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The Apple Blog
The Apple Blog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
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Last Gen MacBook Pros $700 Cheaper, MacBook for $849
Apple may not have broken the $900 mark with the new line of laptops they unveiled at Tuesday’s event, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get a never-before-used Mac at that price. As long as you’re willing to bury your head in the sand and pretend no new models exist, or your computing habits don’t require the absolute latest tech, you can get some pretty good deals on previous generation Apple notebooks.

Amazon.com, for instance, is offering a $700 (compared to its price at the Apple Store before Tuesday’s release) discount on MacBook Pros, which makes this 15-inch model not much more expensive than the now-discontinued black MacBook. While this is a great deal for those looking for a still-powerful laptop at an affordable price, those hoping for the sub-$900 laptop Tuesday likely won’t see $1,780 as much of a deal.
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No FireWire? No Matte Display? Aaahhh! I'm Trashing Everything and Getting a Dell!

Or words to that affect. That’s what I’m seeing on blogs and in a boatload of forum comments. Geez, people. Why is it every time Apple makes a move there’s a pile of people to step in and claim how stupid Apple is, or how they don’t care about their customers, etc.? As if Apple’s not nailing almost all of their decisions lately (and by “lately” I mean over the last 10 years).

Some of the complainers are downright conspiratorial in their railings against the change. And many seem to think that FireWire 400 is gone altogether, apparently unaware that it’s available on the MacBook Pro via the FireWire 800 port. Only the MacBook lost FireWire completely.

Look, I’m not unsympathetic to those MacBook users who may have come to rely on FireWire, but some of the discussion around this move is kind of silly.
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MacBook Pro Review

For the first time in Apple’s history, the recent incarnation of consumer and professional laptops are starting to show signs of being part of the same family. While the MacBook has seen arguably the most impressive bump in terms of comparison to its original feature set, MacBook Pros have also received great treatment.

This brief review will give an overview of the new features and our experience. Future posts will delve into certain changes in more depth. We have previously posted unboxing photos of the new laptop for your enjoyment.

Exterior & Build

The first MacBook Pro I purchased started to vibrate suspiciously when turned on — to the point where it was audibly annoying. I returned it to the Apple store and was given an immediate replacement. That said, I’m certain that Apple’s claim of a revolutionary manufacturing process is not just hype. To quote Harry McCracken:

I hate car metaphors in computer reviews, but I can't help myself: The old MacBook Pro was a solidly-built Toyota, and the new one is a Lexus.

While the MacBook Air clearly benefitted from the new process, it still feels slightly ‘delicate’ due to it’s very nature of being so thin. Imagine the robustness and curves of the Air built around the already sturdy MacBook Pro, and you’ll be somewhere close to the mark.

The keyboard takes very similar cues from the keyboard featured on the previous generation of MacBooks. It is a significant step forward from the previous generation of MacBook Pro, and a step that was undoubtedly needed. It’s also great to see that, despite the generously increased trackpad size, the keyboard hasn’t suffered in terms of space.
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Make Spaces Hyper

I recently wrote about alternatives to Apple’s Spaces virtual desktop offering that comes included with Leopard. There, I confessed that I’ve come to appreciate the simplicity Spaces offers, though miss configuration options.

Well Hyperspaces is the forthcoming extension to Spaces and does well to fill the ‘configurability’ void that some of us pine for. Tony Arnold (who once upon a time provided Virtue Desktops) has been hard at work on Hyperspaces, and has kindly given me a chance to play around with it. I liken the relationship of Spaces and Hyperspaces to Starsky & Hutch — the former doing things by the book, the latter bringing some fun to the party.

When using Hyperspaces, you expand upon the features that Spaces offers. Gained is the ability to assign names to each of your desktops, display that name on your desktop in any font you choose, and on whatever portion of the screen you desire. Next, you can set your specific wallpaper for each different desktop, and you have the option to tint each desktop using the color palette (regardless of whether you choose custom wallpaper). As mentioned earlier, you can name your desktops, and on a desktop by desktop basis you can choose whether or not to display its name or not.
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App Store Deal of the Week: Enigmo
Enigmo, by Pangea Soft is not a new game/application by any means — for the Mac, or for the iPhone for that matter. While I’ve got it on my MacBook, I hadn’t sprung the nearly $10 that Enigmo was priced at in the App Store. But this week, everyone’s in luck! Pangea Soft is offering this great puzzle game for only $1.99. There’s no indication how long the deal will last, but my suggestion is to get in on it as soon as you can. In actuality, after playing it on the iPhone, I realize just what an ideal fit it is for this platform.

If you’re not familiar with the game of Enigmo, here’s the skinny. There’s more or less a vessel dripping liquid, and you have different tools (drums, accelerators, surfaces) at your disposal to reroute the droplets into an empty vessel someplace else on the level. The tools can be dragged around, and the touch interface is perfect for rotating them to perform exactly the way you’d like, to hopefully beat the level before your point bonus runs out.

Performance of the game is quick, load time is minimal (especially for a game of this complexity), save and resume screens are all very easy to navigate. The only thing I didn’t see a note on (but figured out on my own) was that in order to pause the game, you need to double tap the screen for the menu.

While I balked at Enigmo at around the ten dollar mark — after playing it I’m surprised I didn’t buy it sooner — it’s a steal at 2 bucks. If you’re looking for a challenging puzzle game to pass any free time, you can’t go wrong here. If you don’t want to take my word for it, it also won the Apple Design Award this year in the iPhone Developer Showcase.

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Using Time Capsule as a Media Drive

As someone with a large media collection (around 550GB), I’m always looking for inventive new ways to store, backup and stream all my content.

One of my main annoyances with simply storing media on an external drive is that you obviously need to have the device physically plugged in. My Lacie Drive worked well, but was bulky, heavy and impractical for watching media anywhere other than at my desk.

When Time Capsule was released, my first thought was that it could make a great way to store content on a network disk and stream music/video to iTunes, and photos to Aperture. This would allow me to access all my media from anywhere around the house — freeing me from the confines of a desk.

This guide will take you through that very process and explain what works well and what simply won’t.
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Sunrise: WebKit-Based Indie Web Browser
The Sunrise browser has been around for two or three years, but I never paid it much attention. It was pitched as a browser for web developers, and I’m not one, but being something of a browser junkie, the recent release of version 1.7.5 finally enticed me give Sunrise a look. I’m glad I did. This is an interesting browser.

Sunrise uses Apple’s Webkit rendering engine. It’s compact — a 1.1 MB download, and 2.4 MB expanded — but with an amazingly deep feature set, considering its tiny footprint. Highlights include thumbnail bookmarks displaying image and title, window fader and auto-resize functions with which the main window can be made transparent and/or resized from a toolbar command, with all open web pages assuming the revised screen resolution. A button cycles through 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, and full-screen sizes. You can change a page view size from 10 percent to 400 percent using a convenient toolbar pull-down menu, without a page reload.

You can configure your favorite search engine for the Sunrise search field, and the View Source command displays web page sources in your favorite editor. Files can be downloaded by inputting their URLs.

Another handy Sunrise feature is creating PDF files from web pages via a keystroke using the Page Shot feature.
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Experience Sonic Sensations With RjDj for iPhone

Following in the ambient footsteps of Eno’s inaugural iPhone app, Bloom, comes RjDj. Developed by Reality Jockey, an Austrian dev outfit, they describe RjDj as, “the next generation of walkman or mp3 player… a digital drug which causes mind twisting hearing sensation.”

Wrapped up as a cute little iPhone toybox, RjDj is actually a platform for Reactive Sound Art. The “reactive” bit means that the app responds to sensory input. In the case of RjDj, this could find you jiggling, touching, tilting, shouting, murmuring, wiggling and generally seeking out all sorts of noises to generate entirely strange sonic experiences.
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Full Page Screenshots On a Mac
Taking screenshots on Windows used to a laborious process, consisting of performing a print screen then editing the result in Photoshop. Leopard (and indeed, earlier editions of OS X) goes a long way to simplifying the process with different key combinations to achieve different results. It is possible to grab the whole screen, a single window, or a user defined area of the screen. However, I commonly find myself needing to take a screenshot of an entire webpage — not just the portion that is viewable in my browser window.

This is where WebKit2PNG and Paparazzi come in. The former is a command line utility for OS X which uses the WebKit engine (the software powering Safari) to generate full page screenshots. The latter is a piece of software which offers a user friendly interface to the command line utility, making it much easier to use. I’ll focus on the features of Paparazzi first before going a little technical to explain some of the extra features offered by WebKit2PNG.

Paparazzi

Using Paparazzi is simple. Open up the application and enter your URL. You can choose the size of the window that you’re emulating and also choose to crop the resulting image. It takes a few seconds to download the screenshot, then there are several export options to different image formats.
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RIM's Blackberry Bold Pulled From Market: No One Cares
If something like this was even hinted at for the iPhone, the tech pundits and analysts would be pulling their hair out claiming it’s the end of the world. Heck, I’m sure Thurrott would have written a few articles on all his Windows sites about it by now. Yet here is RIM having a serious quality issue with their latest device, resulting in it being pulled from the market, and there’s been little said about it. In fact, the silence is deafening.

At this point, it’s only UK-based carrier Orange that pulled the plug. When other carriers were asked about it, Rogers said only that they have a software update coming, and AT&T simply replied that they’re planning to release it this year. The latter is not much of an endorsement.
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SuperSite FAQ About Windows 7 — What They Really Meant to Say
Since Microsoft is trying hard not to talk about Vista, they're falling back on their SOP of deflecting attention to a shiny new object, in this case Windows 7. To that end, the SuperSite for Windows has taken it upon itself to become the "central location for accurate information about Windows 7."

While I’m sure they meant well, when I read their answers I can see that either the SuperSite was not quite getting them right, or maybe they just chose to use an awful lot of words to say something that could be done much more succinctly.

As a service to those curious about Microsoft's upcoming OS — especially those still running XP Pro — I'll answer the questions here more clearly. The SuperSite can thank me later, I’m just trying to help.
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iBeer v. iPint: The Beer Battle Lawsuit

When I first got my iPhone 3G, I downloaded many, many, ridiculous novelty apps of questionable utility. To this day, friends still ask to see iPint, a virtual beer glass simulator which allows you to tip the iPhone and pretend to drink a virtual beer (which has now been pulled from the store).

The app, little more than a clever Carling (a subsidiary of U.S.-based Molson Coors Brewing Co.) advertising gimmick, also acted as a nice tech demo for the iPhone’s motion sensing capabilities. At the time, I was aware of the pricier iBeer ($2.99) by Hottrix, but, like many people, I opted for the free iPint. And rightly so, since I deleted the app after about a week of showing off, at which point most of my immediate circle were really tired of me and my iPhone.
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Apple's US PC Growth is Even Better Than It Seems
Based on reported preliminary figures from Gartner, Apple is set to show incredible PC growth in the US compared to the industry.

I’m not so concerned with the figures themselves so much as my belief that to properly calculate Apple’s growth compared to the industry you must remove their figures from the industry totals and then compare the growth rates side by side.

For example, in the chart below (from the article) you see total PC growth listed as 4.6 percent. Since Apple’s projected growth is 29.4 percent, they are claimed to be growing at “more than six times the industry.”

But such a comparison not only hamstrings Apple, it favors the PC (i.e., non-Mac) makers by making it look like they’re doing better than they really are. How? Well, it compares Apple to a total that already has Apple in it! You’re essentially comparing Apple to itself. If you want to see how Apple is doing compared to everyone else than you must compare Apple’s figures alone to everyone else’s minus Apple’s.

So, how is Apple really growing in the US? To see, let’s remove its figures from the total and then compare the two growths.

Without Apple, 3Q ‘08 shipments total 15,705, and 3Q ‘07 total 15,312. The growth of 393 represents ~2.6%. That’s a true representation of what non-Mac vendors did on their own. In other words, what they did without Apple. Now, when you look at Apple’s growth you can place it in proper perspective. Apple’s 29.4% represents growing at over 11 times the non-Mac industry in the US! Big difference, and a much better representation of what’s really going on in the US today.

If you’re going to compare Apple to the rest of the industry, don’t inflate that industry’s figures by including Apple in the total. Even Apple has a hard time competing against itself.

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FOX in HD: iTunes Offering Complete Range of HD TV Shows

Apple have announced today that they are now selling TV shows in high definition from all four major broadcasters, ABC, FOX, CBS and NBC Universal. FOX were the fourth and final large network to offer HD support today.

Some of the HD shows available include "Grey's Anatomy", "Lost", "CSI", "Bones", "Prison Break", "Heroes" and "The Office". Apple also highlighted that they have now sold over 200 million TV episodes, including one million HD episodes since the launch of HD programming on iTunes in early September.

Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of Internet Services states:

We've got an incredible Fall 2008 TV lineup with over 70 primetime comedies and dramas, including many of the most popular shows on TV in stunning HD. With over 200 million episodes sold, iTunes customers have proven they love watching television on their computer, iPod, iPhone and TV with Apple TV.

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Microsoft Posts Patches on the Heels of Apple's Security & Firmware Updates
Microsoft released three updates yesterday which fix bugs and address security concerns in their Office family of products and utilities.

The first is for the Open XML File Format Converter, which bumps the version to 1.0.1 and fixes a remote code execution (rated by Microsoft as “important”) associated with security bulleting MS08-057. The Open XML Converter allows you to convert Open XML files that were created in Office 2008 for Mac or Office 2007 for Windows so that you can open, edit, and save them in earlier versions of Office for Mac. The download is 44MB and should be installed by anyone running Office 2004 or Office v. X on OS X 10.4.9 or higher.

Next up is Office 2004 with a 13MB patch to version 11.5.2 which addresses vulnerabilities which could allow attackers to run code on your system.

Similarly, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac kicks it up to version 12.1.3 which addresses similar vulnerabilities as the Office 2004 update in this 154MB download.

You can avoid all this work by letting Microsoft do the work for you with their auto-update.
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