Archive for June, 2003
Fast
Well the Stevenote has come and gone, and I’m pretty impressed. That new G5 is a hell of a machine, and while it’s not the got the same lust factor that the last few Ive designs have had (iPod, Powerbook, iMac), it’s still got a certain appeal about it. The insides however, have a hell of an appeal, and at just £2300 for a dual 2Ghz model (and basically the fastest home computer available today) I’m still as tempted as I was before. My decision is going to be based on what 15″ Powerbook updates there are. And what Graham will give me for my current PC. And what Edward would give me for my current Powerbook.
As for Panther, it’s all good, apart from the metal finder windows, which I’m still unsure about. The Finder features on the other hand look like a good update and I especially like the new Open/Save dialogs. There’s lots of other features in there that I’m looking forward too, all of which I’m hoping to try out when I download it over the next day or so.
Download it? Eh?
Yup, I became a registered Apple developer today. I’ve been considering it for a while and never been sure, but tonight I weighed up the pros and cons and went for it. Part of it is the ADC seeing programme, which means I get access to the developer versions of Panther. Or at least, should. Which is very nice indeed. I think it’s about time I started looking at Apple development more seriously anyway, what with all this free time I’m going to have with v2 launching “real soon now”.
Salmon Of Doubt
I became an Audible monthly member a few days ago because I really liked the idea of getting some audio books onto my iPod, which supports their content. Becoming a monthly member means I get to pick one set of subscription content and one normal book each month, whatever their cost, and still only pay one fixed fee (which is lower than most of their single books cost). This seemed like a good deal, but it’s incredibly difficult to pick only one of each when there’s so many I want to hear (I can of course buy other ones as normal, at the normal cost, but where’s the fun in that). It took me three days to decide on my choices for month one. These were, on the subscription side, Macworld News (not very good, won’t pick it again next month) and as my normal book, Douglas Adam’s Salmon Of Doubt, which has been fabulous.
The Audible software is pretty good, buying stuff on the website is fairly painless and the software downloads it for me and automatically transfers it to the iPod. In fact, it transfers to the iPod with much less hassle than the horrible Musicmatch does. Once it’s on the iPod, the audio quality is excellent, and I’ve had no issues at all playing the 108Mb, 8 hour+ long SOD.
19 hours and 49 minutes
My menu bar is actually counting down the minutes to the WWDC, that’s how insane I am. I read some interesting stuff tonight that further adds to my belief that we’ll see new Power Mac’s tomorrow. The same thing also reported the launch of new 15″ Powerbooks and a sooner than expected release for the Windows version of iTunes.
Should be interesting stuff, especially to see how accurate those Panther screenshots were. Shots I wasn’t totally happy with.
Now I’m off to watch The French Connection…
Just a Couple of Days…
…and v2 will be released. It’s nice to say that. I documented all 94 HTML blocks on Friday (yes, that is as tedious as it sounds) and today I designed a nicer, cleaner version of the Chatbear site and started dropping in all the new content. Got some help pages to drop in there and I need to finish some things on the admin side (most notably the Simple HTML style) but nothing very challenging.
After that? Well I’d like to get Blogbear finished off if I can, but I highly doubt I can get all of that done before my holiday is over. And of course there’s the parts of v2 that need to be done even though the launch doesn’t require them - such as organising the payment system.
Holiday
I’m on holiday next week. This is a good thing. v2 is going to launch. This is a good thing.
Yes, it will launch. It will. It will. It will. I must. Force. Myself.
WWDC
Well the rumour mill is certainly working over time right now. We’ve got supposed pictures of new Power Mac’s smuggled out on crumpled bits of newsprint, people apparently opening boxes in Germany, a new conflicting report every 20 minutes and as always, no official word from anywhere.
At this time, the only thing that is confirmed is that Apple will be showing off the next version of OS X, Panther, probably due out around September time. Even if no hardware is announced, I’m still looking forward to seeing this. I imagine that we’re all going to be quite surprised by it, especially since there has been absolutely no real information over what it might contain. Sure, people have been saying that we’re going to see an entirely metal interface, but I can’t think of anything less likely at this point. After converting all their marketing material to Aqua style over the last couple of years, I doubt what they’re going to do now is dump it all and start again. I do however think that we might see some big changes in some interface areas, there are lots of things in the UI that are still slower than doing the equivelant action on Windows because of the way menus and dialog’s are laid out.
As for hardware, I am fully expecting the announcement of IBM 970 based Power Mac’s. Since Apple’s stock is up so much over the last couple of days, I think the markets might be expecting them too. Whether or not they actually ship on Monday is another question altogether, but announcing new Power Mac’s is going to pretty much kill the sales of all existing models so I doubt they’re going to wait around too long before getting them onto the market.
Will I buy one? I could certainly be tempted if the performance and price was right. Somebody just find me a good binary newsgroup reader for the Mac first.
Perfect Cast
What do you get if you take three of my favourite actors and put them in the one film? Runaway Jury. Will be watching out for this one.
Movie Love
Seen lots of films over the last week or so which I’ll have to write up soon. Starting to think that perhaps I should be putting all these on whatfilm.com or something, at least that way the domain would at least start being used for something.
I’m currently taking advantage of the twelve movie channels I pay for every month and trying to watch at least one film a night, which makes doing whatfilm.com even more worthwhile. But how quickly can I throw it together when v2 and Blogbear are much more important…
Swordfish tonight.
Coke
Why can’t you buy bulk amounts of Coca-Cola online in the UK? Just a couple of slabs (24 bottles) of the stuff. No more, no less.
Sometimes the interweb astounds me in it’s uselessness.
XP
Before illness grabbed me by the balls completely on Friday night, I actually ventured to PC World on Friday lunchtime and bought myself a copy of XP. I actually did feel ashamed as I left the store. That can’t be good.
Basically, after a good 4 (maybe even 5) years of using 2000, since I’ve been using it since the Beta 2 days, I thought it was time for a change. And anyway, ClearType is cool. And the icons are nicer.
Impressions so far? Well the upgrade process was simple enough, nothing went wrong, no settings were lost etc etc. First thing I did was switch off the ghastly default blue interface for the classic Windows one, and I’m generally happy. There’s some nice touches I like (I’m a sucker for the unobtrusive animations), remote desktop works better than VNC (on a LAN anyway, it remains to be seen if that holds true over the net) and there’s a spit and polish about the icons and other bits and pieces that bring it above what Win2K was offering. There are annoying UI inconsistencies (stupid, pointless, web-style User Management panel) and a shutdown screen that doesn’t show the hibernate option until you hold down the shift key (why, for the love of God!), but it wouldn’t be an MS product without them.
I still miss a UNIX command line though. Yay for OS X.
Illness
After a good three, almost four days on the toilet, it’s amazing how drained you feel. And also how fed up you are sitting there. Combined with the stuff also leaving my mouth for the sink, the heavy shakes driving home from work on Friday, and the kind of headache not seen since my heavy migraine years - it’s not been the best of weekends.
So what was it? Food poisoning (that didn’t seem to effect the other four people at the restaurant with me), or some other random bug? Either way, I’ll be in no rush to return to that food emporium.
I do however have a real hankering for a McDonalds. I haven’t the foggiest why.
