I finally downloaded iTunes 10 sometime last night. For those of us in the rural parts of the US without fast cable connections or blazing FIOS networks it takes a while to download a 84+ MB fil (1 double chocolate stout, two double chocolate stout ) After the download and install I was greeted with a new icon on my desktop that I did not recognize. It was this blue bubble thing with a black music note in there. Woah! Too many double chocolates or did they change the icon????? Gone was the shiny CD with the floating note. I went online and did a search to get the icon for RocketDock (an app launcher for Windows  similar to to the Mac Dock) and saw all this hoopla about Steve Jobs defending the new  icon. My first thoughts were gosh people get worked up about the slightest things nowadays. Seriously if you don’t like an icon go roll your own in Photoshop or use the old one. I’m currently sporting the one found here. I think its kinda cute you can pick up some other ones by doing a search at Deviantart or Google for that matter. I guess some folks just like making contact with busy CEOs nowadays assuming that this is even true. Perhaps someone out there is just trying to drum up some Apple hate because of their iPhone 4 experience.

Man as soon as I don’t have my Mac anymore they release all this cool software that I was waiting on. One of which is this little Mapping illustration program called Ortelius.
Ortelius is a Mac OS X program that allows you to create you own maps with layers, labels, colors, and a nice set of drawing/editing tools (including auto junctions). Best of all you an import ESRI shapefiles so you don’t have to start from scratch and it includes scales, geographic intelligence. Its a cartographer dream and a mapmakers fancy. Wish they had this for PC so that I can download and test it out.  Ortelius goes for $99 standard and $49 for student. The professional version is in the works. Tons of tutorials here and screencasts so you can learn how to use the product. I’m just glad to see that the product was released after hearing about it a few years back. If you would like to do more traditional GIS work on the map look no further than Cartographica. Ortelius will help you to make maps quickly especially for presentations and publishing.

Back when my Mac Mini was the only hardware that I used at home I was searching desperately for GIS software program that could run on my Mac natively without crashing. I tried a few freebies but found them slow, buggy, and lacked the ease of use and features that I was looking for. I don’t quite remember how I heard about Cartographica from a company called ClueTrust. but I got my hands on a beta release at some point and was quite impressed it. Cartographica has matured since my early testing last year and was recently updated to 1.1. It is not free it will cost you $395 (limited time), $495 regular price.  If you do need to work with Geospatial data on your Mac and you don’t have the money or wish to install any of the ESRI software products via Bootcamp and such then look no further.  Cartographica has a nice list of features including shape file and KML import/export and there are instructional videos incase you get stuck. I like the rapid filleting feature and wish this was something that they had in the upcoming ArcGIS 10. Check out the Cartographica blog for sample maps and upcoming features.

This is a bit of old news for some but news to me so here goes nothing. Eric Wilfrid has taken over as General manager for Mac BU. For those of you who have no clue what this is, Mac BU (Macintosh Business Unit) is the Division of Microsoft that makes software for the Mac yep that’s right Microsoft makes software for the Mac. Namely Microsoft Office. Apparently, Eric has been working for Microsoft for 14 years and one of the original members of the Mac BU team. You can check out his welcome on the Mac BU blog. I wish him all the best in his new position and hope that he pumps some creativity into the new versions of Office and fix the current one. I really hope that he and his team adds Visio and Project to the current Mac Office. I don’t use Office on my Mac mainly coz I have all I need with Pages and Numbers but I really miss not having Visio and could benefit from Project on the Mac side. I know there are some freebies out there but nothing comes close to those two. Curio comes close for project management and you can do some mind-mapping and Visio like diagrams with it but its still not the same. I really would like to see those two products added to the Office for Mac offerings so hope to see an extension of the office line in the future. What I really would like is if this guy goes to work for Apple and light a bit of fire under iWork. I like iWork but it’s still quite immature and it’s not a true replacement for Office quite yet with the exception of Keynote. Keynote Rocks!

Remember those old Polaroid cameras and the photos that they took? I still have a few of those lying around and actually I kinda miss that old green-ish, blue-ish, purple-is glows that they used to give off. I have to admit that once in a while I wish I still had my polaroid. Too bad they stopped making them in in February. For those of you who miss this effect, there is an application called Poladroid that you can try. Poladroid creates Polaroid-style images from your photos. Drop your photos onto the Poladroid camera that pops-up when you launch the application, and after a few seconds, it spits out your unprocessed print. You can also watch it develop slowly, or speed up the process by shaking vigorously. When your print is fully ready, a red “x” appears on the bottom. I tried it out and its loads of fun. Now I can add this to my collection of imaging programs that I can use to produce cool effects for websites and posters. Poladroid is in beta and its free at the moment so grab it while you can.

So while I was sleeping Google Chrome beta for Windows got released. If you have no clue what that is, its Google’s foray into the raging browser Market. Not just any foray either this browser boasts multi-processing which is supposed to make the web faster, safer and easier (blah, blah, blah). Haven’t tried it yet coz I would use this at home and they don’t have a Mac version (Annoying, Annoying why do we always have to wait) You can find out all about Chrome here. My favorite tutorial is the cartoons… I think that they are pretty cool and explain a lot. Microsoft should try this Can’t wait to try the Chrome. In the meantime while waiting for Google to manifest a version for the Mac, a few projects have gotten started. Check out Stainless and the folks at Codeweavers have concocted Chromium. You can also sign-up at Google and they will let you know when the Mac Dev team have something for you.