Blog posts page 36 of 45

Fixing MacBook Pro keyboard annoyances under Windows

This article was written when Boot Camp had limited device driver support and is now therefore out of date.

There are a few annoyances with the MacBook Pro keyboard when in use under Windows XP via Boot Camp. The lack of back lighting and the swapped WindowsWindowsAltAlt keys I can’t help with but the getting the Fn key operational, replacing Alt GrAlt Gr and switching misplaced symbols I can.

ClearType, smoothed fonts and the bane of MS Sans Serif

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  • πŸ“¦ Typography

Back in the days of Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and Mac OS 7 the operating systems used a bit mapped font as the default system font for the various windows and dialogs.

Apple replaced their venerable Chicago with a scalable version that took advantage of font smoothing and moved on. By Mac OS X they switched to entirely new fonts such as Lucida Grande.

Life with Windows & Boot Camp on the MacBook Pro…

The performance is quite amazing.

World of Warcraft runs nicely under Windows giving an acceptable 20 fps at 1440Γ—900 24-bit color 24-bit depth 1xmultisample1440Γ—900 24-bit color 24-bit depth 1xmultisample with everything turned up high or on. Dropping down the anisotropic to mid-point and turning off the full-screen glow effect and smooth shading bumps that up to 30 fps.

Apple’s Boot Camp and my new MacBook Pro

Apple announced their Boot Camp technology – basically a set of drivers for Windows XP, a wizard to help resize your existing disk partition and the necessary magic to load XP from the EFI BIOS.

I can imagine the Windows on Mac Intel project that raised $12,000 USD are wondering why they bothered…

Country codes for Jersey, Guernsey & Isle of Man added

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  • πŸ“¦ Guernsey

It seems that the UK Department of Trade & Industry has convinced the ISO to add the codes for Guernsey (GE), Jersey (JE) and Isle of Man (IM) to the official ISO 3166-1 country database.

This is the database often used to populate the drop-down lists of countries seen when shopping on-line.

Gloomy long-term future for Apple?

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  • πŸ“¦ Apple

Steve Jobs’ vision and leadership has turned Apple around from a great-promise but minimal market share in the computer business into a media and fashion darling envied by the likes of Sony, Dell and Microsoft.

Under his watchful eye they have put out a friendly computer called the iMac that redefined what computers could look like, a powerful Unix based OS with a simple but gorgeous user interface and practically took possession lock-stock-and-barrel of the portable music player market.

Microsoft XNA

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Microsoft have announced their XNA platform for game development.

The platform is based around C# and the .NET 2.0 CLR and frameworks, specifically tailored for the requirements of game developers. This might possibly mean much of the common language specification (CLS) elements are removed for performance.