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TheAppleBlog
TheAppleBlog, 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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New Sitcom Pilot to be Based Not-So-Loosely on Steve Jobs

It was bound to happen, sooner or later. Steve Jobs is simply too important, too impressive, too easy a target not to base a character on him and turn it into a sitcom.

And that's what might very well be happening, if the pilot currently in development in Hollywood gets optioned for a series. Yesterday, Media Rights Capital released a statement on its website describing how, working with cable channel EPIX, they have green-lit a pilot episode for a proposed sitcom series entitled — what else? – iCON.

From MRC's website:

EPIX and Media Rights Capital have made a team for iCON, a comedy series pilot that will be developed by Larry Charles, the Emmy-winning TV writer/producer, and the director of the Sacha Baron Cohen features Borat and Bruno.

Charles will oversee development of the script and will direct the half-hour pilot of a series written by Dan Lyons. A technology consultant for Newsweek, Lyons created the Fake Steve Jobs blog and wrote the novel Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs—A Parody.

Yes, you read that right. Fake Steve himself is penning the script (it’s most likely he already has, given how sporadic the updates have been in recent weeks on the Fake Steve Jobs blog.) If you're a fan of Fake Steve, this is exhilarating news; Lyons is not only an insightful author but is in possession of a Sahara-dry wit, to boot. In addition to his Fake Steve sideshow, Lyons is the author of Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs – A Parody. You might say he really knows the subject matter.

And then there's Larry Charles. Directing Borat and Brüno might not be an accolade everyone everywhere agrees is worthy of celebration (I guess it depends on your sense of humor) but no one can argue with his other credentials; he directed the 2008 documentary Religulous starring Bill Maher, and was for many years a writer and producer on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. It all sounds like perfect past-experience for any producer charged with the task of bringing this project to life.

The partnership of Lyons/Charles is certain to culminate in a cutting (if not wickedly uncompromising) take on tech-celebrity culture.

A little more from MRC's website on the subject matter of the show:

The show's lead character, Tom Rhodes, is a composite of Jobs and other Silicon Valley titans, and the comedy is described as a savage satire, a study of ego, power and greed…

Jobs and other titans will certainly inspire iCON at its inception, but the show will lampoon the larger hi-tech world. [Larry] Charles will be swinging for the fences.

You may not have heard the name Media Rights Capital before. MRC is a studio owned by, amongst others, Goldman Sachs and (wait for it) AT&T. There's something almost… poetic about that.

MRC will serve as the studio and financier. The company said it had several bidders for the property, but chose EPIX because Charles could be as edgy as he wanted to be.

"We are attempting to do nothing less than a modern Citizen Kane," Charles said. "A scabrous satire of Silicon Valley and its most famous citizen."

You know, at film school I heard time and time again that Citizen Kane was nothing less than the most perfect movie ever made. (I disagreed, favoring The Empire Strikes Back…) So for Charles to make a modern day Citizen Kane is, to put it mildly, an ambitious goal. But don't forget, such bold statements are not uncommon for El Jobso when talking about music players or tablet devices, so I guess we can forgive this kind of hyperbole from a writer/producer described by the studio as "TV royalty."

Apple has, naturally, remained silent on the matter. It's fun to try to imagine what Steve Jobs might make of this. I think he'd probably find it amusing (and c'mon, it's gotta be an ego boost?) but Macworld points out that Jobs has a less-than-stellar track record when it comes to this sort of thing:

Jobs is notoriously prickly about how he’s portrayed in the media. At one extreme, Apple infamously pulled all titles by publisher Wiley from its store shelves after the company released a book called iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (no relation to the TV show).

Well, that was a book, and this is a (potential) TV show. Only Mac-heads and the most dedicated tech historians read books about Jobs. A sitcom from Larry Charles, on the other hand, will reach many millions of people otherwise entirely disinterested in the working of Silicon Valley's executive elite.

This isn’t a series yet — the pilot has to prove there’s potential for that. But is there any serious doubt that Lyons/Charles can pull it off? And I wonder… a year from now, will we be laughing with Steve Jobs as he uses a clip from an episode to demo the next iPad… or rolling our eyes as his lawyers issue Cease & Desist orders to the studio?

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Australian Website Hints at New Macs, Higher Prices
An Australian tech website has started running ads featuring Mac Pros and MacBook Pros whose entry-level prices are noticeably higher than those in the current Mac lineup.

So what, right? The ads are probably incorrectly labeled, or something. But the word on the street (well, the word on Engadget, anyway) is that these might predict the much-anticipated Mac refreshes that we've been waiting for.

From Engadget:

Apple’s Australian online store lists the most affordable versions of the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Pro at A$1599, A$1999 and A$3599, respectively, but the ads show significantly higher “starting at” prices of A$1899, A$2399, and A$4499.

Following the ads to Apple's Australian online store reveals the same Mac models at the same old prices, so either these ads are terribly wrong or they're been released a little early…

It has been over a year since Apple released a major update to its high-end Mac Pro computer. I know very well because I bought one last April at an astronomically high price, and as such, guard it with my life. (No one else is allowed near it. No one!) If history has taught me anything, it is that I am not allowed to have the best and brightest kit for long. Therefore, an update is imminent. As for the MacBook Pro, we can probably expect to see Apple upgrade it with Intel's powerful i7 Chipset.

But why so much more expensive? Engadget’s Vladislav Savov suggests:

The rise in MacBook Pro pricing could be attributed to the cost of the i7 chipset, but it seems unlikely that in a recovering economy Apple would increase their prices significantly without having a cheaper baseline model available.

I am hoping to see something more than just a chipset upgrade this time around; support for Blu-Ray is one of those things I want (even though it's something most people don't need) and who wouldn't like to see high-capacity SSD's as-standard?

I know only this; I'm a weak-willed slave to Apple's hardware. I was the same way with PC's, but let's face it, a tech-obsessed geek with a weakness for shiny new toys will usually spend far less on generic PC equipment than on the latest newness from Cupertino.

At a time when the entry-level iPad would more than easily meet my needs, I know for a fact that, instead, I'll be ordering the most expensive model available when we Brits can (finally!) get our hands on them. The same thing happened a year ago when I bought my painfully-expensive Mac Pro — truth is, I could have gotten by with an iMac. And even now, despite having twin 30" HD Cinema displays, I feel like I'm missing out not owning a 27" iMac as well. Thankfully, I'm in a tiny minority of crazy people.

Are these ads correct? If they are, will we have new Macs before the end of the month? Apple’s New Zealand online store also displays odd pricing inconsistencies along similar lines to those on the Australian store. Perhaps we're reading too much into it (as Apple crazies want to do) but let's face it, one of two things will happen from here; either the ads will be replaced with 'corrected' prices, or, one day very soon, that little yellow sticky note will appear on Apple's online store and insane gadget freaks like me will reach for our credit cards…

Am I as crazy as I think? Share your thoughts with me in the comments below.

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iWork.com Beta Updated, Still No Editing
The iWork.com team at Apple sent out an e-mail to registered users today touting new accessibility from Apple mobile devices and more sharing options for all. However, the biggest feature, really the only feature that matter — editing documents — remains missing.

Carefully not introduced as an online productivity suite designed for collaboration, the iWork.com beta site has existed as little more than an online repository for sharing iWork documents. The only real advantage over simply e-mailing documents has been the ability to comment via sticky note and downloading in multiple formats.

More than a year later, the changes have been minimal, and that may be exactly the way Apple wants it.

As of today, "iWork.com allows you to share a document by creating a public link" with an incredibly long URL. However, accessing the public link does not allow the adding of comments or notes. Sharing documents is a little more efficient with a single page for doing so and a counter indicating the number of views for the document.

The other change, likely in anticipation of the iPad, is something that iWork.com should have included from the beginning: a mobile interface.

The new interface has "improved scrolling" and supposedly helps you "find your shared documents faster." Unfortunately, what it does not do is show comments and notes, making the value of iWork.com even more dubious, if that’s possible. It's becoming more and more apparent that an online version of iWork akin to Google Docs may not be coming at all. After all, Apple has never suggested iWork.com was meant for anything more than sharing, rather a collaborative online productivity suite was just logically assumed.

Well, the new logic is even simpler, that being iWork.com is cloud storage for the iPad. With the announcement of a native version of iWork for the iPad, iWork.com makes a lot more sense. Instead of syncing with iTunes to transfer documents to your computer, you upload them to iWork.com, hopefully with an option to synchronize in the near future. Apple gets $10 for each iWork App for the iPad and gives away the online storage.

Those waiting for iWork.com to leave beta status and be useful may get the former on April 3, but don’t count on logging into iWork.com and editing documents anytime soon.

Related GigaOM Pro research(sub req’d):

Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

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DynDNS Wide Area Bonjour Support Goes Beta

Last week DynDNS released its beta support for Wide Area Bonjour and DNS Service Discovery. This means that if you own your own domain name, and you have a Custom DNS service with DynDNS, you can configure your Apple AirPort device (AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express and Time Capsule) to present itself as part of that domain, automatically updating your domain name and broadcasting configured services.

What is Wide Area Bonjour?

Wide Area Bonjour enables the same zero-config automatic service discovery functionality over the public Internet that we all enjoy on our local network (seeing our shared files, printers, scanners and so forth). If you have a MobileMe account and utilize the Back To My Mac functionality, you’re already using Wide Area Bonjour without even knowing it.

Why would we use this?

Most of us who use DynDNS use it to be able to let the IP Address that our ISP give us resolve with a friendly domain name (such as myname.homedns.org). This basic free DynDNS service works really well as long as you have a third-party router that supports DynDNS (which most of them do). Unfortunately Apple, being Apple, does not support DynDNS in its routers, leaving you to run the OS X DynDNS updater application on your computer. The downside to this is that if your computer is asleep and your home Internet connection drops and reconnects (giving you a new IP address) DynDNS does not get updated until the computer wakes up. When wanting to use Snow Leopard’s Wake On Demand feature this is a problem, so this has meant “tough luck,” requiring you to run the DynDNS Mac client on multiple machines and hope the IP updating occurs often enough. It generally works fine, with the occasional expected downtime when your home IP changes at midday if computers are sleeping.

Does it work?

This DynDNS Community post explains the current problem the DynDNS team are having. The gist is that while the Wide Area Bonjour service discovery works just fine, the domain name IP allocation will only work if your IP does not resolve a reverse name lookup. This is an issue since almost all Internet Providers that give you a dynamic IP address have a full domain name allocated already. For instance, if you do a reserve name lookup on your dynamic IP you may get a name of 123-148-53-102.dyn.ispname.com. This is a problem because of the way Apple’s Global Dynamic Hostname configuration currently works. It will only attempt to configure a name for the IP address if a name doesn’t already exist. DynDNS has queried Apple about the way this works and it appears to be non-intentional behaviour caused by a bug. Apple has indicated on the bonjour mailing list that a fix will come some time in the future, but at this stage there is no ETA. Apple will have to issue firmware updates for the Airport devices to make this work as expected.

What is working fine at the moment is Wide Area Bonjour service discovery. So if you have a static IP that does not resolve with a reverse name lookup and would like to emulate the kind of automatic service discovery functionality that you experience with Back To My Mac, you can achieve this goal with DynDNS now. DynDNS have two guides to assist with the appropriate configurations if you want to give it a try:
- Apple Wide Area Bonjour and DNS Service Discovery with Custom DNS
- Dynamic DNS Support for Apple AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express, and Time Capsule
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