I’m a big time Garageband user and spend time at the Apple user support forum helping new Garageband users get up an running. Today someone posted a link to a tutorial of how to use your Wii remote to put down drum tracks or just mess around using the remote to control the midi drums. You can check it out at screenfashion.org
I just got back from the local Apple Store. I went to check out the new iPods. I first checked out the iPod Classic, there about the same size of the old iPod 30 gig Video but have a brushed aluminum anodized face. They now come with a 80 or 160 gig hard drive and the new user interface and just feel good in your hand.
The next I looked at was the new Nano. The pictures I’ve seen on the net don’t do it justice, this thing is small real thin and super light. The black one is pretty slick looking. The screen is bright and very sharp and text is very easy to read. It also uses the new user interface and I came real close to taking one home with me… it’s only a matter of time.
Another thing I was really impressed with was the Bose headphones that I used to listen to the Nano. They are the newest Quiet Comfort 3. The noise canceling was excellent and they were comfortable and light weight. And most of all they sound incredible the down side is the price they list for $349 woooo.
Looks like Steve Jobs was overwhelmed with upset iPhone owners. Steve announced that the iPhone price will be cut by $200. People who bought the iPhone got very upset, apple did say they will rebate anyone that bought one in the last 14 days with a $200 rebate. Of course anyone that bought it before the 14 day get hosed.
Well along comes Steve with a apology and a $100 gift certificate for all those upset iPhone owners.
This is genius on many accounts.
First; makes iphone owners feel a little better.
Second; makes headlines everywhere, free publicity.
Third; drives customers into Apple stores and traffic to Apple online store.
Fourth; makes Steve look human.
Love apple or hate them they are one of a few american companies that have been able to come back from near death… and shake things along the way.
Just when you think you have the coolest, slickest iPod Apple comes out with new ones. The newest, coolest, slickest iPod is called the iPod Touch because it uses the same touch screen as the iPhone. It is pretty much the same as a iPhone but without the phone. It runs OS X, has wifi to connect to the internet using the safari browser. I really want one. The other new iPod is the Nano, it’s shorter thinner and a little wider. It now has a bigger screen and will play video. The regular iPod is now called the iPod classic and comes in a 160 gigabyte hard drive model it also got some styling updates.
My 30 gig video iPod now all of a sudden looks outdated… and the beat goes on.
I wanted to play a little more with the new imovie today. So I shot a few minutes of video of my miata and added one of my songs I recorded with garageband.
Check it out here on youtube
Well I spent the whole weekend with my new iMac. The first thing I notice was the display was bright as washed out looking a quick look in the display profiles list I see it’s set to imac. I set it to adobe RGB and there are the beautiful colors, my guess is the stock setting is to match the display to the aluminum case.
I then decide to make a video using the new iMovie. This is a new version and is missing most of the editing functions of the old imovie. You can seemy first imovie here. Apple has a free download of the old iMovie HD 6 for anyone not happy with iMovie 08 “I downloaded it”.
Next is garageband, this got some really nice updates I won’t get into them but we now are come close to a real multitrack digital work station. I took about a half hour to build a song using my acoustic guitar and a bass. Listen here
Now comes iWeb. Apple gave us some nice updates, first new themes much needed and nice looking. Next is the ability to easily embed live media like youtube, google maps and goggle adsense, and photo galleries that use apples new skimming more about skimming later. So I built a iWeb site in about a hour check it out at isteve.us. Not to bad and like most apple apps anyone can use it.
iPhoto got some great improvements first is skimming this feature is used throughout all the ilife suite I can’t explain it so check it out on my iweb site run your mouse over the photo album covers. That is skimming, iPhoto uses this to quickly preview pictures arranged in albums or events. “Events” did you catch that, iphoto will auto arrange your photos by date so everything that was taken on the same day will appear as one picture and moving your mouse of the picture will skim through all the shots taken that day. You can join multiple events to make one event or split one event to many. Also iPhoto has some new ways to quickly navigate through and display all your pictures. This gets a A+.
Edit> Just got back from the Apple store one of these little beauties will be mine by the weekend.
Well the Apple media event has brought us some new updates. First of all new iMacs, thinner made of aluminum, glass glossy screen, Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz, up to 4 Gigs of RAM, 250 Gig hard drive up to a Tb onboard, smaller thinner keyboard with media keys, 20″and 24″ starting at $1149. These new iMacs are beautiful.
New iLife 08 plenty of new features in iphoto most having to do wit organizations of photos. .Mac and iphoto now work together auto sync iphoto to a web gallery and let others add photos to your web gallery from remote computers. More .Mac stuf in the future.
iMovie is being replaced with iMovie the name is the same but the app is all new. New way to browse media, scrub through project in a thumbnail mode. Publish movie directly to youtube or .Mac “cool”.
New iDVD.
New iWeb, Live Widgets not sure what that means, Google maps, adsense and youtube integration
New Garageband with Magic Garageband not sure if I care for that feature and I’ not even sure what it does yet. Support 24Bit audio and prints notation. Multi-take recording.
New iWorks new and prettier. Easy to use spreadsheets called Numbers with intelligent tables “sounds like something I could use … I guess”.
Ok tuesday Apple is having a media event. They said it is Mac related so the rumor sites are abuzz about new imacs. The picture above is supposed to be a leaked picture of the new beauty. If there is a new imac and if it looks anything like this and if there isn’t a big price jump… I may be giving Steve Jobs some more of my money.
Also rumors of a new ultralite macbook pro “yea right” and updates to .Mac. We will find out Tuesday.
So you just bought a shiny new mac but still want to use your old Windows apps what to do. Well here is a decent blog post with a quick look at a few ideas. Personally I think windows free is the way to go but thats me.
I have been reading that the new 15″ Macbook Pro is in such demand that Apple is having a hard time filling orders. Many people are saying that the LED backlight display is the problem, everyone wants it and the manufacture can’t keep up. Apple moved the ship date it was 3 to 5 day and now 7 to 10 days. It’s tough being popular.
The new big rumor in the Mac world is that the iPhone multi-touch screen will be coming to the laptop line up this fall. This will let you scroll, click and resize with your fingers right on the screen. Other rumors are that both the Macbook and Macbook Pros will also see updates making them slimmer and faster “well they aren’t going to make the fatter and slower”.
Well this weekend I came real close to buying a shiny new Apple Macbook. I took a trip to CompUSA to get a feel of the little beauty and it’s was love at first isight. I never noticed how thin and elegant the Macbook is. When thinking about the Macbook I had a preconceived notion that the keyboard was substandard for a Apple product and that the glossy screen would have way to much glare. Well I was wrong about both, the keyboard doesn’t look quite as nice as my G4 Powerbook keyboard but it works better. There is more room between the keys so I don’t keep hitting more then one key at once, even with my reckless typing skills.
Now the display. At first look the 13.3″ glossy screen was not that different from my 12″ Powerbook display. It did look brighter and looking close I could see some reflection from the store lights, nothing to bad. Then I played a movie trailer and discovered the pros of the glossy screen. The picture was beautiful. It was bright crisp and well defined, just like a movie should be.
So I went home planning on ordering a Macbook from Apple’s online store and three gigs of RAM from OWC. But just before I make the purchase I couldn’t help thinking why not wait till the Macbook ships with the new os, it’s just a few months away. And what about the 12″ Powerbook it’s still plenty capable… and only three and a half years old… and it looks almost perfect… and has a new un-exploding battery… and a new hard drive. What would I do with it. I know they routinely get $700+ on ebay but I would take less if I could sell it to someone I know. Or maybe just keep it as a backup, yea right that won’t happen.
So here I write still undecided, I think I will start asking friends and family if they would like my Powerbook. Maybe over the summer I can sell it and then the Macbook will be mine. Who knows maybe this summer will bring my dream 12″ Macbook Pro.
The iphone is not even out yet a apps are already starting to show up. The first one is Digg reader from DavidCann you can see it here. I’m guessing we will be seeing iphone apps, iphone chargers, iphone car docks, iphone tv’s and anything thing else you can imagine in the next few weeks. It’s the summer of the iphone.
WWDC started Monday and Steve Jobs gave a great keynote speech, like always. He gave a sneak peek at os x 10.5 Leopard. This is going to be a real cool os adding many improvements and some new features that fix problems I didn’t know I had. Check it out here.
Steve also announced the Safari web browser is now available for Windows as a beta. And the big announcement the iphone has no a SDK (Software development Kit) so third party developers can write apps to work on the iphone. They can can write apps using web 2.0 standards with things like ajax. This is suppose to keep the iphone from crashing because of poorly written apps.
You can watch Steve’s Keynote here
Big changes are coming to the Macs new os Leopard this fall called core animation. Some people say it’s the biggest UI change to computing in the last 30 years. It will allow new ways for applications to interface with users. We should get a preview of whats is coming next week at WWDC.
Well Apple introduced updated Macbook Pros this past tuesday. They both use the newest Intel Core 2 Dual santa rosa processors “very fast”. The 15″ model has a LED back light instead of florescent, as of now it’s the only laptop with LED backlight.
Now I have been holding out for a 12″ Macbook Pro to replace my aging 12″ G4 Powerbook. And as usual I’m denied again. I know the 13″ Macbooks have just been updated a few weeks ago and that maybe my best bet for small size and big power. But again the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) is next week and there is a chance Apple will announce my dream laptop there. Ok maybe not, but I can dream, although dreaming doesn’t make my old laptop run any faster. The crystal ball tells me that a white 13″ Macbook in my near future but common sense tell me to wait till october and the new os.
What would do?
Flock  the social web browser
I just downloaded a browser Flock. I’m using it right now to write this post but I’m not using the wordpress dashboard. I right clicked on the page and choose blog this it put the link in automatically and let’s me drag in pictures from the web or my flickr account. Speaking of Flickr, flock also has a built in flickr picture viewer in the browser and adding pictures to flickr is as easy as dragging a picture to the flickr tool bar/viewer.
I think it’s Mac only right now so if your a Mac user give it a try this may shortly become my default browser.
Today Apple Inc. announced that high quality DRM (Digital Rights Management) free music is now available from itunes. This means the music can be played on any device that plays aac files. And of course you can still burn it to a cd. The new files are 256kb AAC (Mp4 audio) they sound excellent but cost $1.29. If you have old songs in the protected format you can upgrade four songs at a time for $1.20. This option is built into itunes store and finds all you previously purchased music that has a non-DRM version. So far it’s only music from EMI. You will need to update your itunes to 7.2 and you can set a option to automatically buy the new format if available.
Ok this is not a real computer yet. But Intel has shown this laptop as a idea of what companies could be building. But the rumors are this is what Apple will release next month at Apples World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC).
I was at my local Mall (Ingleside Mall, Holyoke MA) this morning and was greeted by some new store construction, so what’s new. But one of the storefronts was boarded up with black wallboard and in big white letters it said www.apple.com and a big apple logo.
I know for most people a computer store is no big deal, most people just go to wallmart. But for a apple user like myself it’s Disney Land. Nothing I like more then playing with the Macs, talking to other mac users watching the instore demos, playing with cameras and drinking cool-aid.
