Hey, did you hear? Someone’s giving away software! Free as in blowjobs (an act for which the Germans apparently have 500 words). Actually, by now it’s all done. Sorry slow-pokes.

The motivations for the giveaway are vaguely political and not too interesting, but the outcome is that I didn’t have to pay for CrossOver Mac Pro, a piece of software based on Wine that lets Mac users run Windows software far faster (and some degree less robustly) than the more traditional virtual machine solution.

Faster, you say? How much faster?

Do you have Office 2008 for Mac? How long does it take to load up a copy of Word? On my 2.4Ghz MacBook Pro it takes 22 seconds from clicking the icon to being able to type text. That’s not awful, I suppose, though quite slow compared to Word 2007 on a 2.4Ghz Windows machine.

Speaking of Word 2007, loading it through Crossover takes a mere 10 seconds until I can type. That includes the time it takes for Crossover itself to launch.

Hell, if it wasn’t free I’d have bought it!

I’ve spent the last two weeks setting up a small business with all-new Macs. They’ve thrown away two Dell towers, a Toshiba laptop and a fax machine the size of a small dog, to replace them with two iMacs, a USB modem and a MacBook. There’s also a Time Capsule, for the all-important backups.

So far so good, right? It almost came unstuck over the printing (has anyone even heard of Oki?), but I wrassled it and won. No, the problem is the hardest problem of modern computing – syncing.

First, we tried MobileMe – the boss had a spare account on his family-pack, so all we needed to do is give all the machines the same sing-in details and keep the contacts and calendars in perfect sync across the office. It’d even push changes out to the boss’s shiny new iPhone. On paper, it’s beautiful. Problem being, MobileMe seems to have been designed with one computer and one phone in mind, since it very quickly starts sucking the dicks in an office environment. After one of the secretaries spent all afternoon entering the old paper diary it promptly threw all the damn changes away.

So then we tried CalDAV. The Chandler Project is an open source service that seeks to unify all your PIM data and make it available through open-standards. Sexy, no? I can practically see Matt’s nerd-boner from here. So far so good, and it works pretty well, despite a lengthy initial sync for out four office calendars. The problem, of course, lies with Apple. It seems that Leopard’s sync services don’t actually get to write events back to CalDAV calendars – so any appointments created on an iPhone must be dropped onto their own new calendar and then manually dumped into the appropriate CalDAV share when you next sync. Tedious.

Ironic, really, that the only people who’ve truly got sync right is Microsoft – it really does seem that an Exchange server is the only way to go about this. I suppose they had to get something right besides games consoles and precision mice? But even then, the hosted solutions seem really… sketchy, and they all cost good money just for fucking calendar sync.

Nerd rage… rising.

Imagine your career is in making and selling some kind of doodad, an electronic gadget of some sort, and it’s pretty popular. Now imagine you wake up one morning and Steve Jobs announces that the next iPhone will do the job of your gadget.

That sound you heard was the GPS industry choking on their cornflakes.

We knew it was coming, high end phones have included GPS for a while now, most with little mapping applications and many actually running software written by the likes of TomTom or Garmin. We knew the stand-alone GPS wasn’t long for this world, what we didn’t know is that the timetable was about to be moved up a little. 

As of June the 11th you will be able to buy an iPhone for around the £130 mark that does GPS. It will tell you where you are, and place a little blue pin on a Google map. Yes, the ones with the satellite imaging. It will also give you turn-by-turn driving directions and track you as you go.

Did you know the cheapest GPS unit that TomTom sells in the UK costs £149? Its screen is about the same size as the iPhone, and it’s neither phone nor iPod nor internet appliance. It can tell you where you are, but it cannot point you to the nearest coffee shop (more on our location-aware Orwellian future later).  Of course, the iPhone doesn’t speak directions at you, or have a car navigation mode with a big arrow and such, so it’s not quite an, ah, apples-to-apples comparison.

That said, I think it’s clear the GPS need to do a Sega at this point: abandon the idea of selling anybody hardware and focus on the thing the other guys can’t do (for now, at least), writing navigation software. I expect to see apps from Garmin and TomTom in the iPhone App Store sooner rather than later.

[edit] So that’ll be sooner then: TomTom has their iPhone app “ready to go“.

More on Jesus Phone 2: phone harder later.