Saturday, March 24, 2007

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) (5 сообщений)

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  • Engadget shows us how to swap out your Apple TV's HD

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    Ban Drawbaugh over at our sister site Engadget has a fantastic tutorial up about upgrading your Apple TV's harddrive. As David pointed out, the stock 40 gig harddrive just isn't going to cut it for most people (my iPod is 80 gigs for goodness sake). Ben uses the Terminal to do the drive cloning (though I imagine for those of you who avoid the Terminal I am sure you could use Carbon Copy Cloner) and iPartition to resize the media partition.

    Go forth and hack!
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  • The Filter iTunes assistant available

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    We told you about a closed alpha of The Filter back in December, and now a beta is available for download. Basically, The Filter is a little program that interacts with iTunes automatically to create playlists based on your mood. The first time you run it, it analyzes your iTunes library, comparing your tracks to its online database of 4.5 million songs. Then you just select a few (it recommends 3) tracks in iTunes, and hit the 'F' in The Filter's window. It will then create a playlist drawing from your personal iTunes library based on those songs. For each song it will put up a nice translucent window with the album art and the All Music Guide entry on that artist. In addition, you can use The Filter to generate appropriate playlists for your iPod based on mood or activity (e.g. high tempo music for working out).

    The Filter FAQ says that "the music recommendation engine that is continually learning the listening tastes and choices of tens of thousands of music lovers. This huge collection of information is combined with your own likes and dislikes to create a personal understanding of what songs from your collection you will like to listen to and when." It sounds a lot like Pandora or last.fm but using your own music library. I haven't used it enough to decide if it's accurate, but I think this might be nice alternative to using the randomly generated Party Shuffle. One thing that is unclear to me, however, is their business model since it does not seem to be advertising supported.

    The Filter for Mac is in beta right now and available as a free download.

    [Via theappleblog]
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  • Leopard Axing Input Managers?

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    There's a disturbing rumor floating around the Mac web today. According to this article at Infinite Loop, Leopard will no longer support Input Manager hacks. Input Managers allow programmers to insert code into cocoa applications, thus allowing the addition of new functionality. etc. These are somewhat controversial as some claim this is a potential security hole. Nonetheless, Jon Hicks brings this up in connection to my absolute favorite input manager plugin, Saft for Safari, which will presumably be rendered non-functional in Leopard. As Hicks notes, its not clear yet whether this also affect the widely used SIMBL plugin architecture (whose author, Pith Helmet developer Mike Solomon, says he won't be sure until he can play with Leopard). If, like me, you're a big fan of Saft and SafariStand and Chax, etc. this is cause for concern.

    It is to be hoped, of course, that the authors of the various plugins will find some other way of implementing their feature enhancements, even if Apple does close the Input Manager route. The best thing would be for Apple to implement an open plugin architecture for doing this sort of enhancement, but I won't be holding my breath on that one. In any case, this is a potential concern for those of us sure to upgrade to Leopard right after it launches.
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  • Apple says Leopard will ship on time

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    Michael Gartenberg, with Jupiter Research, called some folks at Apple in light of recent delay rumors surrounding Leopard, the next iteration of OS X. Unnamed people at Apple confirmed with Gartenberg that Leopard is still on track for a Spring release which gives Apple until late June to ship on time.

    I just hope we get a firm shipping date from Apple soon, all this speculating is making me tired.
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  • Apple TV: The first 24 hours

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    After spending a good 24 hours with a shiny new Apple TV, I agree with Mossberg and Pogue: this thing rocks. Apple has produced a great device that makes getting your iTunes and iTunes Store content from your Mac/PC to your TV and entertainment center, and with a nearly 10x lead in the digital media market at 118 million active iTunes users, they have quite an audience for it as well.

    As with everything else in life, however, the Apple TV isn't without its downsides. But instead of penning a post that did nothing but dog the device, I figured I would put together some pros and cons I've found from poking and prodding at the Apple TV:

    Pros

    • My initial sync was performed via that iTunes wireless AirPort Disk setup I wrote about earlier this month. Just to see how far I can push things, I occasionally tried to watch a video that hadn't been synced yet so it had to stream while the sync was still going on, and I never experienced a hiccup besides a noticeably slower start time. Impressive. I must mention, however, that I'm using Apple's ideal setup: a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro upgraded to 802.11n, with an AirPort Extreme N-based router.
    • As Paul Kafasis confirmed, the Apple TV doesn't require an HD TV, just one that has component (RGB) inputs. That's great news for me, and I can happily say that iTS videos look great on our 32" JVC SD (Standard Definition) TV. HD - what me worry?
    • Thanks not only to Apple's sleek industrial design but also the entirely screen-based UI and minimalist remote, the Apple TV is by far the least intrusive piece of hardware in our humble entertainment center. It has but one tiny white light; no bright calculator-style numbers of blinking lights, unlike my clunky Comcast PVR box.
    • You can turn off the Apple TV's display (holding down Play for a few seconds) during a sync. This 'powers down' the device in more or less the same way you power down an iPod; it isn't completely turned off, and the Apple TV still wakes up instantly at the press of a button.

    Cons

    • This whole 40GB thing is for the birds. We're living in an increasingly digital society, and our libraries are expanding faster than ever. I currently have 28GB of music, 4.26GB of movies (and that includes only two truly feature-length films purchased from the store), 6.13GB of TV Shows and 4.05GB of Podcasts, which is arguably (one of) the most quickly expanding portion of virtually any podcast subscriber's library. While I am on the whole pleased with this device, 40GB is a borderline insult. This is 2007, not 1998.
    • Parts of the UI definitely feel like they were designed specifically for HD in mind, though designing software for the strange, wide world of television can't be easy for anyone. For example: while browsing TV shows to watch, a block of text appears below the show's album cover that contains metadata such as series, show description, etc. Even sitting barely two or three feet away from my SD TV, this text is barely legible, and before you ask: my eyesight is tip-top.
    • Social downside to using the Apple TV: I can't display what I'm watching/listening to in iChat. I'm no software engineer, but me-wagers Apple could easily fix this.
    • While playing music, the Apple TV occasionally swaps cover art and the track control bar horizontally between the left and right sides of the screen. I can understand the desire to do *something* with the TV UI since whatever is on TV is supposed to 'do stuff,' but the effect is really cheesy. [Update: Commenters are pointing out that this is to prevent burnout in plasma displays. Complaint retracted, for the most part.]
    • The Apple TV is a trojan horse: I *so* have the urge to start buying iTS content without reserve. A long time ago a friend bought Pirates of the Caribbean as a gift for me, but I never caught the movie bug. After playing with the Apple TV for a while yesterday, however, I began wanting to buy movies like never before because this setup just works. I buy, I download, I watch on TV - all from the comforts of my couch (since my MacBook Pro is on my lap). As long as Apple cranks out an iTreadmill sooner or later, I'll consider us even.
    • The Apple TV doesn't seem to be able to initiate a sync while something is already playing on it. This is of course to be expected, and I debated leaving it off this list entirely, but I figured it was ultimately worth a mention. [Update: it appears I might be wrong. I'm playing music on the Apple TV and had to restart my MacBook Pro. Upon starting iTunes up again, it found the Apple TV and began syncing a bunch of new items in mid-song. My initial guess as to what's going on here is that, given the drive-intensive nature of video, the Apple TV can't perform a sync while it's playing a movie, TV show or video podcast, but song files are typically small, allowing many to be queued into memory which makes it easier to do two things at once. If anyone has more insight into this, do share in the comments.]

    But don't leave my pros and cons all alone here - feel free to voice your own! If you've snagged an Apple TV be sure to leave your thoughts here, and if you're still on the fence, we'll try to help you pick the yard with the greenest grass.

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