Sorry, kids: no “true” video iPod, no Macbook, no tablet. But…

An iPod Hi-Fi, with “room-filling power without distortion.” It’s portable, mains or battery powered, has built-in carry handles, and connects to every iPod. You can control it with an Apple Remote, or via a Software Update for your iPod. Price: $349, available now.

Also, as we noted earlier, a new Mac mini: in all but name, it’s the media center that a lot of people have been begging for. Same size, same shape, but Intel powered. There are two models, 1.5GHz Core Solo and 1.66GHz Core Duo, priced at $599 and $799 (which means prices have gone up a little with this update). The new machines are available now. They come with Front Row and Apple Remote, gigabit ethernet, four USB ports, analogue and SPDIF audio outs. They are, says Apple, between 2.5 and 5.5 times faster than previous models, depending on the processor.

Included with them is the new Front Row software. It can stream TV shows in iTunes across your network and show them on your TV. It can tune into shared iTunes and iPhoto libraries. Streaming over Bonjour is important here: “Media from any other Mac or Windows computer running iTunes will be piped over to the Mac mini hooked up to your television set.” Bonjour is coming into its own with this release.

OK folks, here’s what we got so far:

New Mac mini - same size, same shape, but Intel powered. With Front Row and Apple Remote. Core Solo CPU and Core Duo models to choose from. Gigabit Ethernet, four USB ports, analogue and SPDIF audio outs. Between 2.5 and 5.5 times faster than previous models, depending on the processor. But! Prices have gone up - $599 and $799. Available now.

Front Row - new feature: it can tune into shared iTunes libraries, and shared iPhoto pictures & videos. Streaming: “Media from any other Mac or Windows computer running iTunes will be piped over to the Mac mini hooked up to your television set.” Really making use of Bonjour now.

More to come.

Much of the hallway talk around PMA has drifted to archiving, the permanence of prints from today’s home printers, and what shape our images will be in 100 years from now. The growing distrust of optical media’s archival ability combined with its lack of storage capacity for today’s huge files has people wondering, “what should I use?”

Hard drives seem OK for temporary storage, as long as there’s plenty of redundancy. But are they really practical over decades? Suddenly photographers are thinking about archiving to paper and film again — printing on stable stock with long lasting dyes and migrating their most cherished digital images to back to film. When stored properly, this return to paper and celluloid makes a certain amount of sense… I think. Or does it?

Looking for a Mac OS X focused Ruby on Rails tutorial? Head over to Apple’s developer web area for a nice little tutorial on the subject.

For the last five days, I’ve been near-obsessively refreshing the FedEx website, hoping for news of the whereabouts of my new computer. I’m transitioning away from a work-owned PowerBook G4 1.5Ghz, and into a MacBook Pro 1.83Ghz of my very own. This morning, when the knocking came at 8am, I was convinced it was anyone but the FedEx guy delivering my computer, as we all know that FedEx’s modus operandi is something on the order of overpromise and underdeliver, but there he was, dropping off the tiny box that I couldn’t believe actually held my computer.

To my shock and awe, there it was. The box itself is half as thin, and only slightly taller than the PowerBook boxes I’ve come so used to unpacking. Nestled within its polysterene innards was my computer, its monumental power adapter, a few discs, a remote and a display adapter. These are my first thoughts, from unpack to working system, are contained within.

Adobe released Photoshop Elements 4 for the Mac today at PMA. I had a chance to meet with an Adobe engineer last night in Orlando to talk about Elements 4 and some of its notable features. Adobe has packed quite a bit of power in this affordable package.

First, and a bit of a surprise, Elements 4 now has a streamlined version of Bridge. So there’s a fully capable file browser built right into the app. The biggest “wow” feature however, is the new “Adjust Color for Skin Tones” control that lets you click on a spot of skin, then Photoshop analyzes it and corrects the color. I saw it tested on a variety of subjects, and it worked remarkably well. Speaking of our people shots, the new red eye correction tool is the model of simplicity. You just enable it and Photoshop finds all the instances of red eye in the image and fixes them for you. The Mac version isn’t able to correct red eye on import as in the Windows release, but this approach works quite well.

Adobe has included some very helpful selection tools too. The Magic Select Brush and the Magic Extractor tools speed up the tedious task of selecting an element within your picture to adjust or copy and place elsewhere. They don’t achieve perfection automatically, but they do get you close enough so that with a little clean-up you’re in business.

The price for Elements 4 is still $89. This a great value for a powerful image editor. Considering that it includes Bridge and the latest version of Camera Raw, this application is all most hobbyist photographers would ever need.

What is Microsoft up to?

Look at the Origami Project and you don’t get very much information, but what little you do get implies that Origami is going to be something mobile-ish, something tablet-ish, something multimedia-ish.

An iPod competitor? Perhaps, in the sense that it will almost certainly include file storage and music playing features. But just because something can store music files and play them, that doesn’t make it a serious iPod competitor.

Related link: https://www.edwardtufte.com/

On Friday Brian Jepson sent email to the O’Reilly Editor’s list about a new book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte.

I’m interested in anything published by Graphics Press, so I visited the web site right away to find out more. It sounds intriguing:

“More than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries….Fresh examples from fiction and nonfiction bring new insights into the ways syntactic patterns work. Because the examples are such a pleasure, readers may be tempted to skip anything else, but the comments are inviting also, calling attention to techniques that are useful to writers of almost any type of fiction or nonfiction.”

Indeed I ordered “Artful Sentences”…but there was another big treat waiting for me at the site. Beautiful Evidence, the fourth volume in Edward Tufte’s wonderful series on information design, is at the printer and available for pre-order!

I took Tufte’s one-day class almost five years ago, and it’s influenced me more than any other class or conference I’ve attended (and in over six years as an O’Reilly employee, I’ve attended some pretty amazing stuff!). I still enjoy refering to the three books (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative) and to my notes from that day. I’ve been waiting for the fourth book ever since. Intriguing previews have been posted to the Ask ET forums, but I’m delighted that “Beautiful Evidence” is almost here, and “Artful Sentences” sounds like it will sweeten the wait.

There’s nothing more powerful on this planet than simple economic theory: the logical outworkings of supply and demand. You have a need? Someone will always fill it — well, for the right price. There’s money to be made? Someone will make it — even if it fills your inbox with all sorts of great deals on Valentine’s Day “meds.” Well, that’s unless big brother steps in. Such is the case with China. Sort of.

Apple recently sent out media invites for a gathering at the Cupertino Town Hall building on Feb. 28. I’ll be covering PMA in Orlando that day, and many of my cohorts will be at Flash Forward. I guess we’ll have to hear the news like everyone else… on our mobile RSS readers.

That doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy the delicious rumors that have been circulating. Some of my favorites are:

• Intel iBook - which most likely with be dubbed the “MacBook” without the “Pro.”
• Intel Mac mini - will it get a new name too?
• Full screen video iPod for movie watching. Looks something like an Apple version of a Palm LifeDrive with a virtual touch screen scroll wheel.
• iTunes Movie Store - If you’re going to have new hardware, you need content to put on it.

Pretty good stuff… how much of it do you think we’ll actually see next Tuesday?

As best I can tell, the 1 billionth song was purchased on iTunes around 0600Z (10PM PST). Somewhere, someone has won a bunch of cool products from Apple. And, boy, am I envious :-)

Over at OWC, they not only received their 15″ MacBook Pro, they took photos of its immediate disassembly. The photos reveal some interesting design changes that are worthy of note. Anyone who’s ever disassembled their 12″ or 15″ PowerBook know what it’s like to keep the screws straight. They also know what it’s like to curse Apple, Jonathan Ive, their own mothers for giving birth to them, and any manner of other inanimate objects nearby. Because taking apart a PowerBook to replace a cooked HD is Painful. I know, I bear a cut on my right index finger from doing one last week.

Looking at the MacBook, though, they seem to have simplified the design a bit. Three screws on either side, that’s the same, but that’s about all that’s the same. Beneath the battery are three screws that hold in the RAM access coverplate, which in turn reveals two torx screws that secure the top cover in place. Take out those, the four screws on the bottom, and the three on either side, and we’re looking at 15 screws instead of 20 to get inside. Except, wait, it gets better. The whole lid just appears to unlock and swivel upward, instead of needing to remove the keyboard (and the 12 screws that requires) to unlock the top plate, the whole lid come off. Now, this may well be the case with the Aluminum PowerBooks with the lit keyboards, but I’m not real sure.

More to follow

If you’re serious about your digital photography, then you may be wondering if Apple’s Aperture is software you should consider. That was on the minds of many people who attended the Aperture Power Tools workshop at the recent Macworld in San Francisco.

If you missed that training, Scott Bourne and I are teaming up again for an Introduction to Aperture 2-Day Lecture/Demo Course at Pixel Corps in San Francisco on March 17 and 18. This two full days of immersion into Aperture is only $249. And the facilities at Pixel Corps are terrific.

Plus… March is a great time to be in the Bay area for photographers!

My friend John is a hardware tech for MacUpgrades in Bethesda, Maryland. From time to time, we have long chats about the state of older Mac hardware, and after seeing what he can do with a Grey and White tower, I would consider him to be one of the last die-hard Mac Hardware Guys. He dropped me a line yesterday to let me know that Apple had marked the venerable old Blue & White machines as “Vintage”, which means that they no longer will issue repair parts, no longer support the units’ hardware and essentially means that repairing them will become near impossible.

The Blue and White tower was such a radical departure for Apple Machines, both aesthetically and design-wise. The Blue and White was the first Mac to take advantage of the hinged drop down door that made them so easy to work with, so easy to fix, so wonderful to live with. And now, like many machines before it, it has been relegated to Vintage status.

We come today, not to mourn Blue & White, but to celebrate it. Give us your best Blue and White Story in the comments.

Related link: https://www.oreillynet.com/future

A couple of Distributing the Futures ago, Chris Adamson produced a piece on Java Podcasts. I always like Chris’ work but I was also struck by how much richer the show sounded with pieces produced by other voices.

I’ve been wary of there being too much of my voice in the show so I’ve tended to edit my voice out of the interviews I do. Listeners have asked that I not do that and so in the most recent program you may notice that the interview with James Duncan Davidson sounds a bit different because you can hear the questions being asked. In the same show, I had already cut myself out of the interview with Bruno Souza - I think we will continue to play with a mix.

We get many suggestions for stories that people would like to hear on the show so I wanted to invite you to consider pitching a story that you might be interested in producing. I’m not sure how this will work, but it’s an experiment worth trying. If you have a segment you would like to produce for Distributing the Future please email us at future at oreilly.com.

Camino and Safari both have a very different view on what “Reset” means. Two very interesting approaches with very different effects for their users indeed.

A new security issue has apparently been found in Safari. What does it mean? That some features should not exist, regardless of how secure an application is.

Does anyone actually know someone whose Mac has been infected by Leap.A? There haven’t been very many sightings of it in the wild.

The media coverage for this event has been out of all proportion to the hazard posed by the malware itself; reports in the daily newspapers, on the TV news. But look closely, and there are two different stories being reported.

The iPod video has replaced the PowerBook as my airline travel companion. There are a couple reasons for this. First, in cramped coach seating, there just isn’t enough room for me and my 17″ laptop. One of us had to go into the overhead storage bin, and it wasn’t going to be me. Second, I have a tendency to work when I have the PowerBook open. And these days, I seem to be working all the time. Yes, I could watch a movie on the laptop, but for some reason I don’t when flying. (I never could sleep on the plane either.)

I bought an iPod video (30GB) the day they were announced. Sometimes you can tell right away that a device is right for you. The 5th Gen iPod is darn close. Among other things, it is my new companion during air flight (along with a good magazine for takeoffs and landings). With the iPod, I switch among podcasts (have you listened to the Ricky Gervais Show?), music, and TV shows. The podcasts and music are easier on the battery, but the video is what has really changed things for me.

I’ve had people ask me: “how enjoyable can video be on a 2.5 inch screen?” Well, quite enjoyable actually. And the key is the piped-in sound through the earphones (btw: I recommend in-ear phones such as the Griffin EarThumps or XtremeMac FS1 earphones with foam inserts). The great audio seems to create a state of immersion. I got my hands on the Belkin Kickstand case and set the iPod on my snack tray. If you don’t like the Belkin case, Andy Ihnatko recommended to me using a CD Jewel case as an iPod stand. I haven’t tried it, but it seems like it would work.

My favorite iPod TV shows are The Office and the standup routines on Comedy Central. There’s also a great deal on Jack Johnson videos on iTMS - you can get a whole album’s worth for $10. I never had time to watch The Office on TV (that darn always working thing), but have been able to catch up while flying.

Thanks to the iPod video, flying is actually slightly fun again. I no longer work on the plane. It’s much easier to carry an iPod in my pocket rather than hassle with a laptop. And I get a kick out of people glancing at me out of the corner of their eyes, wondering: “what the heck is he smiling about?”

Campfire is 37Signals’ latest release. A most fascinating product indeed and one that raises a very interesting question: is it better to keep things centralized or not? Come on in and bring the marshmallows.

Apple and Microsoft clearly have two different visions of what, exactly, security is all about. And the winner is not who I expected.

Should Apple bundle ClamAV with Mac OS X? I have a yes, a no and plenty of maybes in store for you.

We Mac users may not be in the habit of checking security mailing lists and announcements but we certainly have all the tools to do so. Between Mail and Safari RSS, even those of us who do not wish to invest in any additional software of any kind can stay up to date. Here are a few favorites of mine.

I pretty much agreed with Matthew Russell’s disagreement with John Dvorak’s prediction that Apple would dump OS X for Windows until this evening…

Or perhaps I should say, “Hell No!”

I normally don’t comment on articles that are already running rampant on Slashdot, but I can’t help myself here. Windows is my nemesis, and there’s an article running on PC Magazine that suggests that Apple may actually switch its OS to Windows.

Is it April Fool’s day today? No. Is Dvorak insane? Maybe. Will Apple switch to Windows? Not a chance. Let’s take a look at a few blurbs and attempt to at least provide a cursory disarmament.

Leap.A (or Oompa-Loompa) is not a virus. Depending what you read, it’s either a worm or a trojan. You could call it a little bit of both.

And while a lot of Mac news sites have spent much of the day playing down its significance and pointing out that user action is required to run it and therefore infect each machine, I think it ought to make a lot of people stop and think for a minute.

A summary of Leap.A’s activities has been posted by the professional computer security team at F-Secure. I’m inclined to trust what F-Secure say about viruses, worms and other malware, because they have been conducting autopsies on harmful code for years now and they know what they are talking about.

iTunes 6 has a feature that enables you to convert your existing QuickTime videos to iPod-compatible movies. This is a great feature that a lot of folks don’t know about. Previously, you either had to buy third party software or upgrade to QuickTime Pro to easily rip to this custom .m4v format.

The process in iTunes couldn’t be simpler. Use the “Add to Library…” command to bring your movie into iTunes. Then click once on the movie to highlight it, now choose “Advanced > Convert Selection for iPod.” iTunes with rip your move to the appropriate iPod configuration, then save it as a copy in your Library, leaving the original untouched.

Another lesser known tool in iTunes is the “Get Info” command that allows you to change the ID3 tags without having to resave the movie or export it. Go to “File > Get Info > Info” and fill out the appropriate fields. When you click OK, the data is saved to the movie file.

I use this method for adding the metadata to my The Digital Story podcasts. Once I add the data, I go to my Music folder, open the iTunes folder, find the file I just adjusted, and drag a copy out to the Desktop (Option/drag). I can then upload the podcast to my server for publishing with the correct tags.

I’ve uploaded a sample clip of Tim O’Reilly speaking at WWDC ‘05 using iTunes to rip it. The original 1:47 movie (320 x 240) was encoded with Sorenson Video 3 and Qualcomm PureVoice Mono codecs. The file size was 18 MBs. The re-ripped iTunes version uses H.264 for the video and AAC Stereo for the audio. Its file size is 9.4 MBs. The audio for both movies sounds identical, and the video quality is comparable (slight nod to the original Sorenson). This is amazing considering that the H.264 version was ripped from the Sorenson version, not from the master file.

If you have an iPod video, using iTunes 6 is by far the easiest way to prepare your movies for portable viewing.

Related link: https://forums.makezine.com/

Forums can be surprisingly difficult. It was clear that we wanted forums on Makezine.com, but we weren’t happy with what we could do with our existing publishing system. Luckily, we found Vanilla, by Lussumo (from the Lussumo Swell Blog, Lussumo rhymes with “bus-you-toe” means “love you more”.)

What we immediately loved about Lussumo was its clean interface, and its getting real approach. RSS is built right into the application, making it easy to do interesting things like feed new discussions out via the MAKEBot.

There are endless features that one could ask for or imagine in a forums system. We pretty much had to pick two…we chose to limit scope and abandoned some of the features we had previously considered “must haves”. And you know, it’s been ok. It’s been great, in fact. After seeing some of the amazing and useful discussions there, my only real regret is not getting forums on the site sooner.

By the way, it was a great experience working with a Vanilla’s creator, Mark O’Sullivan, who we hired to help integrate the forums into our site and user account system. We could tell immediately that Mark was asking the right questions about the project at the start, and he really helped us make the right decisions about various details. Our in-house technical lead, Jay Laney, did an amazing job of the integration on our side of things; it was a notable rollout in that there was nothing particularly, uh, “memorable” about it.

We’re thrilled with the the forums on makezine.com. If you’re looking for an extensible, open source web forum, Vanilla might just be your solution.

The good folks at the Omni Group must be happy. Apple has just promoted their browser to be part of the iLife suite of applications. Well, almost.

Just over a week or so ago, the 17″ iMac G5s vanished from the Apple Store.

In case you were wondering what had happened to all the old stock, it’s pretty clear that Apple is working hard to dispose of it as quickly as possible. Here in the UK, a bunch of 17″ G5s have turned up at Morgan Computers, a famous retailer of “surplus, overstock and closeout computer stocks” (their own words) just yards from London’s center of technology shopping, Tottenham Court Road.

And at £705 including VAT (that’s what we call sales tax over here), they’re a pretty good deal - the current price for a brand new Intel-powered 17″ iMac is £929.

You don’t see Apple kit at Morgan very often; in fact, I don’t recall seeing any Apple stuff on sale there before (I don’t live in London, but I’m a loyal reader of the Morgan Flyer). Morgan sells good kit at low prices, but it’s always stuff that the manufacturers or retailers don’t want to have hanging around in their warehouses. Apple is clearly in a big hurry to get these PowerPC machines out of the way, and fast.

Access Co. Ltd., who bought Palm OS last year, changed the Palm OS name to Access Linux Platform (ALP).

By trade, I’m a technologist, meaning, I evaluate technologies for their usefulness, and when they are useful, I recommend them to people who need them, they’re just unaware they exist. This makes me, effectively, a consultant, something that many businesses see and run screaming from, or screaming to in certain situations. Technologists often see themselves as arcana, which essentially translates to people who have skills that are not common, or detail-orientation that means their skills and knowledge are opaque to common people. This is both good and bad, but more often than not it leads to misunderstanding and serious miscommunication.

Good technologists are capable of framing the metaphor that users can see, get a handle on, and adapt to without having to work incredibly hard. Finding that metaphor, and doing the legwork to make it palatable to the user, is what they pay you for most of the time. It’s in making users smarter and more literate that the job satisfaction of the technologist goes up. Sure, some users will never, ever want to know why their email isn’t working, but knowing the ones who are open to knowledge is crucial.

This brings me to my point, and to the link I’m about to share. Good technologists don’t just know things, they know how to use them well, and the author of that manifesto is quick to draw the lines that make this division very, very clear. Mac technologists should take this list to heart and begin to understand that making yourself transparent is not useful, nor is making yourself opaque, but become translucent: an intermediary for technology and sociology, with knowledge on both sides and conversationality and understanding between them.

Camino is out of beta and if you don’t use it already, it’s high time you did.

For those of you who haven’t discovered the joys of Camino already, allow me to spell them out.

Camino is rock-solid, dependable like no other browser I have used (and I’ve used a lot of browsers). It feels right, it’s Cocoa, and it was built from the outset to be a native OS X application. Many of the internals share roots with Firefox, but the external wrappings and the interface are Mac and nothing but Mac; Camino is not a port of Firefox, it’s an entirely separate beast.

I woke this morning thanking my lucky stars. Not just because it was Valentine’s Day and my sweetie is wonderful, but because tomorrow was the Estimated Shipping Day for my new MacBook Pro. How sweet the anticipation has been, waiting for the new laptop to arrive. My two year old work laptop is nearing the end of its useful life, and soon must go to the hands of another tech. But then, this morning, there was news out of Apple: The MacBooks are Shipping!

Wait, what is that paragraph toward the top? “The $1,999 model now includes a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, up from the previously announced 1.67 GHz, and will begin shipping next week.” Oh my, oh my. What a valentine from Apple! The 1.67GHz MacBook I ordered will now be a 1.83 GHz MacBook! Hot damn! Now That’s a Valentine’s Day present I can really live with! Even if it means waiting two more weeks…

I did call Apple, and the woman I spoke with confirmed the automatic upgrade, and the delay, with shipping promised by the end of the month. Not shabby, Apple, and thanks for the boost, but can you please, please, get it to me soon? I’m jonesin’ here. And hard.

Since the introduction of Safari, Mac users have favored the browser for its rendering speed, clean interface and fast launch times. Those who relied on Firefox were all about extensibility, configurability and IE compatibility. Or so I thought.

You ever have one of those days where both of the major open-source package management systems fail on you for the same package?

As you’ve probably figured out by now, I was gone last week. Gone gone. I was on a Holland America ship sailing back and forth to Mexico. This was my first stint on the staff of a Geek Cruise. And as a cruisin’ newbie, I learned a lot of things.

For starters, the Geek Cruise concept solves what was previously my biggest concern about this type of excursion: what to do during the days at sea. We had full-blown conference tracks that ran half day sessions from 8:30 in the morning to 5:00 in the afternoon. That was followed by a group activity, such as the “Woz Hour,” then off to dress for dinner and head to the dining room. In other words, no need to wander aimlessly about the ship looking for something to do. More like fall into bed around midnight with your head full of ideas.

On the non-conference days, we were in port. I had the entire day (8 am to 5:30 pm) to explore Cabo San Lucas (Monday) and Mazatlan (Tuesday). On Wednesday I was able to stay out until 10 pm in Puerto Vallarta. Some people chose to participate in the excursions that were available. I may do that in the future, but this time I wanted to explore the cities and the villages. The upshot was I got some great pictures and experienced many wonderful interactions.

The juxtaposition of teaching in geek conferences at one moment then suddenly finding myself on the streets of Cabo the next was invigorating. I think Neil Bauman, head geek who assembles these events, is on to something here. It’s also a clever way to attend a conference and bring your partner — claiming it’s a true vacation.

Macworld Magazine is the primary sponsor for these events. I posted photo galleries for them on Tuesday and Friday. There, you can see images from both the conference side and while in port. You might also want to check out the blog posts from the Macworld editors. Lots of insightful info there.

My view of cruise vacations has certainly changed as a result of this experience. I think this is a creative, mind stimulating approach. The next two Macmania excursions are scheduled for July and the end of October. Something to think about…