Liveblogging the October 2008 Apple Notebook Event (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

This post is where I’ll be posting my thoughts during the October 14, 2008 Apple “notebook” event, where it’s expected that they’ll be unveiling new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. I won’t be at the event, but I’ll be following it live at all the usual suspects’ locations:

• Ars Technica (I’ll probably drop into their IRC channel as well)
• Engadget - they’ve got a blurry spycam pic of what the new MacBook Pro is supposed to look like (like an aluminum and glass iMac, basically), with *two* NVidia GPUs. Interesting…
• Gizmodo
• MacRumorsLive, if they’re around (they were absent during the last Apple event) Looks like they won’t be back until MacWorld 2009 in January

And of course, I’ll be hanging around on Twitter and FriendFeed to see what people’s thoughts and reactions are. I hope they can handle the load. I’m starting this post the night before to be ready for the AM. It’s like Christmas Eve - the anticipation of what Steve Claus is going to bring us is palpable!

Rumors of what is going to be announced range from new aluminum MacBooks (almost certain, given the spy photos we’ve been seeing) with Nvidia chipsets replacing Intel, a “real” Apple TV - a TV with Apple TV functionality built in - to the everlasting Mac Tablet/Giant iPhone/Newton 2.0 rumor, which has practically become a legend at this point.

The most interesting thing I think Apple’s likely to announce is a low cost MacBook. Rumors have been going around about a sub-$800 device. Some have wondered if this will be Apple’s entreé into the netbook world. Personally, I don’t see Apple doing anything with a netbook until OS X 10.6 Snot Snow Leopard is out, which should be in early 2009. Read why I think Snow Leopard is the critical ingredient for an Apple netbook. So what about this $800 system everyone is talking about? I think if they do anything, they’ll drop the price of an entry level 13″ MacBook to $800. It’s $1099 now, and I can see Apple making an aggressive move to get more people using Macs by dropping the price of their iconic laptop. You heard it here first.

But we’ll all know for sure in about 12 hours!

8:30 AM - John Gruber has a post up over at Daring Fireball wherein he seems pretty certain about what’s going to be announced. MacBook Pro with 2 GPUs and a glass no-button trackpad, similar update to the MacBook. No $800 device. Some other minor updates around the line. And a heretofore un-speculated upon new 24″ Cinema Display. Sounds about right, and John knows his stuff. We’ll find out soon.

10:00 AM - I’m here hooked up to the 60″ TV in the JF1 “living room”, ready to go. Got my tabs lined up, Brent Logan is here with me. Lay it on us, Uncle Steve!

Tim Cook is talking about how awesome Macs are. Sold 2.5 million last quarter. Yada yada. Slamming on Vista. Playing a new Mac vs. PC ad. Mac sales have “beat the market” 14 of the last 15 quarters. Great market share. Already equalled 2007 sales in the first three quarters of 2008. We get it. And now Steve’s back!

Jony Ive: “I’d like to take a couple of moments to tell you about a real breakthrough we’ve had about how we can design and build our notebooks.” Here comes the “brick” announcement (aluminum cases machined from a solid billet of metal).

Steve on the new NVidia 9400 M graphics/chipset: “They’ve dubbed it the NVIDIA GeForce 9400 M — it’s an amazing chip. Chipset and GPU on one die — 70% is the GPU, 16 parallel graphic cores, 54gflops of graphics performance. It’s a stunner.”

New glass trackpad: larger, multitouch, glass surface (like the iPhone - should feel great!), the whole thing is one button, can assign multiple buttons via software. I like. Should appear in all new MacBooks.

Which brings us to the new MacBook Pro - just like the spy shots. Black bezel, aluminum and glass (like the iMac), black keyboard (like the Air), all connectors on one side, NVidia graphics and chipset, and the new “precision aluminum unibody” case construction. Oh, and all Macs will now have the “mini display connector”. Uh oh. I hate those.

(Took a break to keep up with the news and chat with people.)

The new MacBook Pro starts at $1999, goes to $2499 for bigger hard drive, faster CPU with more cache, etc. And the Pro line has TWO Nvidia GPUs. The 9400 M, and the 9600 GT (which has 512MB of RAM and 32 graphics cores). You can use the lower end one to save on power and extend battery life, or use “turbo” mode and use the faster GPU. So, 48 graphics cores in the MacBook Pro. The foundation for all of the multi-core/GPGPU stuff like OpenCL and GrandCentral in OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard has been laid.

The MacBook line also got updated. They’re keeping the current plastic case 13″ MacBook (most popular ever), and dropping the price to $999. Nice entry level model. The “new” MacBook is very similar to the new MacBook Pro. Precision aluminum “unibody”, NVidia 9400 M chipset, glass trackpad, glass display with black bezel. It also uses the new Mini Display Port connector. Besides the second GPU and an ExpressCard 34 slot, and a bigger display (15″ vs 13″), there’s not much difference between the new MacBook and the MacBook Pro. The new ones start at $1299. $1599 gets you a faster CPU, bigger hard drive, and a backlit keyboard (boo on Apple for not making that standard!).

The new MacBook and Pro are available for order today, should be in stores tomorrow.

The MacBook Air got an update - CPU speed bump, 120 GB hard drive or option for 128GB SSD, and the new Mini Display Port. Not much else changed (including the price). Available in November.

And there’s a new 24″ LCD Cinema Display. Edge to edge glass, very thin, looks great. Cool features include a wire bundle that gives you a MagSafe power plug to charge your laptop, a USB connection for the hub in the display, and the new Mini Display Port connector. $899, available in November. Looks to be the perfect companion to the new Macs.

Oh, and Steve’s blood pressure is 110/70, in case anyone was interested. Now, for some Q and A.

Steve: “Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.”

Steve: “In terms of netbooks, that’s a nascent market that’s just getting started.” Says netbooks are a new market and “we’ll see how it goes.”

Looks like that’s it! I might update this post later with link to the video that was shown, showing off the new laptops, and anything else interesting that comes up today. Now, to figure out how to get one of these new bad boys into my hands!

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Reading from the Intel Cookbook (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

The Apple WWDC 2008 keynote has come and gone, and my wild speculation about what Apple might say about the next version of OS X, 10.6 code named “Snow Leopard” (and affectionately christened “Snot Leopard” thanks to a typo during my WWDC liveblogging ), that it would be announced as the operating system for a “netbook” or Mobile Internet Device powered by the Intel Atom processor, didn’t come true. In fact, besides a brief reference to an after-lunch WWDC session (under NDA), Steve Jobs didn’t say much about Snow Leopard at all. Since then, a few more details have become available, and Apple has put up a page with the (limited) info:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/

Much has been written about the more controversial questions - are they really not adding any new features? Are they going to drop PPC support? Is it going to be 64-bit only (and if so, what about early Intel Core Duo chips that aren’t fully 64-bit capable?). I’ll leave all that to the people who know what they’re talking about. But what strikes me as interesting is that the few fundamental technologies they HAVE discussed looks like a mirror image of the technologies Intel, and specifically, my group Intel Software Network (we’re Intel’s developer community), have been promoting and evangelizing to software developers for quite a while now.

First, I have to cling to my hope and dream that one day, Apple will release something along the lines of a “netbook”, like the Asus Eee PC or the MSI Wind. Something like the MacBook Air, but much smaller. Apple’s throwing fuel on that particular speculative fire with statements like this:

Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.

Having recently paved and done a clean install of Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro, I can tell you that the operating system itself only takes up about 5.5 GB of hard drive space. Hard drives are growing in capacity and dropping in price at an astounding rate (did you ever dream you’d be able to pick up a terabyte of disk space for a couple hundred bucks?). So why would Apple care about reducing that 5-6 GB footprint, when drives are huge and cheap? Think SSD. Solid State Disks. Like the ones in the netbook devices. The Asus Eee PC I got to play with a while ago had a 4 GB SSD. Current models have 12 or 20GB. Fast, efficient, and no moving parts. Perfect for mobile devices. But still really expensive - you can get a 64GB SSD in a MacBook Air instead of the much slower 80GB hard drive, but it will cost you a cool $999 for the upgrade. SSDs are coming down in price, but they’re still going to be expensive in any really large sizes for a while. So, if Apple was thinking of doing a Mobile Internet Device or netbook, it makes sense to squeeze OS X down as much as they can, to make, say, an affordable 16GB SSD a viable option that won’t get hogged by just the OS.

Next, there’s the new “Grand Central” technology, that focuses on taking full advantage of multicore processors:

“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

Emphasis mine. Intel Software Network has been banging on the multicore drum for quite a while now, ever since it became clear that the future of processor performance was more and more cores working in parallel, rather than ever-increasing clock speeds. In fact, we have a whole multicore developer community (hosted by my awesome colleague, Aaron Tersteeg) dedicated to multicore programming resources, tools, learning, and access to the Intel experts who literally wrote the book on this stuff. I’m sure as Snow Leopard gets closer, you Mac developers will (hopefully) be seeing a lot more details from both Apple and Intel on how to make your apps sing on many-core processors. It’s the biggest fundamental shift in computing since, say, the x86 architecture became the standard. I can’t wait to see this gain broader acceptance and implementation.

Finally, Apple teases us with this little tidbit on the vaguely-named Open CL (Open Computing Language), apparently aimed at taking advantage of upcoming super-powerful GPUs for other computing tasks:

Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.

They don’t name any one company’s products or technologies, but it’s well known that Nvidia and Intel are both working on many-core GPUs that support “GPGPU” - General Purpose (Computing) on the GPU. And again, my group, Intel Software Network, has a whole community (this one just freshly minted!) dedicated to what we call Visual Computing. Steve Pitzel hosts this community (Steve has more interesting stories than ANYONE I know - ask him some time!), and the super swanky page design came from our resident web development wizard, Kevin Pirkl. Intel has a little upcoming product called Larrabee that we think is going to really turn the notion of what a GPU is for on its head. Have you noticed how Nvidia has been getting very aggressive towards Intel, some might say even attacking? Yeah, it’s because of Larrabee. And knowing Apple, they’ll be right there, ready to take advantage of all of the advances in the visual computing world. Competition is a good thing.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s dose of idle speculation, and listening to me play armchair industry analyst. I have to say it feels pretty cool to work for a company (Intel) that has such influence over the world of technology. I get to see SO MANY COOL THINGS in the course of my job, I feel spoiled. And I try to share as much with you as I can - like tomorrow, I’ll be filming demos at the Research@Intel event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. From the previews I’ve seen, some of this stuff is just freaky sci-fi cool. I can’t wait to see it, shoot it, and get it out to you. As usual, I’d love to hear your thoughts, even if all you have to say is how wrong you think I am. Leave it in a comment!
Crossposted on the Intel Software Network blog

Liveblogging the WWDC 2008 Steve Jobs Keynote (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

I’m pretty much counting on Twitter being down (or rather, turning into a smoking crater where their servers used to be) during this morning’s Steve Job’s keynote at WWDC. So I’ll be liveblogging it here. I’m not at WWDC, but will be following via various online tools, and geeking out with fellow Macheads at Intel while it’s going on. This post is mostly going to be my observations and opinions on the news, rather than actually breaking the news, so if you want to follow along as “live” as you can, check out ArsTechnica’s live coverage, MacRumorsLive’s autoupdating page, and Engadget’s live coverage. Twitter and Summize also have a page set up to track the news, but like I said, my money’s on Twitter getting obliterated (it’s already flaky this morning).

The world is about to change. New iPhone. The iPhone App Store. And then what? New devices? OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” (here’s my prediction on what that one really means). I can’t wait! This is better than Christmas!

I’m in the new JF1 “living room” area at Intel, where they have a few tables set up under a 65″ plasma TV. I’m hooked up to it, using it as my external monitor, getting ready to scour the interwebs for each new tidbit as it makes its way from the mouth of Steve. I’ve got my Mountain Dew and some Pop Tarts. I’m ready. Let’s do this thing!

Steve’s on stage now. We’re getting the best updates from the Ars IRC channel (#wwdc on irc.arstechnica.com). Steve’s talking about the enterprise features of the iPhone 2.0 software - calendar and contact sync, remote wipe, etc. Stuff we already knew. Now he’s bringing suits out on stage, from other companies. Stuff we hadn’t heard already - capability of viewing office documents, SharePoint access, VPN and two factor authentication (as in SecurID/SoftID). Cool…

Now talking about the iPhone SDK and how many similarities it has with the “real” OS X kernel and code. APIs are the same, line for line. Location-based services, 3D positional audio, how easy it is to develop for it and debug it, etc. Showing a new demo app, “Nearby Friends”, which sounds really cool. I’ll have to go back and watch the video of this, showing how easy it is to build an application, live. Talking about how much developers love coding for this platform. Yay, look how awesome we are!

Now comes the game demos. First up, Sega, talking about Super Monkey Ball. I have a love/hate relationship with that game on other platforms. The “party” parts of the games are really fun, but the “roll the monkey in a marble across this platform surrounded by a bottomless abyss on all sides” are freaking FRUSTRATING. In the keynote, they’re saying the demo looks awesome. Full “tilt” control using the accelerometer. Will be available “at the launch of the app store” for $9.99. Not a bad price - people were speculating that iPhone apps would be a lot more expensive - $20 to $40.

Now demoing an eBay app, which sounds technically cool, but honestly isn’t very interesting to me because I don’t use eBay. Now they’re talking about an app called “Loopt” (”connecting people on the go”), which Ars is excited about, but I’ve never heard of. Sounds like “friends on a map, showing you what they’re doing”. I’m not to keen on the idea of these kinds of apps, but I guess I’d have to see a GOOD one in action to really decide.

BTW, thanks to Brent, Matt, Tod, and Jerry, who are sitting around the table, correcting my mistakes and typos as I write this. Matt’s trying to listen to a live audio stream, which is sort of working, but it’s more delayed than the Ars IRC feed (which is AWESOME! FAR better than any other way I’ve done this before. Thanks Ars! )

Showing a Typepad blog authoring app, that’s going to be free at the app store launch. Yawn. Show me a generic XML-RPC compatible editor (I can has MarsEdit for iPhone please?) or something that’ll work with WordPress and I’ll be interested. I’m sure that will come soon enough. And an AP “see local news and photos based on your location” app. Sounds kind of dumb - how much news do you know of that has specific location information, more than just “Dateline: this city”? Meh.

Next up a game developer showed off a couple of games that look cool (kind of hard to get a sense of them when I’m reading text descriptions in an IRC channel - I’m sure we’ll see lots about the games soon enough). And an indie dev who works in the insurance industry made a really cool virtual musical instrument app called “Band” that he developed in 8 months in his spare time. And now talking about Major League Baseball. Woo! Not.

Now showing off a bunch of medical reference/learning applications. Talking about med students and K-12 education. I love the idea, but how many K-12 students do you know that have iPhones (or would be allowed to have iPhones by their school’s policies)? Still, very cool ideas, and it’s great that these applications are coming, and relatively easy to develop.

Enough with the 3rd party app demos. I want to know what Apple has to show us today!

OK, now Forstall’s talking about the lack of a good chat platform, and how to receive notifications from your apps while they’re not running. He says the WRONG solution is background processes, because they sap battery life and performance. (And now he’s showing how Windows Mobile does this, and making fun of it! ) “We have come up with a far better solution.” A push notification service to all developers. When your app is running, you’re connected to a server. When you quit, the connection dies. Apple maintains a persistent IP connection to the iPhone, and 3rd parties can push notifications through that server to the phone (badges, sounds, alerts, etc.). Alerts can include buttons to automatically launch your app (so it doesn’t have to stay running the background), and the phone only has to maintain one server connection (presumably to Apple) to make this works. Works over wifi and cellular. Coming in September. I have to admit, this seems like a really clever solution to a really tough problem. We’ll see how it works out in real life!

Steve’s back on stage, and talking about new iPhone 2.0 software features. Contact search, iWork (create and edit iWork docs - cool!), bulk delete and move in email, save images from emails, new calculator, explicit content filters, and new language support for Japanese and Chinese character input - draw them with your finger. That’s a welcome feature for a lot of people, I’m sure. The 2.0 software update will come in early July, will be free for iPhones, and $9.95 for iPod Touch owners (gouged again!).

Now on to talking about the app store. Wireless download and install, automatic updates, devs set prices and keep 70% of revenues. “We FairPlay apps” - FairPlay is iTunes’ DRM for music, so that means that apps will be locked (and presumably, cracked shortly thereafter - FairPlay has a reputation of being pretty breakable). If your app is larger than 10MB, you can only install over wifi. Enterprise apps can be deployed on the intranet, downloaded to your computer, then synced and installed via iTunes. Sounds like a good solution for corporate apps.

Now for something completely different: Mobile Me, new mobile service. Worst kept secret in the industry - this is basically .Mac done right - “Exchange for the rest of us”. Works on Mac, PC (woo!), and iPhone (double woo!). Push your contacts, email, calendar, and files into the cloud, and keep them in sync across all devices. But I do this already with Google - Gmail, Reader, Docs, Calendar. Will be interesting to see how this compares. Or maybe MobileMe will just be powered by Google. The site is me.com. Going into a demo now - I’ll check this out myself later, see if it’s worth it. It’s a cool idea, regardless. $99/year, 20GB of storage, and there’s a 60 day free trial. Expensive for what you get. I’ll probably pass. “Available with iPhone 2.0 in early July”. So, does that mean no iPhone until early July?

OK, now he’s talking about the new iPhone. “Next challenges.” 3G, enterprise, 3rd party apps, more countries, more affordable. iPhone 3G introduced today (big surprise!). Even thinner. The back looks plastic, black. Solid metal buttons. Same display and camera. Flush headphone jack (yay - no more adapters!). Improved audio. Feels “even better” in your hand.

3G = faster data downloads. Email attachments and downloads. Doing a video demo speed comparison between EDGE and 3G. 3G is faster. Duh. Comparing to other 3G phones. It’s faster. Of course it is. Tell us something new! Show us pictures! Their claiming “great battery life”, which was one of the big concerns with previous 3G chipsets (which were also too big).

Talking about location services now, and “GPS”. The question is, does it have REAL GPS (satellite-based, not tower based)? From the demos (tracking a drive down Lombard street), it looks to be the real thing. Or at least, good enough to pass for it (smooth tracking, etc.).

More countries - they’re aiming for 12 countries for the 3G launch, with a stretch goal of 25 70 (!) countries over the next several months. Hear that sound? It’s the bottom dropping out of the international iPhone resale grey market.

More affordable. It started at $599, sells now for $399. 3G 8GB iPhone is $199. Yow! Nice! 16GB is $299. And “something special” - a white one, 16GB. Same price. Saying launch in 22 countries on July 11. I wonder if the U.S. is one of those countries? Showing a new iPhone commercial. Twice.

Jobs has left the stage. No “one more thing”. Nothing on Snot Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 (though they said there will be a session after lunch to talk about it, that’s under NDA). Bummer! I still held out hope for a new hardware class of device, Atom powered. Oh well - there’s always MacWorld 2009 in Januuary!

This was fun. Ultimately, there’s no real new hardware. We all knew about the new iPhone and its features ahead of time. Kind of bummed that it won’t go on sale for a month, but that gives me more time to save up my pennies.

My Laptop Stickers - can you identify them all? (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

Post your answers/guesses in the comments. Winner gets a cookie.

Click on the photo to see it on Flickr, then mouse over the notes on each sticker for the answers.

Got a cool sticker I should have? Let me know!

Is your laptop naked? That’s sad. I can send you some stickers if you really, really need some.

Got a pic of your own laptop stickers? Share, so we can all play!

Juxtapositions: Default OS Browser Fonts (The Jux Entente) by Zagrophyte

Kenny has started a war, a typographical war! Let’s see who survives round two:

Fresh Prince of MacBook Air (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Apple announced their long-rumored ultraportable today, in the form of the MacBook Air, a machine that is described more by its physical specs than by its technical specs (both of which I won't repeat because they're are available elsewhere). Here are my thoughts:

• My first impression was that the machine is damn sexy and I'd like to have one. That said, it is completely impractical for me. I don't travel nearly enough to justify the trade-offs that portability brings. I probably wouldn't spend my hard-earned dollars on it, but if I came across $2000 in Atlantic City one weekend, then perhaps I'd pick one up.
• $1000 for the 64 GB solid state disk drive is both ludicrous (that it would cost so much to begin with) and reasonable (that it's actually a fair value for it) at the same time. It's definitely an early-adopter only option now, especially given that it costs almost as much as a new MacBook, but I'm glad Apple is at least giving buyers the option.
• People will bitch about the non-user-replaceable battery this like they did when the iPhone came out. I think it'll turn out to not be as big a dealbreaker as it was made out to be and those who were going to buy one will and those who weren't won't.
• Some of the new multi-touch gestures on the trackpad seem too gimmicky, although I thought the same thing about two-finger scroll and now I wonder how I lived without it. Three-finger back/forward could be useful but pinching to zoom and rotate seem very limited.

Verdict: Great machine. Not for me (yet, at least).

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macworld, keynote, Steve Jobs, MacBook, MacBook Air

Leopard + Time Machine = MWSF 08 Keynote (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Note: I shamelessly stole the title and source of this post from one of John Siracusa's tweets.

Neil Pomerleau does a great job of predicting the MWSF 08 keynote that takes place a week from this Tuesday. Instead of a bulleted list of predictions, he wrote what Steve will say and how he'll probably say it, complete with photos from the event. His predictions are pretty sound, and while I'm not entirely convinced we'll see a subnotebook or tablet, the level and credibility of the rumor is at about the same as iPhone rumors were last year the weeks prior to the keynote. That said, if I had to choose, I'd pick the subnotebook. The iPhone's largest criticisms are the lack of 3G and the on-screen keyboard. People were getting along well enough before full QWERTY keyboards appeared on cell phones. I don't think Apple would offer a no-keyboard computer as it's subnotebook solution (i.e., the long-awaited 12" PowerBook replacement).

A 12" notebook that's under an inch thick with a solid state drive sounds very reasonable, but I'm pretty sure it will have a keyboard. There's simply no software support: desktop OS X is meant for pixel-precision, meaning our fat fingers would be hitting multiple targets on the screen; iPhone OS X seems too limiting to justify a most-likely >$1500 purchase; and a new in-between OS X would begin with zero software support and further fragment Apple's and third-party developers' efforts.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macworld 2008, predictions, rumors, MacBook mini, OS X

New Twitterrific Offers Ad-Supported Free Version (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

A new version of Twitterrific, the popular Twitter client for Mac OS X, was released today. The changelog details new features and improvements.

The most glaring change, however, has to be the monetization scheme: either you pay $15 for it or you get an ad in your tweet list every hour. If there ever was a desktop application that could function as well on an ad-supported model as websites can, Twitterrific is it. The ads fit in so seamlessly and they're so not bothersome that it feels like Iconfactory could have gotten away with more ads. But I'll stop before I give them any more ideas.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitterrific, The Deck, ads, ad-supported, Iconfactory, software, OS X

michaelb (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by michaelb

After trying a few different methods (QuickTime Pro, iSquint) of encoding video for the Curve I’ve found a simple tool that works. Using Alec Peden’s Universal Build of mencoder and his Automator Workflow; converting a video  for the Curve was as simple as right clicking the file.

QuickTime Pro took too long and seemed to hang, while iSquint worked fine except for the audio was out of sync. Menucoder worked perfectly the first time and in a reasonable amount of time too. Took an 173M AVI file down to 57M, plugged the Curve and now that I have the 2GB microSD card in it mounts as an external drive leaving me just the task of copying it over.

Having never messed around with Automator before this I’m thinking that between it and PocketMac I might not need to try any other Blackberry to Mac syncing applications. If I can get Automator to recognize when a drive is mounted then I should be able to get it to copy audio, pictures or videos that I’ve recently re-encoded.

michaelb (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by michaelb

I picked up a new Blackberry Curve (8300) last week as my new phone. Besides using it for work, its great to have IM with me as Carol can ping me when she is up and able to chat while she is in China.

PocketMac was included on the CD, but it still lags behind the native Windows Blackberry application. There is no way to manage the music, video, pictures or ring tones like you can with the native application and so far I’ve not been able to transfer files over Bluetooth originating from either the Curve or MacBook. So when the makers of PocketMac say:

“14 months of hard work, engineering and testing PocketMac For BlackBerry means you’ll never need a Windows-based PC to sync your crucial data with your BlackBerry device and that synching is fast and rock-solid. “

That is not necessarily the case. This included installing Google Talk, while the other Google service can be installed over the air it requires IE to install it. But having a camera readily available again is nice (Carol took ours to China), maybe I can upload some action shoots from the next baseball game? I’m hoping when the microSD card comes in later today I’ll be able to mount the card through the terminal.

Tethering it as a Bluetooth modem was pretty simple; I used the script and instructions from here. Only thing I changed was updated the script to identify it as a 8300 instead of the 8800. It has worked fine except for this morning I’ve not been able to connect, but I made a change to the data plan yesterday (added the tethering option) and I think that has something to do with it.

Over a great phone and probably one of the better alternatives to the iPhone right now, it even includes a SDK.

MacDevCenter.com -- Replacing AppleScript with Ruby [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Matt Neuberg describes how to use rb-appscript to manage Apple events without Applescript. Learn the basics of rb-appscript usage, with example scripts, including a rewrite of the Ruby-AppleScript example from Matt's book, AppleScript: The Definitive...

Tags: mac, os x, applescript, ruby

Tech Zendo » Blog Archive » OS X swatch Packages [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

OS X swatch packages (both PPC and x86)

Tags: mac, os x, sysadmin, logging, swatch

Amar Sagoo - Tofu [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Tofu is a novel application to address the common problem that people don't like reading text on the screen.

Tags: mac, os x, applications, focus

The Tao of Mac - RRDTool/Snippets [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

What follows are several sample snippets of [RRDTool]

Tags: sysadmin, mac, os x, rrdtool

Monitor Network Services with Nagios - Part 1 [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Tags: sysadmin, mac, os x, nagios

Nagios HOWTO for OS X - Part 2 [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Tags: sysadmin, mac, os x, nagios

FrJo.info » Installing Cacti in Mac OS X Server [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Tags: sysadmin, mac, os x, cacti

CompFusion: Double Dragon [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Regis Duchesne, the technical lead for VMware Fusion project comments on the released video of an internal build using 3D acceleration.

Tags: mac, vmware, fusion, Regis Duchesne

HOWTO: Speak Like Steve Jobs (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Link to YouTube page

How do you speak more like Steve Jobs? Up your daily usage of the following five words/phrases:

• Mere mortals
• Unbelievable
• HUGE
• Wouldn't it be great/nice/cool?
• Pretty cool, huh?

Technorati Tags: Steve Jobs, keynotes, phrases, MacWorld, video, YouTube

OS X Daily » airport - the Little Known Command Line Wireless Utility - Mac OS X Apps, Tips, Tricks, News, Updates, Everything Mac OS X [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Hook up the command line version of airport.

Tags: mac, os x, tutorial, cli, airport, configure, wireless

Mac Mojo : Confessions of a Mac Switcher at Microsoft [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Hi. My name is Blair and I'm a switcher. I guess it all started around OS X. I'd been working in a Linux shop for a little while. On DOS and Windows before that. I was already hooked on the command line, but couldn't find a windowing environment that

Tags: mac, os x, microsoft, macBU

MacZealots > Articles > Beginning Mac Development [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Tags: mac, os x, objective-c, cocoa, development

Macenterprise.org [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Daylight saving time laws were enacted in 2005 that take affect this March 11th 2007. John M. Flender put together a great list of patches to handle the switch for different operating systems, hardware and software.

Tags: sysadmin, mac, os x, windows, Linux, Daylight saving time

WebKit on Rails - Teasing out a webkit-framework for bu... [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Tags: webkit, mini-browser, Mac, os x, wiki

Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Universal Thunderbird builds with Address Book support [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Robert Coleman has bravely made a commitment to compile and host the latest builds of Thunderbird with the patch applied that integrates with Address Book.

Tags: Mozilla, Thunderbird, Address Book, Mac, os x

Tutorial: Customize your disk images - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

The tutorial walks you through the steps of creating a disk image, adding a background graphic, and saving the result for production and distribution.

Tags: mac, os x, tutorial, disk images

Create & manage screenshots on OS X [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Creating & managing screenshots on OS X may not garner the same type of attention had the topic been something more along the lines of ...

Tags: mac, os x, tutorial, screenshots

AFP548 - Xeon Xserve note for systemsetup Command [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Beware of using ARD's Send UNIX command feature with systemsetup on the new Xeon Xserves, the binary in ARDAgent.app is out of date. Check out Apple KB#305668.

Tags: mac, xserve, sysadmin

DeployStudio [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

DeployStudio enables you to image and restore hosts through the network or a simple extenal hard drive (Firewire,...). DeployStudio has automation function. You can install and deploy hosts without interacting with them. You can, for example, deploy a cluster without installing and configuring each node individually.

Tags: mac, os x, disk image, sysadmin

Official Google Mac Blog: Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for the Mac [ma.gnolia] (Put together quickly (Haligan)) by MichaelBiven

Tags: mac, google, webkit, google web toolkit, ajax