Apple have released a new mouse. Unusually for Apple, it doesn’t just have a single button. But if you were worried that Apple might have started to conform a bit too much, try working out just how many buttons it does have…
A bit more of a review on Russel Beattie’s site.
iTunes 4.9 is out and splashed across the front of Apple’s site with the tagline ‘Radio Reborn’. Why? Because it has built-in support for subscribing to podcasts. This is quite big news. More info.
I’ve been surprised how much I’ve used the RSS facilities in the Tiger version of Safari. I had assumed beforehand that the facilities in a general-purpose browser would not match up to those in NetNewsWire Lite, the RSS reader I had previously used. They don’t, but in fact Safari provides all I need – an indication on my bookmarks bar of which pages have new material.
So I expect that iTunes will now replace my copy of iPodderX Lite, though I’d still recommend the full iPodderX for anyone needing more substantial facilities.
If, like me, you normally only hear Steve Jobs talking about the latest Apple product launches, you might like the
Commencement Address he gave at Stanford recently.
If you need to dismantle your Powerbook, as I have recently for a hard disk replacement, you need the excellent PB FixIt Guide Series.
Fraser Speirs’ Flickr Export Plugin for iPhoto. Lovely!
So the rumours were right, and Apple are going to start producing machines based on Intel chips. Steve Jobs demonstrated Mac OS X running on a 3.6GHz Pentium 4; developer kits are available and consumer machines will be out next year. A translation system lets PowerPC binaries run on the new system until native versions are available. There’s an Intel press release here and an Apple one here.
This really makes the Intel architecture pretty dominant. But at least there are other suppliers, so in future Apple can shift to AMD, for example, if needed.
But it makes you wonder what the existing Apple hardware sales will be like for the next year…
I love my new Motorola RAZR V3. It’s the first phone I’ve really been able to slip in my jeans pocket and not notice. It doesn’t spoil the outline of my otherwise svelte figure(!) and it also has noticeably better sound quality than any mobile I’ve used recently.
Of course, when moving away from Nokia, you sacrifice ease of use, and Motorola’s user interface is even worse than most. This has bothered me less in recent years because much of what I used to do on phone keypads I now do on my Powerbook, which integrates with most of them very nicely. Sadly, however, the RAZR doesn’t integrate with the Mac Address Book as well as my previous phones. In particular, unlike the Nokia, it doesn’t let me send SMS messages directly from the Address Book.
This is why I was particularly pleased to discover BluePhoneElite, a $20 utility which not only gives you lots of control over SMSes, incoming and outgoing calls etc, but also does some cute things with Bluetooth, like pausing your music and changing your IM status when you (& your phone) go out of range of the computer. It also does genuinely useful things like pausing iTunes when you make or receive a call.
Very nice. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. Look at the stars!
I was looking up a word in my Mac’s dictionary and, being somewhat uncertain about the details of the response, I reached for the rather heavy OED which is on the bookshelf above my desk. Argh! It slipped from my grasp and crashed down on my Powerbook, scratching the screen and breaking two keys. I looked up, aghast, at the screen where the Dictionary application was cheerfully saying:
Mmm.
Well, it’s not all as tragic as it sounds. What I thought were permanent marks on the screen (because they didn’t come off with a damp cloth) soon succumbed to the world’s greatest cleaner. And I find that, even though it’s not very obvious from their site, PBParts can supply both the key caps and the little scissor mechanisms which go underneath. (Most people will tell you that you need a new keyboard). In the meantime, I have an external keyboard so I can keep working…
AOpen’s imitation of the Mac Mini is the highest form of flattery.
1. Safari can now save ‘Web Archive’ files. A single file that captures a page with all its images, links etc intact. Useful for anything that you suspect may become premium content in a little while! IE on Windows has had this for a while, of course, but on the Mac, as you save it on disk, it gets indexed by Spotlight…
2. The Mail app can now resize images. This is a great timesaver for me; I’m always creating small versions of my pictures using PhotoShop or ImageWell before dropping them on a mail message. Now, if your message has images in, a menu appears at the bottom of the window allowing you to select the size and telling you how big the resulting message will be. Very handy.
I wrote about the ability in the new Mac OS X to drive portrait-mode displays. Normally, on Powerbooks, this only applies to external displays. There is, however, a hidden way to rotate the internal display, which can be nice if you want to view a whole page:
Open System Preferences (it mustn’t already be running) and hold down Alt while clicking the Displays icon. You’ll then get the option to rotate the display.
Warning! This doesn’t rotate the trackpad! It can therefore be a fun challenge to manipulate the cursor after doing this. If you have a mouse, you can turn either it or the laptop through 90 degrees and everything is easy! This works quite well:
It took me some time to work out how to connect to my T-Mobile (UK) GPRS network using my Mac and my Motorola V3 RAZR phone, so I’ve posted this in case somebody out there is Googling for similar things!
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
RSS feed
Recent Comments