BBC iPlayer - iPod touch friendly!

After following the ups and downs of the BBC's support for the Apple Mac platform (yes, I even signed the petition), I was amazed at my discovery yesterday. Many of the on-demand TV services are not that friendly with the Mac, so when I learned that the BBC were developing support for our beloved Macs, I was really pleased.

Just last night I found myself browsing the internet with my iPod touch. When I went onto the BBC iPlayer site, to see if there were any updated news on Mac support, I clicked on a programme just to see what happened. To my surprise, Quicktime stepped in and played the programme. Perfectly formatted for the iPod touch screen, I could now watch the last seven days of television, via wi-fi on my touch. OK, so some of the programmes are not available, but that is down to the BBC and not the particular device being used to watch. The couple I did watch showed a perfect picture and nice speed buffering, so no pauses or skips. This may well be old news that had skipped my radar, but I wanted to shout out a big 'THANK YOU' to the BBC... let's hope the other channels follow.

Todays new Apple MacBook Pro - Wowza!

I love my MacBook Pro, so when todays new offerings were announced I was both happy, but also green with envy. The new models offer all the usual things we would expect, with speed bumps across the range, bigger hard drives, but offer a whole lot more besides.

Having always favoured the Pro, due to its dedicated GPU, the new version now allows you to have up to 512MB of GDDR3 RAM on the NVidia 8600M GT graphics card, that is awesome. Although this is not reflected in the Apple Store correctly yet, their specification pages state that you get 256MB of GDDR3 on the 2.4GHz version, and 512MB on the 2.5GHz and 2.6GHz versions, it remains to be seen if this is a no cost option. You also get 6MB of shared Level 2 cache, which will help with performance even further. With processor speeds now configurable up to a 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, these babies will really fly.

The big addition to this revision is the multi-touch trackpad. You can now pinch, swipe and rotate your way around (like on the MacBook Air). This is something I really liked the look of and was hoping they would include this in both the MacBook and MacBook Pro, but for now, only the Pro version gets it. For now I will have to be happy with my current machine, which really is not that old, but I know that pretty soon the credit card will be beckoning me to play with it.

UPDATE: You now have to pay £15 for the Apple Remote... shame that such a small cost item is now a chargeable option.

So let's look at todays new Apple MacBook

Well, the new Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro has just been announced, so here I want to take a look at what you get in the new MacBook (I will cover the Pro later).

First off the speed bumps, you get 2.1GHz from the base model, and 2.4GHz in the mid-range white and top-range black models. In the black model, you also get a 250GB hard drive, which is a BTO option in the other two. You can also spec up to 4GB of RAM, but this is often a lot cheaper to do after the event from a third party manufacturer (like Crucial). Everything else reads the same, even the graphic card is not a beefier offering. The only other performance enhancing addition, is 3MB of Level 2 cache.

So the good bits are the extra speed and the massive 250GB hard drive option (unless you have a black version). The bad bits, which will be talked about a lot more, is the lack of multi-touch. Apple have this technology and it would be so much nicer if they offered it too the whole range, but I guess that would hurt MacBook Air sales too much, so they will probably wait until a further revision before the MacBook gets this.

Apple Leopard 10.5.2 Experience

I welcomed the news that Apple's Leopard OS had received an update in the form of 10.5.2. For a long time now I have been swearing at Leopard on my MacBook Pro, with the nuisance of airport connection dropouts and the like. So this new version was just urging me to install.
The I read about the problems; updates freezing, Macs not starting up after the update, user accounts disappearing and the like... so I thought long and hard before going for it. I took the safe option though, as my MBPro is my main computer, I opted to upgrade my Mac Mini first. Starting with a backup of all my user files, followed by a bootable clone of the internal drive. I downloaded the standalone combo updater (rather than going through Software Update), then I was ready to go.
It is early days yet, but around 20 minutes in total saw the Mac Mini restart just once. It booted up first go and (touch wood) all seems fine. The only application that seemed to stop working is MailSteward, but apart from that, all I have tried has worked fine. Things seem snappier to, with responses to application launching a lot quicker. Next week will see my MacBook Pro upgrade, I will let you know how it goes.

MacBook Air - All puff & no grunt?

When his Steveness announced the MacBook Air I did my usual excited scurry for the wallet. Yes, the credit card is always at the ready around Macworld Expo time, and this year was no different (sad I know). Then I took a step back and studied the offering...

The MacBook Air in my opinion really does look the business. Its sleek lines and gorgeous thinness jump out at you, in an understated way of course. This is what Apple does best, and the design of the Air really is superb. This really is laptop for users who travel a lot and want to travel light. It is not for the masses, we have the standard MacBook to fill this need, nor is it for the professional who goes out and about once in a while to visit a client, the MacBook Pro jumps in here. So why did my credit card go back into my wallet untouched?

Well, the Air lacks a few things that it really should offer the mobile pro, especially when Steve compares it to the likes of a Sony ultra-portable. Don't get me wrong, I am a fanboy, but a Vaio of some description comes with an optical drive and a damn site more USB ports, and that is just for starters. For the Air to come out and about with me on every single trip it needs at least two USB ports, a card slot, an optical drive, security slot... oh, and a 12-inch matte screen. The MacBook Air is just too close to the regular MacBook, which is a lot cheaper by miles. So my money would go in that direction. I already have a MacBook Pro, so the Air just did not tempt me. Why would I take a speed drop, feature drop all for the gain of thinness and a lighter weight. I think that the MacBook Air is the first Apple product that hasn't swayed me... it is all puff and no grunt if you ask me!

MacLive Expo London 2007 - Show Report

Having recovered from a manic day (mainly travelling) at this years MacLive Expo, I am now in the right frame of mind to give you my feelings about the exhibition. Before I kick off with all the good bits (and there are plenty) I want to get my anger and disappointment out of the way. As I was stomping the show floor, the main complaint from both exhibitors and members of the public was Apple’s absence from the event. Companies paying top prices to take stand and show their wares felt let down that Apple had chosen NOT to show the same commitment to the UK public. Visitors, who had paid their £15 to get into the Expo, were equally annoyed. Many had not even known that Apple would not be there. They were expecting to see the whole line-up of Macs, iPods and more importantly wanted some hands-on time with the new Mac OS X Leopard. OK, enough moaning, with or without the big A, the show went on.

As with all Mac Expo’s, I am always amazed at the enthusiasm that buzzes around the hall. The main central area is taken up by the bigger companies, with the likes of Quark, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Intego, to name just a few. VMWare had a largish stand, showing their superb software that enables the Mac to run Windows. Avanquest was also at the Expo, with their competing Parallels software, that does the same. It’ll be interesting when I review these two products to see which one performs better of the two. In this central area Simms International Accessories were selling their latest range of computer bags and pouches from Crumpler and BuiltNY. They certainly get my vote for the most fun and endearing company at this years show. The likes of Accountz (with their accounting software) and Elgato (freeview and recording on your Mac) also proved popular with visitors. Whilst on the subject of accounting, MYOB won ‘Best of Show’, which is amazing when you think of how accounting is perceived. I had a chat to them, and was amazed at how passionate they were to make their software so sexy and easy to use.

Over the next month or so, Geekanoids will be announcing some awards for our product reviews. Ahead of time though, we will also be looking at the company behind the product and acknowledging good service. Our ‘Most Friendly’ company award cannot wait that long and this goes to Konica Minolta. Their range of printers speak for themselves, but the fact that they take the time to speak to end users on a level playing field, taking that one extra step to make sure they have happy punters, really is noticeable.

On the outer perimeter of the Expo hall there were many smaller vendors. A chance to meet not only the salesman, but often the programmers behind the software or hardware on offer. A quick shout out to our sponsors Realmac Software and Eazy Draw, who were busy answering questions from visitors. Kensington were also on the wings showing their range of Mac compatible keyboards and mice. We were also lucky enough to pick up a couple of iPhone cases from Contour Design, who are also expecting their iPod touch case to land in about ten days.

All in all this years MacLive Expo was on a much smaller scale, mainly due to Apple not being there. Adobe also chose not to exhibit, so two of last years biggest stands meant everything was condensed. This was a big shame and casts a shadow of doubt in my mind, whether we will see a show next year, unless Apple commit to attending. I hope the show does continue, as it is the only real chance for UK users to feel part of the Mac community. The opportunity to talk with people from the companies whose products we use every day is very valuable, so I really hope to see details of MacLive Expo 2008 announced sooner rather than later.

Let's Get Ready for Leopard

It's about that time again; the time where we get organized, back up our files, and prepare for an update to Apple's premiere operating system; Mac OS X, better known this time around as Leopard. You've undoubtedly seen the major changes to the operating system, including nice new features such as Spaces and Time Machine. While these are nice and (hopefully) useful, many have their own small list of changes they hope to see. Most of the changes I hope for reside within the Finder.

Network Storage is becoming more common these days, even for the average person. The problem is that the Finder does not have great support for two common protocols: FTP and SMB. FTP in Finder has always been read-only. This forces you to find (and possibly purchase) a third-party client or learn how to use the client built into Terminal. What I'd like to see is FTP support where read and write are both enabled. Unlike FTP, Samba does have read and write support within the Finder, yet it's unbearably slow. Perhaps it's fine for a 100 Mbps network, but the sub-100 Mbps performance on a Gigabit network is unsatisfactory.

Another feature lacked in the Finder is with "Column View". This is undoubtedly my most-used view when navigating folders, which is why this next "fix" makes sense. the column view needs to have an option to expand to the size of the longest file name in the folder automatically. It's a pain in the butt to frequently look for files with similar but different names and have to expand every column manually.

Safari, which had (emphasize "had") been my browser of choice for the previous few years. It's a great browser, but the "bloat" is setting in as it matures. As of now I'm using Camino, which is super light and fast. If the next version of Safari can manage to feel less like Firefox and more like Camino, as well as provide a little bit of plug-in support, I may move back again. I'd love a lean-mean browser with Del.icio.us support.

Lastly is iTunes, which like Safari is starting to feel a lot more resource intensive than it's previous releases. I'm sorry to say that I don't particularly like iTunes, but since I need it to sync with my iPod touch, it's a necessary evil. Apple needs to put this guy on the treadmill or I may build my own media player for just listening to music. I'd love to reserve more resources for other, more important applications.

Mac OS X has matured a lot over the years, there's no doubt about it, but there is still a long way to go before it becomes the Holy Grail of all operating systems. I'd love to hear what undocumented changes our readers hope for in Leopard. Please post your opinions and have a good day!

Frank Sandoval (Geekanoids Newbie)
www.shouldbefree.net

iMac Keyboard iWork 08 iLife 08... my thoughts

The announcements Apple made yesterday made a lot of people happy, disgruntled a few and for myself, well, it was mixed feelings. As promised, I would love to share my thoughts, it may leave you wanting to add something in the comments, so feel free.

Well, to kick things off, Steve Jobs did a grand job, nothing could have made me happier than seeing how Steve delivered the news. Sitting at my desk, the iMac amazed me. Great specification, better pricing, well worth while to upgrade with the new graphics and processor power. Then Steve delivered a big blow, that word 'glossy'. Do not get me wrong, the MacBook glossy screen was fine, so why not on the iMac. I suppose it was just that my screen of choice is matte. Although I will most likely buy an iMac, it would be great if there was a matte option, but there is not, so I could never see myself using it for pro type work.

The keyboard that now accompanies the all new Macs (except the mini) is fantastic. I love the slimline design and having had a MacBook, the flat keys are nice and very easy to get used to. Two USB 2.0 ports is also a welcome addition, as are the quick keys that have been added. The wireless Bluetooth 2.0 version is also great, and due to its compact size will be a great companion for laptops.

The Mac Mini also got a revision, but nothing to really shout about. Speed bumping the Mini at least means it'll be around a bit longer. Shame it didn't get some graphics love, maybe a dedicated GPU, even at 64MB would have attracted a lot of users. If Apple ever added dual display capability this little wonder would be an even greater success.

On the software front, at last we got iLife and iWork 08. The new iLife adds some fantastic new features. For myself, iMovie sounds fantastic, having just got a lot more involved in video work for Geekanoids, I am very keen to try it out. The improvements to iPhoto also sound very interesting. In the past I have only ever used it to quickly import photos and never really organised my photos properly, so my task when my software arrives, is to really get organised using the new Events and better Keyword features.
iWork 08 is also on my review list. I used previous versions, but never really stuck with them. This was really due to using Quark Xpress for my page layout and TextEdit for everything else. Another promise to Apple coming up, that apart from the review of iWork, I will stick with it and give it a chance to shine. The addition of Numbers also made perfect sense, and if it works in the style I would expect, should negate the need for anyone to invest in the new MS Office, when/if it ever arrives.

Yesterday was a great day for Apple and they really delivered on all fronts what all Mac users have been waiting for. At last we can sit back and start enjoying the new software and hardware, content that the software will be safe for a while, and that new hardware is just around the corner. Many thanks Steve and the rest of the Apple team, on behalf of all your fans.

Apple Mac Mini Rant

It has been a long time since I have written an opinion piece on Geekanoids… well this is more of a rant, through pure frustration of wanting to buy a new item from Apple's portfolio.
With the WWDC coming up soon, I was really hoping that Apple would not save ALL of its announcements until then. They will be concentrating on the iPhone, which I want, but will have to wait for (being UK based), then I anticipate that the rest of the keynote will cover Leopard, which again I will purchase and install when available.
The recent announcements regarding the inclusion of LED displays in 2007, may well see the announcement of a refreshed MacBook and MacBook Pro, which again will be great, but on a personal note, my MacBook has to do at least another year before being replaced.
What I have really been waiting for is a new Mac Mini, with a Core2Duo chipset, or perhaps a Mini Tower, somewhere in between a Mini and a Pro. It seems a little suspicious to me that Apple have left the Mac Mini dragging its heals. Perhaps you could read into the lack of revision, that we may well see something special happening to the Mini at the WWDC. Then again, we have been here before, expecting big announcements and then in the aftermath of getting nowt, waiting as each week passes, hoping for a Tuesday announcement… so come on Apple, deliver us some small revisions before WWDC, or at least make it a two hour keynote and revise the complete Mac range in one go.