See Microsoft? – THIS is innovation…

Light Peak.

Even the name sounds great and it seems that Apple first brought this to Intel.

It’s obviously has Apple’s stamp all over it, even the name sounds cool. If Intel had come up with this it would be called something like “cable no. XP13745G”.

Put simply, it’s a ’super-hyper-OMGthatisfast’ connection technology that achieves speeds of up to 10Gps. That’s faster than Ethernet Firewire, USB and even monitor connections, and it maintains that speed over 100 metres.

Imagine your Mac with a simple, single connection technology that can be used for everything. As a side effect it means that your mobile device of choice will get smaller as well. And expect this on your Mac next near, with a low-power version a year later.

Apple brought this to Intel in 2007. Almost 3 years ago.

Why don’t we see Microsoft do this? It’s because they are happy with the way things are. Stagnant, unchanging. Innovation to them means dominating markets with inferior, me-too technology that fools just enough people so that they get it anointed a ’standard’.

Apple on the other hand actually want things to change; they want things to get better, simpler, less complicated and easier FOR EVERYONE to use (assuming that this will be available for Windows PC’s also).

The hardware manufacturers want things to get cheaper, and, well… that’s about it.

Light Peak is a perfect example of this. I’m reminded of the first iMac commercial with the Bondi Blue iMac contrasting the morass of cables from the beige PC. It seems that that dream, although partly true at the time, is seeing it’s logical conclusion.

Every superhero has an Achilles heel…

Like any superhero the Mighty Mouse has an achilles heel.

Recently, the company I work for moved premises, and we all now have a shiny new open plan office.

The studio didn’t take long to set-up again, and we were up and running in about 2 days, but one thing was a problem.

Every Mac (and a few PC’s), have Apple’s Mighty Mouse and no matter what we did, they wouldn’t work correctly.

The mouse could only be used as a single button mouse, right clikcing didn’t work at all.

After stumbling around for a solution I came across this article at Macintouch:

Mighty Mouse: Problems

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It seems that the Mighty Mouse is sensitive to radio waves and non-grounded electrical fields and sure enough, when we took the mouse over to the other side of the office (a mere 30 feet or so), it worked fine.
If you touch the top of your Mac (a PPC G5), it grounds you and the mouse works fine also.

So what’s the solution? Well there isn’t one – I now use an old Macally mouse and because it doesn’t use a touch sensitive approach, it works fine.
The Mighty Mouse has been relagated to home use only and performs as normal.

There’s a rumour that Apple is about to release new mice that are totally touch enabled – let’s hope that they sort this problem out first.

‘Stand Up’ Mac Dock Mockup on Vimeo…

It’s not often that someone comes up with a ‘wow, why doesn’t Apple implement that’ moments, but this is one.
It’s a great intuitive and visual implementation of the ‘open with’ contextual menu.
Let’s hope Apple is listening and adopts this idea in a similar way they adopted the ‘Coverflow’ (and gives the guy a nice cheque along with it).

more about “‘Stand Up’ Mac Dock Mockup on Vimeo…“, posted with vodpod

Helvetica 5, Arial 0…

Being a graphic designer, typography has been an integral part of my life for a long time.

One of my (and countless others) favourite is Helvetica. It’s hard to make a non-designer understand the beauty of this wonderful set of ascenders & descenders.

Many years ago, I worked as a graphic designer in a larger pc-based company, whose corporate identity was based around just 3 weights of Helvetica.

Following the brand for the Mac was easy. All corporate literature flowed through the Mac, and followed the identity to the letter (pun intended).

Translating this to our PC-brethren was a fruitless task (another pun, also intended).

“No problem”, they would say, we already have Arial installed.

“No”, I would politely respond, “Helvetica is the corporate font, please install it on these PC’s”.

“But it’s the same, look”, they would then show me this ‘Arial’ font, (I had little experience of Windows back then), and I would immediately, and intuitively see the differences, and realise I was talking to, in design terms, an ignorant caveman.

In the end, they installed it. I had to go higher, but they grudgingly gave up, after stalling for a couple of weeks. This was a company, who, when asked to install Acrobat Reader on all the companies PC’s, evaluated it for 2-3 months, just to make sure that it didn’t make the fragile tower of cards that Windows was (and still is), fall around their ears.

If only I had access to an excellent graphic concerning Helvetica here:

Swiss-Miss.com – Arial vs Helvetica.

The beauty, the attention to detail is incredible in Helvetica, but a didn’t realise how much until I saw this article.

I didn’t know I wanted it, until I needed it…

So a complete and total disaster has occurred, I mean a BIG one, to quote the late Douglas Adams (as I often do) – ‘bigger than the biggest thing ever’.

Due to a ridiculous turn of events, I dropped a rather sharp, heavy-ish object onto my iBook from a great height – by accident of course – slap bang on the area, to the left of the trackpad, just where the HD is.

This resulted in the iBook stopping dead in it’s tracks. It was happily playing iTunes to itself, and then – nothing. Black screen, dead.

Restarts resulted in the dreaded flashing OS 9-style folder – couldn’t find a startup disk.

That was in itself worrying, however when starting up from a CD, and running disk utility, it couldn’t even find the disk itself – it couldn’t be repaired, it was gone.

This wasn’t just worrying, it was terror inducing.

After a stiff drink and a think, I tried to calmly look at my options. I remembered that I had being backing up this computer, ever since I upgraded to Leopard using Time Machine.

Without me doing anything other than plugging the disk in occasionally, Leopard has quietly backed up everything on my now dead iBook, and I’m sure that somewhere in the back of my mind I had read an article on how to restore a whole disk using Time Machine.

A few clicks on my iPhone I had the article.

Grabbing a spare external HD, I plugged it and the Time Machine disk in, restarted from the Leopard CD, ran the ‘restore’ command, and it restored  my dead disk from its backup, also making it bootable on the way.

An hour later, I’m now typing this article from that system.

The poor little iBook needs a new HD, and it won’t cost the earth either. I should have it back in a couple of days, with a brand new and bigger HD to restore that backup to.

This to me sums up why I use a Mac. The one technology that Leopard introduced that I didn’t really care for was Time Machine. It has now saved my system.

It runs smoothly and unobtrusively in the background, quietly doing its thing. It has little or no features, you can’t configure it much, and it’s about the most simple backup out there.

But it works. It – just – works.

iTunes Extra (& LP) answered, but keep it to yourself…

The ever-excellent Roughly Drafted goes into great detail here, about how iTunes Extra & LP work.

From what I can tell, the whole iTunes Extra experience is done inside iTunes 9, using Javascript, CSS & HTML. The media file, is actually a bundle, a mini website if you will, all under a framework called “TuneKit”.

So that’s my question answered, however Roughly Drafted also goes on to postulate that the real benefactor for this approach is Apple TV, or whatever it’s successor is to be called.

The real kicker though is the fact that all this is done using open standards – no proprietary Flash or Silverlight required.

It would be really nice if certain people, who have lambasted Apple in the past for their horrible, closed proprietary systems, to maybe just admit, just for once, that Apple just might have the user’s interests at heart.

And of course, as RD points out, their own hardware sales. Once Apple’s users have enough iTunes LP & Extra content on their Mac/PC, Apple will release Apple TV 3.0 and all that content now plays on that device, effectively replacing DVD players in one fell swoop.

As always, there’s far more info in Roughly Drafted’s article, it’s highly recommended, but sometimes I wish RD would keep these plans to himself – we don’t want the enemy knowing all our plans do we?

Welcome back…

How many CEO’s get a standing ovation just for walking on stage, before they say a word?

Welcome back Steve, good health & good luck.

It’s all the more odd then to see the ever stranger posts by SJ’s alter ego, the bitter, twisted and let’s face it, just plain jealous Daniel Lyons at The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.

His posts are getting just cruel; and the way in which he keeps posting about Pogue & Gruber? he exhibits the behaviour of a stalker.

His angle on Jobs seems to portray him in an seemingly ever worse light, totally at odds with the YouTube clip above.

Maybe he has an axe to grind, maybe he’s having some sort of mid-life crisis. Whatever it is, he’s parading his psyche on full view – not sure I want to see that.

iTunes Extra: How?

On a slightly more serious note, it’s interesting to see iTunes Extra with interactive content, basically like the content you get on a DVD.

I’m interested to know how they’re doing that – is this embedded in the downloaded file, or is it hosted remotely on iTunes?

I’m no techie-expert but I remember that Quicktime supports hyperlinks, but this is more than that.

I wonder whether you can buy iTunes Extra movies, or just rent?

Apple – iTunes – Explore the new iTunes.

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FM tuner done the Apple way…

Steve, you genius...

Apple – iPod nano – FM Radio – Listen to the radio in a new way.

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So it’s over. Steve looked fine, new iTunes, new Touch, new Shuffle, new Nano, iTunes LP, blah, blah, FM tuner, blah, iTunes at 70-odd%, Microsoft at 1% (silent laughter), blah, blah, no Apple TV.

Or iTabletslatepad.

Wait a minute – FM tuner?

How can you get excited about an FM tuner? the one thing that you would have bet your Mac that would never be in an iPod?

Ah, with an Apple twist – you can pause live radio and tag songs for later purchase in iTunes.

Steve, you bloody genius. Now you see why it’s never been a feature until now, until Apple made it actually useful.

I will probably buy it just for that feature, but it’s US-only – for now.

Queue the articles about Steve’s health in 3, 2, 1…

90% of the crowd look up and sigh…

…and the other 10% have another chuckle at the expense of the deluded majority.

Offensive line not the only thing broken at Oklahoma game

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Sony Walkman outsells iPod?

Bloomberg.com: News

<sarcasm>

OMG! Apple is dying! What more evidence do you need? The Zune can’t be far behind!

Before anyone sells all their Apple shares, let me point out that this ’survey’ conveniently leaves out iPhone sales.

Ah, you say – the iPhone isn’t an iPod? Well all you naysayers, take a look at the iPhone default home screen.

See that little orange icon? It says ‘iPod’.

I.P.O.D.

What’s next? When Apple on September 9th, announces that the iPod loses it’s click wheel and goes all ‘touch’, by this articles rules, there won’t be any more iPods.

Hooray! The Zune outsells the iPod at last!

</sarcasm>

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The days of the standalone GPS device market are numbered

MacDailyNews – Thanks to Apple iPhone, the days of the standalone GPS device market are numbered

Could not agree more, I recently had to take a major detour on the way to an important meeting and, not knowing the area at all, managed to find my way perfectly using an iPhone 3GS and the standard GoogleMaps app on said phone.

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SneakPeek Photo Adds File Information to QuickLook

SneakPeek Photo Adds File Information to QuickLook

Very nice, but who chose those fonts?

First rule of typography: Though shalt not set type all in caps

Second rule of typography: And italics look awful as well.

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Netcasts you love, from people you trust?

I’ve been irked of late with ‘This Week in Tech’ (TWIT), hosted by Leo Laporte.

One or 2 podcasts in the past have stretched my patience in terms of his attitude towards Apple.

On a recent ‘MacBreak Weekly’, we had a mixture of guests and one who was a self confessed ‘Mac-hater’. (All for impartiality of course).

The Mac users on the show spent some of their time, defending their platform of choice, whilst the hater piled on the sarcasm – not what I want from a Mac-centered podcast.

Maybe that’s why Scott Bourne has not been a contributor recently, he has on occasion been audibly frustrated with Leo’s obvious bias towards Windows.

Now, I know that Leo has to remain impartial, and sometimes my Mac-bias buffets up to that and some comments I can take the wrong way.

That’s why I continue listening.

However episode 210 of TWIT, I’ve just listened to has really pissed me off.

The 1st article was about Snow Leopard. Leo’s general attitude is that it contains nothing of merit, and people shouldn’t bother.

He accused Apple of a marketing ploy, selling to their users ‘a service pack’ that should have been free.

He generalised over the ‘features’, comparing it to WindowsMe.

Just before I listened to this podcast I read the incredibly detailed Ars review on Snow Leopard. I highly recommend it, even if you don’t understand some of it, please slog through every page.

After digesting it all, you’ll then begin to understand the anger I feel. Snow Leopard is not an ’service pack’ and it’s certainly worth the asking price.

I don’t think Leo had any right to say the things he said about Snow Leopard, without doing some research first, and it’s this aspect that shows what a radio-hack he is.

No research, misleading commentary, seemingly biased is not what I want to listen to anymore.

His parting comments were that he would get a roasting from the Mac-fanboys on MacBreak Weekly that week.

So, like a good little fanboy, I’ve sent TWIT an email, simply stating the following:

Can you please visit, read and digest the Ars review on Snow Leopard, before you complete the MacBreakWeekly podcast.

You’ll then begin to realise how badly researched you comments were on episode 210 of TWIT. I’ll then expect a retraction of your comments on MBW and the following TWIT.

Yours, a Macfanboy.

I’m not holding my breath, and being a Macfanboy, my opinion isn’t worth shit anyway.

At least I read an article from an expert though, before I made any comment on Snow Leopard, which is more than ‘The people we can trust”.