There’s an interesting confluence of events happening right now: we are getting a regular dose of new Star Wars, in the form of the Clone Wars TV series¹, as well as a new Star Trek film (to be released in May). This has brought out some of the wags on both sides of the aisle, each fan of one particular franchise disparaging the other.

Now, let’s get one thing out of the way right now: each series has its share of turkeys. I’ll admit I’ve never seen the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, but it’s a notoriously bad thing. Then there’s Star Trek V, which has a few redeeming qualities… very few. And let’s not even discuss “Spock’s Brain”. But every show from every genre has its clunkers, its phoned-in acting and cartoon plots.

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The gang on MacBreak Weekly, to which I was listening on my commute this morning, touched on the recent spate of trojans accompanying illicit copies of iWork and Photoshop CS4. They rightly commented that this is really only a problem for idiots who supply their admin password to install shady downloads. But they (I am using “they” because I don’t recall which member of the panel actually said it—they all seemed to agree) also suggested that it is still a matter of time before the Mac community’s security complacency bites it in the rear. Meaning, the time will come when teh evil haxxorz target Mac OS X full-bore and Mac users start to suffer the same unwitting security problems that have plagued Windows users for decades.

This is the point where I think they are wrong, for two reasons.

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Here are the known bugs of Telegraph going into Macworld:

• Adding a new link with a “mailto” URL does not function
• When an existing tag is added to an object, the Category “expand/contract” arrow does not change state when the Category opens
• Imports from bookmark files saved from Safari do not work properly
• Tag addition or edits to objects do not update visible Categories properly; a refresh of the app is needed to see changes

I will update this post as needed ahead of my departure for Macworld on Thursday, January 8.

No, I’m not at the conference yet; that will be Thursday. But I do pay rapt attention to the liveblogs. Primarily, I like to follow arstechnica’s keynote blogs during the event, then take a look at some of the others for color commentary and different images.

I’m surprised there was no new Mac mini−and yet I’m not. I can see where getting hardware out the door by a given date is harder than software. Hence, they hyped iLife and iWork ‘09 during the keynote, and will save a new mini for their own special event, possibly in conjunction with revamped iMacs. No skin off my back… I just got my in-laws to switch to a mini a few months ago, so it’s just as well that the new ones come out a little later on. (I’m a firm believer in making technology purchases when you need to make them, with no regrets for what comes later, but others don’t necessarily take that view.)

I am excited about the new iLife ‘09 stuff. And jealous, because I probably won’t be able to justify upgrading for a little while. iMovie’s improvements are neat−and I really like iMovie ‘08. The simpler interface that generally “does the right thing” works better for me. I don’t necessarily have time to do all the little tweaks that an expanded, detailed timeline allows. It would be nice to have the option, though, and I love the travel montage theme stuff.

17″ MacBook Pro, kind of a given.

iTunes announcements: yay and meh at the same time. Yay that everything is going to be DRM free, but meh that we knew it would all go this way eventually, and for me personally, I don’t care that much. The notion that the DRM on iTunes music was putting any kind of stranglehold on your music library is ridiculous; it’s trivial to remove it. And I’d rather just keep it in iTunes and on my iPod(s) anyway, because that’s the best way for me to use it. I go to pains (HandBrake, for example) to get media into my iPod; I’m not terribly concerned that it go the other direction.

Tony Bennet: outstanding choice for final keynote musical guest. Very, very classy. The best is yet to come, indeed.

So, barring any new announcements during the week, it looks any time in the Apple booth for me will be spent taking a look at iLife. Mainly, though, I’ll be there to chat up anybody that will listen about Telegraph.

Whew! It’s been a while. Funny thing, you feel like you’ve got a lot you want to talk about, but when you finally get around to firing up a blog, it’s hard to make yourself do it. Lack of time is my excuse.

So, the point of this is I am inching closer to being ready to go to Macworld, in terms of telling people about Telegraph without being embarrassed by it. Follow the link to see the spiffy new icon! There are still bugs, it still doesn’t have an iPhone-friendly CSS scheme, but it’s getting there. The point is, it’s very usable and ready to demonstrate my intentions with it.

I don’t have convention floorspace—no booth, no kiosk, just me. I only have an expo-hall pass. Not being the chat-you-up type, I’m not even sure how this is going to go. It’s my hope to just get into conversation with some people and hand out some cards, perhaps start some word-of-mouth. At the very least, I hope to get some folks to check it out and give me feedback.

Of course, getting my card in the hands of notables like John Gruber, Andy Ihnatko, Leo Laporte, etc. would be ideal, but I suspect unless I’m prepared to be pushy, the chances are small.

Timing wise, I’m looking at Thursday, January 8, from 10am to 5-ish for my attendance. Look for the 6′1″ guy wearing (or carrying, depending on how warm it is in the halls) a brown leather jacket that looks suspiciously like a famous archaeologist’s.

Telegraph has a bug while importing bookmarks saved from Safari. Bookmarks are improperly generated and are unusable. A workaround for the present would be to first import into FireFox, and save from there.

This is it: the bird is leaving the nest. Telegraph is now available as a beta application. Future improvements include drag-and-drop, sharing links with your peers, and both web and native versions for a certain popular mobile device. There are a few rough edges to be worked out before all of that, but Telegraph is certainly in a very usable state. I use it every day. In fact, I’ve used it in one form or another for about ten years for my bookmarks, and I’ve never looked back.

Overall, I think this was a great announcement. Like many, I am a little dismayed that the new MacBook does not include a FireWire port, but otherwise I am impressed. Glass screens don’t bother me in the least, and I haven’t used the button on a trackpad in a long time—I am apparently one of those rare people who doesn’t disable the trackpad-tap feature on his notebook; in fact, I rely on it, and miss I it on other machines whose owners have turned it off.
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This is not intended to become a heavy or whiny political blog (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but I will offer this: one side of the debate last night represented style, the other substance. I’ll leave it as an excersise for the reader to decide which is which.

The debate did serve as a minor test of my household’s decision to go without TV service. So far, for about a year now, we’ve relied on nothing but DVDs and video on the computer, (be it video from network websites, YouTube, or iTunes) and it’s worked really well. We only have a few primtetime shows that we follow, and we don’t think network news is worth a darn. For a panicked moment we were unable to find a full video feed of the debate. The Washington Post had our back, but it was looking like we were going to be left waiting until the next day for a second there. This was a fate we wanted to avoid, since to us the debate seemed like the new episode of Heroes or Grey’s; you don’t want to read the shocking highlights on Yahoo! News before you have a chance to enjoy the narrative in its original form. Spoiler avoidance for a political debate: who knew?