Leopard Man
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.
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Andy
August 7th, 2006 at 8:02 pm
A time machine? So if I start writing a review and save it, I can then fast forward to when I’ve finished it? Brilliant. That’s the kind of feature MS should be copying.
The MacPro is chunky. Not gaming chunky, but still impressively chunky.
Tom
August 7th, 2006 at 8:18 pm
With all the expandability of the Mac Pro, the game where you select all the possible upgrades for a Mac and see how expensive you can get it just reached a new level. For only $27,545.99 you can have 2 TB of hard drive space, Airport Extreme and Bluetooth, 2 super drives, 16gb of RAM, dual 3.0 GHz Dual-Core Xeon processors, a NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 and two 30” Cinema Displays.
Cheap as chips.
Andy
August 7th, 2006 at 8:57 pm
Already posted to Notables but foiled by the delay.
How much space will Time Machine take up? Not a big issue with cheap large hard drives, but if you’re recording changes to all your files I can’t see it being less than several GBs. Unless you select which files you want it to protect.
Tom
August 7th, 2006 at 9:17 pm
The technicalities remain to be seen. Presumably it would be able to see that a particular file remains the same across a region of time and keep only one copy of it. So the size would only balloon once you regularly edited larger files.
I think you should delete your yet-to-premiere link. Have you learned nothing on the web? Your store session timed out ages ago.
Andy
August 7th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
Fine, it’s gone. Stupid Apple.
When will they add the ability to travel in relative dimensions to their time machine? What if I’ve got different versions of a file at work and at home and I’m at Tom’s place and want to compare them with what he’s got? Or if I’m in the fifth dimension and I want to look access my saved game files from 1987?
ben
August 7th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
Any idea on ways to use webcams with MSN etc on macs?
Tom
August 7th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
You might have some luck here. They seem to have implemented a bit of webcam goodness. I hear that the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft are working on video chat for the next version of Messenger but it’s unclear when that’ll come.
Jack
August 8th, 2006 at 2:55 am
That CARS articles is one of the funniest I have ever read.
Not related to anything here, that article on Australian broadband is er… wrong. I admit our average speed is pathetically low, but to say that 1.5 megabits/sec is the fastest speed we have is ridiculous. Even before ADSL2 came along.
Tom
August 8th, 2006 at 4:24 am
Am I to be held accountable for the accuracy of links I post to the notables? This seems most unreasonable.
In any case, I don’t want you spreading your “facts”. How will we get super duper European broadband if “accuristas” like yourself keep pulling us down?
hayko
August 8th, 2006 at 5:54 am
I bet this doesn’t backup the changes within a file, but simply a new copy of a changed file. So when you delete something, then edit something, and then go back in time to undelete, your change will also be undone. Or did they show any in-document versioning?
What CARS article?
Jack
August 8th, 2006 at 6:23 am
The Crazy Apple rumors article that Tom linked to in his blog, and the one I’m linking to now. They are always generally funny, but I found this one particulary special.
Jack
August 8th, 2006 at 6:27 am
Incidentally, how much fucking hard drive space is Time Machine going to use? I’d like to see it go back in time and find the fabled Igor 2. Maybe for people with chunky Macs and there 2TB hard drives.
Tom
August 8th, 2006 at 8:06 am
One bit of Apple copy seems to suggest that it only turns itself on if you connect an external hard drive. Otherwise you’d specify specific folders when you turned it on manually.
I bet you’re right Hayko, on your first point. I don’t get how you can edit something after you delete it though. I’m probably just missing your point completely. All this time travel stuff, you know.
I’d like to go back in time and erase everyone’s memory of the missing Igor film.
Tom
August 8th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
I should point out that I’ve made Time Machine seem a bit more limited than it is. It doesn’t just work with the finder. You can be in your address book and travel back in time as well, or in iPhoto, or probably in a whole bunch of apps.
Andy
August 8th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Telstra’s fastest ASDL speed is 1.5 mbps. Their cable and everyone else’s cable and ADSL is much faster. Stupid Tom’s links. Not my useful ones.
We’ll have to wait for the Alternate Dimensions Machine to see Igor 2.
Will Time Machine work like the Sand of Time in Prince of Persia? Do you have to store it up? Can it make time slow down?
Jack
August 8th, 2006 at 9:01 pm
I smell a lynching coming on. Two people is close enough to a mob. I’m getting my pitchfork.
Tom
August 8th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
Look, even if it’s inaccurate it was still worth posting, given that it’s the news de jour this week. The Age had a few opinion pieces on it and The 7:30 Report had a segment on it as well. It doesn’t matter if it’s true — it’s what people are being told right now. Ra ra ra. I don’t want any of this “lynching” I’ve heard so much about.
Andy
August 9th, 2006 at 12:35 am
What am I going to do with this rope then? It’s already tied into a noose. You can’t make a noose with out a hanging. It’s bad luck.
Andy
August 9th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
Westpac, in their infinite wisdom, have pre-approved me for a $27000 personal loan. Unfortunately, that still leaves me $545.99 short of a fully tricked out new Mac Pro so I guess I can’t buy one. I have been looking at a pair of these graphics cards. I’d rather quad GPUs than quad CPUs.
Jack
August 10th, 2006 at 4:37 am
ANZ, in their folly have decided to reject my application for a paltry $5,000. Which puts a dent in my plan to apply for a $27,001 loan and put it on the fridge.
Not that I’m competitive.