Last year when I bought the iMac, I made the decision that it wasn’t a gaming platform, and I would use the consoles for my gaming needs. Since then Steam has come to the Mac, and with the Mac App Store providing the likes of COD4, Bioshock and Borderlands, it looks like I may have to rethink.
Although I am a major Apple fan boy, the Apple Magic Mouse is good, but no good for gaming. Don’t get me wrong the precision is good, but the touch sensitive top…not so good. I recently started playing Minecraft, and found it extremely annoying that every time I rested my middle finger on the right side of the mouse (as we all do) it would randomly scroll through my inventory. I found this to be the same with any game that uses the scroll wheel, and to be honest became a pain in the butt.
So, I needed a reasonably cheap, but mac compatible gaming mouse. Now I know that you can just plug in any mouse and it will work, however I’ve used the Razer mice in the past and I’ve really liked them. The DeathAdder comes with compatible Mac drivers allowing you to configure every last feature to get the perfect setup.
The full spec is below
3500DPI Razer Precision™ 3.5G infrared sensor
Five independently programmable Hyperesponse™ buttons
Ultra-large non-slip buttons
Ergonomic right-handed design
PC/Mac compatible
I have to say, it feels good to have a decent mouse in my hand again, and looks like I’m back to “PC” gaming.
Screenshots below, as well of a video of the cool light on the back.
Well after much consideration, I finally took to plunge and bought a 27″ iMac.
I’ve been running Mac OSX on my PC now for a good few months, and I’ve also got a MacBook Pro. A couple of things were holding me back, first of all gaming ability. As you are probably more than aware, I game….alot ! and the majority of games come out on the PC. Now I know you can run Parallels desktop, and similar wine based software to allow you to run up Windows games on the mac, but there seems to be only a handful of games that run 100%.
Currently I have the option to boot up my Windows 7 drive in my PC and all is good. I was aware of bootcamp too, however until last week I’d not put this to use.
As mentioned, last week, I was going on a VB.net training course and had to put Windows on my Mac, in case I needed to run through anything on a evening….installed windows XP, installed the Bootcamp drivers, and everything ran very smooth
Another announcement 2 weeks ago which helped sway my decision was the announcement of Steam coming to the Mac in April, and they would also be bringing with them the Valve games. They’ve also said that if you already own any of the Steam games, eg Half Life, Portal, Team Fortress, there is no need to repurchase them !
So the decision was made at the weekend and I bought and iMac 27″. I decided to go with the Quad Core i5 version as I don’t plan on replacing this for a couple of years. When I say I bought 1, I actually mean that I ordered 2, and C wanted one too, as our current machines are around 2 1/2 years old.
I decided as we will have 2 iMacs and 2 MacBook Pros, it was only sensible to get a Time Capsule too. We do currently use our 2Tb Acer Aspire EasyStore for the majority of our storage, but through it would be advantageous to have the Time Capsule for the “what if” factor.
As you can guess by the title of this post, today everything has turned up !
Below are the images of the unboxing of both the iMacs and the the Time Capsule apparently turns up tomorrow.
and finally to give you an idea of the screen resolution, below is a google search ! Look at all the white !
Finally, how is it ?
Let me tell you, it’s huge, it’s fast, it’s deadly quiet, and it’s Apple !…..so yup it works really well. The mouse and keyboard are taking a little getting used to, apart from that, I’m loving it !
Ok, just a quick blog post, but some people may find this useful . If you are like me and have a number of friends of facebook that play a lot of the facebook apps such as Farmville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World, etc and tend to hit the publish button every time they fire up the game, or what seems like every 30 seconds, your Facebook news feed, like mine can get a little crowded.
You could un-friend them, but that’s not very friendly, and if they enjoy playing the games, and I’m sure they have other friends that may finds the post of interest (eg, if they are playing the same game), but for me, it just makes my News Feed unreadable.
The solution is simpler than you think !, when you see one of the offending posts, just mouse over the top right hand corner, and click the hide button. This will hide this post, and give you the option to hide notifications from just this app, or from this user. Hiding the app, will hide all posts from this application.
I spent 5 minutes running through my news feed, hiding all the apps, and now my feed just has relevant information to me, it’s like the good old days of Facebook again.
edit : Just has a message from Chris, and apparently if you just use Lite version of Facebook, you don’t get any apps showing.
