Status-Q

One of the things Steve Jobs announced in his latest keynote was a drop in the price of the AppleTV, from $299 to $229 for the base model.

This should be good news for us at CamVine, because we buy quite a few of these – we take them apart and do nefarious things with them.

But there’s no price drop in the UK market – in fact, they’re still selling at £199. Now that’s not a bad price overall, and you have to remember that UK prices include 17.5% tax, but it’s still nearly $400 – substantially more even than the old price.

The price drop in the US, of course, coincided with the availability of movie rentals from the iTunes Music Store – something not available in other parts of the world yet. I wonder if the US hardware is being subsidised at all by the rental business?

They’re very nice devices, but I don’t have one at home because, some time ago, I bought a Mac Mini to go beside my TV, and an Elgato EyeTV box to capture digital broadcasts. It does everything the AppleTV does and a lot more – playing DVDs, for one thing. At the time, it seemed like quite an extravagance. But I’ve never regretted it for a moment. The vast majority of our TV watching is done this way now, and the recent release of a new version of the EyeTV software just makes it better.

Here’s a new feature in Apple’s Leopard OS that’s quite easy to miss:

In the File > Open dialog box on most apps, the left-hand side of the dialog shows your disks, your favourite places etc. What I hadn’t noticed until I heard about it on the Inside Aperture podcast was that in many cases there will also be a ‘Media’ section below these, which lets you browse and search your music from iTunes, your photos from iPhoto and Aperture etc.

Here, I’m browsing my Aperture library from Word’s Insert > Picture > From file… menu.

No need to know the directory in which an image lives before inserting it into your document, if you prefer to think in terms of albums. No need to start up your photo-management software in order to find it.

I write this blog in WordPress using Safari, and when I came to upload the image above I noticed that the upload dialog box has the same Media Browser section too. And because this is part of the OS, not the application, it’s also there in Firefox.

Just to repeat the point, here I’m in Sound Studio opening tracks from iTunes:

I have a cat, which I think I can now let out of the bag.

DisplayLink (who, quite rightly, seem to be the darling of CES at present) have started demonstrating the Mac support for their video-over-USB technology.

I’ve been using it for a few months, and while the performance isn’t up to that of the Windows drivers yet, it’s quite usable. Here’s a photo I took in September of my 4-screen MacBook Pro setup.

You’ll notice that the DVI connector is not in use in this shot. Normally, at present, I’m using one DVI screen and one USB screen, giving three screens in all.

As we’ve always said, pixels are like broadband – they’re addictive. Once you’ve had them, you don’t want to give them up. A friend pointed out that this makes complete sense – displays are the network between your computer and your brain, so having a lot more of them really is like upgrading to a broadband connection.

And no, before anyone asks, I’m not sure when the Mac drivers will be generally available!

Congratulations to Patrick et al…