Status-Q

I’m quite a fan of Apple’s Mighty Mouse – I have a few of the wired ones and miss them when I’m on a machine that doesn’t have them. They do have a downside, though, which is that it’s fairly easy for the scrollball to get a bit gunked up, and cleaning it is not trivial.

If you suffer from this, you need this page, which has a range of different remedies that have got people out of trouble, and I’ve just added my method to the list. Basically it involves stretching out a piece of Scotch Tape/Sellotape sticky side up and running the ball up and down on it… Not the easiest manouveur, but the results were splendid!

Anyway, all of this reminds me of a great story I read many many years ago, in a book about the Atari ST, back when mice were still a novelty, and they still had their balls on their underside… as it were. So you needed a mousemat, and these were also a novelty and rather expensive.

The author of the book – whose name I forget, sorry – said that you didn’t need to buy one of these expensive things because wetsuit material worked very well, and he told the story of going into his local watersports supplier, where they normally sold the stuff by the foot or the yard, and asking for a piece about 6 inches square.

When they asked why he wanted such a small piece of wetsuit material, he said, quite seriously:
“Oh, it’s for my mouse…”

Michael has a nice comparison and likes the new one. I’ve only had a quick play with it, but I admire Apple’s courage in breaking out of the traditional video-editing user interface model. There are some bits of it that are done very well, and if you’ve never used any kind of video-editing tool before so don’t have anything to unlearn, it could be rather good. A major use of iMovie is in education; I’d be interested to know how that world takes to it.

I do most of my video editing in Final Cut Express and only use iMovie for quick stuff. I expect the new iMovie would do the quick stuff just fine, perhaps better. But it’s less capable than the old one and I couldn’t survive on it alone if I didn’t have FCE, which I might have been able to do in the past.

A cynic might suggest that this is deliberate, that Apple want to push more people to upgrade, but I don’t think that’s their way. iPhoto keeps getting better and better, for example, despite the obvious upgrade path to Aperture. And if you wanted to smooth the path for those school kids to become eventual Final Cut Pro editors, you wouldn’t introduce them to that world using a completely different paradigm.

No, I think the only real mistake here, as others have said, is calling it iMovie and selling it as an upgrade. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Follow-up: One more thing to be aware of from the System requirements page: “iMovie requires a Mac with an Intel processor, a Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0GHz or faster), or an iMac G5 (1.9GHz or faster )”. Powerbook owners take note. If, for this or any other reason, you prefer the previous iMovie, Apple offer it as a free download for those who have purchased iLife ’08.

InfoWorld is reporting a survey suggesting that Apple’s laptop sales are growing fast while Dell’s have fallen to an historic low.

This made me wonder whether the announcement 18 months ago that Apple was, for a while, worth more than Dell, still held true now. I headed over to NASDAQ and, to my astonishment, not only is Apple worth more, it’s worth nearly twice as much. Wow.

Just starting to get to grips with the new features in iWork.

Keynote has a nice one: When you select the fill/outline characteristics for an object such as a photo, one of the stroke types is ‘picture frame’ which puts a fancy border around the thing you’ve selected.

This is very cute, but there aren’t many frame types available. Over at KeynoteUser, however, they’ve discovered that there are many more hidden away inside Keynote, which can be enabled with a quick hack.

Oh, and it works in Pages too, with a minor modification.

Announced today – new and very pretty iMacs, an update to iLife, and iWork now has a spreadsheet application and many other improvements.

An iWork update will certainly make me get my credit card out. I’ve become a great fan of Keynote and Pages, and the fact that Pages now has a ‘track changes’ feature means that most of my reasons for starting up Word have now vanished. Hurrah!

Have a look at some of the iWork demo videos on Apple’s site. Looks very pretty. My family pack is already on order…

Oh, and the Mac Mini is now a Core 2 Duo machine.