it’s plugged on the charger. The interesting thing about this though is that this only ever happened at home and when it was on the charger at work I never had an issue.

Thinking that the issue was related to my electrical supply at home I spent a good few months trying to plug the machine into different plugs, adding it to a UPS and even trying to change plugs that came with the machine itself. Alas, I still got shocked.

I posted this on twitter, after being the lucky recipient of a big surge of electricity up my arm, and lucky for me Armand was there to help. It seems that this is a very common problem and the solution is really simple. According to AppleDefects the only real fix is to replace the 2-prong plug with an earthed 3-prong plug which I tried immediately.

I’m pleased to report that since making the “switch” I haven’t experienced another shock again. Seems that while the Titanium casing on the MBR is super cool it can also provide for some shocking experiences.

While Amazon MP3 will compete directly, and very effectively, with iTunes it really hasn’t changed much for us third-world users here in South Africa. Jason Bagley reports that Amazon MP3 works well for him but I’ve now tried to buy three different albums and all three gave me the following error message.

Here I was getting all excited but clearly there are still a lot of usage restrictions for us mere mortals…

Most Mac owners actually couldn’t be bothered with Virtual machines on the stable and powerful OS X operating system but at The Times we’ve been given some licenses of SWSoft’s Parallels so that we can run some Windows-only software and eliminate the need to have a PC sitting on our desk in addition to the nifty MacBook Pro most of us have.

As with most virtualisation products I’m sceptical because this normally equates to a slow Mac computer and many system crashes. My experience of virtualisation is that there simply isn’t enough memory allocated to a virtual machine and after a short period of time the virtual machine (i.e. Windows) becomes unusable. Parallels however is different.

The first noticeable difference is the quick install of Windows XP. Normally this can take many hours however within 35 minutes I had Windows XP installed and working.

Virtual PC allows you to run a host PC in a windowed format as shown above but one click of the Parallels Coherence button changes things completely:

You’ll notice that Windows XP is now fully integrated into Mac OS X and I’ve now got a task bar displaying at the bottom of my desktop. This means that not only can I run various Windows applications via the Start Menu but I can also switch between Windows and OS X as if I was working on one operating system. The integration between the two is just awesome.

Starting up Internet Explorer 6 and Safari is a breeze and now I can finally check compatibility across multiple browsers without having to leave my desk.

The potential deal-breaker for me is how much CPU and memory this application requires and uses. A quick snapshot of iStat Pro shows exactly what’s going on in my machine.

I’ve allocated 768MB of my Mac’s memory to the Windows XP virtual machine and while I don’t have much memory free, both my Mac and Windows remain lightning fast and there is almost no noticeable difference in performance.

My CPU usage is largely non-existent so this is pretty much a non-issue. Both these figures surprised me as I was expecting the worst. I’ve actually never worked on a PC machine that loads and runs Windows as fast as Parallels does so it seems the combination of the dual-core Mac processors and stable OS X make for a good combination when running this application.

As I’m a huge Linux fan I’ve also installed the latest Debian Etch flavour as a virtual machine and while this can’t integrate with OS X like Windows does I am still able to load a lightning fast Linux operating system without any issues.

I have to say Parallels has far surpassed my expectations and kicks some serious butt in the process. For a mere $79 this is one piece of software that’s worth more than the asking price.

Prior to this largely successful campaign Apple ran the Think Different campaign which was truly one of the best seen in the late 1990′s. I had forgotten about this until I recently stumbled upon the original Think Different advert and because it’s just brilliant I’ve included the ad below.