Author: Mark Crump

A long-time Mac user, Mark has been writing about technology in some form for over ten years. Mark enjoys his Kool-Aid shaken, not stirred. He also believes the "it just works" slogan from the ads should have an asterisk: except when it refuses to. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/crumpy. His personal site is www.markcrump.com

Time tests loading Word 2008 vs. Word 2007 via an emulator

Today at the day job, I was working on getting Word 2007 to connect to SharePoint on my Mac via Parallels, and it got me to wondering what the load time differences were between Word 2008 12.1.4, Word 2007 via Crossover, and Word 2007 via Parallels.

I ran three tests (four if one of the three tests generated a number out-of-whack from the other two): Three from a fresh startup of the OS, and three from just quitting the app and re-launching it. In the case of Parallels, I quit Word from within the VM and then quit Parallels. I did not do a fresh boot of Windows XP for the tests; I left the VM in a suspended state.

I’ve got the numbers at the end of this post, but from a cold boot time. Word 2007 from within Parallels won, with Word 2007 within Crossover coming in second and Word 2008 natively within OS X coming in third. Warm starts Word 2008 won, with Word 2007 in Parallels coming in second, and Word 2007 in Crossover coming in third.

I’ll admit: there are a lot of apples to hand grenades comparisons happening here. About the only valid point is two separate Microsoft Word Processor have drastically different start times between a native app and one running in a two different emulators. You also can run into some issues if the emulator doesn’t want to start up properly – not to mention in Parallels’ case running an entire OS on top of OS X.

I’m not really sure what to make of these numbers. If you told me Word 2007 running in two different emulators would actually start faster than Word 2008, I would have laughed my ass off. However, in none of the cold start time tests I performed did Word 2008’s fastest load time beat the fastest cold start time tests of an emulated Word 2007. If you rarely reboot your Mac, subsequent loads of Word 2008 are faster, but not dramatically so.

One other difference is looks. I’ve attached screen captures of the three versions below, but I found Word 2007 in Parallels to read clearer because it uses Clear Type. Word 2007 in CrossOver looked the worse since it was bolder than the other two. Word 2007 also interacts with SharePoint and Blogs better; this entire post was written and posted in Word 2007. I’m also enjoying the ribbon interface a little better in Word 2007.

That said, I think it’s unlikely I’ll be doing a lot of work in Word 2007 – mainly because it’s not a native OS X and running Windows XP on top of OS X is too resource intensive. I did find it amazing that it loads faster than Word 2008.

 

Time Tests

Word 2008:

Cold Start 1: 1:03.11

Cold Start 2: 34.7

Cold Start 3: 1:09.4

Cold Start 4: 1:22.3

Warm Start 1 7.3

Warm Start 2: 6.9

Warm Start 3: 8.4

 

Word 2007: Parallels

Cold Start 1: 32.7

Cold Start 2: 46.5

Cold Start 3: 43.5

Cold Start 4″ 1:29.8

Warm Start 1: 10.7

Warm Start 2 : 1:36.4

Warm Start 3: 11.6

Warm Start 4; 10.3

 

Word 2007: Codeweavers

Cold Start 1: 40.8

Cold Start 2: 41.0

Cold Start 3: 38.5

Warm Start 1: 12.8

Warm Start 2 :13.8

Warm Start 3: 11.8

 

 

 

 

Initial Wrath of the Lich King impressions on a MacBook (GMA950)

I threw WOTLK on my circa-2006 MacBook last night for some initial tests. While the card is not supported by Blizzard, I can’t say I noticed my framerates were any worse than I got in Shatt.

I was averaging about 15fps, which was normal for me in TBC. It was definetely playable–at least as far as what I was used to.

Looking forward to podcast downloads in iPhone 2.2

According to this Apple Insider post, podcast downloads are coming to the iPhone.

I’m thrilled for this. Very rarely do I sync my iPhone to my iTunes library — usually when I’ve just bought new music. I only subscribe to a handful of podcasts, but because of how infrequently I sync, I’m usually too far behind to make an effort to catch up.

It’s unknown right now if it will support EDGE, but my feeling is it will. According to that post, we’re under the same 10mb limit for for App Store and that works just fine over EDGE.

I can’t wait for this to be released.

My predictions for today's "Let's Rock" Event

Obviously, we are going to see new iPods, but I’m going out on a limb and think the Classic form might be retired in favor of the Touch model. The Touch will go to 64g. New Nanos with a larger screen too.

I also think we’ll see a new iLife with improvements to Garageband. I’m 50/50 on a new iWork; a part of me thinks we’ll see that at Macworld, but since the 08 version got rolled out at last September’s showcase, it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw an update today.

What I’m hoping for is firmware 2.1 for the iPhone.

Testing Scrippets

Not sure if I’ll ever use this, but testing the Scrippets plug in

[scrippet] INT. HOUSE – DAY

MARY yells across the hall to FRANK.

MARY Anything you want to tell me?

FRANK (O.S.)
I swear, honey, I don’t know how mayonnaise got in the piano.

CUT TO:

FRANK

running out of the bathroom.

FRANK
(terrified)
There are bees in the toliet! [/scrippet]

Follow up to yesterday's battery test

Last night when I went to bed I was at 50% battery — this was with two GMail accounts fetching every 15 minutes. I’ve turned NuevaSync back on as a fetch service to test battery life today.

I think something is wonky with push. My yahoo account was set to fetch, but I think the push setting was overriding it . If  I’m not alone on this, it might explain why the APIs for push on non-Apple apps was yanked from the latest beta.

Since I don’t need my calender updating constantly, if it saves on battery life fetch is fine.

I’ll report back tommorow.

Push, NuevaSync, and iPhone battery life

I’ve been having some procedural issues with managing my calendars. The big problem is, I’m not a big fan of iCal, and entering calendar info on the iPhone is a bit of a pain in the ass because I can’t set the event name and its time all in the same screen. I much prefer Google’s calendar, where I can just click where the event occurs and type in its name.

The problem is, getting the Google Calendar to the iPhone with a minimum of hops. NuevaSync is beta testing a service that will sync your iPhone and Google calendars via push. I signed up for it, and it works great. However, starting late last week I noticed my battery life went to hell in a hand basket. In the “I can’t make it through the work day” bad. Last Friday my battery died around 8pm. Sunday wasn’t much better. Yesterday it died at 5pm. While that sucks, it’s not difficult for me to work around. I can keep it charged at work, and my truck has a charger for it, too. However, next week at Dragon*Con, poor battery life is going to be a big, big problem.

I saw this thread over at Arstechnica, where someone was complaining about poor battery life with push via Exchange. There was a key line in there:

So, I asked one of our IS guys to have a look at our Exchange HTTP logs, and here’s where it gets interesting. My phone was hitting the web server every five seconds. Now, we have about a dozen staff with iPhones, and mine is the only one exhibiting this behaviour.

I began to wonder if I was having a similar issue. For now, I’ve turned off NuevaSync entirely — for the record, I don’t think this problem is on their end, but some wonkiness in the iPhone software. If I can get through the day with amazing battery life I’ll know at least where the problem is.

However, that poses a problem with calendaring. Given my dislike of iCal and iPhone’s calendar, getting my Google calendar to the iPhone is going to take some monkeying around. I tried using the CalDav Google linkup, but I can’t edit the calendar on the iPhone. There’s a few things I’m going to need to test:

  • Do more testing and see if it’s just the push technology hosing things up, and set NuevaSync to fetch and not push — right now, push is completely disabled on my iPhone. However, that’s going to end up being a problem when they come out of beta and announce their pricing scheme — it may be too damn expensive.
  • Look into a solution like SpanningSync to sync iCal to Google. While I’ve spent $25 on worse things, it’s another process running and another point of failure.
  • Look into MobileMe. Given how crappy that’s running, and paying $100/year to just sync my calendars seems a little much.

It’s probably going to be either the first or third options. I just know as soon as I drop the money on SpanningSync, Google is going to announce some sort of push technology.

My predictions for next week's Jobsnote

iPhone

  • The 3g iPhone will be announced, going on sale at the end of the month
  • The App Store will be demoed, going live the same time as the 3g iPhone
  • The 3g iPhone will also have a camera that can take movies, and will upload directly to YouTube. This functionality may be part of a software upgrade for the first-gen iPhone
  • Most of the Jobsnote will be about the iPhone and the App Store.
  • iPhone 2.0 will allow syncing of tasks, finally. I hope

Macintosh

  • We will not see a consumer-class headless desktop
  • Weill not see iLife or iWork upgrades; those will be during Macworld or a special event later this year.
  • We will see a preview of 10.6, but I disagree with this TUAW report. OS X 10.6 will have new features, but I don’t know what they are

Mobile Mac

  • Mobile Mac will be announced and will bring Enterprise-level syncing to the iPhone. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you can also sync over the cloud with Google calendars
  • I’m going further on a limb and will predict Mobile Mac to be free for iPhone users
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