Xavier Defrang

I've already tried a few times to write a short review of the iPhone but I just can't find the right words. And so many things have been written already...

I guess the simple fact that someone who has always dodged PDA's and "smartphones" is actually using one should indicate how great this thing really is.

I could never understand why people were buying such devices and why would anyone care about the mobile internet when all you had in the field were half-assed browsers with clumsy user interfaces.
I would have never imagined that it was actually enjoyable to check emails and google up some stuff on the go. The Google Maps integration is brilliant, so is the address book (it's so fun that you just want to fill it up). There are so many details about user feedback and the screen is so gorgeous that this thing seems alive.

I've never been a mobile phone freak but this one is just too cool!

If suddenly your shiny new MacBook with a RAM upgrade starts to throw kernel panics at random, make sure the memory banks are properly plugged in and, trust me, you may have to push very hard. One of my buddy's MacBook had been running smoothly for more than a week before the problems started to occur...

Do you remember a revolutionary new kind of device called the Tablet PC? Wasn't that thing supposed to invade offices all over the world and replace laptops? How many months since MSFT stopped talking about this technology? Now what's happened to the Tabled PC?

This crap will probably be remembered as the virtual reality helmet of the early 2000. I suppose all the manufacturers who followed the cluefull MSFT on this one will thank them one day or another...

It's always a good reality-check to google for "technology-name-here sales" months after the hype faded...

Back to the future : Apple posted a doctored version of their legendary 1984 ad for the first Mac. Now the hammer chick has an iPod.

I can't live without music, I absolutely hate silence. Since I'm 12 or so, I've spent a good deal of my life with headphones on my ears. I started my walkman-geek's life with a couple Sony Sports walkman cassette players. (Has anybody any link to a collection of these?)

In late 96, I switched from tapes to a minidisc player which is still going strong despite the thousands of hours of daily usage. It's certainly one of the most reliable device I ever had.

Yesterday, I finally got myself a 30G v3 iPod and it's worth the hype! The packaging is brilliant, in fact it's plain techie fetish porn. The hassle-free iSync integration is handy and iTunes makes it easy to manage thousands of tracks. And that's the point, with the 1700+ tracks I can put in my iPod, I have in my pocket almost every single song I could ever want to listen to and that's a brand new way for me to have access to all my music anytime, anywhere... being able to switch from jazz to digital hardcore through vintage synth pop!

A 32-bit CPU for your C64, anyone?

Some thougts after Steve Jobs Apple MacWorld Keynote speech.

• The new 17" PowerBook is just a desktop killer whereas the 12" looks more like a good-looking expensive toy. The new USB printer aware, 802.11g Airport Extreme is also a pretty cool product.
• The Safari web browser is fast indeed but why the hell KHTML instead of Gecko? As long as Safari lacks tabbed browsing and more customizable features, I'll stick to Chimera.
• Keynote looks to me like the killer app for corporate switchers. Just bring your Mac in a meeting and blow the crap out of every other tasteless PowerPoint slideshow with advanced compositing and font rendering of Quartz Extreme. The software looks also way easier to handle than PowerPoint (oh boy these smart rulers!). That's a really good surprise!
• It looks like that Steve was either too busy demo'ing cheesy family-oriented iApps or he was still afraid of the UNIX heads switching to OS X since he completely "forgot" to announce X11!

iLamp is a powerful screen saver specifically designed to unleash the full potential of the new 2002 iMac. It will turn your iMac into an ultra modern lamp when you are not using it as a computer.

I just got my brand new toy... hence the lack of update of this site! I've been way to busy playing around with Jaguar... now everything looks fine and I can update my blog using my brand new 802.11 home network. Running bleeding-edge desktop and graphic applications on the same machine that runs Apache and a UNIX shell is too cool to be true! After more than a decade using a PC running various operating systems, I finally switched, the UNIX core of Jaguar being the main reason as I only feel 100% productive when I know I can have a shell at hand any time...

It's a fact that todays laptop computer are way too hot. They're so hot that a man burned his penis after placing his laptop on it for an hour!