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Journalists Cover Microsoft, Using Macs

It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire”  at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]

Guide To Black Friday Apple Bargains: Cheap MacBooks, iPods and Accessories Galore

Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]

Review: Voices Is Today’s Best Thing Ever, Grab It Now While It’s Cheap

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

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Review: Sony Walkman S540 Series Video MP3 Player

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“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]

WrongRoom: Honestly Ripping Off Better Software

wrongroom-icon-20081022.jpgIf there’s one thing you can admire in software developers who rip off other people’s ideas, it’s honesty about what they’re doing.

In building WrongRoom, Joseph Lyman has created something modeled on the longstanding best-in-class full screen editor, WriteRoom. It’s his first OS X app, so we should be gentle: but at least he’s up front about why he made something that’s been made before:

“WrongRoom: A shoddy freeware clone of a perfectly good program”

He even encourages anyone who downloads WrongRoom to go and buy a license for WriteRoom. And he’s right. WriteRoom is a much better app with many more features. WrongRoom offers vaguely similar functionality, but it’s just … well, wrong. Even the icon’s a little wonky.

Top marks to Joseph for being so upfront about it, though.

About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He is a columnist for PA, and has written for the BBC, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, MacUser, Macworld, and The Morning News. He has a blog you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

Email the author | Read more posts by Giles Turnbull.

One comment

    Hey, Joseph Lyman here… honestly, I’m shocked that anyone even found my little program :) As I state on my site, I only wrote it because I can’t stand “timed trials”, and I wanted a free version of the program I liked… voila WrongRoom.

    And you’re right, the icon is a little wonky… I made it in a jiffy in GIMP, which has a not-so-great algorithm for shrinking a circle… anyway, no excuse there, I was just in a hurry. Since you complained, I’ll fix in in the next version :)

    Speaking of next versions, 1.5b is out today because someone emailed me and asked if they could have an option for bigger or smaller fonts… enjoy!

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