Today Apple is set to announce iPhone OS 4.0, and probably go into some details about what is going to be in it. Most are speculating about multitasking and some new springboard, but I have to think it’s going to be more than that. There must be something really interesting Apple is going to do with it, or why do it?
First, Telegraph:
I’ve finally spent a little time on it, and I have three things fixed.
I’ll cut right to it: what an awesome device. It seems there are two kinds of people out there: people who went, “Meh,” and people who went, “OMG OMG OMG this changes everything I need one NOW!” I am decidedly in the latter group.
I am, generally, a liberal. The relevance of this will become pertinent in a moment.
Microsoft, as you know unless insert-your-living-under-rock-cliché-here, has opened a couple of brick and mortar stores. This is laughable for several reasons, most of which are plainly obvious even to Windows enthusiasts, but I’ll repeat them here for the sake of completeness.
I have it. Crazy, but there’s something about that group—there’s no cultural touchstone, let alone any band, that’s anything like the Beatles for my generation1. I’ve been jonesing for my extended family to get Guitar Hero or Rock Band for a while now, and when it was announced that the Beatles were going to have a game, well, that cinched it for sure.
Recycling is such a racket, at least in my current experience.
I try to do the green thing. Actually, where I live in Roseville, recycling is built-in to the waste pick-up service, so we can just throw our plastic, aluminum and glass in with the rest of our trash, and rest assured that these materials will be sorted out and properly recycled. But what about that deposit I paid at the register? Lost, at least to me. I have no doubt Roseville is collecting a tidy sum for all this stuff, and well they should, I guess. Those funds surely make their way into the budget somewhere; at the very least I would hope they reduce the cost we pay for garbage pickup.
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.
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.
Here are the known bugs of Telegraph going into Macworld:
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.
