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MacBook Air Update Rumored, But Apple Could Skip Sandy Bridge
Less than six months ago, Apple launched a redesigned MacBook Air, introducing an 11-inch model, better battery life, and universal solid-state storage, as well as lower price points. It was almost a completely new machine, but only “almost” because the new MacBook Air still uses the “old” Core 2 Duo processor: the same class of CPU the original MacBook Air had when it was launched in 2008. That may finally be about to change.

CNET is reporting the MacBook Air will be transitioning to Sandy Bridge, Intel’s latest microprocessor architecture, as early as June. While Sandy Bridge and Core “i” series CPUs offer improved performance, especially with Intel HD integrated graphics, a hardware flaw related to SATA ports temporarily slowed shipments this month. While the issue has been resolved, it likely pushed back MacBook Pro updates until mid-March. Depending on whether or not that update happens will set the stage for Sandy Bridge for the MacBook Air in June.

There’s still a degree of uncertainty, because there remains some debate as to whether Sandy Bridge supports OpenCL, the programming framework favored by Apple that allows use of the graphics processors. If the 13-inch MacBook Pro moves to Sandy Bridge, Core i3, and Intel HD graphics, Sandy Bridge for the MacBook Air is a certainty. If the 13-inch MacBook Pro gets a discrete GPU in addition to Intel HD, like the other MacBook Pros, that probably means trouble for the MacBook Air. If Sandy Bridge doesn’t fully support OpenCL, Apple will have to wait for Ivy Bridge. Ivy Bridge is the die shrink of Sandy Bridge that supports OpenCL, which is on track to be released in the second half of the year.

Apple could well just wait for Ivy Bridge. According to DigiTimes, Apple is doubling orders of some “hot-selling” models of Mac laptops. That would be the MacBook Air, which has been credited by analysts as largely responsible for the record 2.9 million Mac laptops sold during the holiday quarter. Clearly, the use of an older microprocessor architecture isn’t hurting sales, and arguably only the die-hard tech crowd would even care if Apple held of on updating the MacBook Air until late this year.

As a member of that crowd, the thought of not getting a Core i3 MacBook Air this summer with OS X 10.7 is hurtful indeed. Would you be upset if Apple skips a mid-year spec bump?

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Dating Apps: Valentine's Day for the Single iPhone Owner
To properly write about dating apps, one needs to be single, so I’m taking one for the team and getting divorced. To those that are finding out this way, I’m sorry Mom and Dad, I meant to tell you.* To celebrate the first time in years I haven’t had to buy flowers and chocolates for Valentine’s Day, I’m looking at iPhone apps that could ultimately cause me to end up buying several sets of flowers and chocolates.

I’m not going into the sites (there are other resources for that, and this is TheAppleBlog, after all) themselves, but rather an overview of how the apps themselves work.

The Apps

eHarmony. Without getting into a review of dating sites in general, I’ll just say I found the entire experience at eHarmony to be the best. Their guided communication method helps you figure out if a person passes some a self-defined litmus test before proceeding. The eHarmony app is a replacement for the full website; in fact, likely due to some Flash error on my Mac, the iPhone app was the only way I could upload my photo. I did have a few weird issues, though. Sometimes, the eHarmony Mail wouldn’t go through on the iPhone. It would send it, but then it would disappear from my sent mail items, apparently having gone nowhere at all. Overall, it was a great experience, though. The app is also a Universal app, and I love how it app opens to a dashboard instead of directly into the Mail view (unlike other apps — read on).

Plenty of Fish. Plenty of Fish’s app seems to play to the site’s focus of immediate communication — unlike eHarmony, Plenty of Fish starts off with messaging your prospective suitor. When you launch the app, you’re brought directly to your mailbox. Unfortunately. the app isn’t really well suited for messaging. The font is a tad smaller than it is in the iOS Mail app, and the overall feel of the message pane is cramped. They’d be better off just copying the iOS Mail app’s interface entirely. Also, when browsing photos, you can’t swipe to get to get to the next photo, you have to use buttons instead. It feels awkward and unintuitive.

Match.com. In terms of usability, I found the Match app to be about halfway between eHarmony and Plenty of Fish. This is fitting since the site itself seems to be halfway between as well. Both Match and eHarmony are subscription sites. Unlike eHarmony, the free portion of the site allows you to view photos, however you need to subscribe to go through the communication process. The app itself is very well put together. I actually found searching for potential matches easier via the app than the web site. Like Plenty of Fish the app defaults to the Mail view on launch, which isn’t ideal in my opinion.

Notable Absences

Two websites that purport to focus on geeks (gk2gk.com and sweetongeeks.com) don’t have apps. To me, this is missing a potentially huge segment of their user base. While not everyone who owns an iPhone is a geek, I’m willing to bet a fair amount of people who consider themselves geeks have iPhones. Also, Ashley Madison — a site that caters to people looking to have an affair — has an iOS app but I’m not sure that falls under the gamut of this review.

The Morning After

Of the three apps, I enjoyed eHarmony the most. It was easy to use, and it was easy to keep track of all the activity going on with my account. However, both Match.com and eHarmony are subscription sites, and eHarmony is the most expensive option. Plenty of Fish is free, but as with anything else in life, consider the adage “you get what you pay for.”

* Ed. note: The author’s marital status was not a requirement for this post.

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How Crowdbeacon Is Mobilizing the iPhone User Community
Earlier, I pointed out an emerging recent trend in apps: community-assisted recommendations. Recently, I got a chance to talk with the CEO behind one of these apps. Crowdbeacon (link opens iTunes) is a free iPhone application currently available through the App Store that provides location-based recommendations and answers to questions sourced by the app’s user community.

Crowdbeacon works by allowing users to ask questions about specific services, businesses and locations in their area, and then seeking answers to those questions from other users and businesses using Crowdbeacon, and from other services. It also lets you answer questions in your vicinity, and includes a gamification element to promote user interest through leaderboards.

In my previous article, I mentioned Locamind, a web-app currently in beta which offers similar functionality. Aside from being iPhone-only for the moment, Crowdbeacon also offers some interesting additional differentiating features, like the ability to narrow your query results by category, and tie-ins with other services like Foursquare and Yelp to help augment the number of potential sources of information a user can access. Right now, the UI could use a little more polish, but in major metropolitan areas, it does what it claims to, providing answers to questions that are thoughtful and timely from others using the app via push notifications.

Here’s what Crowdbeacon CEO Rob Boyle had to say about his app, their plans for future releases, the iOS platform, and the future of community-assisted apps in general:

TheAppleBlog: What do you see in the future for community-assisted apps?

Rob Boyle: We might be biased, but our perspective is that the future for community-assisted apps is bright. As smart phone adoption increases and the consumer-web evolves to become more custom and data-driven, being able to plug into existing communities for advice and perspective provides a practical benefit that just flat-out wasn’t possible 24 months ago. And we’re excited about the potential that this type of interaction provides as both a business and as people who benefit on a daily basis from being able to plug into these communities.

TAB: What does Crowdbeacon ultimately hope to accomplish, for its users and as a business?

RB: We started Crowdbeacon with one (simple) goal in mind: to create a location-based app that wasn’t a game or a check-in service (which Foursquare so successful commoditized), but one that actually helped regular people and local businesses alike. And ultimately if our platform can accomplish this feat — which only user adoption and validation will show — we will be thrilled. As a business, we would be very happy creating a brand with long-term equity, that helps establish location-based communication as an important part of commerce and daily life. And no one is ever against a successful exit, so there’s that too.

TAB: Why iPhone for launch? Any plans to expand to other platforms?

RB: As any bootstrapped startup, we had to make the hard choice of which platform to start building with since we didn’t have a million dollars and institutional funding… and we ultimately chose the iPhone for a bunch of reasons. Most important though was the fact that when we started development we felt that the iPhone SDK was the most mature (this was just after the iOS4 was released) OS on the market… and our CTO Luca Columbu was excited about the possibility of building an iPhone app. That said, we are working this very moment on our Android app, which we hope we can release in the next 3-4 weeks, which will be followed by a Blackberry app after that. And we’re really excited about these platforms as well.

TAB: Does iOS offer advantages for community-assisted apps that others don’t?

RB: When we started development of Crowdbeacon, the iOS may have had an advantage but in reality I think that now all of the major players have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to community-assisted app development. For us personally, we like the device standardization that the iOS brings with it, but since we haven’t finished building Crowdbeacon for Android I can’t truly compare so I probably shouldn’t try — lest I inflame Android developers everywhere.

TAB: How are you currently funded and what are your plans for future funding?

RB: We are proud to say that we are a fully-bootstrapped startup that was incubated, designed and built entirely by myself and the team at Squeaky Wheel Media. That said, we have been meeting with VCs on both coasts for the past 6 months to determine who we like (and who likes us) so that when the time came for us to raise our Series A — which will be soon — we were prepared. And we’ve got some great firms who are interested so that’s very exciting from our perspective.

Right now, Crowdbeacon is in a good place on the cusp of an emerging trend, but I expect the field to get a lot more crowded in the near future. A lot of people already use Twitter to solicit these kinds of recommendations, but the service isn’t geared toward providing them specifically. Will we see ever a major player with a focused, hyper-local mobile Q&A service? Probably, since it seems a natural extension of existing ones like Google Places, but for now the startups are free to lead the way.

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How to Backup Your DVD Movies for Mac, Apple TV, iOS & iPod
Creating an image file of a data disc is straightforward. Preserving music CDs on a Mac is only challenging if you wanted to get it just right. While somewhat forbidden, it’s still possible to tame Blu-ray on a Mac as well. That just leaves your DVD-based movie collection to conquer.

Surprisingly, I’ve found DVDs the most challenging of all disc formats to preserve and back up. The variety of software available for the task is overwhelming, and the success rate of said solutions is far from 100 percent. Sometimes you have to try different software, or tweak certain in order to get the desired outcome. Here’s a guide to using some of the best current Mac software available for DVD archiving.

Keeping Your Discs Clean

For whatever reason, DVDs tend to be the most fragile of the optical disc formats that I’ve had to deal with. Beyond keeping a soft cloth nearby to wipe down each disc before decrypting and decoding, I’ve found that more serious means of cleaning discs are often times necessary. Generally speaking, Aleratec’s DVD/CD Disc Repair Kit for about $40 on Amazon gets the job done. You’d be amazed at how many failed rips can be resolved just by cleaning your disc.

Decrypt and Copy to Hard Drive

Once you have a clean disc, the next step is to get its contents onto your hard drive. On the Mac, there are only a few good options to consider for doing this. Longtime favorite MacTheRipper has all but disappeared, as has the open-source Fairmount. That leaves Pavtube and The Little App Factory’s RipIt. Since I already covered Pavtube when working with Blu-ray on the Mac, this time I’ll focus using RipIt.
1. Download, install and launch RipIt.
2. In the Preferences (Ripit > Preferences in the Menu Bar), under General, set the destination for the extracted files.
3. Also in General Preferences, make sure that “Use .dvdmedia Extension” is not selected. This will make sure your movies are saved as a standard VIDEO_TS folder, which can be read by many applications.
4. Insert a DVD and click Rip.
It’s that easy. And once you set the location where you want to store the decrypted movie files to, you don’t have to change your preferences unless you want to select a new destination. Just insert the DVD and click Rip.

Encode for Apple TV

While both Pavtube and RipIt offer the ability to compress the DVD’s content into various other formats directly while ripping, I prefer to use HandBrake on the Mac and its built-in preset list of supported device targets. Encoding from a DVD that has been copied to the hard drive is also much faster than encoding from the original disc. To encode your video files with HandBrake, all you need to do is:
1. Download, install and launch HandBrake.
2. Click on the Source icon in HandBrake’s toolbar and navigate to the location where you ripped your DVD’s VIDEO_TS folder to using RipIt (which you set in step 2, above).
3. In the drop-down menu labeled Title, select the title you wish to encode. HandBrake usually does a pretty good job at automatically selecting the actual movie title, as it is typically the longest running video on the DVD.
4. Toggle the presets and select Apple TV as the destination device.
5. Select a destination and file name.
6. Click on the green Start button.
Encode for Everything Else

Unfortunately there is not one best encoding format for all devices. If you encode to the lowest common denominator (likely an older iPod), you’ll notice serious quality problems on larger HDTVs. You can certainly follow the exact same steps above in HandBrake and select different destination devices each time, but there are two other more convenient options available to you:

iTunes Conversion. In Advanced menu in iTunes, you will notice two options: ”Create iPod or iPhone Version,” and “Create iPad or Apple TV Version.” This works great for turning files in your library that you’ve created using HandBrake for Apple TV into ones that work with your iPhone or iPod. This process tends to take a very long time to complete.

iSquint Conversion. Like MacTheRipper, iSquint has fallen from grace and is no longer supported. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t still work. Once you’ve created a version of the movie file created via HandBrake, all you need to do is drag and drop your media files onto iSquint’s single screen. iSquint is great when creating versions of movie files for older video iPods and iPod Classics.

Unfortunately, from time to time you’ll encounter a DVD that just wont rip using either iRip or Pavtube. In these cases, if you have access to a Windows machine (virtual, Boot Camp, or physical) either AnyDVD or DVDFab should help you resolve the problem. Converting your DVD movies to Apple device-friendly formats may not be easy, but once it’s done, you can sit back and enjoy your film collection however you choose, which feels pretty good.

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