Jun 7, 2008 Jun 9, 2008 Sunday June 8, 2008
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Rumor: Mac Fusion - a new developer Mac
Filed under: Rumors, AppleGallery: Mac FusionOn WWDC Eve, we at TUAW are hard at work keeping an eye out for the unknown and unexpected. We just received a tip showing what appears to be the Mac Nano computer that we've all wanted -- and it looks to be aimed towards the developer crowd. The pictures appear to show a Mac geared towards developers on Windows and Linux systems. "Leave Windows behind. Build your Apps for OS X" states the title. While we are extremely cautious about rumors like these right before WWDC, we did have a rumor that a "new Mac" or at least an updated Mac might be released.Thanks Jackie!Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Fearless WWDC keynote predictions
With Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote just hours away, Philip Michaels offers some final predictions on what to expect when from Steve Jobs’ speech.
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Apple TV Junkie: Know what's going on in the movie world
Filed under: iTS, Odds and ends, iTunes, Apple TVIf you find yourself looking at your Apple TV every Tuesday to learn what new releases Apple and the movie studios have blessed us with, then you might find Apple TV Junkie really useful. That's because Apple TV Junkie posts all of the new releases of High Definition rentals -- along with other important Apple TV news. In one glance of the page you can find out: The $.99 movie rental of the week How many HD movies grace the iTunes shelves Top 10 movie purchases Top 10 movie rentals So, if you're always looking for the hotest new movie rentals on the Apple TV and iTunes, you can make Apple TV Junkie your first stop.[via Tekzilla]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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★ The Ins and Outs of Snow Leopard
Here’s what I expect regarding “Snow Leopard”, the in-progress version of Mac OS X 10.6 which I expect Apple to talk about tomorrow at WWDC. Dropping PowerPC Support This is not going to be popular, and it does seem too soon, but my sources indicate that it is the case. Why would Apple do this, when it is clearly going to antagonize owners of late model PowerPC hardware? A few factors: (a) Snow Leopard won’t ship until next year, at which point even the newest PowerPC Macs will be at least three years old; (b) dropping PowerPC would significantly simplify the QA testing for Snow Leopard; (c) perhaps Apple will argue that there are technical merits, i.e. that by dropping PowerPC support, they’re able to implement certain performance improvements that can only work on Intel hardware. 64-Bit 64-bit support is a talking point for Snow Leopard, but I do not believe it means Apple is dropping 32-bit support in the OS. For one thing, many Intel-based Macs (those based on the older Core Duo, as opposed to the Core 2 Duo) don’t even support 64-bit. Dropping PowerPC support would be aggressive; dropping support for 18-month-old Intel machines would be insane. Plus, unlike PowerPC, the dual support of which in addition to the Intel architecture really does add to the development and testing effort of new software, 32-bit support isn’t weighing down OS X — I’m not aware of a single good reason why Apple would even consider dropping 32-bit support, and there are thousands of good reasons not to (to wit, the thousands of 32-bit Mac apps already in existence). ‘100 Percent Pure Cocoa Apps’ That’s a phrase that is circulating in Cupertino regarding the outline for tomorrow’s keynote. Some have interpreted it as meaning that the Carbon APIs will be dropped from Snow Leopard. I don’t buy that. Last year Apple dropped 64-bit Carbon from Leopard, clearly a sign that the Cocoa side of the aisle is where Apple’s attention lies. But dropping a planned future feature like 64-bit Carbon is a far cry from dropping Carbon completely. Even if you consider no apps other than Microsoft’s and Adobe’s, a Carbon-less Mac OS X 10.6 doesn’t seem feasible. If you thought it was bad when Photoshop and Excel only ran under Rosetta, imagine if they didn’t run at all. Crazy talk. My interpretation of the “100 percent pure Cocoa apps” line is that it’s an admonition for developers — not that they must use “pure” Cocoa APIs for their apps, but that they should, that there are performance and efficiency benefits to doing so that will not be available in other APIs. (Perhaps something to do with the LLVM compiler architecture? Optimizations to the Cocoa libraries to offload more computation to the GPU?) Multi-Touch This stuff with multi-finger gestures on this year’s MacBook trackpads is not multi-touch, at least in the iPhone sense. The marvel of the iPhone UI is the touch screen. I don’t expect to ever see touchscreen Macs. Touchscreen computers from Apple running OS X? Yes, I think, probably someday soon. But not Mac OS X. The user interface simply isn’t designed or optimized for it. Adding touchscreen support to a user interface designed for traditional mouse-and-keyboard access is a lipstick-on-a-pig design (cf. recent demos from Microsoft of Windows 7). The ‘No New Features’ Thing Major version upgrades, whether in an application or an entire operating system, have traditionally been about features, not fixes. Why? Because features are what people pay for. So how could Jobs sell this no-new-features idea in the keynote? One way would be by not selling anything, and announcing that Snow Leopard will be a free (or inexpensive) update. But I can see it being sold another way. The appeal of Mac OS X versus Windows is what? That it has more features? No. It’s that it is more elegant, simpler, more efficient, and more reliable. So I can imagine Jobs on stage announcing that Apple has assigned their best engineers to a year-long project to focus on just those things. Vista may or may not be getting an unfair rap in the press, but the public perception is that these are exactly the areas where Vista is most disappointing. Apple could press their current advantage by emphasizing efficiency, elegance, simplicity, and reliability.
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Talkcast tonight at 10 pm ET, last chance for WWDC best guesses
Filed under: TUAW Business, Podcasts Last week's talkcast included some great WWDC preview discussion with developers Kai Cherry and Todd Ditchendorf along with an expanded panel. Apologies for the scratchy audio (we had to use the Talkshoe low-bandwidth recording instead of the local Skype copy). Download the show from Talkshoe, play it from the Flash player in the continuation of this post, if you like, or pick it up on iTunes. Join us again later tonight, Sunday June 8 at 10 pm ET for more WWDC conversation -- let us know what you want to hear about and which developers you want us to interview, and our man on the ground in San Francisco will try to track them down. Time and personnel permitting, we'll be back on the air Monday night with another show; keep an eye on the TalkShoe page and our Twitter feed for scheduling.Continue reading Talkcast tonight at 10 pm ET, last chance for WWDC best guessesRead | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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New iWeb themes from Jumsoft
Filed under: iLife, Odds and endsiWeb 2 (the iLife '08 version, that is) comes with an assortment of 26 different themes, but if you're tired of trying to mod the Comic Book theme for your new blog, you may want to look at ten new iWeb themes from Jumsoft.There's a good assortment of styles in the Jumsoft collection. I personally find the Teddy theme to be a bit twee and Flowered World is too feminine for my taste, but YMMV. My personal faves from the new collection are the sparse and paper-like Simple Info, and the pastel and plastic Business. An installer app is included to make sure that your new themes end up in the proper place on your Mac. Jumsoft sells each theme for $9.99 or you can buy the entire pack of ten themes at a 30% discount for $69.99. If you're an iWeb fan and want some additional design options, take a look at the new themes.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Text to Audiobook free script
Filed under: Freeware, iTunesThe idea of being able to select text and have it automatically converted into an audiobook using text-to-speech isn't a new one, but it is a good one. I mean, who doesn't love the idea of being able to take longer text on the road with you and listen to it in the car or on the bus? Well, if you loved the idea as much as I did, but didn't think you'd be using it enough to justify coughing up some dough for it, you're in luck. Over at Mac OS X Hints, user miketyson has created a script that will add a service to your Mac's Services menu. The new service, which is appropriately called Speak to iTunes Audiobook, allows you to select a body of text and automatically have it converted into an audiobook, then have it imported straight into iTunes. In testing the script works as advertised. My only quibble is that the clipped audiobooks don't get any sort of meaningful name given to them. They are simply named Speech 1, Speech 2, etc. If the script was smart enough to look at the title of the document the text was being clipped from and generate a title from that, this would be a killer utility. But that's really only a minor complaint considering the heavy lifting this little script actually accomplishes. And heck, if you find yourself using it, you might consider going back and giving GhostReader a second look.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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TUAW Best of the Week
Filed under: Features, TUAW Business, Weekend ReviewWelcome to the latest installment of TUAW's best of the week, where we gather up our favorite posts for your easy clicking enjoyment. With WWDC just around the corner, the TUAW team has put together our WWDC '08 predictions for your reading enjoyment. .Mac mail down, speculations aboundMany .Mac users were angry after their .Mac service went down; not only were existing users angry, but hopeful users were looking at this as Apple preparing for the MobileMe launch on Monday. A low cost guide to making music with your Mac, part twoJoshua continues his second post on how to make music on your Mac without spending much money. If you want to learn about the hardware portion of making music on your Mac, then why not take a look at his first post. Students: Get an iPod touch free with qualifying Mac purchaseApple started their new "Back to School" promotion for 2008. This is Apple's most expensive give-away to new Mac purchasers, being as the iPod touch is $299. However, this should make Mac using college students everywhere rejoice.
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Will WWDC break Twitter?
Filed under: WWDC, Internet ToolsIn the Venn diagram of users, the intersection of "Mac" and "Twitter" appears to be quite large. Why this is, I'm not sure, but it's true that many Mac users rely on the short-message broadcasting service for their day-to-day lives. There's some concern in both communities that the flood of new tweets about announcements at tomorrow's WWDC will break the back of the Twitter infrastructure. Their uptime has been mostly in the 90s this month, with some features still disabled for performance reasons. Do you think it will hold up? What will do you if Twitter grinds itself into metal shavings? A poll and results, after the jump.Continue reading Will WWDC break Twitter?Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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How much will an iPhone cost you?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iPhoneIf you've held off so far, this week's new iPhone announcements may sway you to re-consider moving your phone service to iPhone. So what will this decision cost you? The phone cost is the least significant factor. Whether the 8GB iPhone sells for $200 or $400 subsidized or $400 or $800 unsubsidized only minimally affects your other out of pocket costs over two years. Read on for the facts and figures that will help you make a decision.Continue reading How much will an iPhone cost you?Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Will Apple cave to mobile operators pressure; iPhone selling for $200 or less?
A turn off for some people who drooled over the iPhone was the price. Yes they wanted it, but they weren't willing to drop $399 for the iPhone 8G, and they wouldn't even think about paying $499 for the iPhone 16GB. I know people like that, thing is the people I knew could easily afford to purchase the extremely popular smartphone they weren't about to spend the money. If you've balked at the price it even though you wanted the iPhone you most likely will see a price drop. Financial Times is reporting that Apple has caved to the pressure from mobile operators and agreed that they can subsidize the latest iPhone. Of course, this is great news for Apple it means that they will be able to reach its target of selling ten million iPhones in 2008 a lot sooner since more people will be willing to spend the money. The big question is how much will the price drop? Analysts are saying that AT&T could provide a $200 subsidy on the iPhone which means the customer could purchase the iPhone for $200 or less. Those familiar with the issue are saying that Apple has finally accepted that the new iPhone should be subsidized. The current iPhone was so pricey was because there was not subsidy. Mobile operators won't mind taking on the cost of the iPhone because the iPhone provides them with other money making opportunities. Arrangements have been in place between Apple, Deutsche of the UK, France Telecom, and O2. What are the companies saying about this issue? Nothing all companies declined to comment on this subject. The iPhone has done very well in a short time. Apple is now the worlds #3 smartphone vendor. In the U.S., they have done even better claiming the#2 spot with 20% of the market share. They are far behind the #1 smartphone vendor, RIM, who has 42 percent of the market share. The success with the Apple iPhone is very impressive especially when you consider that it didn't appear on the scene last year. It was announced at the MacWorld Expo on January 21, 2007, and it was introduced on June 29, 2007. Time named it invention of the year. A lower priced iPhone 2 is great news for those longing to get their hands on this hot device but were reluctant to pay its high price. Now if Apple would only open it up to other operators, I would be able to claim my piece of iPhone goodness. With a lower priced iPhone Apple should have no problem meeting its goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008. I honestly believe they are going to reach that goal anyway. Will we see a lower priced iPhone? We don't have too much longer to wait the WWDC kicks off tomorrow and all answers surrounding the much hyped about iPhone 2 should be revealed. Are you going to purchase the next generation iPhone if the price is lowered, or where you planning on buying it anyway?