Apple Grrl

Do Apple and Fox have a movie deal in the works? It seems to be the case. Fox and Apple have been in negotiations to have Fox movies available through iTunes for download as rentals. This could tie in quite nicely with an upcoming AppleTV upgrade also said to be in the works that would allow movie downloads straight to the set top box.

I said when AppleTV first came out that I wouldn’t get one until they had DVR capabilities, since I already had enough gadgets and gizmos hooked up to my TV. Basically, I’m looking for something that will help me to have less things plugged in to my television, not more. If AppleTV is going to be part of the Fox/Apple download deal, I’d say that’s a step closer to becoming something I’d buy.

Rumors about that Apple has been in talks with the other major studios to add movies from their labels to iTunes, but so far Fox is the only one that has concrete evidence to back it up. I’d love to see rentals in iTunes. I have been dissatisfied with having both Blockbuster and NetFlix as solutions, and would love a third option. If the price is right, iTunes downloads, Amazon Unboxed and Blockbuster or NetFlix could all work together to form the basis of a new movie rental market that I’d be happy to participate in.

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In the news this week, Apple filed a patent petition that would eliminate the irritating necessity of standing in line. Once the technology is live, it is expected that Apple will begin testing it out in Starbucks stores, a good fit after the hugely successful iTunes song of the day campaign and iTunes WiFi channel in Starbucks from this year.

Basically, the technology would allow you to pre-order your cup of java or snack before heading into the store, pay for it, receive an order number and grab the item at the pick up window when you arrived - no waiting. It’s like cutting in line at a concert, without the ensuing fisticuffs.

This revolutionary development for the impatient out there, like me, will work with technology like the iPhone. It is not, however, expected to be iPhone exclusive - it should also work with your MP3 player, PDA, laptop or regular cell phone, though I do expect Apple to give its loyal iPhone customers first dibs on the “beta” version.

Apple’s application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office describes a process for placing an order and then notifying customers when an order is ready to grab at a pick-up station. One goal, the patent application notes, is to avoid an “annoying wait in a long queue if the purchaser arrives before completion of the order.”

Of course, all good ideas come with a price, and the cost of this innovation is information. Stores opting in to the program, like Starbucks, would be tracking your orders and learning your favorite things, tailoring your shopping experience to suit your needs. I’m sure marketing to consumer taste would logically follow that, unfortunately.

The patent puts Apple’s partnership with Starbucks in a new light. The technology promises to morph Apple from the business of simply selling gadgets and music and movies that can be played on those devices into an intermediary in all kinds of exchanges.

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Not content to only shut down ThinkSecret, a legitimate closure, Apple is going after one of the blogosphere’s favorite satires: Fake Steve Jobs. The author of the blog has been disclosing the details online, which has angered the Apple lawyer machine. Apple Inc, you are acting like a jerk. Not cool.

UPDATE: Is it true? Not true? Satire? Hyperbole? Fact? Fiction? Endgadget wants us to slow down and think about it.

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The internet is buzzing with the news that Think Secret will be required to cease and desist as a site as part of a court settlement. Most people think this is a bad thing (and it is a bad thing for Think Secret, obviously), but I’m not sure I agree. Let me tell you why.

There are tons of Mac fan blogs and web sites out there, like this one. A lot of them just report news, commentary and product hints and tips, like I do. Many of them follow in Think Secret’s footsteps, however, and try to be the engine behind Apple rumors and “scoops”. Think Secret was one of the first to do this, and it must be said they did it best. They had a cadre of “sources” in and out of the Apple corporate machine that fed them everything from confirmations of rumors to product design plans.

It ended up being the proprietary information like design plans that killed Think Secret, and on this point I agree. I think posting a company’s proprietary information on designs and products is wrong, and it should be punished. Is Apple being too harsh, taking it to court? No. If you follow Apple news at all, you know that they have given Think Secret plenty of warnings over the years. When someone repeatedly does something after you’ve asked them not to, you have to take it to the next level.

The shut down of Think Secret should serve as a caution for the remaining rumor blogs and sites out there. It isn’t OK to divulge secrets that affect a company or person’s bottom line. I’m sure now that Think Secret is down Apple will begin to turn it’s sites on other offenders, so exercise caution, rumor sites.

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I am building an Apple community on Cr8Buzz from the ground up. Come get in on the ground floor of this new social network and user generated content site!

Click the link to see my profile, and leave a comment below to request an invitation from me. Don’t forget to join the Apple channel once you get your invite! My personal goal is to have 50 new Apple members by the end of the year! If you sign up, post it here so I can add you to my friends and contacts on Cr8Buzz!

Cr8Buzz is not your typical Myspace / Facebook social site. It is a new and growing community of users who are using Cr8Buzz to launch their own content and meet like minded people.

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As the well-loved company becomes more and more mainstream, expect more hackers to try to cause problems for the users. This is the first Trojan virus discovered on the Mac OS. (Hat tip to JP)

“We’ve been made aware that a small number of Web sites attempt to trick Mac OS X users to install malicious software on their Macs,” said Apple spokeswoman Lynn Fox. “Apple has a great track record for keeping Mac OS X users secure, and as always, we encourage people to install software only from trusted sources.”

The timing of the Trojan horse suggests there are more to come, say some computer and Internet security professionals. As Apple’s popularity rises, “the bad guys are taking Macs seriously now,” wrote Bojan Zdrnja, of the Internet Storm Center, which is led by the Escal Institute of Advanced Technologies.

You can protect yourself by taking precautions, such as installing free virus protection software like Clam XAV and running it on a regular schedule. At this time I can’t recommend Norton for Mac, but in future that could change.

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Y’all I just installed Leopard, and I can’t even begin to describe the gorgeous eye candy that is this software. I haven’t even really begun to play with all of the shiny new features yet, and I’m already in love.

For those who were wondering, installation was, as usual with Apple products, a complete breeze on my MacBook. I put the installation disk in at 9:30 and by 10:30 had a brand new operating system up and running. On the eMac, it was a touch slower because I was testing the minimum requirements on the box, but still hassle free. The eMac was upgrading from a much older version of OS X Tiger, to be fair.

So far, my thoughts on Leopard pretty much consist of the not-very-articulate “OOOOOOOOO PREEEETTYYYYYY”. I’m going to stop drooling and start playing with it and write a little bit more informative review as I go.

As a test, I removed the additional RAM in the eMac and put the original cards back in to make it barely meet the minimum requirements for Leopard. I wanted to see how it would install. The answer is slooowly. But, as promised, it did install a fully featured version of Mac OS X Leopard, and automatically kept honey’s Mac OS 9.2 installed and active so he could play his older games without my having to do anything special. Nice!

Running on the eMac with the bare minimum of RAM installed Leopard was functional. If you used more than two programs at a time you got some system drag, but no crashes. It performed as promised. Of course, being used to more RAM the drag was too annoying to play with for long, so soon after installing it and nosing around I flipped the newer SDRAM back into it, giving it the full 1GB. What a difference! Leopard running on the eMac with the maximum RAM is a complete improvement over Tiger - fast, interesting, useful and more intuitive. Honey loves it. On my MacBook, running 1.25GB RAM and with plenty of room on the hard drive, Leopard runs like lightening. I’m so pleased with this installation, not to mention each new feature I discover.

My favorite feature so far is Stacks. Clicking a folder or application package in your dock and seeing all of the contents without having to commit to opening anything is a definite must-have feature. It has saved me tons of time already. So far the biggest drawback is having to resort some of my filing so that I have room in my dock for the things I use daily, without having to set the dock size to “microscopic”.

Dashboard is still here, and still a nice collection of widgets. I like Dashboard for its novelty, but I have to admit I don’t use it all the time. I keep a few widgets going, like weather and word count widgets, but often forget to click over to see them. It’s more of a matter of personal work habits than anything else. Exposé helps handle that, but still Dashboard sometimes gets ignored in this house.

TimeMachine was quick to set up to work with our external drive, and it was easy to create different backup areas on the same external drive for both computers. Even honey should be able to back up his machine regularly without frustration. (He isn’t bad at computers, he just doesn’t like to play with them the way I do - he wants to do what he has to, finish then go play his games without hassle.)

I always opt out of .Mac - I have plenty of storage using external drives and JungleDisk, and .Mac so far doesn’t offer enough space for me. I’d love to hear from a .Mac user how TimeMachine and .Mac worked together for them in the comments. Right now I’m sticking with the TimeMachine/external drive set up.

Leopard comes with a variety of goodies, including two good games: Tony Hawk and Daemos Rising. Other new features include using the Cover Flow application for your files. The cover art browsing system you have come to love in iTunes has been applied to your folders and files. It’s pretty fun, actually, especially when browsing photographs or web pages where there is plenty of visual input.

You can also “cheat” with Leopard, “seeing” what’s in your files before you open them using Quick Look. Seeing the first bit of a file before you open it has been saving me time all afternoon. As a writer who earns most of her bread and butter on non fiction writing, its easy for articles on similar topics to start to blend together in your memory. Quick Look saves tons of time when I need to go back and revise or reference earlier work.

I’ve already discussed Time Machine’s backup capabilities, but it also offers you a way to see how your files looked day by day, or restore to a specific time frame. Even Mail has had an upgrade. I haven’t had a chance to test this out yet, but it is supposed to integrate with iCal and online calendars like Google calendar. It also is supposed to let you create your own stationary and other cool things. I’ll have to keep you posted on that. Up until now I’ve hated the Apple Mail application and have used Thunderbird instead.

More fun things arrive with the new iChat, which now includes special effects, art effects and visual options for how you display your video self in your chat sessions. I’ll try this at some point, though I am quite camera shy and dislike video chat intensely myself. Nothing says “Fuuuuck. Me.” like having to do an 8 AM video conference with new clients groggy, uncoifed and uncoffeed. Luckily, you can even change your “backdrop” and mess around with your chat text if you want.

Another groovy program is called Spaces. This basically gives you visual work flow and sorting for any project. You can dump files from any program into the Space for that project, keeping them together in a fast, easy to remember conceptual sort pattern. You then use a combination of Spaces and Exposé to flip back and forth from file to file and project to project. I have so many uses for this in keeping my majillion blogs, web sites, forums, and web sites sorted it isn’t even funny. This is a great feature, especially combined with Quick Look and Stacks.

Safari supposedly has a plethora of new features. As a general rule I tend not to use Safari. Unless one of those new features is being compatible with forms and web sites like FireFox is, it won’t be in my repertoire, still. It simply doesn’t see the web the way I need it to in order to work. But if it is your browser of choice, read all about its new features (tabbed browsing, inline search, clippings, and more) here. Also on the “meh” list for me is the Parental Controls feature (no kids) and integrated BootCamp (no Windoze shall ever touch my Mac. The end.).

All in all Leopard is a solid, multifaceted release that has significant performance upgrades and new features. I’m definitely happy I invested the time and money in putting it on our home and home office network. I can’t wait to hear how you are using the new features in your work and play!

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Apple is usually the guru of marketing. They pioneered the art of “culting” a brand, creating a lifestyle associated with their products, an “in crowd” feel, if you will. Sure, some Mac users take that too far, turning off potential converts from Windoze land, but for the most part it just engineers brand loyal customers. Apple genuinely makes what I feel is a superior product, so most of the time I can overlook their cult followers customers’ antics and even their constant marketing to a type.

This time Apple has gone too far. How, you ask? By the way they are handling the iPhone. I was already upset that they tied the phone to Cingular/AT&T. I had Cingular, but have since switched to Verizon for reasons unrelated to Apple. Even when I had Cingular, I was pissed when Cingular was gobbled up by AT&T, the Big Brother of telcos, willing to sell out its customers to Uncle Sam and Shrub at the drop of a hat. The fact that Apple willingly signed on with them really chapped my hide, and did some major damage to Apple’s image for me and many other politically aware Apple users.

Now, they have restricted sales of the iPhone in such a way as to prevent unlocking the phone for other carriers. Apple, if you’re listening, that stinks worse than year old gym socks stored in fish guts. How have they restricted unlocking? By limiting sales to two iPhones per person, and prohibiting cash sales altogether. That’s right - they won’t let you buy an iPhone for cash, for fear you will use that precious anonymity to resell the phone as an unlocked iPhone.

Apple has really gotten my goat with this one. Will it make me stop buying their products? No. But it will make me NOT buy an iPhone. Not even when they get the second generation out. That’s right - they lost two potential sales in this house, and I hope they lose a lot more iPhone sales until they wise up and lift the unlocking restriction and remove the exclusive AT&T contract requirement. A company as good as Apple doesn’t need to be associated with Big Brother Bush and his lackey’s at AT&T.

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