iPhone launch day June 29, 2007
Posted by Jimbo in Hardware, News.add a comment
Naturally enough, the emphasis right now over at apple.com is firmly and unashamedly on the iPhone, which launches in the US at 6.00 pm their time today. As part of the campaign, Apple have posted some really great material, including a few excellent introductory videos. This is the main one — it’s A Guided Tour, and runs through every aspect of the new device. There’s also a video about activation & syncing and about using the keyboard. There’s no doubt that Apple really know how to do this kind of thing with flair and panache. These are top-notch examples of video production. Watch out for some nifty and humorous transition effects during the Guided Tour.
Of course, all the hype is presently restricted to the US. Reports which have filtered through suggest that there have been difficulties finding a provider to take on the iPhone in Europe. It’ll be interesting to see how things turn out there. Personally, impressed as I am with what Steve showed us in January and now what’s shown on these videos, I can’t see myself ever getting one of these. I don’t have an iPod and don’t expect to invest in one of those either. Basically, I’m not a fan of music on the move, and when it comes to mobile phones that’s all I want: a phone. I wish someone offered a no-frills phone without music storage and built-in camera and internet access. A phone that worked reliably and did everything I want a phone to do without unwanted extras: now that is something I’d get really excited about!
New stuff at Apple’s site June 11, 2007
Posted by Jimbo in Web.2 comments
Well, when I went there first I didn’t spot anything different, but going back again a bit later made it clear that there was a bit of a timelag between the WWDC keynote finishing and the Apple site being updated. Two obvious changes are (1) as I expected, a revised set of pages for the Leopard sneak peek, and (2) availability of a public beta (for both Mac and Windows) of Safari 3 (why didn’t Steve mention that at the keynote?).The other big surprise is a total re-design of the Apple web site. I haven’t explored it fully yet, but at first glance it looks quite slick. It certainly seems to incorporate a lot of Web 2 stuff, and has a very different look.
News from WWDC keynote June 11, 2007
Posted by Jimbo in Uncategorized.add a comment
I’m keeping an eye on what’s happening at WWDC in San Francisco. After bits about Intel and about new games coming to the Mac, His Steveness has moved on to discuss OS X 10.5 (‘Leopard’), which is what we all want to hear about. He says there are 300 new features, and he’s going to show 10 of them — beginning with
- a new Desktop and
- a new Finder! Steve says Leopard will have a totally consistent look, and that Brushed Metal will be no more (Hallelujah!). The Dock is 3D, Stacks are a new concept, the new Finder looks for all the world like iTunes and even includes Cover Flow for document browsing.
- Quick Look is a new feature which allows files to be previewed without opening applications.
- Leopard is 64 bit throughout, the first mainstream OS to take this route.
- Core Animation.
- Boot Camp is built in to Leopard.
- Spaces (multiple virtual desktops).
- Dashboard, including Webclip that we heard of before (and that I really liked the sound of).
- iChat.
- Time Machine — “Our goal was to make it so simple that people would actually use it”.
Leopard shipping in October. Basic version, $129. Premium version, $129. Business version, $129, Enterprise version $129. Ultimate version, $129. (I presume that’s all a bit of a dig at Microsoft and their Vista pricing?)
And now: One More Thing! Safari? Yes, Apple are doing Safari for Windows! Safari 3 (included with Leopard) will run on XP and Vista. New feature: draggable tabs. And then there’s One Last Thing: the iPhone. Will ship (in the States, of course) 18 days from now, on 29th June. Apple wanted to allow third-party developers write apps for the iPhone. The solution? Use Web 2, with the iPhone’s fully fledged Safari built in.
And that’s it. I’m off now to the Apple web site to see what’s changed there. Maybe they’ll have updated the Leopard sneak preview pages.
iTunes Plus is appalling [forum title at Apple Discussions] June 1, 2007
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A lot of people are upset, and I have to say that I am too. It seems that I was really lucky with my first iTunes Plus download. That went smoothly, totally trouble-free, and really remarkably quickly for such relatively large files. But that’s been the extent of my pleasant experience since iTunes 7.2 and iTunes Plus came on the scene.
I went on to try my Library Upgrade. A huge mistake! It’s taken I don’t know how many attempts, how much time and how many re-starts of iTunes to download the 32 tracks involved. Download progress has been either excrutiatingly slow or has just stalled and timed out with 504 and 9006 errors. By ’slow’ I mean snail-like, with the progress indicator reporting download times of several hours for files of 10 MB or so. Not good, Apple. There are lots, and lots of unhappy people out here in Consumerland, and it’s time something was done to fix this.
As I’ve said, I’ve tried re-starting iTunes in an effort to flush things out, and this actually worked at one stage, with the remainder of my 32 tracks finally flying through as the original album had done. But these re-starts brought to light an irritating side-effect of iTunes 7.2. On each re-start, I’m now asked to sign in to the iTunes Store and iTunes ‘checks for purchases’, presumably so it can resume all those interrupted downloads. Why doesn’t iTunes remember my account info like it used to?
iTunes Plus adds EMI DRM-free music May 30, 2007
Posted by Jimbo in Miscellaneous, Software.add a comment
I wasn’t expecting this to happen until June, but I suppose it isn’t all that far away. Point is: Apple launched the previously announced DRM-free, higher-quality content from the EMI catalogue today. A new version of iTunes (7.2) was also released, and is needed to access the new content at the iTunes Store. I’m currently listening to my first-ever purchase of one of the new albums (Mstislav Rostropovish playing Bach Suites for solo cello), and pretty damned good it sounds indeed, even through my iMac’s built-in speakers. I’m looking forward to listening through my stereo speakers later on in order to carry out a more detailed sound-quality test. The increase in quality is as announced: a twofold increase, from 128 kbps AAC to 256. Also, as mentioned by Gerry in an earlier comment, the price increase only applies to individual tracks, and not to entire albums, so the complete album still only cost €9.99.
Now I have to investigate to see if there’s anything else of interest at the Store, and I also have to decide if I want to follow through on the Library Upgrade option (I’m shown as qualifying to upgrade three albums and one track, all for a total of €9.30). I may well do it, but I’ll check the sound quality of the Bach downstairs first.
OS X 10.5 (‘Leopard’) delayed until October! April 13, 2007
Posted by Jimbo in News, OS X.add a comment
Apple Statement
iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones. [Apr 12, 2007]
Well now … this is hugely disappointing news, and it sure sounds weird that keeping the iPhone deadline is being blamed for missing the Leopard one. Also, what implications does the OS X delay have for the iLife ‘07 package? Rumour had it that some functionality in the updated iLife suite is Leopard-specific, so if that’s true then we won’t get one without the other. That certainly isn’t good. iWeb especially desperately needs an upgrade sooner than October. It was bad enough to learn that ‘Spring’ is interpreted in the US as extending to the end of June (!), but stretching things to the fourth quarter is a rather karge slap in the teeth.
One effect the delay will most probably have on me, though, is that I will now more than likely go ahead and purchase Aperture. I’ve been playing around with a demo of Adobe’s competitor Lightroom and have been severely underwhelmed (usability, general appearance, bad UI design), but I’ve been telling myself that I should hold off until iLife ‘07 comes out and first see what improvements are to come wiith the new iPhoto. I don’t think I can wait until October to make that decision.
A fix for jagged fonts in PDFs exported from Pages April 4, 2007
Posted by Jimbo in OS X.add a comment
Mac OSX Hints has an excellent tip for resolving the sometimes mysterious pixelated appearance of some fonts in Preview when exporting to PDF from Pages.
It turns out that the setting under System Preferences » Appearances that sets the smallest font size to be [anti-]aliased on-screen also influences PDF creation (which makes sense, as OS X renders everything on-screen as a PDF, I think).So if your PDFs have fonts that aren’t [anti-]aliased, simply lower the font smoothing setting when you create the PDF, and the problem will be avoided. You can then raise the threshold again afterwards; the PDFs will still look fine.
Apple leads the way again: Bye-bye DRM! April 3, 2007
Posted by Jimbo in News, Software.2 comments
It’s been reported everywhere, and the details are set out no better anywhere than on Apple’s own site: EMI’s entire digital catalogue will be available DRM-free from May at the iTunes Store — for a premium. That’s the slight sting in the tail, which makes you wonder if we’re going to see a bit of a tradeoff here between Apple and the music giants. They’ve been mumbling about wanting to charge more or less for downloads depending on age or whatever, while Apple have consistently said the same-price model is the right one. Customers who want to be free of copy restrictions and fancy the idea of the improved quality which goes with this (twice the bit-rate), will have to pay for the privilege. This could well be the thin edge of the wedge as far as future pricing is concerned. It’s already there at the iTunes Store to a certain extent when it comes to complete albums as opposed to individual tracks. In the case of Classical donwloads, at any rate, albums from budget labels like Naxos or the London Symphony Orchestra’s own label are cheaper than the €9.99 norm. But the introduction of higher prices for DRM-free tracks is no small change.
It’s interesting to think back now to the beginning of the year when all those so-called ‘experts’ and industry analysts pooh-poohed Steve Jobs’s open letter to the music industry and his statement that Apple would drop DRM ‘in a heartbeat’ if the big four music companies would agree. At least I see that the great and the good John Gruber at Daring Fireball gives due credit to the BBC’s Bill Thompson who has the grace to admit he was wrong. Even allowing for the fact that EMI are presently the most vulnerable of the Big Four companies, there’s absolutely no gainsaying the significance of this announcement. Well done, all concerned.
Preview: Hidden Sorting Options March 28, 2007
Posted by Jimbo in Uncategorized.add a comment
This is another one in Apple’s Tip of the Week series — again, a tip which is new to me.
When you open multiple images in Preview, they appear in the Drawer. You can sort them manually by dragging them up and down the list, but there’s another way—if you Control-click on one of the images in the Drawer, a contextual menu will appear, and you can then sort by name, size, keyword, and more.
Not sure about Twitter March 28, 2007
Posted by Jimbo in Software.3 comments
Twitter is the newest thing, and I’ve signed up to it all because TUAW did an item about Twitteriffic, the Icon Factory’s Twitter client. I really don’t think I’ll use this much. One thing I have done, though, is make reuters and the NYT ‘friends’, so that any tweets from them will show up in Twitterrific as they come in and I can really stay on top of things if I feel an urgent blogging need.
Apart from that, though, I’d have to say that I see this as being just another short-term flash in the pan. I don’t really need or want to know what some total stranger is having for breakfast, now do I, and there really ins’t much point inviting people I know to become Twitterites, because none of them are as much into being on the web as I am.
