Technology Topic

Originally posted by MWSAH[..]

Got my own Sennheisers CX300 here.. Will be heaven on earth. I got the Philips HDD085 now, some 2-year old 3GB player with black adn white screen. It's loaded with U2 so I definately need a new one. I heard these Creatives are great, they might be even better than the Ipod Nano's. And the sound is also brilliant...

Originally posted by drewhiggins[..]

The nano is so feature-less. As are all the iPods (except the touch and iPhone). I might be getting a touch soon.

I started cleaning out my U2 collection the other day. Got rid of a lot of live shows (mostly Vertigo) and the compilation albums like 18 Singles, Best of 1990-2000 / 1980-1990 etc because I really don't need six identical versions of Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Originally posted by MWSAH[..]

Exactly right about those compilations. My Philips has a different approach: he knows the two Beautiful Days from ATYCLB and The Best Of are the same. So he puts BD in the Best Of map, leaving ATYCLB without BD. So I do have one version of it, but not in the right map. I can change the ID3-tag of course, but BD isn't the only one. I think I'll get rid of these compilations too...good idea

And about Vista: Indeed, Drew...way too slow. My laptop with 1 GB has XP and it's faster compared to the main PC, with 3GB, which has Vista running on it.

Originally posted by drewhiggins[..]

3GB should run Vista fine. My main PC runs XP Media Center Edition 2005 with 512MB RAM and does HDTV fine. And that same objective on Vista takes 1GB RAM minimum! So what's the deal? Either it's too slow or coded pretty shitty.

Only reason I had 18 Singles and Best of 1990-2000 was for the All I Want Is You, The Hands That Built America, Electrical Storm and Window In The Skies. Stuff The Saints Are Coming - I have a wrapped CD which I've had since the end of 2006, could become collectors stuff one day.

Originally posted by drewhiggins[..]

Mmmmm, a bit useless-sounding to me as well. So what's the "Air" reference mean? When it breaks can you can throw it through the air?

You can't use it over-the-air either (so to speak in technical terms). And that reminds me too...most modems plug in via Ethernet (the long blue cable with the clip on the end, actually it can be yellow, grey, red - whatever colour amuses you) doesn't actually work in this new MacBook.

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So you're stuck using USB cords or a USB dongle - and remember, you've only got one USB port. Is Apple taking functionality out of a lot of their products to get prices down and not having to support as much? They don't even support Firewire (officially) anymore, which is a better standard than USB and UWB simply because it's faster and more reliable.

Any difference in iTunes 7.6?

Originally posted by Apple
MacBook Air is the notebook that allows for a fully wireless lifestyle. It all begins with the fastest-available, next-generation 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR built in. And that’s just the beginning of the unprecedented wireless capabilities of MacBook Air.

Ahead of the curve.
In redefining thin, MacBook Air has shed something you no longer need: the optical drive. That’s because MacBook Air is built for the wireless world. So instead of listening to a CD, you can download music wirelessly from the iTunes Store. And instead of backing up files to a stack of discs, you can backup files wirelessly using Apple’s new Time Capsule.

However, for those times when you still need to install software on MacBook Air from a CD or DVD, a new feature called Remote Disc lets you wirelessly use or “borrow” the optical drive of a Mac or PC in the vicinity. So you can have full access to an optical drive without having to haul one around.

Remote Disc: How it works.

Set up Remote Disc on a nearby Mac or PC.
Select a nearby Mac or PC with an optical drive. On that computer, install the Remote Disc Setup software (found on the supplied Mac OS X Install DVD). It is now permanently enabled for Remote Disc.

Insert the software disc you want to install.
Insert the DVD containing the software you want to install on MacBook Air into the optical drive of the Remote Disc-enabled Mac or PC.

Install the software on MacBook Air.
In the Finder on MacBook Air, under Devices, select the icon that says Remote Disc. Click on the computer you enabled, and then double-click to open the software DVD. Now proceed with the installation just as if you had a built-in optical drive.

Even migration is wireless.
How do you transfer all of your files, music, photos and other valuable content from your old Mac to your new MacBook Air? Forget the FireWire cable — that’s the old way. MacBook Air lets you migrate everything wirelessly.
When you turn on MacBook Air for the first time, Setup Assistant walks you through the initial setup. Install the Remote Disc Setup software on the old Mac, and it will then be available to transfer information onto your new MacBook Air. It’s all wireless. All simple. And all secure.

Introducing wireless backup.
Mac OS X Leopard brought you Time Machine, the built-in backup that automatically copies files to an external drive. And now, Time Capsule — the new hard drive plus Wi-Fi base station — lets you use Time Machine to wirelessly back up your files. It’s effort free and yet another way MacBook Air lets you live and work untethered.

Originally posted by djrlewis[..]

Umm. You're way off the mark I'm afraid Drew. Bags of wireless support - the whole thing is built around it:-

[..]

So, it's very wireless enabled. Seems Apple have decided CD/DVD is a dead technology, ultimately.

The iTouch update is available now - I have it and it's very awesome. The e-mail in particular is very good, and I have a little icon on the main screen for here now!

iTunes 7.6 seems to be for this extra functionality on iTouch/iPhone and for the rental thing (US only again it seems)...

Originally posted by djrlewis[..]
So, it's very wireless enabled. Seems Apple have decided CD/DVD is a dead technology, ultimately.

Sounds good. I'd just like to have iTunes 8 soon. iTunes 7.5 is getting boring.

Originally posted by drewhiggins[..]

What I was told by someone who watched the whole keynote and others who were actually there. So if it has wireless support, why do most people who were at the presentation tell me that it has no wireless? Oh well, it probably does have wireless (maybe not one of the earlier 802.11 standards) and I'm hoping it's 802.11n. But, I see no point to getting rid of a CD/DVD drive. What if people want to import their CDs to iTunes or something like that - or do an operating system upgrade - or even backup their music collection through iTunes? Not everyone I know has an external hard drive or a flash drive.

A question to Dan...if I only have 4GB of music is it worth getting an iTouch?

Originally posted by Apple.comDisplay: 13.3" LCD widescreen display, 1280x800 pixel resolution
Graphics: Intel GMA X3100 / 144 MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory
Storage: 80-GB PATA hard drive / 64GB SSD optional
Processor: 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Merom[8], with 800 MHz FSB or 1.8GHz
Memory: 2GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM soldered to the logicboard
Optical storage: none, Optional External USB SuperDrive
Battery: 37 W-Hr Lithium-polymer battery, 5 hours running time
Bluetooth: 2.1+EDR built-in
Port connections: 1x USB 2.0

Originally posted by drewhigginsJust not "standard" wireless yet. The n standard is still being drafted 18 months on!,


[..]


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Not bad and looks the part, but the one USB port is probably a little bit of a drawback as well as no user-replaceable parts; the hard drive, memory and battery are sealed inside and external drives, Ethernet adapter, TV tuner (you've gotta get one for digital and HDTV) and expansion battery packs can be attached to the USB port only. So not one for upgrade enthusiasts.

Customizable home screen

While Apple still doesn't give you the ability to completely delete unnecessary built-in icons (like You Tube) from the iPhone Home screen, 1.1.3 does at least allow you to move them to sub-screens and arrange them as you like. Now, you can have up to 9 iPhone Home screens. You can even change which icons appear in the iPhone Home screen's Dock, that area at the bottom of the Home screen that contains links to Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod by default.

The customizable home screen is actually advertised the first time you turn on the iPhone after installing the 1.1.3 update. You'll see a dialog with the following text:

Edit Home Screen. To rearrange icons, touch and hold any icon until it starts to wiggle, then drag icons to desired locations. Drag an icon to the far right to create additional Home screens. Press the Home button when done.

It works as advertised. (The wiggle effect is ridiculous, but whatever.) You can drag icons around the current screen, off of either edge to other screens, or into the Dock (which is consistent across all screens). While there are a number of iPhone apps I'd love to just remove, this is better than nothing: I've moved You Tube, Text, Stocks, Calculator, and Notes off the main page as I never use them. I've also added Calendar to the Dock and moved iPod into the regular Home screen area. And I've added some much-used Web applications (see below) to the primary Home screen as well. Now the iPhone works the way I want it to. Nice.

Apple has also provided a way to add special Web shortcuts, called Web Clips, to the newly customizable Home screen. Web Clips aren't just bookmarks, however: They also save whatever zoom and page location data that exists when you create the Clip. So if you're zoomed into, say, the forecast section of the weather.com page for your location, you can save a Web Clip of that. Or just save the whole page like a regular bookmark.

Web Clips are created via a new plus sign ("+") button on the bottom toolbar in Safari, the iPhone's Web browser. This button opens a pop-up menu with Add Bookmark, Add to Home Screen, and Mail Link to this Page buttons; the middle option creates a Web Clip. Tap Add to Home Screen, and you can name the Clip (don't use too many characters as it gets truncated) and click Add to add it to the Home Screen. Web Clips appear as small thumbnails of the selected page, which is kind of nice.

To create a more specialized Web Clip--one that includes the page location and zoom--navigate to the page you want to save, navigate and zoom in on the page as needed, and then follow the same steps: Each Web Clip remembers the page location and zoom level that was used when the "+" button was pressed.

Unlike built-in apps, you can actually delete Web Clips from the Home screen: Just touch and hold the icon and once it stars wiggling you'll see a little "x" box above it and to the left. Click that box and the icon will be deleted.

Web Clips are a neat idea. Obviously, had Apple not decided to open up the iPhone with a real SDK, they'd be an even bigger deal. But in these months before legitimate iPhone applications appear, saving links to Web apps in this fashion will be highly desirable. And if you spend a lot of time in particular Web apps as I do, this will be a nice option going forward regardless.
Maps improvements

While the iPhone does not include dedicated GPS hardware or even offer a way (at least yet) to add that capability via a plug-in device, Apple has improved the (Google) Maps application in the iPhone to add a GPS-like location capability. This feature uses cell phone tower triangulation to locate you. The result is not as precise as GPS, of course, but it's much better than nothing. (The iPhone can also use a connected wireless access point to locate you via Wi-Fi, though this is even less reliable in my experience so far, often resulting in a "your location could not be determined" error.)

The new location feature is exposed by a small round button in the lower left of the Maps application, in the toolbar to the left of the Search and Directions buttons. When you click it, Maps will try to triangulate your location. It's not accurate enough for a military bombing campaign, but it's OK for casual consumer use. At my home, Maps tells me I'm about one exit down the nearby highway, but it's in the ballpark. Assuming a pretty big ballpark, that is.

There's another new icon in the Maps toolbar, which looks like an eye and is found to the right of Search and Directions: This button visually curls up the current map view to expose options such as Drop Pin, Hide/Show Traffic, and Map, Satellite, Hybrid, and List. Hybrid view is new: As with its Web-based cousin, you can now overlay the Map and Satellite views on top of each other. The Drop Pin is also new to Maps, though again you are likely familiar with it from the Web-based Google Maps: You can drop a pin at your current location (or at least nearby, based on the accuracy of the location triangulation), save pins like bookmarks, and use pins as the start and end points of directions. Again, all very familiar to anyone that's used a Web-based mapping service before.

Multi-recipient SMS

Being an adult and an iPhone user, I don't have much use for SMS, but I know a lot of other people do, so I won't completely ridicule this feature, at least not while you're watching anyway. With iPhone 1.1.3, you can now send the same SMS message to multiple recipients. Just add more recipients via the handy new plus ("+") button that now appears in the To field in the New Message portion of the Text application.

Sadly, Text still uses horrible iChat-style text balloons and sound effects. You can edit the sounds in the Sounds Settings, but hopefully, we'll be able to customize the balloon silliness in a future iPhone update. (As, incidentally, you can do in iChat.)
iTunes movie rentals

In tandem with the release of iTunes 7.6, Apple now supports the same kind of movie rentals that Windows Media-based services have employed for about a decade now, with similar functionality and pricing. But there's one huge and important difference with Apple's system: Because it works with all modern iPods and the iPhone, movie rentals from the iTunes Store are far more interesting.

Of course, you can't download rented or purchased movies from the iPhone itself. Instead, you must rent movies from your PC-based version of iTunes and transfer them to the iPhone as you would with any other iTunes-based content. Rented movies are reasonably priced ($3 to $4 for standard definition movies and $4 to $5 for HD movies) and come with industry-standard usage terms: Once you rent a movie, you have 30 days to begin watching it. And once you begin watching that movie, you have 24 hours to finish watching it; you can watch the rented movie as often as you'd like during that 24 hour period.

As of this writing, rented movies have yet to appear in the iTunes Store, but if Apple's promotional materials are accurate, this service should work as well or better than similar services from Amazon.com Unbox, CinemaNow and Movielink. (Yeah, we have it good on the PC side.) On the iPhone, rented movies show up in the Videos section of the iPod application, under a new heading, "Rented Movies." Because rented movies expire, information about the time out period appears on this screen as well.
Other iPhone 1.1.3 changes

In addition to these big changes, iPhone 1.1.3 adds a number of smaller new features.

Gmail IMAP support added to Mail
While Google added IMAP support to its popular Gmail Web-based email service back in early December, iPhone users (like myself) who wished to access Gmail in this fashion from the iPhone were forced to manually configure the server information. Now, the iPhone's Mail application automatically configures Gmail as IMAP, removing this time consuming and error-prone process. Bravo: Gmail support on the iPhone is now truly a first class experience.

Movie chapters support
While rented, purchased, and even ripped movies can support DVD-like chapters that make navigating through a movie easy, this support was never been formally supported on the iPhone. Now it is. Supported movies will feature a new Chapters button on the iPod playback overlay, to the right of Back, Play/Pause, and Forward, that brings up a DVD Player-like list of the available movie chapters, similar to the display you see in iTunes. Just tap a chapter to navigate to that part of the movie.

Song lyric support
If you add lyrics to music files via iTunes (found in the Lyrics tab of the Get Info window in iTunes), the iPhone will now display them. Song lyrics appear over album art during song playback.

Use Gift Cards in the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store
Apple now lets you redeem iTunes Gift Cards in the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, so you won't have to use your PC to take advantage of such a gift. Gift Card redemption occurs via a handy Redeem button, found in the top toolbar of the Downloads section of the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store application.

Tthe world's thinnest notebook at 0.16" to 0.76" - thinner than the the thinnest part of a Sony TZ series laptop. Screen size is an LED backlit 13.3" widescreen with a magnetic latch. The MacBook Air keyboard is MacBook-like, but with an ambient light sensor. The new machines feature a multi-touch trackpad, allowing the user to double-tap and move. Rotate a photo by pivoting your index finger around your thumb, as well as pinch & zoom.

Additionally there's a 45 Watt MagSafe power adapter, a Micro-DVI out as well as Audio Out, 802.11n + Bluetooth 2.1/EDR. There's a 1.8" hard drive for storage - either 80GB standard, or a 64GB SSD as an option. Intel shrunk the size of the Core 2 Duo chip by 60% to fit in the new machine.

Battery life is approximately 5 hours. No optical drive is on the MacBook Air, but a SuperDrive accessory is available for $99. There's also new software being released that allows the portable to "borrow" a Mac or PC's optical drive. All models feature 2GB of memory standard.

The case is fully aluminum (good for recycling), the first fully mercury and lead free display, circuit boards are BFR free, and retail packaging are 56% less volume than a MacBook.

Starting at just $2,999, the new Xserve has up to two Quad-Core 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon processors for 8-core performance, a new server architecture, faster front side buses, faster memory, up to 3TB of internal storage and two PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots for greater performance and flexibility. “With the latest Intel processors and no client access licenses, Xserve offers unbeatable server performance and value for under $3,000,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

Major software upgrade available for iPod touch

With the installation of this major software upgrade, the best iPod becomes even more: the world’s best Wi-Fi mobile device. The upgrade—available from iTunes for just $19.99—adds five more great mobile applications to iPod touch: Mail, Maps, Stocks, Weather, and Notes. It also includes such new features as Web Clips, a customizable home screen, and the ability to watch iTunes Movie Rentals on iPod touch.

Mac OS X 10.5.2 was one of the possible updates surrounding Macworld, but has yet to show up in our software update. The previous seed of Mac OS X 10.5.2 re-introduced a list view to the Stacks.

No announcements about Mac OS X 10.5.2 were made at Macworld, but one submitter noted that the requirements for Time Capsule had stated originally stated a minimum of Mac OS X 10.5.2, though this has since been changed.

Apparently, Apple hasn't quite finished working on Mac OS X 10.5.2 and issued a new seed just yesterday, addressing a number of issues. The latest build is 9C16.