djames4242

sflocal said:

I’ve never used Parallels as I’ve been a loyal VMWare Fusion user.  Now though, I wouldn’t touch Parallels with a mile-long stick.  Usually companies like these don’t last long when private equity firms get involved like they’re doing here.

I’ve been using Parallels since v3, well before Fusion was released. When Fusion came out I gave it a shot, but it caused frequent kernel panics when using VMs stored on external media.

A few years later, with 2-3 Macs I use regularly, I tried Fusion 7 because VMWare has a much more liberal license policy (that is, one license can be installed on up to three Macs, while Parallels requires a license for each, even when only one is in use at a time). I hated how it treats multiple displays - when using multiple displays on a guest, it does not allow you to switch those displays independently. I frequently will have one display showing a guest OS while the other displays my host OS windows and I switch back and forth. Parallels allows this. Fusion does not. If you swipe one display’s space, the other display switches as well. This is a show stopper and is not even a selectable option. From what I can tell, this still exists in current versions of Fusion.

For this reason alone I pay for two Parallels licenses rather than a single Fusion license.

Well that’s stupid. I do mostly use control center, but the app does something I find very useful that isn’t in control center. The app has a details label you can tap that’ll show you what’s currently playing with a slider showing the content length and the current position.

AFAIK, this isn’t something you can do with control center and it’s nice to see what my kids are watching, or how much time is left on my show without bringing up the playback position on-screen.

Been looking forward to this for awhile. I have a Classical Archives subscription, but their app is absolutely awful. Their website isn’t much better.

I feel a little sorry for them because this will definitely affect their subscriber count, but they should’ve been keeping up their application which looks no different today than it did when it first hit the App Store over a decade ago.

Another health element users will miss out on is blood oxygen sensing.

Well that’s disappointing. I’ve been waiting for this feature to return so I can finally upgrade my tired (and now deprecated) S5…

SnickersMagoo said:

iTunes should check out Roon! It's what iTunes should have been 5-10 years ago....It's the most incredible playback software ever made.....iTunes could not carry Roon's Jock strap!

It looks pretty, but that's not enough to get me to pony up $120/year, unless it comes with some must-have features, and I didn't see anything particularly compelling on their site, but maybe I'm missing something.

longfang said:

Blood Ox is available for customers outside the US. 

So can I pick up an Apple Watch while traveling (say, to Canada) and bring it back with the feature intact? I presume it will be disabled when activated by my US-based Apple ID. 

brian green said:

BGeek said:

Any idea why Apple does not have a store in downtown Seattle? Seems like every other major city has a Apple store downtown.

No idea.  It's only the fastest growing city in the region.  Maybe they think the small stores in Alderwood Mall, and Bellevue Square are "good enough".  

University Village is much closer to downtown than either of those, and Apple is building a brand new, much larger store adjacent to its current location.

Frankly, however, I'm not sure how convenient downtown stores are. I'm picking up a brand new iMac this weekend in Portland and choose Bridgeport (15 miles south) over the downtown location because I don't want to have to pay to park in a lot two blocks away carrying a $3000 computer back to my car. The store at University Village has a parking garage about 100 feet away from it with ample, free parking. The lots at Alderwood and Bellevue Square are only slightly less convenient, yet still free, unlike nearly every other downtown.

I switched to Pages when iWork was still a paid product. It’s simply a better layout tool than Word. Ever tried to place an image where you actually wanted it in a Word document? Bit of a nightmare, really.

I do have a small wish list though…

1. Allow us to create new documents in Page Layout mode rather than word processing mode. 99.9% of my documents are done this way and I always have to convert the new document before working with it.

2. Let mail merge work with labels. It’s literally the only thing I still use Word for. I keep a spreadsheet with names and addresses for holiday cards and Pages merge feature creates a page of labels with the same address rather than putting each address on each label.

powermacbandit said:

If you can’t control display settings from the Mac (volume, brightness, etc) then it’s a non-starter in my book. 

It may be seen as kludgy, but BetterDisplay lets me control my inexpensive LG 4K monitors with my keyboard. I also have a portable USB monitor which defaults to 50% brightness every time I plug it in. This is the reason I paid the $20 to support this app because it was annoying having to use the monitor’s flimsy controls to increase its brightness every time I use it.

matrix077 said:

Is this because of security reason? I can’t think of any other.

More likely because it never worked reliably.