Heavy or light loads, it didn’t seem to matter … the new MacBook Pro gives “The Best Battery Life I’ve Ever Seen“:

Eight, freakin, hours. I couldn’t believe it. In my lightest test, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro lasted eight hours and eight minutes. That’s with the screen at half brightness (completely usable) and no funny optimizations. The notebook is just playing music and surfing through a lot of my old reviews. There’s no way this could be right. Maybe my test was too light?

From a reader’s comment to the TUAW article, Worldwide Mac: getting online in New Zealand:

What I’d recommend doing to alleviate your problem is to set up some kind of home server (perhaps a Mac Mini) and configure an Apache / Squid proxy server on it. Set up each Mac to use the server as its proxy, and you’ll notice a significant reduction in bandwidth, as well as a significant increase in speed, because you’ll pull down duplicate resources via your home network rather than the slow internet link.

With a caching proxy (and a sufficiently large cache, a few gigabytes or so) you should be able to, for instance, download software updates once and then have the other Mac fetch them from the cache

theAppleBlog looks at four plugins that extend the functionality of the Quicklook function.

TypeIt4Me has a chart comparing the features of their software vs. two other popular abbreviation-to-full-word-or-phrase applications, Typinator (which I currently use), and TextExpander.

The main shortcoming on Typinator and TextExpander is that they don’t allow for variable input.

Let’s say I want a phrase that says:
“Hey nnn, thanks for the query. Don’t worry about it, ok nnn?”

… and I want the text expander software to prompt me for nnn, so that I can enter the name of a person and have it appear twice in the phrase.

Typinator and TextExpander only allows you to have the current clipboard content appear at the position(s) you specify, there is no feature that prompts for user input.

This forum discussion is one of the best threads I’ve read on the subject of switching from the Windows / PC platform to the Mac.

Here’s an excerpt from my favorite post in that thread, the one by Greg Zillgitt:

The machine I’m using to write this post, a late ’08 Macbook Pro, is the best all-around personal computer I’ve ever owned. It’s beautifully designed and built. It has a stunning display. It has a fantastic backlit keyboard with a great feel. It has a huge, smooth trackpad. It has firewire. It’s fast. And most importantly it runs the very best operating system, one that is truly a joy to use both at the GUI level and at the command prompt. It also runs XP, Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux, all extremely well.

There is also a post by Tom Almy which links to his article, currently titled “Now 26 months with a Mac” – be sure to check out that long-term review from a user’s perspective.

Bill Wilson dislikes the keyboard that comes with Intel Mac Pros, and bought a Matias Tactile Pro 2.0 USB keyboard instead.

The Tactile Pro is designed around ALPS mechanical keyswitches that provide great tactile feedback.