Apple Grrl

My colleague Cyndy wrote an outstanding article about why you can’t get your NBC content at iTunes trting this fall, which outlines yet more reason why Steve Jobs rocks.

There’s a reason why Apple surges with Jobs in charge: the man knows what he’s doing. The media companies are arguing for variable pricing, but most fans don’t want that. It’s nice knowing that you can pick up the latest Amy Winehouse album for the same price as a collection of performances from Yo-Yo Ma, and never have to wonder what your end total is going to be. Parents are actually giving allowances in iTunes accounts based on the simplified pricing; who wants to listen to a kid griping that this week’s allowance wasn’t enough to score the soundtrack from High School Musical 2?

Jobs called NBC/Universal’s bluff. Apparently, the price increases they wanted would have resulted in a price hike to iTunes customers of $3.00: from $1.99 per episode to $4.99 per episode. And rather than cut iTunes users off mid-season? Apple has decided to cease selling NBC’s programs starting with the new fall season. NBC/Universal will be left with no outlet for their programming, since Hulu isn’t expected to launch until October, and without the additional buzz that iTunes carrying new episodes of their fall premieres would add. I think they called your bluff, NBC!

Rock on, Apple. Rock on.

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Nothing to do with Apple, but I thought you’d like the geeky goodness nonetheless. Thanks, JP!

PC Magazine’s Take On The Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites

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the teen who spent 500 hours unlocking the iPhone this summer has traded the hacked device for a 350Z, three 8 GB iPhones (for the three friends who helped him) and a consulting gig. Awesome.

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By now you’ve heard that someone hacked the iPhone, unlocking it so it can be used with other carriers than AT&T/Cingular on any GSM network. Hallelujah! Many are surprised that Steve Jobs hasn’t weighed in on the issue, but I’m not. He got his start by renegade computing, after all, in a dynamic double Steve duo with Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. I would be more surprised if he came out against the hack. Let’s hope he honors his roots and keeps mum on the subject. 9 to 5 Mac has a nice synopsis of the hack and the history on their site.

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I have never used iMovie to make a movie.

Pick your jaws up off the floor! Seriously! What???

I am no cinematographer. I have enough trouble getting good images with a digital camera, and these days they do a lot of the work for you. Also, both myself and my honey are camera shy. If we won’t sit still for a snap shot, how can you expect us to be the focus of a movie? I have friends who make movies all the time, like one of my best friends Meleah. She is living proof of just how intuitive Macs are. She went from knowing not one single thing about Macs, movies or laptops last year when she got her MacBook to making frequent home movies of family events and video blogs. In fact, movies have become a much loved way of keeping her extensive family together and up to date on each other’s lives.

Regardless, there has been buzz around the interwebs that while overall iLife ’08 improved the rest of the programs (GarageBand, iWeb and iPhoto), iMovie actually took a step backward. I find this interesting because Apple doesn’t usually lose ground on their own software. I’d love to hear from readers who are using iMovie ’08 what they think, since I obviously can have no opinion on this one. I’ll make songs, podcasts and ringtones in GarageBand and iTunes all day long, but no movies for me!

Tags: iLife ’08, iMovie ’08, iMovie 08, GarageBand, iLife

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Funny article brought to you by Macworld, touching on the recent news story about laser printers being as hazardous to your health as smoking. Read it here.

So, just to be clear here: I’m inhaling cigarette smoke and ultra-fine particles that contribute to air pollution. I’m doomed. I watch a lot of House so my educated guess tells me I’ve got about two months left before they’re clearing out my cubicle and sadly reminiscing about how full of life I seemed.

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I’m not sure if this is an application I would personally use, since I use the Dock and Expose to surf my open files. It still seems cool, offering the ability to drag any open file or application to any side of your desktop and turn it into a discrete little tab. Made by Donelleschi and priced to move at $16, it’s an affordable way to keep your desktop clutter free if you find tabs easiest to work with.

Tags: tabbed browsing, tabbed desktop, sticky windows

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Oh thank goodness! I could have used this 3 sheet cheater pack about five years ago, but whatever. No such thing as too late with this one. This site has a downloadable three PDF set of cheater notes showing every character key on your Mac. Sweet! What are character keys, you ask? Any time you want type the registered trademark or copyright symbol, or figure out the stroke combo for typing the Euro symbol – those are character keys. Have fun!

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MacWorld has written a very fair side by side cost comparison of PCs and Macs. I highly recommend checking it out. They have remained objective in acknowledging places where Apple falls short (such as business priced models with service access in mind) and they have managed to avoid the fanboy trap of using Apple ad tag lines to defend what they like. I thought it was a balanced analysis.

1. There is plenty of software available for the Mac, both from established software houses and from individuals. Surprisingly, there are more products in some product categories than there are for Windows. For example, every time I turn around, I stumble across another project management tool for the Mac. There are more browsers for the Mac than there are for Windows.

I don’t think Windows users realize just how many Windows software product categories Microsoft has come to own, eliminating all or most of the viable competition. Though it’s true that in some categories there are only two or three Mac offerings, all in all there is a very solid, rich spread of software makers creating Mac applications. As a longtime software reviewer, I’ve been surprised by the quality of these applications.

That’s just one of many points he makes. Never fear, Windoze fans, you win out in several categories, but overall the Macs have a good showing here.

Related Articles By Me: Laptop Dilemma: Mac or PC?

Tags: Mac vs PC, MacWorld, Compare Windows and Mac, Jobs vs Gates

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So, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, is reportedly dating Kathy Griffin, bad comic and D-List abusing pseudo-celeb. I keep getting emails from people wanting me to post it here or on the celebrity blog I am one of the writers on, The Juicy Dirt. This gets a resounding MEH from me. But, in answer to your demands, it is now posted. Woz and Griffin, sitting in a tree…

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Seriously, people? Have you nothing better to do than file lawsuits like this one over the potential cost of the battery needing to be changed in your iPhone, sometime in the distant future? According to the source, this isn’t even the first lawsuit filed over this. There are more?? Get over yourselves people. Seriously.

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It was big news this year when EA Games made the decision that their games would be made compatible with Macs. Well, the first wave of new games is scheduled to hit a brick and mortar Apple store near you soon, and to be in the online Apple store also.

The first four games are Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Need for Speed Carbon, Battlefield 2142 and Command and Conquer Three. Next up for release will be Madden NFL 08 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08. The plan is to release as many old titles as possible on the Mac platform, and all of the new titles on both Mac and Windows platform.

In response to an inquiry about the delay for Madden NFL ’08, an EA representative said “we’ve shorted the gap between the Mac launch and other platforms to just a few weeks. This is a huge leap compared with past launches. Over time, as EA gains experience in completing and shipping Mac games, the gap will narrow.”

Tags: ea games, madden nfl, tiger woods pga tour, need for speed

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This site, Creative Mac Tutorials, offers brief tutorials on using a variety of programs on your Mac. They have a series on Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks and more. Add them to your resource links.

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We discussed DocX, the new Microsuck Word format, and it’s issues with compatibility before. Microsuck programmers have been hemming and hawing about producing Office 2008 for Mac to include DocX compatibility, and now Apple has beaten them to the punch. That’s right, iWork 08 includes Open XML (that’s what DocX is) compatibility, suckas.

Tags: iWork 08, Office 2008 for Mac, Microsoft, Microsuck, DocX, Open XML

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Apple doesn’t chase after the business market the way Microsuck does. That’s been a fact for many years. The reason why is the big question. Fanboyz and Fangrrlz will spout “because Apple doesn’t need to” and other company jargon until the cows come home as a reason (which is why people sometimes see Apple users as a cult, not a user base), but is that the real reason?

You can rattle off a list of things that Apple does not do that makes its products and services a poor fit for corporate IT, and this list has not changed for years. To the extent that Apple products have actually infiltrated big businesses, it’s been through small groups of enthusiasts—the canonical example being the art department that somehow manages to get themselves Macs, despite a company-wide standardization on Windows. We’re seeing some of the same phenomenon today with the iPhone: employees purchasing iPhones because they’re cool, despite corporate IT’s prohibition against them.

Some see this as the seeds of an uprising. Here’s Gruber’s take:

Self-important IT experts will continue to insist that the iPhone “must” or “needs to” support “business software systems”, but in the meantime, their employees will be buying iPhones on their own. [...] Like many successful revolutions, this one might come from the bottom.

Ars Technica thinks that the main reason Apple doesn’t market to enterprise is that it would require an entirely different marketing strategy than the one it has so successfully employed for years. Marketing to business means selling to an IT department, and Apple markets products directly to end users. I agree – it really is that simple.

Because Apple markets to the people who will actually use the products they sell, and not to the IT geeks who would have to maintain them, Apple users really are happier with their purchase and overall experience. IT departments are shunning the iPhone, for example, because it doesn’t have the traditional clunky interface or support hard to use business software like Exchange. Well, no shit sherlock. and customers are buying them because of that – they don’t want a clunky interface, or to be tied down to hard to use corporate products, not because that hard to use product is better, but because the IT department is familiar with it and doesn’t want to change.

This is why Apple does not compete in the enterprise market in the traditional sense. This is why no other company created the iPhone. This is why most desktop PCs are pieces of crap. When you don’t focus on the user, the user gets shafted.

Truer words were never spoken. Read the rest of the Ars Technica / FatBits analysis, it’s worth it.

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Tags: Apple, Enterprise

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It seems you can play music on a bluetooth headset using your iPhone. Cool.

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Apple made some big announcements yesterday while I had my head stuck in the keyboard writing for a client deadline. Lucky for you, bloggers around the appleverse were all over the good news. You can read about the announcements of the new, brushed aluminum iMacs (oooo pretty), the new iLife and iWork software suites and more at these fine sites:

Think Secret

MacWorld, Press Briefing Live Update

MacRumors

The new iMacs are super sleek brushed aluminum and glass and super fast at 2.0 and 2.4 Ghz. They are available now at the Apple Store on and off line. iLife and iWork include new features and new programs like the Numbers spreadsheet program, that make them even more useful than they already were. I can’t wait to try them out, and the temptation to replace honey’s perfectly good eMac with a new iMac is strong. I’ll have to use the force to resist for a while, since I’m trying to save up for the next generation iPhone right now.

Is Apple’s goal to overtake the PC in market share? Jobs said, “Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends. We want to do that at the lowest prices we can.

“But there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship. And we just can’t do it. We can’t ship junk,” said Jobs. “There are thresholds we can’t cross because of who we are. And we think that there’s a very significant slice of the [market] that wants that too. You’ll find that our products are not premium priced. You price out our competitors’ products, and add features that actually make them useful, and they’re the same or actually more expensive. We don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products.”

Tags: iLife, iWork, Steve Jobs, Apple, iMac, Brushed Steel

Technorati Tags: iLife, iWork, Steve Jobs, Apple, iMac, Brushed Steel

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I made two recent Mac purchases, and I love them both.

The first recent purchase was Mojotones by VoodooErgonomics. I’ve been using a product called Xingtones. Xingtones has been great, I have no problem with Xingtones, but I have to say Mojotones came along and blew it away. They are both $20, so well within most budgets. They both make excellent sounding ring tones. they are both easy to use, though I have to give Mojotones the edge here for being a little more pleasant to look at and overall a slightly simpler interface.

So if they are both equally good products for creating your own ring tones? What really put Mojotones in first place? Four little words: Full Song Ring Tones. also, it is fully integrated with iTunes. Unless the song is locked by the artist, you can make any song in your iTunes folder into 30 clip on repeat or a full song. I love it! Plus, it is one click action and it works with any phone. Xingtone only works with one phone number at a time.

The other little gem I bought this week is the Griffin iMic. For under $40, I can now transfer all of my vinyl and cassettes to my MacBook. How sweet it is! It is a completely plug and play device. If you find the set up as it comes in the box is too noisy on your records and you don’t want to run them through garage band for clean up, they also sell a $20 grounding cable for your turntable that eliminates the problem. The hissing noise just sounds like an old school record to me, so I don’t need the second cable. I’m having a blast with this. It’s too bad I have to work to afford these toys, otherwise I’d be playing with the thing all weekend.

I’d write more gushing words about the iMic, but I have to go play some more old school punk records now. I’m currently on 7 Seconds. See you on the flip side!

Tags: iMic, iTunes, Xingtone, Mojotones

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Thanks to Readdle, you can now read your eBooks on your iPhone. This little application offers a full features reader for the iPhone. Not only can you read eBooks you have purchased, you can upload documents you create yourself via Readdle’s web site and read those on your iPhone as well. Readdle is a free service and comes with 50 MB of storage.

Tags: readdle, ebook, iphone, ebook reader

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iPhone users are getting a treat this month from Internet access provider Boingo. The company is offering free WiFi during the month of August at the following terminals:

* AZO – Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport

* BNA – Nashville International Airport,

* BWI – Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport,

* DTW – Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport,

* EWR – Newark Liberty International Airport,

* JFK – John F. Kennedy International Airport,

* LGA – LaGuardia Airport,

* MDW – Midway International Airport,

* MSP – Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport,

* OKC – Will Rogers World Airport,

* ORD – O’Hare International Airport,

* STL – Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, and

* YYZ – Toronto Pearson International Airport.

To use the service:

Users interested in trying out the service are supposed to connect to the “Concourse” SSID with their iPhone at one of the identified airports; launch Safari on the iPhone and connect to the Boingo Web page; enter your e-mail address on the special promotional page and then click on the Go button.

Tags: boingo wireless, airport wifi, airport internet, wifi internet, iphone

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