A trip to Argos later and we were back at the house installing on the kitchen iMac. After 10 minutes or so the install was complete and we were ready to fire it up for the first time. Unfortunately when the game tried to contact EA’s licence servers it failed for some reason and just displayed an error message asking us to try again in a short while ! Ben was gutted as you would expect…

Over on the EA Forums for Spore I found a number of threads complaining about Internet servers ( authentication and licence ) being under capacity and failing to allow excited new owners to play. While we “waited a while” I decided to check a few other options to make sure the error was valid. Ben’s account on the iMac is setup as a Standard User ( not an Administrator ) and additionally has Parental Controls switched on. As a test I logged in as Admin, switched Parental Controls off and made Ben an Administrator then switched back to Bens account and tried again.

Hey presto, connection went through straight away and Ben was able to get down to the serious business of “evolving”.

A minor frustration and one I am routinely faced with in the world of Microsoft where the vast majority of consumer applications appear to require that the user is a machine administrator to run them, but not something I have come across in the last 4-5 years I have been a Mac user. I suppose it is fair to say that this is the first commercial game I have bought for a Mac which is a shame as it may well put me off buying further titles ( especially from EA ).

You would think that after 7 years of development a simple bug like this would have been spotted wouldn’t you?

Cheers

It actually sounds more complicated than it is. Download the application and try it, it is FREE after all.

There are a surprisingly small number of sites where you can find additional templates for the iWork applications. The list below contains the best ones that seem to be available at the moment. If you know of any better ones please drop a comment on this post and I will gladly update it to include them.

iWorkCommunity.com:Template Exchange - This site is probably the most comprehensive currently available. At the time of writing there were 225 Pages templates, 5 for Keynote and 15 for Numbers. All the templates here are free to download and use.

iWork Templates - This is a slightly more recent free template site which currently only has about 18 templates to offer.

Number Templates - This site specialises on free templates for Numbers as well as providing hints and tips on how to use the application.

Jumsoft is a commercial site providing high quality templates for iWeb, Pages and Keynote as well as clipart and animations. The Pages templates product is $39 and provides a range of 20 different templates.

Keynote Pro is another commercial site that offers a range of templates for Pages and of course Keynote. Their themes are exceptionally elegant and stylish.

Oneeyedgoldfish is a UK based company who provide a range of templates for Pages at £10 per theme or all of their themes for £40. They also have a small number of free templates for download as a taster of their full offerings.

So there you have it. A small list for now but hopefully of help anyway. Please do tell me of any other good resources for iWork by leaving a comment below.

I was virtually on the point of starting to use Firefox Beta 3 until I saw this… Looks like Apple pulled one out of the bag again. To be fair though, Firefox is almost as quick loading, although the first load is much slower than Safari. Interestingly both browsers now do a perfect job of rendering the Acid2 test. Does anyone know what the beta of IE 8 makes of the Acid2 test ?

There is however a way to take a picture with Photobooth without the flash firing. All you need to do is hold the Shift key down while you take the shot. Better still if you don’t want to wait for the 3 second timer before the shot is taken hold the Alt key down as well, the picture will take instantly.

Get it while its hot !

Things is still in alpha stage and access to the download page is still by invite only, however unlike in a number of recent new Mac products you can register to be part of the alpha/beta testing and do not need to beg for invites on forums from those who have been lucky enough to receive an invite already.

Interestingly the data for things is held in XML format and not locked into a proprietary file format so third party developers and users will be able to build their own plugins and add ons for reporting and manipulating your Things data.