Apple News Review and Pre WWDC Musings

It would seem I’ve fallen off the pace with my posts but without excuse making here’s the news from my latest travels.

Scoble has taken a shot at the iPod in his blog recently [what's a Microsoft guy supposed to do?] and voiced with many others how the iPod locks you into the iTunes. People prefer the ipod player to the other ones and in fact they put more music on the iPod ripped from CDs than they do from the iTunes store. You only have to use one of the other brands to get the difference. It also helps that Apple has created a certain cachet identity for their products.

iPhone News: A few more insights are coming in from the wild and if what they say is true the iPhone should be a huge hit. At one point I thought this phone is just too much in a small package but in final analysis anything less than the three in one might not have been sufficient to shake the market and become the new “iPod” setting the numbers aside of course. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a iPhone nano at some point if the market demands. Steve says third party apps may be forthcoming if they can manage the security issues.

WWDC: What they roll out at WWDC this year is hard to tell. If last year is any indication then we may see less hardware and more software. Apple is sending even more coding headstarts to whet the appetite of developers for this years roll out of Leopard [beta]. This bodes well for the need to rewrite or tweak a lot of code to take advantage of the “secret” features in Leopard. Should be a busy year for programmers. If we see hardware at WWDC I am guessing it won’t be a tablet mac; more likely would be a new iMac and maybe some displays. The high order gear I think will be left for the usual January rollout. The ilife apps will be revamped to take advantage of the new features in Leopard with the other details left up the missing manual’s trade.

New Software: Look for a new image editor on the block called Pixelmator, beautiful UI wrapped around some of the familar tools in photoshop but sporting new image editing tricks and features. Check them out online and sign up for a notification email; only 59.00 USD. If you aren’t using iGTD then stop on over and give it a try; it’s free [support couldn't hurt though]. More to follow….

Mac OSX Keyboard Shortcuts and New Interface

Back in the day there was no mouse and all the input was done with the keyboard. Then the Mac came along and changed all that; teaching us to mouse everywhere and now we’re back to using the keyboard again but I wonder for how long.

Before I trail off into Mac speculations here’s the “tip”. The keyboard can be quite useful and many times we don’t want to jump to the mouse for selecting something. The one I want to focus on has to do with editing text in OS-X [Tiger]. Let’s say you notice a spelling or grammatical error and you’ve moved back to that position and corrected it and now you are ready to jump to the end of the sentence. Hit command, right arrow and that will take you to the end of line. If that is not the end of the sentence you can hit option right arrow and that will jump a whole word at a time. Here are a few more but I suggest you experiment with these. It make some time to get used to using them.

Right click or Control Click will bring up spelling suggestions.

Shift plus right or left arrow keys will highlight one letter at a time.

Shift plus the up and down arrow keys will select whole lines at a time.

Control plus the left and right arrow keys will jump to the beginning or ending of a line.

For the whole big list of shortcuts go here

While I am quite sure these will work and may even be useful if you do lots of typing on your mac; I am less sure about what it will mean down the road. If Apple decides to roll out some new way for us interact with our computers then we’ll be blogging about the new interface features. To quote Mr. Jobs “who needs a stylus, no body wants a stylus…”

Leopard, Coding Headstarts Hints at Possible New Interface

Update on WWDC …. In the previous post we mentioned the coding headstarts offered by Apple and how this may be tied to new features in Leopard. If so coders would have to do some quick adjusting to get there applications ready for Leopard when it ships in October.

Carl Howe of (Blackfriars Communications) seems to feel the same and goes so far as to predict that we may see a whole new interface design via core animation. Getting rid of overlapping windows would make the interface so much easier to use. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some things like flip around windows ala dashboard Widgets in the core OS. RSS for details as they become available….

Dot Mac to get New Life?

Briefly! According to reports from the recent Apple Shareholders meeting Steve Jobs did make some encouraging remarks about dot mac. It has been clear for some time now that many Mac users were not happy with dotmac; not for what it did but for what it didn’t do. Complaints have generally been all over the map but generally that it lacked really useful features, cost was too high and it was slow.

That said; Mr. Jobs indicated that indeed dot mac had fallen behind and was set for some “new initiatives” but we have no idea what those initiatives are but at least something is happening. Will we see a preview of the new dotmac at WWDC? It’s hard to tell but if not out right description we may get some hints. We will be looking at those features in the Mac OS that could be exploited by dotmac.

It’s less than a month now till WWDC and it remains to be seen what will be rolled out beyond what we’ve been told thus far. A “feature complete” view of Leopard and beta to take home for developers. Stay tuned for further developments.

Apple – Plugging WWDC Again!

Apple developers received another offer to come to WWDC again today with new Coding Headstarts campaign. These jump starts come with sample code and are downloadable if you are a WWDC E-ticket holder.

Hmmm… something tells me there’s a whole lot of code that is going to be written when we finally see what Leopard is all about. Well speculation is high and confidence is about medium I would say. Since March there has been a fairly regular stream of emails from Apple Developer Connection which could simply be their way of keeping the interest in Leopard alive and not overshadowed completely by the iPhone.

On the other hand this might be an indication that software is going have to stay on par with the developments in the OS as well as new technology coming from Apple, intel, google and others.

There are many technologies now that must be reckoned with in one form or another so no one piece of the puzzle is going to create the whole picture. Today Comcast, [the cable tv giant] showed a new modem that dwarfs anything available in a cable modem today. This new device is 25 times faster, downloading at 150 125 megabits per second. The next twelve months should be very interesting, indeed.

Better Quicktime Viewing in One Easy Step

First of all let me say, I love Quicktime! We all watch Quicktime movies but the quality of the movie depends on how it was filmed and encoded. I am not a expert when it comes to all the various combinations and resolutions but it’s pretty easy to see what you have once you hit the play button. If you are interested you can check the get info on the movie file and you will see something like this.

But to use this tip you don’t need to know anything about pixels or resolutions and the like. While we will have to wait for Leopard and resolution independence for the best solution today you can see more with a simple keyboard and mouse trick.

Ever notice under the view menu you have options to change the size of your playback window. If you select a larger size you a bigger picture but with less quality. So to see the movie larger with minor degradation hit the control key and use the scroll wheel and you zoom right in. In order to activate this feature you will have to go into system preferences, click on Universal Access and click the button which says “enable access for assistive devices”. If you are using a laptop you will need to use control and the two finger swipe upwards to zoom in.

As you experiment with this technique you will find what the optimal viewing distance. This will also work for YouTube videos or anything on screen for that matter. This has been tested in Mac OS 10.4 Hope you find this useful!

Apple Hints – Here’s one thing we do know…

Posted in an email to all Apple developers, we read:

The Leopard beta. Available first at WWDC.

At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, we’re planning to show you a feature-complete version of Mac OS X Leopard, and you can take home a beta copy. Be the first to get your hands on the Leopard beta and get a huge head start on development. Register now for WWDC 2007—it’s your ticket to the future of Mac OS X.

Notice the words “feature-complete” This is the first time that Apple has actually said they were ready to show all the features in Leopard. At least to my knowledge. Prior to this it has been the generally accepted idea that we would see all the features but now from the horses mouth we’ve heard it ourselves.

In a second move they have also extended the deadline to register for WWDC. This would seem to indicate that they wish as many developers to get there hands on the beta as possible. This is Apple’s way of reaching out although they may not term it such. A whole lot is at stake for Apple right now and it would seem that Apple is just a little bit anxious. As I see it anyway… about a month to go. iPhone, Leopard, iLife?, New iMac?, and one I’ll call the iBook nano?

MacApper – Site Pick Of The Week

If you’re looking for Mac Software take a trip on over to MacApper; a great resource for Software reviews, ratings and forums. Extensive list of software picks all brought to you by, “count em” at least 18 writers located around the blogosphere. In short you are likely to find some gems here that you just can’t live without.

5000 Links, Right under your nose… Made for Mac

As we type I am sitting at around 5000 links in my browser. The truth is neither I or nor anyone else remembers what all those links are for… it seemed like a good idea at the time. With all of that I still have to find stuff and I am always amazed when I find something lurking right under my nose.

If you are looking for software; all those nifty little freeware and shareware apps that we have to have look no further than the “mother ship” as some refer to it. I am talking about Apple.com. Right below the tabs bar on their site is a row of options that changes depending on which tab you have selected. In the default condition when you first open the site one of the options on the second row is made4mac. Click it. What you will find is a nice little database grouped by category and searchable. While not exhaustive it will contain many of the commonly sought after applications mentioned on this blog and others around the web. Enjoy!

Free Video Tutorials

If you’re a visual learner as I am, you know the power of watching someone run through the steps to do something on your Mac. One of my favorite places to do this is a site called ScreencastsOnline. This is the work of Don McAllister and if you haven’t checked out his work you should do yourself a favor and have a look for yourself. Great Content! Don also has one of the best subscription models on the web. You get a ton of content at high resolution for a very reasonable cost; this is in addition to the free content you can download from his site or subscribe on iTunes.  Enjoy!