Phil Taylor writes: | I've put up a first rough beta version of BarFly Carbon, for all the | folks who've been badgering me for an OS X version. You can download | it from: <http://www.barfly.dial.pipex.com/BarFlyCarbon.hqx>
Hmmm ... I'm getting more and more tempted to invest in a PowerBook with OSX. Now there's another reason. Actually, I've done a bit of digging, and have put it off because of not enough information to decide what to order. While my official excuse for buying one would be for "professional" software development reasons, I'm also interesting in something that could function as a portable musical tool. Maybe someone here knows more than I can get from apple.com. There's a lot of hype about the wonderful music support, but it all seems to be aimed at people who are downloading and playing musical recordings. This is interesting, of course, but it can be done on nearly anything these days. More interesting would be the ability to use the machine as a recording studio. I can tell that a PowerBook comes with a microphone, but I can't even tell from the specs whether it's mono or stereo. And, of course, I'd like to plug in N microphones, and it would be interesting to learn how large N can be. Can the "sound studio" software actually input N tracks from mics and play games with them? Or can it only download the N tracks from some other computer? Another topic that's hard to get straight info on is what can actually be done with the wireless ports. An anecdote might explain: A couple of months back, when it was still warm, I was at a dance camp out in the wilds of the Berkshires. At one point, someone asked how a tune went, and nobody could remember. So I whipped out my cell phone (a Kyocera "smartphone" that's also a Palm Pilot). I fired up its browser, which promptly made a connection to my Tune Finder. I found the tune, fetched the abc, and copied it over to the "palmabc" program that I'd installed. It started playing the tune through the tinny little speaker. People were incredibly impressed. It got me lots and lots of geek points. And we had the tune. This is feasible right now. If I'd had a PowerBook with its nifty wireless stuff, could it have handled the task? If so, I could have also displayed the music on a real screen that people could read, unlike the tiny window on my cell phone. But look as I might, I can't tell if there's a way to make the Mac connect to the Net like my cute little phone can. The Mac has a modem, yes, but it's apparently not wireless. The wireless stuff would likely be rejected by whatever phone company was there, because they don't really supply Internet access, of course; they just provide a "phone line". And if your wireless gadget doesn't have a proper phone id, it won't get anywhere, no matter how good it is at doing Internet protocols. There seems to be no mention anywhere of the idea that the Mac might use the ubiquitous cell-phone system. Maybe I could use the Kyocera as a cellular modem, but the Mac comes with so much wireless hardware that it seems a shame not to use it. As far as I can tell, the only available answer is "Buy one and see if it works." I'm not sure if I'm ready to invest that much money, just to find that it will only work when I'm at home. Sure would be useful, though. (And, since I'd use it for testing my day-job stuff, its price tag would be deductible. ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
