This isn’t like getting tickets to a Fugazi reunion at the Black Cat; there will be plenty of iPhones to go around. Rob Pegoraro says Don’t Run Out To Buy An iPhone Today

People don’t understand that we’ve invented a new class of interface. As Apple Gains PC Market Share, Jobs Talks of a Decade of Upgrades - New York Times

How To Take Better Photos with Your iPhone

And we shall call it “maclet” -dj

Macintouch Reader Reports: iPhone

With the earbuds in, using the phone function, the caller’s voice is now comfortably in the middle of my head, in the center of my aural space. This makes talking on the phone SO much easier, since I don’t have to automatically shift my attention to one ear, and exclude the other. It feels like telepathy, really.

What a dramatic change in how I talk, done so simply, and found so unexpectedly…

Last year’s launch of Leopard’s Time Machine featured a video that contained files and contents from a user named “Rose”, which was a notable coincidence as Rose Tyler was the name of a time-travelling companion who had just been “lost” by the world’s most famous fictional time traveller, Doctor Who.

This year’s WWDC has an updated video of the Time Machine feature, and shows a backup being created on “Sam’s Disk”. Coincidentally or not, Sam Tyler is the lead character in the ’70s cop show “Life on Mars”, which features a young 21st-century detective who wakes up from a coma in 1973, and has to work with the people and practices he finds at his old police station 30 years ago.

By the way, Sam Tyler is not related to Rose Tyler, either officially or as an in-joke; however, one of the writers of “Life on Mars” asked his daughter for a suggestion to help him decide a surname for Sam. Later on, she admitted that she chose the name “Tyler” because she was a fan of “Doctor Who” and liked Rose’s surname. Macintouch Reader Reports: WWDC 2007

List of artists signed to EMI - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I just did the 10.4.9 upgrade on my 15″MacBook Pro (Core Duo, 2GHz), with no unusual behavior or problems. I downloaded the Combo updater and used it for the upgrade, even though I was already running 10.4.8. I made full clones to two different external drives with SuperDuper! beforehand, and I also ran OnyX’s automated housekeeping functions. The RAM in this machine is Apple factory-installed, and I chose good music for the update: Copland’s Appalachian Spring. I think a lot of upgrade problems result from playing inappropriate music during the process. Eric Bergman

This Macintouch Reader Report on Music Servers offers some deep and dirty real-world hacks involving network storage, multiple iPods, and other edge cases. As home networks get more sophisticated, the shortcomings of iTunes' single-user model become clear. The time I spend on dumb repetetive tasks, such as copying music to my wife’s computer, will soon be double as my children discover iTunes (it’s already my son’s number one “place to go on the computer” – he has a favorite podcast, you see). I hope the famous it-just-works ease and elegance we expect from Apple are brought to bear on this issue. In the meantime, here’s what the pioneers of family music management are cobbling together with their bare hands.

Mac OS X reports hard drive capacity in binary math, hard drive manufacturers report capacity in base 10 math.

Prediction: XP Is The "New Classic" Under 10.5

Your grandma doesn't want the Mac if she has to give up her favorite solitaire game.

In this piece from January (!) Gavin Shearer explains why even in the face of crippling malware lots of people haven't yet switched away from Windows — and why they will. (via Daring Fireball)

Sitting at home with the window open, listening to the tree branches brush against each other outside and the occasional horn-honks of Flatbush Ave, bark of dog and squeal of child... this uncomposed ambience is my creativity engine lately.

From a comment on Click opera - Ubiquity is the abyss.

I’d love to pull my photos from Flickr right to my iPod.

A thought: photocasts should be possible.

Want to play with Apple's Front Row without buying a new iMac? Check out the hack I'm calling 'Orchestra Pit'. (Disclaimer: randomWalks did not originate any of the technologies or techniques known as 'Orchestra Pit' -- we just gave it a fancy name.) Just download:

• Apple's Front Row 1.0.1 Update (contains the Front Row application)
• Pacifist (needed to install Front Row on your Mac)
• Front Row Enabler 1.0.1 (magic?)

Then follow the directions that come with Front Row Enabler. What's it good for? Well, it's a nice way to show off a photo album, and it's good for watching movie trailers. For much else, you'd really want a remote control.

Open Source Mac “is a simple list of the best free and open source software for Mac OS X.”

Apple's Front Row Comes Closer to Couch-Driven Computing

Where most of the computer industry trudges on under a banner of "more" -- more processor speed, more expansion ports, more stickers on the front of the computer -- Apple's mission statement amounts to "less." It is one of the few companies in the business that understands editing -- how the discipline imposed by having to remove yet another button, menu and toolbar can yield simpler, easier and more useful products.

Playlist: The iPod’s interface could be even better

iTunes has those lovely little Arrow icons next to a track’s name that, if Option- or Alt-clicked, take you to the entry and its surrounding album tracks if you’ve sorted tracks by album. I’d be thrilled if there was some way to open an album or artist entry from within a track’s Now Playing screen on an iPod.

This is the outstanding feature iPod needs most.

A revolution is happening based on web standards, it can either help or hurt the Mac, a lot depends on Apple and right now a lot of us don't have a lot of confidence in the decisions Apple is making so it can go either way.

Applepeels: Switching from Apple. I agree. The painful truth is that signs of cluefulness from Cupertino are few and far between these days.

When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware — none of which are available for the Mac platform — it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.

Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer

As Apple keeps innovating, its challengers keep competing like engineers, thinking that advantages in storage capacity or battery life can make silk purses out of ugly, hard-to-use sows' ears of machines.

WSJ.com - Real Time: The Second Coming of Apple

Dave Morin is Apple’s first public weblogger. They launched a “student weblog” on their education site yesterday, “for students to hear from other students about their observations and Mac-related stuff.” (That’s the sharp focus and clarity of purpose I like to see in a new weblog.) Lacking any external links or the ability to accept comments, the most interesting thing about the blog so far may be the disclaimer: “Any information in the blogs is provided for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement or representation by Apple. Apple is not responsible for the content.” I hope Dave does something interesting with the site so it doesn’t remain the token brand-positioning corporate weblog it appears to be.

iTMS: Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay Mix because I am such a tool.

There was no surer way for me to get into the spirit of the time (primarily the early to mid 1940s) and the feel of the place (primarily New York City) that gave birth to the comic book than to put on some Ellington or Goodman.

MacInTouch Home Page

[Brian Shaw] Unmentioned on any Mac/Apple web site that I can find is the fact that neither of the new iPods includes the remote control or case. They are both options with both units (see iPod specs). Furthermore, only the 40GB includes a dock.

Since all three of these options have a $39 price tag, it is not correct to state that the new units reflect a $100 price reduction from current models. For example, a 20GB 3rd-generation unit, which included a dock, case and remote, listed for $399. The 20GB 4th-generation lists at $299, but add the optional remote, case and dock, and it costs $416, a $17 price increase!

Put another way, I now can get a 40G iPod without paying for an iPod sleeve and a featureless remote.

The New York Times: In Silicon Valley, Tear-Down Interrupted in which Preservationists dispute Steve Jobs' Impeccable Taste.

In this affluent community west of Palo Alto — where bridle paths wend their way to hitching posts at grocery stores stocked with $800 bottles of burgundy — the woodsy rural life, or a semblance of one, is valued above all. The debate over the Jackling estate has pitted preservationists from Woodside and beyond against those, like Mr. Jobs and many property owners here, who argue that a man's home is his castle and if the castle happens to be an outdated white elephant its fate should be his to determine. Historians say the house qualifies for the California Register of Historic Resources and therefore merits protection under the state's Environmental Quality Act. "It's a significant house and it can continue to serve the community," said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. "It's symptomatic of a discard society. He ought to buy another lot."

"It was never really a very interesting house to start with," Mr. Jobs, who lived in the house for ten years, explained to the commissioners. "So I think I could build something far, far nicer and far more historically interesting down the road."

At a Web site, Folklore.org, Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original Macintosh designers, describes visiting Mr. Jobs in the house in June 1985: "We knocked on the door and waited a few minutes before Steve appeared and led us inside. The massive house was almost completely unfurnished, and our footsteps echoed eerily as he led us to a larger room near the kitchen, with a long table, one of the few rooms that had any furniture."

Apple - Mac OS X - Mac OS X Server v10.4 Tiger Preview

A new Weblog server in Tiger Server makes it easy to publish, distribute and syndicate web-based content. The Weblog server provides users with calendar-based navigation and customizable themes, is fully compatible with Safari RSS and enables posting entries using built-in web-based functionality or with weblog clients that support XML-RPC or the ATOM API. The Weblog Server, based on the popular open source project "Blojsom," works with Open Directory for user accounts and authentication.

Erudite Mac community members lament the shortcomings of the iTunes Music Stores France, Germany, and UK.

~stevenf on Airport Express

It's not bothering any consumers really at the moment, but Apple is tying more and more things into iTunes, and they should be careful not to become an island again, like the Apple of yesteryear. If Microsoft released a wireless-to-stereo adapter that only talked to Windows Media Player on XP, and played only from an encrypted WMA stream, everyone would have cried "monopoly". Just sayin'.

Daring Fireball: An Ounce of Prevention is the definitive resource for the recently discovered OS X security concerns.

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > What's Next: To Quiet a Whirring Computer, Fight Noise With Noise

Dr. Sommerfeldt's system has four miniature speakers and four even tinier microphones set in a ring around the computer fan. The microphones and other sensors detect the noise of the fan blades and, with the help of digital signal processing and algorithms, radiate opposing tones from the speakers. The whole system can be tucked into the same space that a conventional computer cooling fan would occupy.

Wild prediction: Someone named in this story is getting a phone call from Steve Jobs tomorrow.

The Search field is disabled in iTunes 4.5’s Party Shuffle list. This could be improved: the Party Shuffle display should have a third horizontal pane for search results.

An excercise to find the worst songs on the iTunes Music Store and compile them all together in one handy playlist. Those with a strong stomach can now preview all the songs together through the Dumpster Diving iMix.

Macworld's Jonathan Seff reports that, according to Apple, the big difference between ALC and FLAC is speed -- Apple says ALC is faster. Apple says ALC is not based on FLAC, but was created by Apple itself.

I've not seen anything else about the Apple Lossless Encoder yet.

The Slashdot: Apple Releases Major iTunes Update discussion includes the following gems (unattributed, because I'm lazy):

Lastly, and this is a feature of the entire music library, not just playlists or Party Shuffle, the same "arrow" icons that show up in the iTMS when you search for a song are present in iTunes. This means you can click an arrow for a song name, album, or artist and it will launch a search on iTMS. But say you don't like that feature? Well you can of course turn it off in preferences, but you may also hodl down "option" and click it. The result? it searches only YOUR library, not the iTMS.

You can now use other playlists as criteria for a Smart Playlist. Create one playlist that is a combination of several other playlists.

With roots both in Silicon Valley's digital culture and the 1960's counterculture, Mr. Jobs has long been an arbiter of what is cool in technology, much like a real-world version of a trend-spotting character from "Pattern Recognition," one of the cyberpunk novels by William Gibson.

AND, helped by his growing prominence in Hollywood through his second company, Pixar Animation Studios, Mr. Jobs has attained a level of influence over how life is lived in the digital age that is unmatched by even his most powerful computer industry rivals. "He is the Henry J. Kaiser or Walt Disney of this era," said Kevin Starr, a culture historian and the California state librarian.

The New York Times > Never underestimate Steve Jobs.

Many references to the iPod in this week’s SF Bay Guardian.

originally posted by xowie

It's been said that this year's "Worst. Macworld. Ever." was really about GarageBand, and I agree, although personally I'm most pleased that iPhoto will finally be able to handle my photos as one library rather than seven. The only reason I'll continue using iPhoto Library Manager will be to sequester certain photos from those intended for a general audience.

MacSlash and Rael Dornfest offer notes from the O’Reilly OS X Conference on a digital home session.

Tristan Louis says yesterday's big news is about Apple's cross-platform DRM and some logical progressions.

As predicted, Apple introduced a version of Itunes for windows today. A lot will be written about how this solidifies Apple's lead in the digital music player market but what many may be overlooking is how Apple is pushing its own version of Digital Rights Management into a wider market. I suspect this is a strategy similar to the one they used in the early 1990s to make quicktime a strong contender for digital video.

While companies from Intel to Microsoft are talking about how they plan to implement digital rights in the future and are taking tentative steps in that direction, Apple is working on a strategy that covers multiple platforms beginning today. The ITunes music store may be an interesting story in terms of the consumer market but it seems to me that there is also an interesting play at hand for a business to business model. If Apple succeeds in its implementation of the music store (and there is little doubt that they will), they could turn around and start offering a set of products and services to organizations dealing in digital goods. (...)

I am Looking for the code numbers in the yellow cap game that were to be postmarked by Dec. 31,2003. Where do I obtain a list of numbers? Can you E-mail me a list of winning codes. Thank you Jay Heath

Here is the full article, keen and insightful, for your convenience:

One afternoon in March 1983, Steve Jobs, the brash 28-year-old founder of Apple Computer, stood on a Manhattan rooftop terrace overlooking the Hudson River. He faced John Sculley, the 44-year-old president of Pepsi, whom he very much wanted to recruit and uttered a line that's become a Silicon Valley legend:

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?" Sculley later recalled in his autobiography.

Twenty years later, it turns out changing the world occasionally includes selling sugar water.

The very same Steve Jobs, now somewhat older and grayer, proudly announced a huge marketing deal with Pepsi on Thursday to promote Apple's newly expanded iTunes Music Store.

The irony is hard to miss.

Jobs is famously vegetarian, reportedly subsisting on a diet largely confined to fruits and nuts. He's never seen drinking anything other than bottled water during his press events -- including Thursday's rock-star-studded show at the Moscone Center West in San Francisco.

I can't say for sure, but I'd bet Jobs' personal consumption of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Sierra Mist -- the three soft drinks covered in the agreement with Pepsi-Cola North America -- is zero.

Well, as Apple said in its ads, sometimes you have to think different.

Pepsi will sell 300 million special bottles in February and March with distinctive yellow caps. Underneath one in three caps will be a code number winners can use to download a free song from iTunes that would otherwise cost 99 cents.

The offer doesn't include the modest 12-ounce cans of Pepsi or Sierra Mist, with a mere 150 calories and 41 grams of sugar. You have to buy either a 20-ounce bottle with 250 calories and 68 grams of sugar, or a one-liter bottle with 425 calories and 115 grams of sugar.

Soft drinks are heavily advertised to children and teenagers, also a target market for the music industry, and are a significant factor in a nationwide obesity epidemic. Diet Pepsi, of course, doesn't have sugar, but does contain caffeine and steers children away from healthier drinks such as milk and fruit juice.

The iTunes Music Store, launched in April for users of Apple's own Macintosh, is already very successful and could reshape the future of the recording industry now that it's available on Windows. It's just too bad the values of Steve Jobs in 2003 have moved so far from those of Steve Jobs in 1983.

Apple: Hip Hop

In conjunction with the release of the third generation of the iPod, Apple and TBWA/Chiat/Day/Los Angeles have unveiled an eye-popping new campaign for the iconic MP3 player. In both print and television executions, the effort shows figures silhouetted against brightly colored backgrounds, getting their grooves on with the help of what -- even in three colors -- is obviously the Apple iPod. For the television campaign, Chiat/Day turned to @radical.media director Dave Meyers, who is fresh off winning the Video of the Year award at this year's MTV Video Music Awards for his clip for Missy Elliott's "Work It." Meyers previously worked with Chiat/Day on the production number "Jimmy & Jenny" for former client Kmart. In the new iPod spot, titled "Hip Hop," the shadowy dancers shake it to the track "Hey Mama" by The Black Eyed Peas.

So, friend of mine is running pre-relese version of Mc OS X 10.3 (“Pnther”) nd is hving some inexplicble trouble with his keybord in which he cn produce cpitl ‘A’ but not the lowercse version of the populr vowel. Neither he nor I hve clue how to begin troubleshooting this isse, so ny dvice would be extremely welcome. Thnk you.

The very first ad for the Apple II.

When this ad ran, Jobs got a letter from a woman in Oregon, who felt it was sexist, so the ad was revised for subsequent insertions to show a woman using a sophisticated display and a man (me) with a low-resolution display. We got no further complaints.

macosxhints - Saving and restoring tabs in Safari

As of this writing, an unplayable iTunes Music Store-encoded AAC file of Double Dutch Bus by Devin Vasquez is at auction for $15,099. I don’t think I’ve ever heard this song; have you?

iTunes iSbogus

Steve Jobs says the Music Store is “revolutionizing music.” What an impoverished imagination he has. An expensive jukebox and a long-playing walkman aren’t revolutionary. A revolution in music will be when people stop buying music and start living it: when 25 cent donations support more musicians than CDs ever did, when payola’s dead and radio is commercial-free all day long, when every American highschool has a recording studio just cause they’re that cheap to set up. This can all happen right now.

The new MacBytes.com looks like nothing so much as our dear Fark – just an observation.

I’ve been using Jen’s “post this” Movable Type bookmarklet for Safari for a couple weeks now and it’s quite refreshing. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a working bookmarklet and getting it back reminds me just how quick and easy it makes things. I have a slight improvement to share – this version puts any text you have selected into the ‘Entry Body’ field of the pop up window. (Be sure to check out the link above for good instructions on customizing the code to suit your needs.)

[post this]

I got an invitation to go to Apple's office for a presentation/meeting today (June 5, 2003) about how to get independent artists into the iTunes Music Store. There were about 150 people there, representatives from the best independent record labels and music services, in this invitation-only conference room. Steve Jobs came out and started a two and a half hour presentation/seminar/Q&A about iTunes and the benefits of independent labels making their music available there. I type fast and had my laptop, so I wrote down all the major points of their presentation as they went.

The PowerMate (input device) and Synergy (iTunes software controller) are a sublime pair, mating this luminescent dial to my own heavenly radio.

Steve, don't take it entirely personally. Your arse, up which I gleefully would shove every bit of your music service, was a trope.

PowerBook G4 (17-inch): How the Ambient Light Sensor Works.

‘Al brings an incredible wealth of knowledge and wisdom to Apple from having helped run the largest organization in the world—the United States government—as a Congressman, Senator and our 45th Vice President. Al is also an avid Mac user and does his own video editing in Final Cut Pro,’ said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

originally posted by xowie

It was about Chinatown, and the formation of Chinatowns in America. I lost like three pages of it; it was terrible. It was a really, really good paper.

Late-80s stoner fave Jam Session is now a free download. (It’s not unlike le piano graphique.)

Mac-nostalgists can also grab M.O.R.E., a still-great outliner of similar vintage.

originally posted by xowie

An astronaut will open several mid-deck lockers, pull out some parts, assemble the Power Mac G4 and a small satellite, float out of an airlock, and deliberately throw the satellite overboard.

Obligatory post from the new Apple Store in Tyson’s Corner… I’m having too much fun to write more. (The new iBook is incredible.)

What’s the word? New iBook.

45 minutes until Apple’s just-announced, invite-only “press event” (promising “exciting announcements,” of course). Everybody expects a new iBook, since the old ones have disappeared from retail channels & the Apple Store alike, but beyond that it’s anybody’s guess. ZDNet rounds up the rumors that seem grounded in reality, and if that’s not enough reading for you then keep an eye on MacSurfer for the latest headlines from the best of the Mac news sites.

I’d really love to know who gets invited to these things – I wonder how Apple treats sites like MacCentral and Macintouch which have all but replaced the mainstream media as the papers of record – so to speak – in terms of Apple news.

"I still wish we had been able to buy [Palm]," he says. Okay, then, how about making a run at Handspring, a maker of Palm-compatible handheld computers? Or co-branding with a maker of portable MP3 players or digital cameras or camcorders? After all, wouldn't Jobs like to have Apple profit more broadly and directly from this new digital lifestyle? And wouldn't that strategy work best if Apple's own stores were stocked with a wide array of Apple-branded digital gadgets? "I don't know what you're talking about," Jobs replies, looking at the ceiling. Then he smiles and changes the subject.

The Guardian Weblog is carrying a special May Day edition offering “analysis from the corporate and alternative media around the web” on expected May 1 “anti-capitalist” protests and on the broader protest movement. Meanwhile, across town… Apple is expected to announce everything from world peace to OS X on X86 at the May 1 “Apple event”, so keep your eyes on randomWalks (or any of a dozen better Mac news sources) to see what the big deal was.

You come to realise that the people who make these products are craftspeople who love what they do beyond any other product you have ever seen. And because so much love was put into this you end up loving the product, too.

You might ask: if any information can be represented as a finite sequence of symbols, can we represent other aspects of the world, such as a 1-centimeter cube of pure gold or an infinitely long non-repeating decimal like the square root of two, as information? We can. I just did.

Macworld San Francisco is right around the corner, and here at randomWalks, we’re keeping the faith. thanks, morning news.

Why didn’t anyone tell me how stunning Apple’s new monitor is?

And on the sage one, we went through racking our brains trying to find a song that mentioned sage. And all we could come up with was Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkle, which cost about as much as putting somebody on the moon to license it. Then we heard the Frank Sinatra version of "It's Not Easy Being Green." But somebody mentioned the Kermit version, and we were able to get the rights for that. Isn't it wonderful?

The power "button" on the top of the Cube has no moving parts. It's simply a spot with a logo on the plastic that uses capacitance to sense touch. When off, the power button turns on the Cube. When sleeping, the button wakes it. When on, the button puts it immediately to sleep.

Two takes on Apple’s next mouse: Appleinsider has posted some renderings of the ugliest looking blob I’d never want on my desk, and ZDNet has some nice stylized illustrations of the general shape of the new mouse, which is to be buttonless and possibly cordless. A new keyboard is expected to accompany the new mice.

Anyone who thinks Apple's revival is all about colors, curves and cutesy ads should take note -- this is real innovation. Apple didn't invent the technology -- it gets its AirPort cards straight from Lucent. But Steve Jobs et al deserve a lot of credit for seeing the potential in the technology, integrating it into their hardware and software, and bringing it to market at prices that have competitors gasping.

There’s a great Ask Slashdot discussion going on about computer companies and social responsibility. If you can cut through the “free” market rhetoric you’ll find some great info, such as this post with the news that the plastics used in Apple’s iMac carry some health & environmental risks.

Is there room for another mac rumors site? To be honest, I’ve always wanted to start one myself. In my fantasies, insiders send me blurry jpegs of unannounced Apple hardware and puzzling fragments of overheard conversations at Cupertino pizza joints; I’m guessing that chaosmint shares my perversion. What I find odd is that macrumors is using php and claims to have trained squirrels managing the submission process, which I thought was exclusive to CmdrTaco’s perl-based slashcode…