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Show Notes
Using the Sidebar
Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts
Photocasting and publishing articles for subscribers
Other Sites Mentioned
Bell’s in the Batfry
In The Trenches

MacTV episode #98 was released a couple of days ago with a high resolution video of the new Mac-Intel ad. Featuring Keifer Sutherland as a voice over the TV commercial depicts some Intel “bunny-men” setting free a new Core Duo processor from Intel. The controversial voice-over by Sutherland says:

The Intel chip. For years it’s been trapped inside PCs, inside dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks; when it could have been doing so much more. Starting today the Intel chip will be set free and get to live life inside a Mac. Imagine the possibilities.

Intel denied all knowledge of the content of the commercial, insisting that it only saw it for the first time 2 hours before Steve Jobs’ Keynote on Tuesday. Regardless, another stir in the Intel camp as PC manufacturers (some of Intel’s biggest clients) were appalled at their apparent belittling.

Regardless, I say well done Apple, and well done Intel. This is one effective commercial and one many of us will watch with joy for some time yet.
[Update: A development I didn't want to help ignite, arose shortly after publising this article. I since have further information which may be of use to some readers. Apple appears to have copied a music video with the design of this commercial. The video was for a song called Such Great Heights, by The Postal Service. MacTV have released a side-by-side video comparison of some of the shots from either video. It certainly makes for interesting viewing given Apples background in the advertising market.

That said, Sarah Moody of Sub Pop Records (The Postal Service's Seattle record company) quoted:

... the Apple commercial is indeed very similar, it wasn't licensed in any form, and was made by the same directors as the Postal Service video [Josh Melnick and Xander Charity, whose working name is Josh and Xander]. We weren’t alerted to the fact that it existed until the day it came out.

Details of the legality of this commercial are still a little gray.]

Did I miss something in the Keynote last week? There was one feature, one incredible, can’t live without feature that Steve Jobs introduced a while back in 2005 that doesn’t appear to be in the new versions of iLife or iWork… Let me explain.

I was taking a look at iWeb last night when I noticed something was a little off. I wasn’t made aware of how the images were stored in those web pages. Do the images simply overlay the Apple example images, or do they replace them? For this I realized I would have to go into the source code, it has to be faster than surfing the Apple support forums.

Then, before I got chance to go elsewhere to check this out, I started thinking about images in general. Wasn’t Aperture just the most amazing application? Completely out of the blue, very new and it integrated just tones of new features really well. For example, it had this amazing , non-destructive database system for image editing… Wait a minute. Shouldn’t iPhoto have that?

I checked my Keynote notes and Steve didn’t mention it, I checked the preferences and help files and nothing to suggest it, I checked my Pictures folder and hey presto; not one, but two folders for image storage. Original and Modified folders for your iPhoto Library. Why? Since this new data-basing technology is already available to Apple, it’s already been developed, couldn’t this have been included?

While I pondered this as a major loss to one of Apples best pieces of software I started thinking why they wouldn’t. I quickly came to the conclusion that Apple knows it’s a pro feature, from a pro application and unlike Photoshop (which is often pirated and used from time to time by consumers instead of power/pro users) iPhoto is used all the time by everyone. Rosetta won’t handle any of Apples Pro apps until March and thus I don’t think this new technology will work on new Intel based systems until around the same time. Is this really a good enough reason not to include it though?

My prediction to come out of all this: iLife ‘07 will see the major upgrades, as will iWork ‘07 (where running on Intel chips may well prove to be a real bonus for Spreadsheet programs as well as the aforementioned database programs) including much of the currently “pro” technology being included in consumer level applications. For now though; we will have to put up with iPhoto’s poor file and disk management.

During the bustle of MacWorld 2006 there were reports coming form any and every source attending, and even some not attending the event. One report seems to have slipped through however; the NewsWeek MSNBC exclusive interview with Steve Jobs. Steve had some interesting answers to questions which his staff were not obliged to retort on the show floor. For example, when asked about the similarities between the PowerBook and the new MacBook Pro, Steve responded:

The form factors [the physical design] are perfect, we don’t know how to make them any better. And now we’ve got Intel processors in them so obviously they run a lot faster.

When questioned about Apple Stores reaching saturation point (following a first billion dollar quarter at the end of 2005) Steve replied:

We tend to build 30 to 40 stores a year. We know we can control the quality that way, both in terms of the real estate selection and in terms of the build-outs. We have many years to go at that rate.

The most interesting answer however, one which we have all been looking for Apple to release seemed to just slip out of Steves mouth before he realized what he was saying:

[The MacBook Pros battery life is] About the same—this with a dual processor! Each processor is as fast as a G5, and the battery life will be the same as [the previous PowerBook’s] G4.

Some interesting quotes and more over, the final question of this interesting if short lived interview refers back to a theory I have made public many times, so perhaps I wasn’t so wrong after-all.

[Note: I publicly announced that my estimate for iPod sales, Q4 2005, was 12-14 million. So there you go.]

It would seem that not everyone is excited about the new iWork updates. The two applications in Apples new iWork suite are the same as before, Pages and Keynote, and it ships for a fee of $79 (single license, $99 for the family pack) without an upgrade option. Taking this into account, that is a relatively large amount of money to spend every year on what Steve Jobs only appeared to describe as some template designs.

robg of Mac OS X Hints has other ideas however. He has extensive knowledge of Keynote through his work related presentations and has always had one gripe with the software.

Since I do a lot of presenting, I was most interested in the changes in Keynote, and whether they would address my number one gripe with the program. My gripe has to do with bulleted lists; namely, that when you have a bulleted list on a slide, you can (a) only have one such list per slide, and (b) you can’t do anything else while those bullets were appearing on the screen. Assume the first bullet in a list is “Mail’s new interface look,” for instance, followed by “iTunes’ new video features.” In prior versions of Keynote, you couldn’t insert a screenshot of the Mail interface after the first bullet, then have the screenshot vanish before the second bullet. This led to all sorts of stupid workarounds, most of which involved duplicating large numbers of slides.

In Apple’s booth Tuesday after the keynote, a rep demonstrated that Apple had fixed my gripe in Keynote 3. You can have as many bulleted lists on a slide as you like, and you can now do things during the bullet builds. Since my presentation wasn’t until Thursday, I went to the Apple retail store in San Francisco and bought a copy of iWork. I then spent much of my free time on Tuesday and Wednesday updating my presentations to take advantage of the new Keynote 3 bullet building feature (and inserting some of the nice new slide transitions). I found Keynote 3 to be a great improvement over the prior version, and hence, iWork earns this week’s Pick of the Week on the merits of Keynote alone.

It would appear that for those of us with iWork ‘05, but without proper experience of it there is a lesson to be learned. Not everything is always as it seems, and if you plan on giving presentations in the future, it may be worth the purchase (or convincing your boss of the purchase) for the more hidden and back end features.

[robg's rating: 9/10]

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This is a special Macworld Expo wrap up show that was recorded by my friends Deborah Shadovitz, aka Deb Shadovitz, Author, speaker and consultant from www.shadovitz.com, and Shelly Brisbim, technology writer and host of Shelly’s Podcast. I know many of you have heard all about MacWorld but this is a good review of the shows highlights from a very honest point of view.

Deborah and Shelly did a great job on this wrap-up. I am so lucky to have these wonderful Mac professionals contributing my podcast. Thank you.

I want to thank Deb and Shelly for giving up their time and talent to let us have this wonderful wrap-up of the Mac Expo.

Show Notes
Deborah Shadovitz Mac Website
Shelly’s Podcast. You must subscribe to this podcast.
Who is Guy Kawasaki? Here is his Wikipedia Entry
Memory Miner
Circus Ponies Notebook
IRISCard mini
IRISCard mini: not yet available in the U.S., but on display at
MacWorld, IRISCard mini is a scanner that lets you scan business
cards in black and white or greyscale. It includes OCR software that
automatically reads the card, and sends the data to their appropriate
fields, then exports the data to contact management software
including Apple Address Book.

A special thanks to M-Audio for providing the audio equipment

Thanks also to Pam Borys (Apple Consultant), and Sam Downey (Apple Solution Consultant) for participating in this podcast.

Enjoy
Victor

A couple of days ago I reported issues with my iLife ‘06 installation where GarageBand 3 was repeatedly crashing, even when I ditched all the preferences, .plist etc. Nothing I did would stop this behavior except changing Users. This I thought was odd, what is different between User accounts other than preference files? Now it seems obvious; media. I did test GarageBand without the Media Browser open and performance did improve, temporariliy.

George Starcher contacted me today however, having dug around the Apple Support forums a little. He came across this thread which explains that GarageBand has issues with certain media types in your /user/movies folder when runnig. For more information, please refer to the linked thread or contact us.

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TMPU04-01-13-2006.mp3

Ok this is a test podcast so that my listeners can hear the new Garage Band Podcast Studio. This recording was done 5 minutes after installing the new Garage Band Podcast Studio. I completed recording, saving and posting the recording to my dot.Mac account in 33 Minutes start to finish.

This file is being published here so that you can hear the quality provided by this new wonderful too. I can predict that Garage Band Podcast Studio is going to open up podcasting to a whole new world.

I will do a full show next Wednesday. All I can say for now is. . . WOW!!

Get iLife from the Apple Site Now!

Ejoy
Victor

FYI you guys I found this on the Apple Web site and thought I’d better get the word out.

GarageBand 3 songs won’t open in earlier versions

If you take a song that you created in GarageBand version 1 or 2, open it in GarageBand 3, and save it, then it will no longer open in GarageBand 1 or 2.

This happens because GarageBand 3 has a new song format that makes its projects incompatible with earlier versions. To maintain backward compatibility, create copies of older songs before opening them in GarageBand 3.

Note that there’s no warning messages about this compatibility issue. So consumer beware.

Enjoy
Victor
[Be the first to Digg this Article]

Earlier I found a great little article to clear up the confusion from my posting earlier in the week about the iTunes Music Store, especially the Mini Store. While I was raising the question and answering it as best I could at the time, there has been much information come to hand over the past 24 hours or so that has really opened up our knowledge. Well worth a read and my apologies for anything I wrote which may have mislead you.

[The Article: The iTunes Music Store: Fact and Fiction by Kirk McElhearn]