Tag: Mac

Evernote’s New Pricing Plans

July 15, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Evernote revealed a couple of weeks ago that they’re changing their pricing plans:

Beginning today, the prices for our Plus and Premium tiers will change for new subscriptions, and access from Evernote Basic accounts will be limited to two devices.

So, for Basic accounts like mine, I’m now limited to accessing my Evernote notes in up to 2 devices. Although Evernote‘s regional pricing plans for the Philippines offer a much lower price at PHP550 per year (roughly less than $12/yr.) for the Evernote Plus account, I’m not too keen on paying for something that I can actually get for free in other services. Continue reading

The Pre-Retina Display MacBook Pro

March 11, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Marco Arment enumerates the reasons, “Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells.”

As we’ve progressed toward thinner, lighter, more integrated Macs, we’ve paid dearly in upgradeability, versatility, and value. There are many Macs to choose from today, but in some ways, we have less choice than ever.

When Apple introduced the 3rd generation MacBook Pro (MBP) back in the middle of 2012, it then came with the Retina Display and solid-state drives (SSDs) in lieu of the hard-disk drives (HDDs), but dismissed the optical drive altogether. Moreover, you cannot upgrade the memory (RAM) by yourself, it has to be pre-packaged when you buy it.

I own an Early 2011 13-inch Macbook Pro, and I’ll probably hold back from upgrading to the latest MBP in the near future. Why? Here are my reasons:  Continue reading

Tweetbot for Mac

October 20, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I am a big fan of Tweetbot for iPhone. There’s no denying I would recommend this app to any iPhone user who wants a more robust Twitter client for their smartphone. A price tag is attached to the app in the iTunes App Store, but the price is well worth it. This app is probably the best Twitter client-app out there available to any platform. Unfortunately, Tweetbot is an iOS-only app, which makes it one of the selling points why I choose the iPhone. Continue reading

Hiarcs Chess Explorer Video Quick Tour

October 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The Hiarcs team recently posted two videos (one for Mac and another for Windows) to give a quick tour of their products. The Hiarcs Chess Explorer applications for both platforms virtually look the same and share the same functionalities.

I have a Mac and purchased the Mac version, and here’s the quick tour:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtBdRjtrBDU&w=480]

Yet, I have to reiterate my feature requests I hope we get in the next version:

  • Engine match and engine tournaments;
  • Ability to publish PGN games to be replayable in HTML through javascript;

See also Hiarcs Chess Explorer for PC video tour.

Running Fritz 12 on a Mac via Crossover

September 9, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Fritz 12 is a great chess product that unfortunately has no Mac version. I’ve installed it on a Bootcamp partition, and it works great. But I hate rebooting to Windows everytime I need it. Besides, all my files are in the OS X partition.

I also tried running Fritz 12 in a Parallels Desktop. It works fine as well, but then I have to boot Windows on top of OS X, which in the process they’re sharing the same computer’s resources, which proves to be an inefficient environment to run a resource hungry application like Fritz 12. I was only able to assign 3GB of RAM out of the total installed 8GB, and the application can only utilize 1 CPU out of the total 4.

So what about Codeweaver’s Crossover? Well, this is how it looks like: Continue reading

Hiarcs’ Mac Chess Explorer is Now Available

August 27, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Got a message today that Hiarcs’ Mac Chess Explorer is finally available:

At last, after a very long wait, it has finally come for us to check out.

It comes bundled with Hiarcs 14 and costs US$59.95 for the single-core version, and US$99.95 for the Deep Hiarcs (multi-core/multi-processor version).

By the way, there’s also the PC Chess Explorer. But what the heck, we’re only interested in Mac here, right? Continue reading

The Chess Explorer by Hiarcs

August 20, 2011 / / 0 Comments

The Hiarcs page right now goes:

HIARCS Chess Explorer is an exciting new chess product which is under development and we hope will be available in the autumn 2011. More details on the new chess explorer application will be posted here when they are ready. We hope chess players of all chess abilities who really wish to explore and improve their chess will like the new HIARCS chess explorer software.

For me, this leaves more questions than answers:

  • Is this a GUI alternative to Chessbase’ Fritz 12?
  • Is this thing available for Windows and Mac?
  • Is this Hiarcs answer due to Sigma Chess not available to support OS X Lion?
  • Can I install other competing engines?
  • Will it have intuitive interface for game analysis?
  • Will I become a better player with this software?
  • Will this be free or shall be sold for a hefty amount?
  • Do you think it can beat Houdini?

I can go on and on, even with stupid questions, but really, that page is not helping a lot. Hope Hiarcs can come up with a concrete answer and hopefully fill that bridge for a good native chess program for the Mac.

Raptor is a Great FICS Desktop Client for Mac

August 14, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Free Internet Chess Server (FICS), which can be found at www.freechess.org, is a great way to play chess online for free. Besides being free, another great thing about FICS is the presence of a huge community, so that you’ll always have someone within your playing level to start a game with. It is also highly moderated by system and human moderators so that trolls and cheaters are quickly identified and acted upon accordingly.

I used to connect to FICS via Winboard or BabasChess on my Windows machine. But now that I’m on a Mac (specifically on an Intel, Mac OS X Lion 10.7, Macbook Pro 13″ Early 2011), these two programs don’t just seem to work. Good thing I stumbled upon a comment from one user in the FICS group in Facebook about Raptor Chess. Continue reading