May 4, 2008 May 6, 2008 Monday May 5, 2008
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VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1
Filed under: Software VMware has just announced VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1, the first beta of the second iteration of their very successful virtualization product for the Mac. As you'll recall Fusion allows you to run a host of OSes on your Intel Mac including, but not limited to, many flavors of Windows.The above video gives you a tour of Fusion 2.0 Beta 1's top new features, including: Multiple monitor support (up to 10 displays!) Improved networking and printing Support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 (this is experimental, and it might not work on your Mac) A refined UI for settings and VM management And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The beta is available now, and best of all the upgrade to version 2.0, when it comes out of beta, will be free to all Fusion users.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Bezipped is free compression, archive utility for Mac OS X
Posted by Dennis SellersBezipped is a new, and free, file compression and archive utility built on top of the bzip2 command line tool that comes with Mac OS X.
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Handwriting recognition coming to iPhone
A couple of weeks ago a Chinese developer released handwriting recognition software — for both Latin and Chinese alphabets — for jailbroken iPhones called HWPen. Similar to Graffiti, the classic writing software for Palm, you can setup HWPen from Installer.app. I tried it, and while fun to play with, handwriting Latin characters is much slower than [...]
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Mac software updates for May 5
Posted by Dennis SellersApple has released Logic Pro 8.0.1, an update of the pro audio editing application. The upgrade addresses compatibility issues and specific customer issues. It also includes WaveBurner 1.5.1 and Impulse Response Utility 1.0.1.
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VUDU: Day and date releases? Yeah, we’ve got that.
Remember on Thursday when Apple announced that “Day and Date” movie sales and rentals would available on iTunes (and Apple TV) on the same day as they’re released on DVD? Well, it turns out that that may not be that big of a deal. According to an email I received from the PR agency that handles [...]
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A quick uninstall tip for Quicksilver-AppZapper users
You can directly drag an application from the Quicksilver pane onto the AppZapper window to uninstall the program. This is easier than opening the Applications folder and then dragging and dropping over to AppZapper (or any such similar program).
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New Apple laptops tomorrow?

Posted by Dennis SellersReliables sources tell Macsimum News that the MacBook and MacBook Pro will be revved as early as Tuesday, May 6. We haven't confirmed this yet, but keep an eye out.
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iTunes typo causes widespread speculation
Sometimes the strangest things get blown out of proportion online. Take the Apple parody in GTA IV for an example of when I've done it, but this weekend MacNN and TUAW kind of lost their minds over a typo in iTunes. See last week Apple celebrated the 5th anniversary of iTunes, and in the page in iTunes talking about it they claimed to have “10 Million songs” in the iTunes library. Later, that number was reduced to 6 million songs. That's the whole story. Still these two articles have titles like “Apple backpedals on 10m iTunes song claim” and “4 million iTunes songs disappear” Really? “4 million iTunes songs disappear”? We bloggers need to calm down and drink a little less coffee, me thinks.
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★ Regarding the iPhone Keyboard
Coming from the aptly-named BlackBerry enthusiast site CrackBerry, I was intrigued by this list of “Top 10 Reasons the iPhone Is No BlackBerry”. Never having used a BlackBerry, I don’t know as much about them as I’d like — I’m generally wary of spouting off regarding things I’ve never used. But this list is weak sauce. A few items are reasonable — e.g., video recording,1 VOIP for Wi-Fi, and GPS — but they’re also exactly the sort of things the iPhone seems likely to support in the not-so-distant future. (VOIP for Wi-Fi seems like a sure thing once the iPhone App Store hits the street.) Other items on the list are just sad — #10 is that the iPhone is harder to use one-handed and therefore not usable while driving a car. And #1, bafflingly, is “The iPhone Third-Party Apps Debacle”: Sure the iPhone SDK has been released, and there might be some great apps in the works, but in my opinion, that’s too little, too late, as they say. Methinks Al Sacco, the author of this CrackBerry list, is deeply misinformed regarding the imminent iPhone apps market, but we’ll know the answer for certain in a few short weeks, so there’s no use spilling pixels over it here. The item on the list that interests me is #2, regarding the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard — clearly a fundamental difference between the two platforms, and a subject of debate ever since the iPhone was unveiled. One thing worth noting is that there doesn’t seem to be any measurable demand at all from current iPhone owners for a physical keyboard on future iPhone hardware. My own opinion is simply that the iPhone keyboard works a lot better than I expected it to. But, never having owned a phone or PDA with a BlackBerry-style QWERTY keyboard, I’m in no position to compare. This, to me, is the question: What do iPhone owners who do have experience using phones with physical keyboards think? So I asked just that on Twitter, generating two threads of replies: here and here. I encourage you to read them yourself. The general consensus: It really does take a week or so to get the hang of the iPhone keyboard, and about a month to get good at it. Most admit the iPhone’s keyboard isn’t quite as good as a physical one, but once used to it, it’s good enough to be happy. A few claim to type faster on the iPhone. A handful, like Dori Smith and Alex King, admit to still using both regularly, and those people tend to like the iPhone keyboard the least. (I suspect the only way for someone accustomed to a BlackBerry-style keyboard to get used to the iPhone keyboard is to switch full-time. The necessary muscle memory is too different.) In short, even iPhone users who previously owned phones with physical keyboards seem happy. But here’s the rub: if it takes a week of use to get the hang of the iPhone keyboard and a month to get good at it, how does Apple convince a current BlackBerry/Treo/Sidekick/BlackJack/whatever owner who is particularly skeptical about the keyboard? A few minutes pecking away on a demo unit in an Apple Store are likely to yield disappointing results. E.g., Laura Lemay, who responded thusly: Do you want actual iphone switchers, or people like me who really want to like the keyboard but don’t and therefore won’t switch? That’s not to say that everyone who won’t switch because of the iPhone’s keyboard would, if they did switch, grow to like it. The point is that some who would will never know because they won’t buy an iPhone in the first place because they don’t think that they would. “It takes a couple of weeks to get used to it” means you’ve got to take it on faith. In the grand scheme of things, the pocket of iPhone resistance comprising people currently using physical-keyboard phones is not that big a deal. Apple is looking at the iPhone market as iPod-sized: 100 million phones in the next five years or so. The grand total of existing smartphone users pales in comparison. Even if there’s not a single already-using-a-smartphone user left who is going to switch to an iPhone, it wouldn’t prevent the iPhone from being a mass market success. Most iPhone users — and especially most future iPhone users — are coming from regular mobile phones with numeric keypads. And no one can argue that typing on the iPhone doesn’t beat the pants off gimmicks like T9. But, in the near term, I do think Apple covets BlackBerry switchers in particular. Everything about the enterprise features that Apple has announced for the upcoming iPhone 2.0 software seems catered to appeal to BlackBerry users. The keyboard is perhaps the single biggest advantage RIM has with these customers. I do not think Apple is going to release an iPhone with a physical keyboard (“iPhone Enterprise”?), but if they did, it’d be one of those Steve Jobs “a year ago he said these things were crap and now he’s telling us this one’s awesome just because it’s from Apple” moves that drive some people — bless their hearts — spittle-flying-out-of-their-mouths crazy. I bought a $135 Flip Ultra video camera at the end of March, and have subsequently fallen in love with it. But it strikes me that an iPhone with video recording and a slightly better lens (than the current iPhone) could completely obviate the need for a Flip. ↩
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Is Apple selling off its professional software titles?
The slimmest hint of a rumor can gain steam when cycled around the Internet. It seems to be happening with rumor that Apple is pitching its professional applications such as Final Cut Pro.