Posts tagged ‘apple’

Oooooh. Ooooh er. Oh my.

Boy, am I glad I didn’t stay up for that. Boring! Where’s the iMiniProBookMacChat? WHERE? What have you done with it? And don’t even get me started on the ONE TRUE VIDEO IPOD. I still believe, and it says in the Book of iPod that those who believe shall receive an OTVI on the day of reckoning.

I should probably start making sense — Apple had its WWDC last night. Rumours abounded as they always do but aside from introducing the chunkiest Mac ever not a lot happened. I was hoping for some new Finder goodness in their new OS, Leopard, but nothing. They’re probably just holding back, the teases. There’s still half a year until it comes out. Whether it beats Vista remains to be seen.

What I loved was Time Machine, the new backup application. Specify specific folders for backing up, and then you can browse them like this:

Just drag to and fro and travel back and forwards in time. Awesome. Just be sure you don’t cross your own time stream. Jobs was unclear as to the specifics but it seems that if you meet yourself browsing your backup from the future then it have catastrophic implications for the fabric of space-time, or at the very least cause a kernel panic. Disappointingly, you can’t change your computer’s history — unless you were meant to, in which case, for god’s sake, don’t not change it.

Having attempted to switch to iChat the other day, the awesome improvements to that app were a little more exciting than they otherwise would have been. Screen sharing, presentations, tabs, all the IM networks…

Huh. That makes all the work I just did connecting Gtalk to ICQ, MSN and AIM seem a bit useless. But you kids at home can do it, and talk to all your contacts even in the little gmail sidebar. All you need to do is to give your password to any one of hundreds of obscure jabber servers. It’s unclear as yet whether iChat can voice chat to PC users using Gtalk but I’m hopeful.

If you want more detail on Steve Jobs’ keynote, then go to the people you know you can trust.

Some day in October, 2005. Huh. You ran out of batteries after just an hour the other day. You’ve been fine today though. Probably not worth worrying about.

Some day in September, 2005. It happened again. Maybe I should return you. CRAP! It would have been free if I’d done it yesterday. $100? Bugger that. I don’t want to look like a fool and return it so soon after the date. I’ll look very clever by wandering round with a dying iPod.

Some day in February, 2006. You’re out of batteries? But I haven’t even gotten to the train yet! You could at least have the grace to konk out when I get to work. I’m not walking with you again. I can’t cope with the disappointment. I’m sending you away.

11am, 10th June, 2006. Ah, you’ve come back. Did she treat you well? Was it fun backing up icky PC data? Has your battery magically repaired itself? Let’s have a go. How long can you play Dark Side of the Moon for?

11.10am, 10th June, 2006. Oh dear. Right, it’s time to take action. Do Apple take Boodles? I’ve got 50.

15th June, 2006, $100 later. You’re being “diagnosed” are you? I told Apple what the problem was with you. They don’t trust me. Bastards. Hopefully the diagnosis will be “too old” and you will be replaced with the ONE TRUE VIDEO IPOD.

16th June, 2006. The “issue” has been “identified”. I remain hopeful, but the picture on the site still depicts your classic, ‘no moving parts’ form. Perhaps you’ll have a new shiny metal back at the very least. I am struck by a fear that the “issue” is my brief installation of linux. I mean, they don’t say “issue addressed”. Just “identified”. I’d already done that, dammit. I wanted them to fix the issue.

9am, 21st June, 2006. You have been returned to me! And by “you” I mean a completely new replacement 3rd generation iPod! So very shiny. The letter I receive with you specifies that you retain the Soul of my old iPod (but not the R&B, or the Country). I’ll charge you up and take you to work. Where are my headphones?

9.10am, 21st June, 2006. Noooooooo! Where are my headphones? Dammit. One day more.

I have recently developed a certain knack for falling asleep while standing on the train. Unfortunately there’s another skill you really should have in order to complement this ability, and that’s the power to stay upright while you’re sleeping standing up. Without this, it’s a useless ability. And it’s tricky to practice. Twice in two weeks I’ve almost fallen over in front of the whole train. Today, I also almost stole an old lady’s seat right in front of her because I thought I was making way for her to get out of the train. I don’t know when trains got this complicated.

How pretty’s that? Pretty pretty. You can get them in black, too, but only the top-of-the-range one. Because everyone wants the black. I’m staying with white though, because as has been pointed out, I’m a white supremacist. But I don’t forsee a time when I need a laptop. I do want a new iPod, though, one that can stop me from going to sleep on the train. But Apple keep holding out on delivering the

ONE

TRUE

VIDEO

IPOD

The bastards. I know they’ve got it hidden in Cupertino somewhere, I’ve read the rumour sites — and they speak truth, always. Or, if they don’t, they recap the truth so it sounds more like what they said.

Well, it’s about bloody time. Though we apparently don’t have any music from Sony BMG, the Australian iTunes Music Store is up and running — with tracks available for $1.69 and albums for (usually) $16.99. Bought me a Sarah Blasko track this morning and it was easy as pie (the greek letter pi! ahem, no, not really).

Ah, but is anything free, you ask? Well, they have a free single of the week (This week it’s ‘Shadowlands’ by Youth Group) and a nice collection of Australian Podcasts too.

So, er, yay. Hopefully we’ll get some TV at some point in the future…

So, the new iPods are out. As the rumour sites had been alternately predicting and denying, they play videos. The American iTunes Music Store has an arrangement with both ABC and Disney to offer such shows as Lost and Desperate Housewives as 320×240 movies for US$2 each.

So do I get one? To replace the struggling battery on my current iPod would cost me $100; the 30GB iPod is now $403 for a student and the 60GB is $538. And you can get them in black. Hmmm. I was kind of hoping that the iPod would have a widescreen, that would just be a very tall display normally, and then be turned on its side to watch TV. But that would have made it kind of a long iPod. The new ones are quite small, thinner than they’ve ever been before.

The idea of watching my innumerable TV DVDs re-encoded for iPod use on the train is appealing, but having black bars on an already teeny screen seems a waste. I also have a certain reluctance to get the ‘first generation’ of iPods with video.

Meanwhile my lovely iMac was superceded — the new ones come with built in webcams, a remote control (and software to show large-type menu options when using it) and a few smaller additions/subtractions. I’m vaguely jealous, but I’m also aware that this moment of supecession must come to all technology. Imagine how my iPod feels.

So… to iPod or not to iPod?

The more astute of you will have noticed the lack of a grapefruit redesign. It’s on it’s way, there’s just a few kinks to iron out. And, an acupuncture website to make, as Shannon is no doubt thinking when she reads this. Almost done Shannon! Here’s an update of some things that have happened to me recently, while the tumbleweeds roll past grapefruit.

• I’ve gotten roped into helping with yet another website, for EMS. If you like the design, don’t congratulate me; it’s just a theme that came with the Content Management System, Mambo. I did the picture though.
• I found a very nifty little Mac app, still in beta, called CoverFlow. It’s a way of browsing your albums stored in iTunes. When you move the mouse along the covers, they slide about, and you can flick through a bunch as if they were on a rack. Pointless but sexy. A better solution for the Mac and Music head perhaps is Clutter.

• I walked all the way to a tutorial, and then back along three blocks of La Trobe street today with my fly undone, and my hands in my pockets. What’s stupidest about this is that I noticed the fly issue in the tutorial, covered myself up, and then forgot all about it.
• I found this cunning solution to the scratching on the back of iPods the other day. Easier than some iPod modifications I’ve seen.
• In tutorial related news: I appear to be the wisest person in my English tute. This hasn’t happened before. I don’t know if I got cleverer or everyone else is slightly (and only slightly) sillier. I suspect that I’m more at home in the highly text-based analysis of Character and the Novel than with the historical perspectives of Shakespearean Worlds and Victorian Crime Writing last semester.
• I got home today to find an extension for my Computational Physics report on Quantum Mechanical Bound States. Yippee! And I was all stressed out. The lecture I missed this week is online, as well. I must have gathered some good karma somewhere.