macBlogger - Apple Mac Blog

Some guy called Steve Jobs (ever hear of him?) did something called a keynote speech for like the millionth time this year yesterday evening. Apparently he does these kind of things fairly often. Yesterday’s keynote speech was in relation to the next generation of iPods.

Apple have taken the iPhone, removed the Phone part and replaced it with the Pod. What you get is an iPhone which can’t make telephone calls but which does allow you to listen to music and connect wirelessly to iTunes, ohh and it has a a fancy touch screen too. It’s called the iPod Touch. Amazingly enough it only costs $100 less than an iPhone but has about 1/4 of the features, but I suppose you do get screwed with AT&T if you go down the iPhone route (comment based on American iPhone release).

It comes in a fairly paltry 8GB(€299) and 16GB(€399) and contains Safari (Web Browser), a WiFI connection and an interesting Starbucks feature…

If you’re in Starbucks drinking a Choco Mooke Banana Latte with sprinkles of extra Choco and you’re acting extra pretentious because you have your iPod Touch in hand and you know that everyone is looking at you but you’re trying to concentrate on looking cool without trying to put in too much effort to cool because you don’t want to look needy but in reality you are and you want to listen to some ‘tunes’ but you’re sick of listening to Jon Bon Jovi and Aerosmith and you want to listen to something less 90’s and more ‘hip’…..well now you can.

You can tune into Starbucks’ radio playlist via the iPod Touch’s inbuilt WiFI connection. This feature also allows you to download the currently playing track and lets you browse the last ten tracks played as well.

Some guy explains it in more detail in the below video (3minutes and 30seconds in)
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Does this feature infringe on a Patent though?

When I was finishing my third year in college, May 2005, one of my lecturers spoke to myself and a few of my classmates about a project he was soon to be working on. It was a really adventurous venture and I personally could not see how it could be implemented.

So what was his idea?

You’re driving in a car or you’re in a shop and you hear a song on the radio. You find yourself humming along to the track and you wish you knew the name of the track so you could buy it on iTunes when you get home….You take a small device out of your pocket, it identifies the radio station’s frequency and subsequently manages to identify the track which is playing (I’m not quite sure how this is done). You then head on home and you connect the deceive to your PC. The device launches iTunes and brings you to the iTunes Store which presents the before-mentioned track for your download. Da-DAAAAHHHH! And you’re done. A satisfied customer.

I don’t know the Patent number so I can’t check what exactly they have patented but is it too similar to the technology which is going to be used in the Apple - Starbucks agreement?

Other posts about the iPod Touch

• New Toy: iPod Touch
• Apple Releases iPod Touch
• Touchscreen iPods Today? How about WiFi?
• iPod touch, a gateway drug

Hey there MacHeads!

Before I launch into my post on the Leopard preview I guess I should say who I am and what I’m doing here. My name is Katie and I am officially Mac obsessed. I’ve been a Mac user for as long as I can remember and Cormac recently asked me to contribute here with a post or two. The whole blogging thing is relatively new to me so be patient please!

I thought that as a first post I would tell you all a little bit about the developer Leopard preview which I have been working on lately. Leopard, which is due for release in October, at a cost of approximately €150 has had a lot of coverage on various Mac sites so I thought it would be nice to cover some of the new features here. Unfortunately, due to the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) I can only give you my own thoughts on the features you have heard about and cannot really get into the finer details.

Probably the most talked about changes are the look and feel updates given to the Dock, Finder and a number of other native applications. Finder now uses Cover Flow which makes your Finder window look and feel like you are browsing your iTunes music library. In the same way you can browse your iTunes collection while viewing your artwork, Cover Flow displays a large preview of each file in your directory, while Quick Look will even playing previews of QuickTime movies. The 3D look and feel applied to the dock is carried over to the Finder preview window as well. From a user’s perspective browsing through files could not be any easier now. Finding that photo or movie is simply an arrow click (or two) away!

Another change to document browsing in Leopard is Stacks. You can create Stacks from anything you want to access quickly from one place: a handful of documents, a group of applications, or an entire folder, simply by dropping the folder onto the Dock. When you want to see the files in a Stack, all you have to do is click — Stacks spring open from the Dock in an elegant arc for a few items, or in an at-a-glance grid for more. I find this feature very convenient for folders I access on a regular basis, allowing for fast and efficient access to files in the directory.

One of the most useful features of Leopard for me so far would be Spaces. With Spaces you can create a virtual work area for each application/window and organise each Space the way you want it just by dragging in windows. The Spaces interface is very convenient and user friendly allowing rearranging of Spaces simply by drag-and-drop, toggling between Spaces using the arrow keys and activating an application with a simple Dock click will automagically bring you to the relevant Space for that application. You can create as many Spaces as you need and configure your Spaces by using the Exposé & Spaces pane in System Preferences. Arrange your Spaces according to your needs, then choose the function keys you want to control them. You can also assign applications to specific Spaces, so you will always know which Space your favourite application lives in! Linux users can breathe a sigh of relief at this progression!

My workflow in Leopard is much more efficient and certainly requires less Mighty Mouse clicks. Overall I find the environmental changes to the OS to be very welcome and beneficial from a user’s perspective. New functionality such as Time Machine makes backing up your system an incredibly quick and easy job. It keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac syncing it with an external drive, and even offering a wireless sync option for Airport Extreme Base station users.

The look and feel of many native applications have also changed in Leopard. Welcome updates to iChat, Mail, Preview, iCal and Safari all add to your daily Mac experience. Bootcamp will be automatically included as part of Leopard, making it even easier to configure a Windows partition on your Mac. With the announcements made at yesterday’s keynote about iWork and iLife ‘08 users can expect even more of their favourite applications to step up with new features ensuring the ultimate work and play environment. Roll on October for a faster, sleeker and more keyboard friendly operating system!!

Steve loves his keynote presentations!

Mr. Jobs is currently in the middle of giving his presentation at the Apple Media Event where he is raving on about the updated iMacs. The iMac range is to be built from aluminum and glass and will come in two sizes, 20″ and 24″ and has four models in total. There is no 17″ but the iMacs will have an entry-level iMac, two mid-range iMacs and a top of the range iMac.

The retro looking iMacs are getting tanked up on hardware too…

• 20-inch, 1680 x 1050 LCD
• 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 1GB RAM
• 250GB SATA
• 8x SuperDrive
• ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT

• 20-inch, 1680 x 1050 LCD
• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 1GB RAM
• 320GB SATA
• 8x SuperDrive
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro

• 24-inch, 1900 x 1200 LCD
• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 1GB RAM
• 320GB SATA
• 8x SuperDrive
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro

• 24-inch, 1900 x 1200 LCD
• 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 2GB RAM
• 500GB SATA
• 8x double-layer SuperDrive
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory

Check out the Specs page on the Apple site for more info.
Update: The Euro prices are after coming through!

The entry level iMac is priced at $1,199 (€1,199.00), the mid-range at $1,499 (€1,449.00) and $1,799 (€1,749), while the top of the range iMac will cost $2,289 (€2,219.00). We will have the Euro price later..

The new keyboards have the same brushed steal look as Pro range and the keyboard is 3 times as narrow as the current one. I’m not sure what the new mice look like.

The images above were posted on a thread on a Mac Forum I go to. When more information (and a video) is made available, I’ll post them up.
Edit: The images are taken from Engadget. They are live blogging the media event.

The new iMacs are available to order as of today, but we’re not certain if it’s US only. The Apple store is currently closed for business while they update, so the new iMacs must be going global. The iMac page on the Apple site hasn’t been updated yet with any information from today’s media event.

I’m getting sick of updating this post. I’ll come back to the new iMacs once the dust has settled.

Duncan Riley of Techcrunch is after writing about Apple’s intention to intergrate iTunes into Bebo.

From Wednesday, Bebo’s 8.8m users in the UK and Ireland will be able to buy music directly from the profile of any musician who has a Bebo profile and whose music is available on iTunes.

It will be the first time Apple has linked iTunes to a social networking site.

More information available from FT.com .

Nice move by Apple to tap into Bebo’s popularity which includes an archive of more than half a million bands.

To coincide with the recent WWDC conference and Steve Job’s keynote speech, the Leopard website has been updated. The site features a run down of some of the forthcoming features, which include:

• A more 3D based Dock.
• A new Finder, it is pretty much based on the iTunes layout.
• Stacks - This feature stacks multiple folders on top of each other when in the Dock.
• Quick Look - Provides a live preview of the document.
• Spaces - Allows you to switch between workspaces.
• Boot Camp - Installed as default.
• Dynamic Widget Creation - Allows you to create on the fly widgets based on a website’s content.
• Spotlight - Will have the ability to search Macs and PCs on your local network.
• .Mac - The spotlight search is going to extend to Macs outside of your local network.
• iChat - Is set to get a massive facelift on Leopard.
• Time Machine - Back up and recovery software which uses Spotlight and Quick Look.

The keynote speech is available to stream (quicktime of course), it is quite long but worth the watch. I have watched the first hour of the speech which touched on EA Sports and ID Games coming to Mac and of course demonstrated Leopard to the 5000+ audience.
Below is a shorter promtional video which demonstrates some of the above features of Leopard

One thing I didn’t like about the Keynote speech was Apple’s snobbery at Windows again. The opening video footage featured ‘PC’ from the ‘I’m a PC, I’m a Mac’ advert trying to pass himself off as Steve Jobs. PC stated that he is quiting Apple and shutting down the whole company. While the footage was fairly funny it wasn’t really required to be shown to the audience. Below is a cam recording of the footage.

Okay, back to Leopard. It looks amazing. Roll on October.

The stand out features for me include, the dynamic widget creation, workspace and stacks. The Widget feature allows you to highlight any area in a webpage and then ‘grab’ the contents of that area and turns that area into a widget. It’s basically like dynamic RSS. It’s a really imaginative addition. The upgrade to Leopard from Tiger will cost approx <€150. Roll on October.

Other discussions of WDMC 2007

• Paul Watson - WWDC 2007
  
• Johnny Pez - OS X Leopard Preview Page gets an Update
• Boards .ie - WWDC Discussion Thread
  
• Apple Insider Forum - OSX Leopard Preview
• The Apple Blog - Leopard lots of show, little go?

Safari beta 3 is available for public beta from the Safari download page. It is also making an appearance on Windows for the first time. I have just downloaded it and I have to say it’s the fastest rendering browser I have ever used. I actually can’t believe how fast it is.

I’m not too familiar with Safrai’s features as Camino is my browser of choice but I will explore this beta release a bit further. From my early experience there seems to be no major additional features but the speed is very very noticeable.

The download comes as package which includes an uninstaller which will revert to the previous version of Safari when run.

I’m very surprised this has been released before both the iPhone and Leopard. I wonder what features will make it into the final release…? What features would you like to see?

There are unconfirmed reports speculating that Apple are about to close up shop on two of their most affordable desktop releases. The young and headless Mac Mini and the 17″ iMac are soon to be binned. One of the major barriers for potential purchasers of Mac systems is price. Macs have always been dubbed as expensive hobbyist toys (or along those lines anyway).

The Mac Mini, which is currently available onwards from ¢629 to ¢809, was meant to accommodate those who were financially restricted.

There is some speculation that Apple conceived the Mac mini under pressure from shareholders who wanted a sub-$800 Mac, but never really saw much in the design itself. It’s almost as if the mini stood in direct contrast to Apple’s fundamentals from the get-go.

I’m surprised at Apple’s decision, if this is true of course, because the Mini has great potential. I don’t think it’s been marketed as well as what it should have been. For money you can attach a Mini to your front room TV and use the TV screen as a monitor. This will allow you to not only browse the net but you can also use the Mini as both a DVD player and as a Hi-Fi system. The Mini is also very portable and can of course be hooked up a normal PC monitor and can be used as a desktop.

Introducing Apple TV.

This little guy has stolen the limelight from the Mini but it’s nowhere near as feature rich and powerful as the Mini. There is nothing on the Apple TV that you couldn’t do with the Mini. It doesn’t make much sense to me. It’s just poor marketing. They should have evolved and promoted the Mini more instead of introducing a sub standard off shoot of it.

I’m not a happy camper. I was looking forward to tracking the development of the Mini in the hope of some day soon purchasing one and using it as a home entertainment system.

When the time came for me to choose which iMac I was going to purchase there were only three options. A 17”, which I thought was a bit small by today’s standards, a 20” which I ultimately bought and a 24” which I couldn’t afford and felt it was a bit of over kill. Those extra 3” over the entry level 17” are a godsend. Not only for the improved screen size and the more cinematic feel but also because the 17” looks set to be discontinued.

The decision to axe the smallest iMac comes as display prices continue to track downwards, making the cost difference for Apple between a 17-inch display and a 20-inch display almost negligible. Demand from display customers for larger sizes coupled with more productive manufacturing plants in Asia have been the guiding factors in those lower prices.

Eliminating the low-end iMac will also improve logistics for Apple, which will need to track and stock considerably fewer parts.

This is surprising if true. It doesn’t seem logical to remove the entry level iMac and replace it…..well…with nothing. I realise that the iPhone is the new darling and it requires a lot of TLC but you would hope that Apple would have an affordable desktop solution on the market in the not too distant future. Apple are getting a lot of good press and more and more home users are making the switch. Not all of them can afford to pay more than ¢1,000 on a system. Apple are raising the bar on price but they’re not satisfying growing demand. Removing the Mini and the 17″ iMac is a dangerous move.