PaulSpoerry.com

Major tech pubs put out their Snow Leopard reviews last night, and they’re all predictably positive. Snow Leopard offers lots of small and subtle improvements to your Mac plus gets speed boosts out of even older hardware for an affordable $30. Here’s the rundown of reviews seen so far:

• Gizmodo: Snow Leopard Review: Lightened and Enlightened–lots of great charts here demonstrating SL’s speed increases doing various common tasks on your Mac
• The New York Times’ David Pogue: Apple’s Sleek Upgrade
• Walt Mossberg: Apple Changes Leopard’s Spots
• Macworld: Snow Leopard Review

Even though Apple suggests Mac users without Leopard buy the $169 Mac box set to get Snow Leopard, anyone can purchase the $29 Snow Leopard disc and install it. This means the Snow Leopard DVD isn’t an “upgrade” at all, it’s the full-on Mac OS X operating system for 30 bucks, $100 cheaper than Leopard was. I suspected this was the case, since it is with the developer build I’m running, but The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg confirms it’s true for the final release as well:

For owners of Intel-based Macs who are still using the older Tiger version of the Mac OS, Apple is officially making Snow Leopard available only in a “boxed set” that includes other software and costs $169. The reasoning is that these folks never paid the $129 back in 2007 to upgrade to Leopard. But here’s a tip: Apple concedes that the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade will work properly on these Tiger-equipped Macs, so you can save the extra $140.

So if you’re jumping from Tiger to Snow Leopard, you saved $129 bucks never purchasing Leopard and you can save $140 skipping the box set. Guess being a late adopter does pay off.

Check out Amazon for the $29 Snow Leopard disc.

Geoff Chappell published an article explaining how the 4GB memory limit for 32-bit Windows (he is writing mainly about Vista) is more of a licensing preference than an architectural limit. The article outlines how Chappell unlocked his system to use all the memory that is present, but cautions that such hackery is ill-advised for several reasons, including legal ones.

“If you want [to be able to use more than 4GB in Vista] without contrivance, then pester Microsoft for an upgrade of the license data or at least for a credible, detailed reasoning of its policy for licensing your use of your computer’s memory. … [C]onsider Windows Server 2008. For the loader and kernel in Windows Vista SP1 (and, by the way, for the overwhelming majority of all executables), the corresponding executable in Windows Server 2008 is exactly the same, byte for byte. Yet Microsoft sells 32-bit Windows Server 2008 for use with as much as 64GB of memory. Does Microsoft really mean to say that when it re-badges these same executables as Windows Vista SP1, they suddenly acquire an architectural limit of 4GB? Or is it that a driver for Windows Server 2008 is safe for using with memory above 4GB as long as you don’t let it interact with the identical executables from Windows Vista SP1?”

Read the full article here.

Back in 2006 Apple launched its “Get a Mac” ads, and they were amazing. Even being a PC developer I thought “holy hell those are funny”. Microsoft seemed to be attempting to fight back with it’s Laptop Hunter ads. The ads show how an equivalent PC laptop costs less than it’s Mac counterpart (which is true)… well, Apply has decided to retaliate directly, in two new ads.

The first one, “Top of the Line,” is notable because it employs the one-and-only Patrick Warburton as a high-end PC: “When you’re ready to compromise, call me,” he says.

The second ad, “Surprise,” takes a different visual approach (basically, it has John Hodgman playing “Mission: Impossible” in an attempt to get a nice lady to switch over to a PC), and comes to the same conclusion as “Top of the Line”: Windows PCs are virus-laden and slow.

Gmail Notifier Plus rests in the new Windows 7 taskbar and allows you to easily access several components of Gmail quickly. The app uses Gmail’s secured RSS feed to retrieve mail. The notifier has two major features that make it a good implementation into the new taskbar.

Login screen lets you set how often to check for new messages

Jumplist Access:

Right clicking on the Gmail Notifier Plus icon will bring up a jumplist that lists your most recent unread messages. A counter is shown at the top but the jumplist only allows for 10 maximum titles to be displayed. Below are some common tasks that increase productivity.

Message Preview:

Probably the coolest feature of the notifier is that if you hover your cursor over the icon, it will activate thumbnail previews that show an excerpt of your unread mail. The app makes great use of the thumbnail feature to display other alerts as well.

Note that the application is only at version 1.0, and may contain some bugs. Providing feedback will probably help the programmer to improve on the app.

The Gmail Notifier plus was created by daty2k1. You can download it from the Neowin forums here. (Requires registration)

Here’s an alternate mirror link you can use to download as well:
Gmail Notifier Plus Alternate Mirror Download