The Whole Widget

Looks like my old trusty first generation 5GB iPod is going to have to be replaced.The new iPod Touch. Just what I was after, an iPhone without the phone.

When I initially read yesterday about the possibility of this happening I thought it must be an April Fools prank. However, it looks like the beginning of a sea change to DRM-free music from on-line music stores has begun with the announcement by EMI and Apple that DRM-free copies of all the EMI catalogue will be available on iTunes starting in May.Not only will DRM-free copies of EMI music be available for purchase, it will be encoded at 256Kbps – twice the bitrate currently available on iTunes – but will incur an additional cost to the purchaser of 20p per track. Any album purchase will be available only as DRM-free and will remain at the same price point as before and as a bonus any previous purchases can be upgraded to DRM-free although I'm not too sure on the cost of doing so.This is the tipping point for me that means that it will now be worth my while buying content from iTunes and I believe I won't be alone. Hopefully all the other major and independent labels will jump on board soon and we can kiss DRM'd music goodbye.

The new Apple iPhone looks absolutely tremendous and apparently Wall Street believes so too. At the close of Steve Jobs keynote, Apple stock was up over 8%.

Well, with under 24 hours to go until Steve Jobs walks out onto the stage at the Moscone Center to deliver his Macworld 2007 keynote speech, I thought I should post what I believe we will see tomorrow.

Summary of sales over the holiday period.

With Apple laptops and iPods literaly flying off the shelves I think it will be safe to say that we'll hear all about it and I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs doesn't take the opportunity to have a little fun at the Zune's expense.

iLife 2007

I believe that this is a definite addition to the keynote, but will see just a feature bump to the existing applications rather that anything earth shattering. Ideally I'd like Apple to open up the iLife applications so that they could seamlessly interact with on-line services such as Flickr, YouTube, Google Maps and Odeo but I wouldn't be surprised if there was further integration with .mac, which would be a shame as I'm no longer a member.

iWork 2007

I think this will see feature updates for both Pages and Keynote and will also see the release of a simple spreadsheet application along the lines of what is available in AppleWorks. I'm definitely not expecting an Excel killer.

Mac OS X Leopard

Progress report on how things are coming and a release date announced for late Springtime. Hopefully we'll see some of the super secret features that Jobs eluded to back at WWDC 2006 now that Windows Vista has been released. Expect Jobs to have another dig at Microsoft here.

Hardware Upgrades

I think that both the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini will receive slight upgrades—the Mac Mini moving to Core 2 Duo across the line hopefully—but the rest of the hardware line will remain unchanged.

iTV Released

The iTV will be released and we will all learn it's real name. Hopefully it's got something more up it's sleeve than this, but I have my doubts. I really can't see any advantage to the iTV over buying a Mac Mini and sticking it under my TV. Obviously it's cheaper, but with the Mini I get a proper computer and therefore have the ability to play and record DVDs as well as allow my kids to play their favourite games and surf the Internet. I'm hoping to be proved wrong on this one.

One More Thing...

The iPod Phone. I think this will be a slider mobile phone that looks like an iPod nano but about twice as thick. When closed it will appear—and act—as if it is an iPod nano with about 4GB of storage, but when the slider is opened it will change into phone mode and the keypad will be revealed. I also expect it to pack a 2 megapixel camera with a flash.That's it. Check back later to see whether I'm gloating over my prediction performance or hiding my face in shame.UPDATE: It appears that Intel have just launched their first Core 2 Quad branded processors so don't be too surprised if the MacPro line get bumped up to these chips.

At the start of the week Google accepted my ‘Google Apps for Your Domain’ application and I've finally made the decision to not renew my .Mac account when it expires in a months time. My reasons for this are highlighted below:

Web Presence

Although .Mac allows you to host your site on their servers, they don't allow you to use your own domain name. As I have free server space at my place of work, and full access to the server to configure it how I want, it makes more sense to host my own domain and therefore have a fully featured blog rather than the rather anemic version .Mac offers.

Mail

As much as I love my .Mac mail account I just think the storage quota of 1GB is a bit measly when you consider that you need to share it with your iDisk quota. Added to this is the fact that the other members of my family have e-mail only .Mac accounts and so they only have 50MB of storage. With Gmail each member of my family can have their own user@mydomain.com e-mail address with 2GB of storage each. We can still use Mail.app to access our accounts since Gmail supports POP access and if we are ever on a machine that isn't our own we can use the Gmail web interface to access all of our mail.

Synchronisation

At first I thought that this might have been an area where .Mac would have won hands down, but over the last few months I've found .Mac synchronisation to be flaky at best. I find I can easily keep my computers at work and home synchronised with the information I desire by using Synchronize! Pro X and external firewire drives.Basically, everyday at work I back up files onto portable external firewire drives and take these home with me so that the backups are off site. All I needed to do was create a few new synchronise actions to back up my Address Book database, Calendar files and anything else that I wanted to be available on all of my Macs and then run the same actions periodically at home to update those machines. The only restriction I've found in this process is that it really pays to assign one machine as you master machine and only make changes on that machine.

Photo Hosting

I used to be a big fan of the integration between iPhoto and .Mac, but with the release of the FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto and the purchase of a Pro membership for Flickr I've not used .Mac for photo hosting for a long time. FlickrExport is currently at version 2 and costs £12, but I have been using it since version 1 which was open source and it still serves me well. The source code to version 1 is still available, so if you want to build it yourself and save yourself the cash, you can do so.

Calendars

I've never been a big user of the shared calendars feature of .Mac but by using Google Calendar I can still use this feature. The only restriction to this is that for any shared calendars that I host I must either enter all my data using Google Calendars web interface or periodically upload the iCal calendar file to Google Calendar.

Chat

None of my friends or acquaintances use instant messaging so this isn't a priority for me. All my family can be set up with Google Talk accounts and we can use iChat as our chat client as it supports Jabber. My existing .Mac username will still be valid for AIM chat through iChat once my .Mac account expires.

On-line Backup

One thing that .Mac offers that I can't replicate for free or cheaply is on-line backups of my most important files. However, gDisk does seem to have the potential to allow me to use some of my Gmail storage as a virtual drive and I will be keeping a close eye on this project over the coming months. If truth be told, I barely used iDisk at all because the length of time it took to upload anything to it was prohibitive.

Cost

Finally, this is what it all coms down to. To renew my .Mac membership is going to set me back about £70 for a years membership with all the inherent restrictions and problems that I have mentioned above. Whereas, for the price of a domain name and a Flickr Pro account — about £20 per year — I can have a better and more flexible collection of web applications at my disposal.

So after considering all of the points above it is heavy heart that I must say “Goodbye .Mac”. We had some good times and hopefully if Apple sees fit to give you a much needed upgrade we can be friends again.

It turns out that the battery in my 12" PowerBook G4 is one of the ones Apple wishes to recall. I've filled in the form and Apple are sending me a new one out in the mail but it's going to take 4-6 weeks to arrive. I'm going to be travelling down to London twice in that timeframe so hope that BA don't decide to follow Quantas' lead and consider banning Apple batteries from the cabin.I know Apple recommend that you remove the offending battery immedisately and run the PowerBook on mains power only, but that isn't really an option for me right now so I will be dicing with death and continuing to use my battery until the replacement arrives. Wish me luck!

This is a great bit of news as the first thing I do on an install of Mac OS X is download compile and install all the various bits and pieces to get Ruby on Rails up and running. My ideal situation would be that this will be upgradable through software update and that setting up Rails apps with Apache would be handled through the Server Admin tools, but I won't hold my breath on that one.Anyway, this is great exposure for Rails so hats off to Apple for including this and congratulations to all the Rails team.

The developer seed that was distributed today at WWDC contains Ruby 1.8.4 and Rails 1.1.2, but we fully expect to have Rails 1.2.x along with Mongrel, SQLite bindings, and lots of other Ruby goodies on the final gold master when it goes out in spring.It’s been no secret that Apple is held in very high regard by the Rails community. Every single Rails Core contributer is running on Apple and the vast majority of Rails developers are too. To see Apple acknowledge this and return the favor is very rewarding.

Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard) (Via Riding Rails)

A new piece of software came to my attention yesterday called iAlertU. It's specifically written for the MacBookPro and uses the Apple Remote that ships with it to activate what is in effect remote locking — such as you would find on a car — for you laptop.The best way to do it justice is to see the on-line demo video hosted by YouTube.com.A couple of questions spring to mind, however, after watching the demo:

• If you are in a location where you cannot trust those around you not to steal your laptop, why on earth would you leave you laptop lying around?
• What's to stop the would-be-thief simply pressing the mute button on the keyboard therefore rendering this software useless?

I suppose it's a cool little application but I can't see any real world uses for it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac OS X, Software

Just noticed this post from Engadget outlining details of Parallels Workstation, a virtual machine for enabling users of Intel based macs to run X86 based operating systems within a window from within Mac OS X.Personally this is my preferred solution to the Windows on Apple problem, as I only ever need to run Windows to check my designs in Internet Explorer. However, I'm sure gamers will prefer to go the Boot Camp route so that they can get every last ounce of power from their Intel macs.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac OS X, Windows, Software

It looks like Apple have been less than economical with the truth once more. Just after the first Intel macs were released Phil Shiller of Apple was asked if the new macs would run Windows. His response was that they would but that "Apple will neither help nor hinder" the user in doing so.
Well, as of yesterday, it certainly looks to me that Apple is helping their users of Intel Macs run windows on them with the release of Boot Camp Public Beta.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Software, Windows