Apparently Apple aren’t quite at that point yet, and so have tried to make a mouse trackpad. Still, I couldn’t quite resist it, and have picked one up. Here’s my mini review.

Pros

• Let’s get it out of the way to begin with: it does look awesome.
• It moves about nicely, in the sense that it moves as well as any optical mouse I’ve used.¹
• Scrolling is pretty awesome for someone who’s come from a 1-d scroll wheel. No more shift-scrolling. Also, it can scroll “with momentum”, allowing you to flick your finger across it with force and let it scroll happily away by itself (and be stopped if you put your finger back down), a la iPhone.
• It’s raised from the ground by two easily cleaned plastic strips. Previously I’ve only ever used mouses with four little rubber sections that gather caked-on dust. I don’t anticipate this problem here.

Cons

• When you’re moving your fingers across a trackpad, you can move your whole hand. No such luck with a mouse; some of your fingers have to stay behind to keep the whole thing from moving. Not quite as comfortable.
• The surface resembles the glass of the iPhone more than the slightly less shiny surface of my MacBook Pro trackpad. If you’ve got clammy hands, therefore, the scrolling doesn’t come as easily.
• In comparison to the glorious set of trackpad options you get given by Apple, the Magic Mouse’s preference pane has only four options, with the only obvious multi-touch option being two-finger swipes, and only left and right. The surface of the mouse is smaller than a trackpad, so I understand a reluctance to offer more options, but two and three finger swipes up and down are easily manageable (three-finger swipes left and right are a bitch though).
• No middle click!

Extra Bits

Luckily for those last two cons, people are already working on ways to get around the lack of customisation:

• Middle-click. If all you’re after is a middle click, Clem has your solution. Simple and works well.
• BetterTouchTool has far more options (including middle click). I’ve found it a little ropey so far–my two-finger swipes in Firefox keep getting forgotten–but if you want some excessive customisation, this is for you, and it’s under very active development. I should point out that it’s based on…
• MultiClutch, which I’m still using on my MacBook Pro, but which needs a bit of fiddling about to work with Snow Leopard, as per Prashant’s forked build and SIMBL plugin.

So, in conclusion, I’m afraid I still want a giant trackpad. The Magic Mouse is cute, but it’s the child of two worlds and fits comfortably in neither (except, not as cool as that sounds). If I could change just one thing about it, it’d be making the surface less glossy. Actually, if I’m getting wishes, I’d probably go for less clammy hands, but you get the point.

1. I’d actually just about forgotten about ball mice until I wrote that.

That can only mean the perpetually rumoured Apple Tablet is coming. Except not really. The only thing certain – a professional pundit will complain afterwards that it was not announced, despite almost everyone else (besides shareholders) knowing that it wouldn’t be.

Will Steve Jobs be giving the keynote? Will the iPod Classic finally die the wretched death it deserves? Will the Apple TV get a Take 3 and become useful?

Pretty standard bunch of questions really, but regardless I’ll be on hand to relay the answers to all these questions as the keynote unfolds - answers laced with just enough vitriol to create the impression I’m not some kind of apple fanboy. Which I’m not. Or at least I won’t be after tomorrow if Apple does not announce HD television for the Australian iTunes store!

Seriously Apple. Fuck you. I can see it sitting there on the American store. If I wasn’t so lazy I would buy an American gift card from eBay.

So there it is. If you only read one live blog of this event, then I strongly recommend Arstechnica’s. Because that is what I’ll be plagiarising reading. But if you read two you could probably read Macworld’s because that is generally excellent. I won’t mind because strictly speaking mine won’t be a live blog. More like a delayed-by-ninety-thousands-of-minutes blog.

I’m sure as hell not getting up that early.

But there’s two bright sparks on that not terribly enticing horizon now, and that’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, both now available in Australia for the first time digitally. I’ve been addicted to them ever since discovering them on free-to-air Canadian television, but suddenly I can actually get them legally without subscribing to Foxtel.

And the deal isn’t too shabby. $9.99 for 16 episodes (four weeks’ worth), which you pay up front and have downloaded for you automatically as they arrive. The DRM of course is still about and annoying (I mean, you can’t even burn them for god’s sake), but for more disposable shows like these, that’s not nearly as irritating to me.

And, I can watch them on my TV, because while I don’t have an Apple TV, I do have a MacBook Pro. Ahem.

6:01 So wait a second – it’s over. This is bullshit. I calculated I had to wake up at five o’clock. Apple sucks. If they had announced their keynote time in GMT and not PDT then I would have had a chance.

6:02 Apple sucks more! Their server is too busy and I can’t get the iPhone 3.0 Gold Master seed before I get to work. On to the keynote I guess…

6:03 Firewire returns! That is definitely the reason I need to throw out my 10 month old unibody macbook and upgrade! I was one of those people¹ that cracked the shits when I learned I could no longer use target disk mode.

I’ve given my credit cards to Marissa but I think she’ll understand when I explain to her it will be easier to troubleshoot my laptop in the event something goes wrong and I need to recover my data.²

Easiest. Sell. To. Girlfriend. Ever.

What else — new battery, more RAM and… wait… what’s this? No express card slot?? WTF???!? OH MY GOD APPLE YOU HAVE DROPPED THE BALL! I WILL NEVER BUY AN APPLE PRODUCT AGAIN!!

6:04 For the record — I know I am not actually live blogging. It’s because it makes nasty markup. Actually it’s because I don’t know how to do it. Yes, I am a n00B.

6:56 I had breakfast and a shower. None of you really needed to know that, or even care. Tom is here trying to figure out what is in the new iPhone 3GS that he won’t get in his 3.0 update. He says — not much. I say — sexiness and new speed! Seriously — I love this free update for the iPhone thing. Best thing about owning one. Bring on Tethering!

What is it with apple launching stuff right between my upgrade cycle?

7:03 $14.95 upgrade for Leopard is sweet! So cheap it isn’t worth stealing.

7:05 Now I can remotely erase my iPhone in case it is stolen! Yeah! Total justification for MobileMe. What a glorious day. I feel vindicated. In your face Tom. And you said MobileMe was a waste of money.³

7:10 So that is a wrap. I had more to say but I have to go to work, and this is long anyway. I thought of a killer joke in the shower but I’ve forgotten it now. I am shattered.

In summary — Apple sucks. How dare they update their macbook line after almost a year. You might think that is a good run for me to have a top end laptop, but not when you consider Tom has an iMac which has not had significant updates for years. I like the new iPhone but am pleased since I am not off contract for another 15 months we get most of the functionality anyway. Snow Leopard to not be $160 is awesome and looks really nice. I like any OS that makes my machine run faster. MobileMe still sucks at it’s price point.

7:24 What else? Oh, the iPhone 3.0 seed is downloading now. But I don’t think I’ll get it installed before I have to leave for work (in approximately 5 minutes). I should put on some clothes.

UPDATE I have noticed at one point I imply that Tom is in the same room as me and at the end I imply I have been naked since my shower. Neither of these inferences are true.

1. Along with 95% of the fucking internet, apparently.
2. Years of hand picked, best quality porn.
3. Actually, it is. Really, it is. For the love of god, spend your $119 on something else.

Now, the iTunes store in Australia is selling Battlestar Galactica episodes as they’re shown in the USA, and I find myself having to put my money where my mouth is. Unfortunately, whereas iTunes music has recently and wonderfully become DRM-free, video content is still bound up by various restrictions. The most annoying of these is that I can’t watch it on my television without buying an Apple TV. As I’m already the owner of an Xbox 360 and a Playstation 3, I’m reluctant to purchase yet another device.

Meanwhile, the iTunes solution is highly tempting as it’s in iiNet’s Freezone. And it comes down hassle free, and knows its episode name, and I don’t have to worry about seeding to people. But on the downside, there’s something vaguely irritating about paying for content which I know I’ll be buying on DVD or Blu-Ray later. If only buying a season of TV gave you a reduced price on buying such things later. At $3 dollars an episode, a 22-episode season becomes $66, which is often more than you’d pay for a nice, unrestricted, playable-anywhere set of DVDs.

Even once you get past the DRM and cost, there’s a few annoyances to iTunes television. For a start, there’s no way I can see to get notified when a new episode turns up. Apple have an RSS generator, but for some reason you can’t make a “Just Added TV” feed. The best I can find is the page in the iTunes store which shows you the most recent TV shows. But since you can’t bookmark the iTunes store, this isn’t super helpful either. And the update schedule seems poor. ‘The Oath’ arrived in the store on 30 January, and eight days later, the following episode has yet to arrive. This may sound like whinging, but one thing that your regular TV does usually manage to do is get a new episode for you every week.

Ultimately I’m not sold on iTunes TV. It’s super-easy, but restrictive and kind of expensive. Hopefully, at some point we’ll get some competition in the Australian marketplace, and things will take a turn for the better.

The Slightly Larger iPod Touch will be the 12th Mac Tablet rumour¹ and will take over from the short-lived Jason O’Grady Mac Tablet rumour which like all previous incarnations, proved to be completely full of shit.

One rumour that has caught my fancy however, is the Apple Home Server Rumour. I want it.²

In a house with three computers, and two people who have users on each one, having unified iPhoto and iTunes libraries that we can both access at the same time from any computer would be awesome.

Reading the article, the idea of having a massive media library stored on the internet sounds a bit ridiculous. Perhaps because we live in Australia – the land of crap upload speeds and data quotas – a combination which makes the whole idea working here retarded.

Anyway, expect a review this week. I would threaten to completely redesign the site to scare Tom, but since it would probably cost him $8 just to visit here from his phone I doubt he will read it.

1. I’m just guessing for comic effect here. But surely I am close. I’ve been hearing about Apple Tablets since 1995 for fucks sake.
2. I would love to find a more credible source for it than Gizmodo, I really would. Sorry I linked to them, by the way.

1. It’s the first phone I’ve had which allows me to make my own ringtones, out of any audio file I have to hand. After years of never touching Garage Band, suddenly we’re best mates.
2. It has 16 icons visible on the home screen. That’s 7 more than any phone I’ve used in the past. Result!
3. The App Store. No wandering around the internet, finding dodgy looking programs and nervously sending them by bluetooth to my phone. Oh, the joy. In a related vein:
4. 2 Across. The Age crosswords… on the train! 2 Across, by Eliza Block is $7.99 AU and worth every cent. There’s also the slightly more expensive Crosswords, which cunningly insists on showing you the keyboard at all times. This is probably good for geniuses, but as I spend most of my time with crosswords pondering, I prefer the 2 Across style. Crossword’s keyboard is also a squished-up tiny one, which makes noises when you type, even if you’ve told your phone not to do that. And also it’s ugly. I suspect most of my issues with Crosswords stem from it being a port from the Palm OS.
5. It will auto-correct your words including accents. For example, the other day it corrected curacao to curaçao. Awesome. Well, awesome on some levels.

But there are downsides to the iPhone, too. I occasionally miss being able to hit a green button whenever I’m looking at something even vaguely about a contact in order to call them. I can’t copy and paste text of course. I’d settle for being able to insert the contents of my “Notes” into proper textareas while browsing. And what the hell is up with those notes anyway? Why don’t they sync with Mail’s notes? It’s not like they look and function EXACTLY THE SAME or anything. I know many have expressed these frustrations, but it doesn’t make them any less annoying. The only redeeming feature of the Notes app is that you can email them.

In other annoyances, the Contacts app — surely a simple sort of thing — quite often hangs after you launch it. Or rather, it did before iPhone OS 2.0.1 was released. Well played, Apple.

Having to wait for Apple to approve updates to software is occasionally frustrating, too, though from a user point of view, it’s easily solved by the developers not telling us about their awesome updates before that approval comes. When you actually update an app, it gets wrenched back to your first home screen, regardless of where you happened to have it filed away.

These are niggles though. My biggest beef with the iPhone, perhaps predictably, came not from Apple but from Optus. While the service had been excellent, my initial bill was unexpectedly $123 and not $66, as I had expected.¹ It turned out that I had impressively managed to download 200mb of data in my first five days, and that those five were in Optus’s eyes, part of a pro-rated month, where my download limit was around 80mb. When I pointed out to the sales assistant that my first month was supposed to have unlimited data, he pointed out that in the terms of service, the “first month” didn’t start until two weeks into the contract. I pointed out that the person selling it to me had specifically told me otherwise, and he kindly refunded me — take note, hapless Optus customers.

1. $59 cap, plus $7 a month payments for the iPhone.

So I’m minus two reviews, we’re about to get to the Doctor Who finale and my dreams of catching up with the schedule have been dashed. I have films I want to talk about. Zodiac. Pirates of the Carribbean. Blades of Glory. I mean, I could just say, here, “Good but slow,” “Ugh but Keira,” and “Funny but a bit tepid.” But I want to waffle.

I can, however, still write blog posts, I think. So here is one.

I’ve been learning about financial stuff at work recently. All sorts of things that I knew nothing about are opening up to me. General ledgers, natural accounts, accruals, commitments, cost codes. I thought I had a handle on GST, but there are things about that I find I had no idea of. I’m somewhat embarrassed that I can actually find reconciling a monthly account interesting. I can’t decide whether my ability to be fascinated by the most apparently dull things is a skill or a curse.

And now, five things that are pissing me off:

1. This iPhone business. I can’t believe those ungrateful whingers in America are daring to complain that the thing has been overhyped. At least you can buy one! Spare a thought for the less fortunate than yourselves. No no no, not starving Africans. More fortunate than that. Closer to yourselves but not quite. Three months behind you in television, no iPhones. That’s us. Selfish buggers. Someone needs their priorities straightened out.

2. Drifters. Those pedestrians who start to gently drift across the pavement just as you’re trying to overtake them on that very side. One day I’ll snap and I shouldn’t be held accountable.

3. My inability to think of a third thing.

4. The stuff I mentioned in the very first paragraph of this post.

5. Point 3 again, but now with a more ‘five’ related theme.

What was it all for, I ask myself? What was any of it for?

The iPhone looks awesome. It’s arguably the One True Video iPod (but with a small hard drive and battery life). The interface looks sweet as. It has wi-fi. It can tell when it’s on its side. And they won’t be releasing it in Asia until 2008. Oh, how I am fuming. It wouldn’t be so bad, but we only just started 2007! Gaaaaah!

Steve Jobs doesn’t care about Asian people.

The Apple TV is less exciting, but far more available. I’ll have to do some investigating into what sorts of video can be played and streamed, but it seems like a nice alternative to an actual media centre PC.

Oh, woe is me. The One True Video iPod Slash Phone has arrived and I’m not one of the chosen ones.

Meanwhile, Canadians have sneakily been showing Stargate without telling me. Sneaks!

We had our first ever (and most successful) review-a-thon last Wednesday, in an attempt to catch up on Battlestar Galactica. You’ve seen the partial fruits of this endeavour. As the review-a-thon drew to a close, Andy told us he had done two reviews himself, and promptly went to sleep. It’s been a week now. I’m not calling him a liar. I’m calling on you, the people, to bash down his door with flaming torches.

I mean, the door to his room. Not the front door. That might irritate Jackson. Try to keep your wild cries and angry chanting to a minimum as you enter the house.

I’m not addicted to these new asterisks. I could stop any time I wanted.

Look at all the white shiny things. Now all I need is the iPhone and the OTViP which should be out any day never.

Also, I saw the Opera DS Browser which might be coming out soon here, too. In a way, the DS is an investment; if I can browse wireless networks with it, I’m less likely to get seduced by a laptop. Also, BioWare is branching out to the DS, so I’m guaranteed at least one good game in the future.

What impresses me most about the DS though is just the ease of multiplayer. To be able to sit down with one copy of Starfox or Big Brain Academy and play a game with five of your friends, with only a very small waiting period is really amazing. And, Mario is surprisingly addictive. Excuse me.