Yes, this is the obligatory "omg I saw an Apple sticker!" post. Yes, I know some of you probably don't care. And yes, it has been a great day, thanks for asking!
Ready for the most shockingest revelation you'll ever read on any blog ever? Here it goes: Apple is getting more and more popular. I know. Unbelievable, right? That's ok, sit down if you need to.
And with popularity comes more and more branded-adhesives smacked onto cars, mopeds, moogs, luggage, um...Dells, and, yes, janitorial trash cans. (Flickr's got a great selection of stickered tangibles.)
This lovely image was taken with my iPhone underneath a stairwell on campus.
Now, I know what you're thinking: Holy crap, Dan! You took a spy shot of a secret new Apple product!
No-ho-ho buddy. I thought so too at first, until I asked some pretty smart Apple-oriented people and they assured me it probably wasn't. At least I think that's what they said. It was hard to tell over all the laughter and lousy mean-spirited jokes.
In one of my previous attempts at finding my life's calling (which, clearly, is blogging), I dabbled with becoming a filmmaker. I made a couple of shorts and wrote a few screenplays, which will likely never see the light of day. Sometimes, I feel like I just missed the curve on the accessibility of technology though. You kids today!
So for those aspiring moviemakers who are still striving away, you may be interested in checking out the Insomnia Film Festival that Apple's running on October 13th. The rules are simple: a team of five has twenty-four hours to create a film no longer than three minutes. At 9AM Eastern on the 13th, Apple will also post a list elements; choose any three to include in your money.
Once your film is uploaded, visitors to Apple's website will be able to rate all the films; the top 25 will then get watched by industry professionals like Barry Sonnenfeld and Nora Ephron. The most popular movie with the judges and most popular with the plebes will both net their team a full set of MacBook Pros, Final Cut Studio 2, Logic Studio, and Shake.
I'd totally be there, but the contest is only open to college and high school students. Blast! Is it too late to go back to school?
If I am any indication, the recent MacUpdate bundle helped publicize SRS iWOW quite a bit inside the Mac shareware community. I've now been using the fancy sound enhancement iTunes plug-in for a while, and I've been pretty happy with the results. I don't know how iWOW does it, but the music really does sound much richer, more detailed, and just plain better (in case you haven't noticed, I'm not one of those Dan Frakes-style audio experts versed in the art of sound quality description).
So I was pleasantly surprised to see iWOW 2.0 be released. The new version brings welcome improvements, including the much-needed ability to save your custom presets. Also cool is that iWOW can now automatically change the active preset based on the playing song -- I assume it looks at the Genre field. Speaking of presets, we've now got a few more, including podcast and techno. Finally, there's some kind of virtual 360-degree surround sound experience thingy which sounds interesting. See for yourself at the website.
That's all very fine, but frankly, many of these changes are (a) fairly minor or (b) should've been there in the first place. And this leads us to the bad news: the upgrade cost for registered 1.x users is $11.99 (the full version is $19.99). I don't want to complain too much as I got iWOW as part of a bundle, but still, $12 is a little steep for 2.0's new features. What do you think?
Just because we're Mac users doesn't mean we don't like to save a penny here and there. That's why we keep an eye out on deals for you, our lovely readers. But we understand that you can't just depend on us to let you know when prices have dropped, or there's a sale going on. You need that information delivered to your desktop in a timely fashion, so you take advantage of those special deals at a moment's notice.
That's where the Refurb Store widget from Widgetinfo comes in. It delivers the latest deals from Apple's Refurbished store direct to your Dashboard. You can choose between Mac, iPod, and iPhone price breaks, and the widget will tell you what model's going for how much. Clicking on any of them will take you to the Apple Store, where you can shop 'til you drop (or run out of cash). And it's not just the US, either: you can also monitor deals from Canada and France.
If you're in the market for a new iPod, Mac, or iPhone at cheap—and, well, you're reading a Mac news site, so you probably don't need too much of a shove—Refurb Store is probably the best way to stay up-to-the-minute on the latest deals.
You might excuse me for thinking, upon seeing the headline that AOL had decided to release a new version of its Desktop software for the Mac, that I had been sucked into some sort of temporal vortex, and spat out into the year 1999. Like that show Journeyman, only, you know, less crappy and with more Macs.
Okay, so what's in this fancy shmancy public beta? IM integration. Tabbed browser and IM windows. The ability to send email from multiple accounts, including .Mac, Gmail, Verizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz—What? What? I'm awake. Totally awake.
Are there people out there who still use AOL? I guess. On their Mac, though? You can do all of this pretty much out of the box, as long as you've got an ISP. AOL says that this is all part of "reaffirming its commitment to Mac users," which kind of sounds like a threat to me. I mean, I might reaffirm my commitment to family, but that doesn't mean I want creepy Uncle Algernon moving in with me. And to drill the point home, they've also launched a Mac Blog (everybody's doing it! It must be—what are the kids saying now, is "hip" still in?). Unfortunately, it kind of reads like your average student being forced to write an essay for English class.
Let me ask you this: How much do you think we'd have to pay AOL just to leave our platform the hell alone?
[via Macworld]
If it seems like just last year that Apple brought on IBM's former counsel, Donald J. Rosenberg, to act as their lawyer-in-chief, just six months after the departure of options-embroiled Nancy Heinen, that's because it was just last year. November to be precise. And now, after a hard ten months on the job, Rosenberg is bidding adieu to Cupertino. Given the amount of work that Apple Legal sees on a daily basis, we can't say we blame him.
But when one ornately scrollworked door closes, another must open. To replace Mr. Rosenberg, we give you Mr. Daniel Cooperman, formerly general counsel at Oracle. Apple CEO Steve "Lawyer Up" Jobs had this to say:
"Dan will be an excellent addition to our team and will fit right into Apple’s fast paced culture," said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. "Dan is a seasoned professional with extensive experience in securities compliance, intellectual property, litigation and corporate governance."You know, if I close my eyes and think really hard, I can pretend he's talking about me. I am a seasoned professional with extensive experience in securities compli—gah, never mind. The moment's gone.
At last, though, a member of the Secret League of Dans in a useful position! It's only a matter of time before the intelligence begins flowing straight from Apple Legal into my coffers (wait, do I have coffers? Note to self: pick up some coffers on the way home).
Dan (number 2) brought word of several EFI Firmware updates yesterday. I took the plunge and applied the Mac Pro variant to my own lovely machine. The good news is that although I’m typing this on my Powerbook, my desktop is just fine. This update acted like the rest of them. Am I the only noticing that the Intel Macs get far more firmware updates than the PowerPC machines ever did? I’m not complaining, but it’s interesting.
First, the update gives you the set of instructions. It shuts down the Mac. You press and hold the power button until the light flashes or you hear a long beep. Release. Then wait as the progress bar slides across the screen. This is where things got interesting. My Mac Pro suddenly kicked both optical trays open. Once the update was finished, the trays closed on their own. Like the title says, all I could think of was the game Hungry, Hungry Hippos.
At this point, I had another little mishap (completely benign). My Mac Pro started into Windows for some inexplicable reason. Choosing my Mac OS X boot drive in the Boot Camp panel and restarting set things right. Hopefully it was just a one time thing.
Apple’s online store got a very nice redesign recently. We’re a fan of its clean looks and the use of blue (color my eyes, so it must be good). While it’s beautiful to look at, the code behind it is also gorgeous.
But while its beauty and usability have always run ahead of the pack, its underlying source code has not always kept pace. Now the online Apple Store’s inside is as beautiful as its exterior—and as far ahead of the mainstream in web development as a company like Apple needs to be.
One day, all sites will be built like this. View Source for an inspiring glimpse of how semantic and accessible even a grid-based, image-intensive, pixel-perfect site can be.
What Zeldman says is very true. You may wonder though, why we should care as users of the site? The answer, my friend, is accessibility. Think about people that don’t use traditional web browsers. Screen readers can handle clean sites far easier than complicated ones. So, in that regard, this update gets double cool points.
Since its release (and perhaps even for part of its beta phase), I’ve been talking up VMware Fusion, the virtualization software that allows you to run alternative operating systems within OS X. It’s most often used to run Windows (yes, yes, I know, boo hiss), but it can be, and in some environments frequently is, used to run operating systems like Linux, Solaris, and other Unix variants. Parallels was the first to deliver the dream of running Windows at nearly full speed without leaving the comfort of Mac OS X and as such, became the early favorite. I tried Fusion and was pleasantly surprised by its functionality and reliability (Parallels and I were on the outs because it was misbehaving).
I don’t use Windows often, but I do use it to get the most out of Netflix and its streaming movie feature. I’ve read a lot of positive feedback about the product that seemed to corroborate my own feelings, but I was never quite sure if the fanboi in me forced me to look for validation. Rob Griffiths (that’s Mr. Mac OS X Hints to you) examined Fusion for Macworld’s review.
Rob likes Fusion’s multiple CPU and USB 2.0 support, strong memory management, and library of pre-built VMs. I personally would add 64 bit OS support, Cocoa interface, and excellent Linux support to the list. He dings it for single snapshots, Unity’s lack of multiple monitor support, less 3D supported uses, and costly tech support. Those are all fair points, but despite Parallel’s very accessible support, I felt as if I never got any (hence my multiple posts about its incompatibility with Cisco’s VPN client).
I can’t put my finger on it, but Fusion just feels like the more mature product despite Parallels early arrival on the scene.
