Back in January 2006 Garmin announced with a flourish that they would support the Mac. They made the announcement at Apple's Premier event, Macworld Expo. Since then we have seen one beta plugin for Motionbase and no sign of Training Centre. What has gone wrong? In the linked article above it is mentioned that less than 5% of visits to their site are from Mac users. What a surprise when they don't support them. Is this a sign they are backing out?

I bought a Garmin Forerunner 305 and it is a great GPS device. I bought it because of the promise that was made at Macworld. Garmin now say that the software will come out by the end of the year, but considering it was meant to be spring, who knows? Come on Garmin, how about a public beta. The Macintosh community is ready and willing to help. We know what running beta software means. Lets see it.

After installing Macintosh Office 2004 and patching it on my new Mac Pro I got the following error. Microsoft Visual Basic Class not registered. Looking for object with
CLSID: {AC9F2F90-E877-11CE-9F68-00A00574A4F}

After trying different things I found that deleting the folder ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft fixed the issue. ~ is your home folder. Everything in the folder will be remade. I checked Excel, Word and Entourage and all had kept their preferences. Only Remote Desktop had reset back to default.

So we are all told to backup and some actually do it. As someone who used to look after clients whose livelihood depended on their files I had to preach backup.

Their used to be only one solution for Mac users, Dantz Retrospect. I have used it since verion 2 and it was a wonderful product. It was so simple to use that I was hoping that they would bring out a PC server version. I was even involved in the beta. The PC version was equally easy to use and has grown over the years quickly supporting sql and Exchange.

It is now on version 7.5 which was release in February 2006. So where is the Mac version? It is way back on version 6.1. It has had the odd driver update, but nothing else has changed since January 2004.

Actually one thing changed. EMC bought Dantz in October 2004. Have they forgotten they bought a Mac version?

Dare we ask that they make it a universal binary when the next release comes out, if it comes out. They have forgotten their roots to such an extent that is not a given.

They told me it works fine under Rosetta. Well it doesn't work for me. It crashes when it tries to backup my idisk.

Where does this leave Mac users? Their is a great shareware product called Superduper. It works very simply and you can make your scripts pretty complicated if that is what you want. Compared to Retrospect it is very cheap. Only $27.95.

I would still like to use Retrospect. It has some features that I would still like to use. The ability to go back to previous versions of a file with a snapshot is great. That will be replaced by Timemachine when Apple's 10.5 comes out in early 2007. Between Superduper and Timemachine maybe I will be covered and EMC will have lost a customer. Perhaps they don't care. Perhaps the home user no longer matters.

It has been sad to see Macintosh Retrospect dying. I hope for corporate clients sake it gets a second wind, but I think its days in the home are gone. Shame on you EMC. You let a loyal customer base down.

Last week I went to the Ironport customer day. Ironport make an excellent email appliance that is superb at stopping spam. The customer day was excellent and in the afternoon they had some interesting events. One of the events was falconry. It was fascinating to have the birds so close and have them land on the glove. They are much lighter than you think.

The Kestrel was amazing. The movement and the speed was remarkable to watch. Despite all this the grace with which the bird flew was wonderful. It really did make you want to get involved with these wonderful birds.

After recently getting 3 Mac Pro's in the office I realised that we had a problem. Two of them would not shutdown, they would immediately restart. If I tried to restart them they would kernel panic. These two machines were cloned from the first one and I could work out what was different between them. I then realised that these 2 machines had the Cisco VPN client (4.9) installed.

I had to install it on the machine that was working. Low and behold it then did the same thing. I uninstalled the client when I was done and the problem went away. Hopefully Apple with 10.4.8 or Cisco will fix this soon.