Apple Universe with Daniel Brusilovsky

Thursday, Jun 07, 2007

Apple Universe Episode #15 Part 2- Bye, Bye Mac Mini

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Download this episode (12 min)
Mini-Review: Power Support Track Pad Film. When a leading computer publication has a revolving-door editor-in-chief hiring policy, it can make other weird editorial decisions look sane and prudent by comparison. Exhibit A: the annual PC World "100 Best" feature, which presents the 100 best products of 2007... online in May, and in print for July. Not even half the year has gone by, but the farsighted crew at PCW has already figured out the best of the bunch! Might as well take the rest of the year off, then...The real reasons that the 100 Best comes out mid-year (covering the end of 2006 and the start of 2007) are detailed in a post from once-and-current big kahuna Harry McCracken. It comes down to legacy scheduling of the product awards around the June date of the no-longer-extant PC Expo trade show. That's a relief; I was worried that we were changing the calendar again. Anyway, more to the point: the list is top-heavy with some big Mac products, including TUAW darling Parallels Desktop at #6 (the top-ranked application on any desktop platform, not counting #1 Google Apps Premier Edition), Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger at #9 and AppleTV at #11. The Intel Core 2 Duo processor that powers new Macs is a top pick at #2. Noticeably absent from the top 100 was the latest hotness from Redmond, which may correlate with PC World's comment on the Tiger ranking: "Name a good Vista feature that goes beyond what's in Tiger. Yeah, we can't either." This one has been climbing up the bloggeist for a few weeks, and it's a fine apertif for the start of the holiday weekend. Copywriter Laurie McGuinness, moonlighting as a commercial parody director, made a series of four Mac/PC ad spoofs in early 2007, with PC as the businesslike, successful protagonist and Mac as the geeky, freelance hand-to-mouth sidekick. (Is it just me, or does the guy playing PC look like a thinner, less crazy version of John Dvorak?) All four ads are viewable on McGuinness' site or on YouTube, and they're mostly moderately funny; one exception is the 'Music' spot, which suggests that iPod users are selfish goobers who don't like to share music. Poor form! If you've got a favorite Mac/PC ad parody, let me know in the comments and I'll highlight the top choices in a weekend post. Found Footage: Possible video taken by iPhone? Tide is teaming up with the St. Bernard Project in New Orleans to help rebuild 10 homes in the St. Bernard parish by selling T-shirts. Everyone who buys a tee also gets entered in a contest to win this funky custom iPod and a $50 iTunes gift card. They're giving away one of these iPods a week until the contest finishes on June 25. I love the way they overlaid the scroll wheel with the Tide logo, but what I want to know is how that scroll wheel feels like after the customized art has been applied. Is it possible to do a custom mod like that but retain the feel and response of the original scroll wheel material? A while back we mentioned some ways to develop a meta-data tagging system for your files to be used together with, or even as a replacement for, standard hierarchical organization. TagBot is another tool designed to help make tagging easy. Basically it allows you to tag files either by dragging and dropping them onto the appropriate tag in a "Tag Palette" or by selecting the tag from a contextual menu. The tags themselves are added to the Spotlight comments of the files for searching, etc. Nick Santilli over at The Apple Blog has a nice little screencast that gives a good sense of how it works.

TagBot is $20 and a demo (limited to six tags) is available for download. Attention, residents of the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. It looks like there's an Apple Store in your future. According to Mcall.com, Apple is scheduled to install a store in the soon-to-be-built addition to the Whitehall Township Mall. Sure enough, a quick look at Apple's jobs page revealed several retail positions are available for that location. Since the mall's addition hasn't been built yet, we won't ask our operatives in Pennsylvania to start scouring the area for spyshots just yet. But still...be ready. RubyCocoa is a nifty "bridge" between Ruby and Objective-C (the language of Cocoa), that allows developers to "write full-stack Cocoa applications in Ruby" or a "Cocoa application that mixes Ruby and Objective-C code." It has just received a major update to version 0.11.0. The release notes list the considerable changes; these include compatibility with Ruby 1.9, support for Quartz Composer, support for 64-bit applications and much more. As it happens, I've been slowly learning Ruby, so I'm looking forward to learning how to use RubyCocoa to build Mac applications with Ruby on the back-end. We recently mentioned a concept from Arriva for iPod Shuffle headphones that integrate the Shuffle into the 'phones themselves. Well Monster Cable (of way-too-expensive-cables fame) has apparently beaten them to the punch with these foldable iFreePlay headphones. As you can see the Shuffle fits into the top of the left can for a "cordless" experience, while still giving access to the controls, etc. While you're certainly not going to be a paragon of fashion walking down the street with these, I could imagine that they might be useful for the gym or a run. The iFreePlay headphones are available now for $49.95. Gene Munster, a PiperJaffray analyst, is predicting the debut of a widescreen 6G iPod early this autumn, possibly at a $399 price point according to this article at the UK's PC Advisor. While many of us would love a 6G widescreen iPod, would it make sense for the iPod to appear so soon after the introduction of the iPhone? Munster thinks the iPhone will sell a million units in just the first three months after launch. That's a lot of iPhones to move in such a short time. I think a 6G iPod would cut into iPhone sales. If you had the choice between a 6G iPod and an iPhone, would you still get the iPhone? Apple has just posted its latest security update. This update addresses a boatload of possible vulnerabilities including a number of core unix utilities as well as iChat and VPN.