So as I noted earlier today, I was rudely awakened by a FedEx man desperately looking to rid himself of a box that conveniently contained the MacBook Air I ordered from Apple two weeks ago. Being the great guy that I am, I took the box from him, signed his little digital doohickey, and sent him on his way with a smile and a threat that if he ever wakes me up that early again, I'm going to throw hot coffee in his face.
Nice guy.
Anyway, I asked for any questions you might have about the MacBook Air that weren't already answered in other reviews, and I gathered 'em up and answered them as best I could. Click on to read my enlightening responses.
If you still have questions, post them in the comments here, and I'll do my best to keep on lauding over you the fact that I got my Air before you got yours. Sucker.
Continue reading "MacBook Air Q&A"
We're a little remiss in notifying you about the excellent version 2.1 update to MacUser's blogging client of choice, Mars Edit. You'll have to excuse us: the reason we've been so cavalier about it, is that some of us have been using the beta versions for a while, and have gotten used to all the spifftastic features that Red Sweater mastermind (and Friend of the Blog) Daniel Jalkut has packed into the latest release.
Besides the slick new tokenized tag system (think of Mail.app's auto-completing addresses and you'll get the idea), Daniel's also revamped the preview window so that it's far speedier and more usable, added the ability to search your posts and drafts, and folded in support for putting drafts on the server (he's even come up with a workaround for MacUser's Movable Type platform, which hates drafts—I think they used to go out or something).
We cannot speak highly enough of MarsEdit—really, we keep piling on superlatives, and nobody has yet disproved a single one. It's one of my indispensable applications, having earned a permanent place in my Dock, and I use it every single day. What higher praise could there be?
"It's like offering a glass of ice water to people in hell."
So said Steve Jobs in an interview with Walt Mossberg during the D5 conference. In case the simile eludes you, the "ice water" here is iTunes and the "hell" is—no prizes for guessing—Windows. Steve Jobs claims that Windows users love iTunes, but I've seen a lot of users who disagree; most people I know regard it as a necessary evil.
Your love or hatred for the application notwithstanding, a survey by WebSiteOptimization reveals that it has surpassed RealPlayer to become the second most popular streaming media player across all platforms. iTunes usage grew 26.8% in 2007 while QuickTime fell 8.6% and RealPlayer suffered a fall of 17.5%. Still the leader by a wide margin? Windows Media Player.
Plenty of people have told me that iTunes is quite slow on Windows and they wouldn't use it if their iPods weren't so intimately coupled with it. I understand that iTunes is naturally used widely because of the dominance of the iPod, however, managing your iPod does not require you to use iTunes as your streaming media player. If a person is doing that, they're doing it by choice—or they just don't know any better. Personally, I think iTunes is not quite as hated on Windows as zealous non-users make it out to be. It's probably just that the haters are far more loud than those who're happy with their glass of ice water.
That said, it is indeed true that iTunes on Mac OS X is far better than the Windows version, which could do with a lot of improvement, especially on the performance and responsiveness front. At the end of the day, gaining a little ground on a program as hated as Windows Media Player is kind of like...well, getting a glass of ice water in hell.
[via The iPod Observer]
While I was idly perusing the newly unveiled MacBook Air support section on Apple.com, I ran across an interesting nugget of important information in the article about the Leopard installation discs bundled with the notebook.
The Mac OS X 10.5 installation media that shipped with your MacBook Air is designed for use on this computer only and not intended for any other computer.What makes this version of OS X so special? Well, the MacBook Air trackpad supports multi-touch gestures and the notebook can access the optical media from other Macs and PCs in the vicinity using Remote Disc. These aren't standard features on other Macs so we presume that the version of Leopard installed on the MacBook Air is a custom one with these features bolted on.The installer prevents this software from being installed on other Macintosh computers. Furthermore, other Mac OS X 10.5 installation media should not be used when restoring the system software on your MacBook Air.
Therefore, it is important that you preserve the installation disc that comes with the MacBook Air because in case something goes wrong, and you use other installation media for installing Leopard onto the Air, you'll lose out on the multi-touchness of the trackpad and all the remote disc fun.
This leads me to another question—what if you lose it? The retail version of Mac Os X Leopard does not have those extra features. So are we going to see another retail version of the operating system for MacBook Air users? Or can MacBook Air users get Leopard reinstalled from Apple for no charge, in case they lose the installation media? Your guess is as good as mine.
It is no secret that Apple has great taste in music. One of the numerous things they excel at is picking noteworthy tracks for their TV commercials. And, luckily enough, they have a music store to tie them to. Right now, they're promoting the pop number from the MacBook Air ad on the front page of the iTunes Store. It's a win-win situation.
The song, available for purchase on iTunes Plus, is sung by Israeli singer Yael Naïm and is part of her sole album which consists of thirteen songs in total and a digital booklet. It is also available as a single.
Personally, I love this song. As soon as I'd heard it in the commercial, I'd searched for it and bought it myself. The lyrics are amazing:
I'm a new soul I came into this strange worldI'm glad someone came up with this idea at Apple and hope they do this more often, specially with the songs they choose for the iPod commercials. They're helping customers, themselves, the record labels and the artists. It also saves us the trouble of having to hunt for it ourselves. What's there to lose?
Hoping I could learn a bit about how to give and take
But since I came here, felt the joy and the fear
Finding myself making every possible mistake
If there is one thing I love about Mac OS X applications, specially the ones designed by Apple, it is the presence of subtle features all over the place. These are the features that you probably wouldn't find if you were looking for them but are more likely to stumble upon by accident. Once you do, you realize that it is quite possibly the best way that feature could have been implemented. I just unearthed one such feature in Pages, Apple's word processing and page layout application, and being the dutiful blogger that I am, immediately fired up TextEdit to let everyone know about my find.
It is not immediately obvious but Pages has a word count feature neatly tucked away under the 'Info' tab of the Document Inspector. Among other things, it lists the number of words, lines, paragraphs and characters your document consists of. At first glance, you'll see that these figures are for the entire document. But what if you want to know how many words are there in just that one particular paragraph? Or how many characters there are in the word 'acanthocephalans'?
It turns out that Apple has taken care of that too. Theoretically, all you need to do is select the text in question and the numbers in the Info pane will immediately change to reflect the number counts for the selection, instead of the whole document.
However, it does not exactly work as unadvertised but intended to, at least in my case. When I select some text, the numbers in the Info pane simply (and rudely) disappear. They do change to the right totals when I select some other tab or Inspector and then return to it, so I guess it works, albeit not perfectly. If it works for you without any hitch, let us know. Maybe Pages is just a little angry with me, tired of playing second fiddle to twitchy little TextEdit.
Man oh man, this surely must be music to Herr Jobs' ears.
Those little tykes who were just four years old (!) when the iTunes (Music) Store debuted in 2003 have now gotten all growed up and are buying music of their own. Says a recently published study of the "tween" demographic, the NPD Group says that 49 percent of this crowd is getting their music off of iTunes.
"The recording industry has focused on high-profile litigation programs as a deterrent, and education initiatives to communicate alternatives to illegal music file sharing," said NPD vice president Russ Crupnick, in a statement. "Findings in this report suggest that the industry can still do more to promote specific ways children can obtain digital music legally, through pre-paid accounts and gift cards."
So while it may be easy to label these kids as having seen the light and learning not to pirate music, it may just be that their parents (likely the ones funding these purchases) find iTunes to be the easiest as well.
[via Apple 2.0]
In the "unrelated to Apple but might affect them eventually" news headlines today, Amazon has bought Audible, the most prominent player in the digital audiobook market. The acquisition cost them a total of $300 million and the deal will be finalized by spring this year, pending government approval.
It certainly doesn't take a genius to figure out that Amazon will likely tie Audible in to their Kindle e-book reader in due course, providing an iPod/iTunes Store sort of relationship. That's the part that is logically clear.
The ambiguity, however, lies in what this could mean for the future of the iTunes Store, since the entire audiobooks section of the iTunes Store is powered by Audible. It's possible that this relationship will not change and the iTunes Store will be unaffected by Amazon's latest acquisition.
But then, it's also possible that Amazon might sever the connection in an attempt to keep Apple at arm's length from the e-book market so that they cannot pose any challenge to Kindle. If I were them and I didn't particularly like Apple, I know I would want to do it.
What say you, beloved readers?
[The interesting question to me is what this means, if anything, for Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store. I find it unlikely somehow that Amazon will ditch DRM on the audiobook downloads—at the very least, it would require negotiations with the publishing companies. Unlike Amazon MP3, Audible currently runs as a subscription service; it'll be interesting to see how, if at all, Amazon integrates those two offerings. - DM]
While everyone's abuzz about the new MacBook Air (or not), it appears that while individual orders are coming in to eagerly awaiting customers, those hoping to procure one in one of them brick n' mortar stores just might be out of luck.
Says our sister publication, Computerworld:Several calls to Apple retail stores in New York, Oregon and elsewhere, however, failed to turn up a MacBook Air. "We haven't gotten our filthy little hands on them yet," said a sales representative at the store on West 14th St. in Manhattan. When told that Apple had announced the Air's availability, however, he added: "That's good news. It means we'll have them in in two days."
We'll keep you updated to this most grave situation as details trickle in.
Well, well, well. Hooray for tiny surprises: my MacBook Air arrived a day early.
And yes: this thing is freakin' thin.
There are already plenty of great reviews online, so I don't think any broad-ranging analysis I were to write would be much different. Instead, I'm going to ask you, dear readers, if you have any questions that maybe were not covered in the reviews, or not answered with the depth to fully satisfy your intense curiosity.
So go ahead and drill me in the comments. I'll do my best to answer them, either there or in a future post.
