In my continuing saga to be as lazy as possible, I have brought back my Apple Remote into use. It has practically no use except when away from the computer you can change the iTunes track. So been as I use Spotify almost as much as I use iTunes why can't I do the same.
Turns out you can with a little SIMBL plugin, http://themacbox.co.uk/smr/
In an interesting twist, Computer World is reporting that a federal judge ruled last week that the Mac clone maker Psystar can continue its countersuit against computer maker and Mac OS developer Apple Corporation. Neowin
So what is Apple's next move, well thats quite simple. If you can't beat them fairly beat them unfairly. I can see Apple taking some of that Cash on Hand, and buying Psystar outright and effectively putting them out of business.
Well at least some stores are banning the popular social networking sites from the instore computers. While alot can be said including that its an evil move by a big corporation. Although it is since been found out that Apple is not doing this by a policy and it appears only a handful of stores are operating the policy.
I personally think that Apple will enact such a policy across all stores soon, they want to stay profitable after all and time is money. The time spent dealing with questions and people who a clearly not there to buy only to check their gmail account has to stop. Apple has a massive retail presence based on quality of staff, if they are to keep the quality of staff high and thus maintain this appearance through the oncoming storm, they have to draw the line at some point.
Via TinyComb TechCrunch
There has been lots of talk about Apple is doomed to fail with the iPhone as a software Platform and the Android platform is going to be so much better, simple because its open.
Firstly, take a look at the iPhone. Its a fantastically designed device, and the attention to detail is insane - that's not to say the Android platform isn't. But it is a sensible justification that the platform needs to slightly closed to allow a continuity of quality to be maintained. Secondly, the iTunes to iPhone facility has yet to face any real competition, its far from perfect but there is a seamless connection from buying to using. You click buy and the app or music is downloaded and synced to your phone, without having to drag and drop, move or do anything manually. However there is growing concern that the closed nature of the platform will be its undoing see Pull My Finger [1] Continue reading
Twitter has come under attack for being a great service that has a poor record of up time Link1 - TechCrunch, Link 2 - TechCrunch. Well news on the street is Twitter survived the several thousand posts it recieved during WWDC, including my own meager posts. But at what cost.
I laughingly joked that the next feature for twitter to disable to ensure it stayed up, was to turn off twittering. In reality it was nearly at that point the following features were cut for the duration of the Keynote:
It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up! Only one unexpected disruption occured and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service distruption some time after Steve Jobs' keynote. With that single distruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%
WWDC was a bit of a let down, iphone alleys' coverage by ustream however was fantastic. I was expecting more information and more products, not a grueling 45mins of demo's of apps we cant use for a month, not quite the usual Apple finesse we have come to appreciate.
One important thing to note was Steve Job's committed to pricing the new 8gb iPhone at no more that $199US in all 70 countries the iPhone 3g will be sold in by the end of the year. I hope this is the signal of a much bigger push by Apple to price equivalently in all countries. That said they create products people will gladly pay for in some cases even twice such as myself who will be upgrading come July 11th once again.
Surprisingly the announcement of OS X 10.6 dubbed Snow Leopard was pushed from the forefront of the announcement, giving credence to the fact it will not be a stability release just a fit and polish release to keep ahead of the competition. Also .mac will be no longer and be replaced by mobile me, which has to be an improvement of the aging .mac name and technology.
It was a bit of a let down in the fact that Steve had very little stage time, some reported as usually steve looked ill.
Shock Horror - There was no one more thing.
Ok So heres my predications:
It was less then 30 minutes after the official word that iTunes was selling films in the UK store, before I was watching Batman Begins. But is the convenience coming at too high a cost?
In the UK we have become used getting ripped off around every corner, it stinks but we are British so we put up with it. My problem is that some of the films now available particularly Al Gores documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" £10.99 At this point the noveltywore off, I can have this shipped to me from amazon £6.22 in less than two days.
I aren't apposed to paying £6.99 for a film, but £10.99 for a film that you can buy in the shops for less than £7 I think its pushing it. Us Brits whilst being hard done by after getting the long of the stick for so many years we have all become cynics, and easily see where profiteering is taking place. We saw it with the iPhone, which didn't do anywhere near as well as planned (see here) We also see it with practically every computer or gadget, when you get nearly 2$US to £1GBP and the prices of things are the same in dollars as pounds you know there is something wrong.
Unless iTunes get more content up in the store and stop stupid pricing, they may just take off. Who am I kidding it will take off whatever apple do, its what their good at. I would like to think that Apple at least get some semblance of order in pricing and price match with the High Street.
Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about - available wherever you happen to be. www.mesh.com
Microsoft being its usual self has joined the web 2.0 party, and looks as if the Yahoo! bid was a hint at a much larger plan.
So what exactly is the significance of Mesh and the whole Microsoft online play? Its validated a couple of ideas cloud computing is definitely going to have a massive impact the way in which we interact with both mobile devices and laptops/desktops, and also Microsoft has seen a little sense and is bending to the will of user.
Office Online?
An obvious application that Microsoft will put into mesh is Office, quite frankly the current online offering is underwhelming and Google Docs beats it, but in mesh with a cross-platform version of office that follows you I would be willing to pay for that.
Did I here you say Cross-Platform?
Along with the announcement of Mesh some other intersting things came out of the tour, support for Macs! Is this a much bigger plan to get out of the Operating System business or transition to providing a thinned out operating system that can access mesh (They may even use an Open Source kernel)
I think Microsoft has got themselves some new friends and I will be sure to check out Mesh in more detail very soon. Its going to interesting if they do it right...
O2 obviously isn't making enough money or selling enough iPhone's to make it worth there while and they have completed re-structured there tariff plans, basically more for less. I don't make enough calls to make it any cheaper for me anyway 
More Details here
So I have a nice new unhacked iPhone. My first impressions are all somewhat good, so I though't I would run done some of the things the press have been knocking the ye olde iPhone down with.
EDGE
Whoa! The iPhone is only 2.5G phone, run! Well in all honesty the EDGE coverage is poor although I can get it most places where I go, it ain't to slow and even out of EDGE areas webpages load pretty damn fast. Its not youtube fast but it gets the job done.
Camera
2 Megapixels is that all? Well this is something that has bothered me, but not for the reason you may be thinking of. I have yet to use a camera on any phone, if I want to take a picture I have a dedicated camera for it. Though 'cameraphones' are getting much better there are still no match to a good quality dedicated camera
Price
This point I actually agree with and I think like our American cousins, we will get shafted for at least £100 come January, but do you know what I don't really care. It would be nice if there was a Pay-As-You-Go option but then I can't see anyway for o2 to make money.
The rest of the package is spot on, iPod and Phone work perfectly (not that I call many people) I am looking forward to the SDK, but may hack apptap on there before too long.
Having had some issues with iTunes over the last week, nothing downloading from the store to be specific. I just got an email from a nice person at iTunes Store support, saying the problem was fixed and I got 5 Free credits to boot. My lucks in, maybe I should do a lottery this week.
The move to VMware fusion just hasn't happened, since the new Parallels update dropped earlier this wee, I have been impressed with the increased speed and the integration with exposé a feature which windows desperately needs and not just an alt+TAB varient like that of Vista.
In other news, CommonApp.org should get a medal for being impossible to understand if your an international applicant (like I am) there's a lot they could learn from the new UCAS website, also good help documents would make it easier for people such as my self who haven't got a clue.
I just installed VMware fusion on my Macbook; Parallels they crept up behind you. Don't get me wrong I love parallels and its incarnations, but VMware has a smaller feature set and its fast.
I have been running Fedora 7 through VMware, with it emulating to cores thats right you can virtulise stuff on multiple cores. It screams. I had a little trouble getting the resolutions right (this is because Fedora isn't a supported OS) but a bit of googling (who knew this was now a verb) and I got it going.
I now have a fully operational Death Star, for use with my many future Ruby on Rails Projects. I am really looking forward to seeing what Parallels comes up with in there next version, all it really needs is more performance and I will have a dilemma which to use?
Its almost a day since the WWDC bomb dropped, and everybody has stood back to see what a lack of real good announcements. What I mean is what we all really wanted to hear (even if impossible)
What we have got though is a solid Safari update that works 10times better than the old version, another tool to get people to switch (Safari on Windows ofcourse) Clear detail on leopard, and just how much more polished than Tiger it is. As for my experience with safari, I have had Safari 3 open all day, Google Reader hasn't frozen up. All my plugins work even Inquisitor (http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/)
Search within pages works just like Firefox with abit more fancy pants animation and highlighting. Now the only thing that Safari for Windows needs is a GPO template for Windows Server, then the holy grail has been cracked. This is the only thing stopping me from deploying Safari or Firefox on the networks I admin.
Whilst the Announcements may not have been a giant leap. They certainly were a jump in the right direction.
I always pick the best days to go to the Cinema after exams. I got in and the World of Apple has turned to jelly (at least mine anyway). Leopard = Yes! There is anything really revolutionary, but it doesn't need a fancy new pair of Interface trousers, Finder looks fantastic, stacks (I have already being using folders to do this) Generally Leopard looks like a solid update, and as I said a long time ago, Leopard need not be singing and dancing upgrade. Just fix the quirks and add some useful features, also make sure the install takes less than 3-hours unlike the last 3 times I have set up Vista.
As for safari, I have switched back. First impressions, its polished and fast. Google Reader now no longer has the weird beach ball effect when loading the next lot of stories, its also a lot faster than Firefox loading, Visual Rich Editor in WordPress works (although it has its quirks). It also has the Element Inspector from WebKit which is incredibly useful to me making sure websites work. It also just seems to feel better, nothing much has changed but it seems to run more smoothly even load web pages faster?
In the process of making this post I have corrected 4 errors, on the website. Due to Safari 3 not liking certain elements.