Apple Reporter

The 2008 WWDC Keynote begins in about 15 minutes, and the internet is abuzz with predictions for what Apple is planning. Here are some of my predictions for what we will see at this year’s WWDC 2008 Keynote.

• 3G iPhone: Duh. While the first generation iPhone has only been around for about a year or so, the demand for a 3G iPhone is extraordinary. There has been way too many “leaks” for Apple to deny the fact that they are making a 3G iPhone. My expectations: standard 16GB, maybe a 32GB as well, starting at $199 and $299 respectively.
• “Snow Leopard“: While I’m not entirely sure about this one, I believe there has been enough development for the iPhone in order to necessitate some sort of “developer” edition of Leopard. Maybe it is a less memory-intensive version of Leopard; built for pure developing. Price will be $99, offered at WWDC immediately following the keynote, available across Apple stores starting tomorrow.
• Mac Tablet: It is probable that Apple has been in the works making a Tablet for a while, maybe even before the iPhone. Meant for graphic designers, engineers, etc. Starts (begin extreme speculation) at $1499, 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM.

That’s my short list of predictions. I won’t be liveblogging the liveblogging like I normally do (I’m in Biology class right now) but I will be reading the liveblog at MacRumorsLive and posting important announcements as they are.. announced.

Safari, whether we like it or not, is the Internet Explorer of Macs. No, I don’t mean that it is buggy and unreliable like Internet Explorer, instead it I mean that it is bundled with all Macs. Many people are not Internet Explorer fans, and so they have switched to different browsers. Many of these switchers switch to Firefox for increased security and speed, and on the Mac it is no different.

Firefox 3.0 RC (Release Candidate) 1 was released yesterday. Potentially, this could be Firefox 3 or if changes are needed, the first in many RCs. From the release notes:

“Released: May 16, 2008

This Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only.

Preview releases are published to collect feedback from Web developers and our testing community before advancing to the next stage in the release process. The final version of Firefox 3 will be released when we qualify the product as fully ready for our users. Users of the latest released version of Firefox should not expect all of their add-ons to work properly with this preview release.

Please see below for an extensive list of features and enhancements found in Firefox 3, as well as known issues and frequently asked questions. As always, we appreciate your feedback either through this feedback form or by filing a bug in Bugzilla.”

New features in Firefox 3 include:

• Gecko 1.9: A new graphics layout engine used to improve standards compliance.
• Themes for each OS: Mac OS X, Linux, Windows XP, Windows Vista
• Redesigned download manager, bookmark system, password manager, plug-in manager, and others.

Firefox 3.0RC1 is available for download here. Remember, this is a test release! Use at your own risk!

So here we are. It’s time for Macworld 2008. Refresh your browsers and get ready for an exciting morning. The keynote starts at 9 AM PST.

8:15 AM: People are beginning to get press badges for the keynote. No one has been allowed in yet, as far as I know.

8:50 AM: Press is about to be let in to the Center.

9:00 AM: People are in the Center now, Coldplay playing while we wait for the Stevester.

9:05 AM: Starting the keynote in a minute or so..

9:13 AM: Lights beginning to dim.

9:14: Get a Mac Ad playing..

9:14: Steve is on stage, talking about Leopard selling 5 million copies, almost 20% of installed base has upgraded.

9:17: Microsoft Office 2008 is shipping as of today.

9:19: Time Machine is good, but not good enough for notebooks. New product announced: Time Capsule

9:19: Time Capsule is Airport Express with build in hard drive for backups.

9:20: Two versions announced: 500 gb - $299, 1 TB - $499.

9:20: Showing Mac/PC ad for Time Machine

9:21: Second thing: iPhone

9:21: iPhone been out on market for 200 days, 4 million sold. 20,000 sold per day average

9:23: iPhone holds around 20% of Smartphone market in US

9:25: Talking about SDK coming out in February, “we wanted to give everybody something today too”… New features announced: Web Clips, Maps with GPS location, home screen customization.. etc, (just like 1.1.3 firmware)

9:28: Still demoing all the different features, SMS texting, etc.

9:30: Showing “Add to home screen” feature

9:31: Up to 9 Webclips on your home screen at a time

9:33: Showing off Locate Me feature on Google Maps, uses Google and Skyhook wireless

9:34: Update 1.1.3 is available today.
9:35: Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes, and Weather are now available for iPod Touch (finally). $20 upgrade for iPod Touch users (WTF?)

9:35: Third Thing: iTunes

9:36: 4 billion songs sold as of last week, 20 million sold on Christmas day. 125 million TV shows sold. 7 million movies.

>

9:37: iTunes Movie Rentals

9:38: Every major movie studio is on board, Touchstone, Miramax, MGM, Lionsgate, Newline, Fox, WB, Disney, Paramount, Universal, Sony.

9:40: Over 1000 movies available. Watch on Macs, PCs. all iPods and iPhones on the market.

9:40: Watch the movies instantly.

9:41: Library titles are $2.99, New Releases $3.99.

9:42: Launches today in U.S., International is later in the year. Updates will follow for iPods/iPhones and iTunes.

9:45: Apple TV take two, no computer requirement, rent movies, DVD and HD + 5.1 Surround sound. Audio and Video podcasts, and photos from Flickr (woo) and .Mac.

9:46: Syncs with iTunes, HD rentals are $4.99, 100 titles available today

9:47: Showing demo of Apple TV

9:49: Preview movies from interface, see what other renters of that movie have rented.

9:51: Showing a scene from Die Hard, third time we’ve seen Justin Long today.

9:52: Searching through iTunes Movies

9:53: Showing off new UI for Apple TV

9:56: Showing Photos feature, stream directly off of .Mac servers

9:58: Showing Flickr on Apple TV, really nice looking.

10:00: Flickr causing some technical difficulties.. demo is now over, reviewing the features

10:01: Apple TV update is a free software update. Price has been dropped $70 to $229. New software update will be out in two weeks.

10:02: Welcoming CEO of Fox to stage, Jim Gianopulos.

10:05: Apple is reinventing the movie rental model

10:07: Talking about DVDs, Family Guy DVD has a iTunes compatible copy.

10:07: Stevester is back on stage.

10:08: Fourth Thing: There’s something in the air..

10:09: Macbook Air. “The World’s Thinnest Notebook”

10:10: Comparing to Sony TZ notebooks, 3 lbs — too much compromise with other features.

10:12: Macbook Air is 0.16″ to 0.76″ thick. It fits inside an envelope.

10:12: Magnetic Latch, 13.3″ widescreen

10:13: LED backlit, iSight, Macbook-like keyboard but with light sensor, multi-touch trackpad

thanks to Gizmodo for the pic

10:15: Showing off trackpad, moving windows, rotating windows, etc.

10:16: 1.8″ hard drive, 80 GB hard drive standard, 64 GB SSD as an option.

10:17: 1.6 GHz standard, 1.8 GHz option — kinda slow, isn’t it?

10:18: Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel taking stage, talking about processor size.

10:19: Steve back on stage

10:20: 45 Watt MagSafe, 1 USB 2.0 Port, Micro-DVI, Audio Out

10:21: 802.11n + Bluetooth 2.1

10:22: New feature called Remote Disc for installing things via CDs and DVDs, Macbook Air has no optical drive, Superdrive accessory for $99.

10:23: 5 hours of battery life

10:24: 2GB RAM standard

10:25: $1799, ships in two weeks, preorder today

10:25: Showing ad for Air

10:27: Environmentally friendly, recyclable case, mercury and lead free display, BFR free circuit boards, etc.

10:29: Steve–First two weeks of 2008, we have updated MAc Pro, introduced Time Capsule and Macbook Air, updated iPhone, iPod Touch, and Apple TV, and added movie rentals for iTunes.

10:31: Randy Newman about to perform

Well, that seems like it is it. Thanks for all of you who stayed for the whole thing, and an overview of all the new products will be up this afternoon.

Adium, arguably the best IM client for Mac, has been updated to version 1.2, adding features such as improved menus, improvements to Jabber support, better group chat and better Applescript support. From the Adium team:

“The Adium team is proud to announce the availability of Adium 1.2. This is a major feature release with a ton of fantastic improvements as well as a a ridiculous number of bug fixes. We’ve discussed many (but not all) of the new features themselves previously on the blog, including the improved Adium menu item and account management features, various and sundry improvements to Jabber support (including SSL certification authentication, server-supplied action support, and discovery services browsing), fixed Bonjour local area network messaging with file transfers, better group chat (conferencing), a completely rewritten Applescript dictionary which should lead to all sorts of powerful new interactions with other programs, and detachable groups. (One ‘advertised’ feature which did not make it into Adium 1.2 was MSN personal messages; development efforts for these are still in progress by the libpurple team. A future version of Adium will have this enhancement once it’s ready.)”

Next on the Adium team’s list of improvements are MSN personal messages (a favorite of MSN users), and eventually video chat. Adium has been covered on Apple Reporter before, as one of our “Apps of the Week”.

More info about Adium: (from the App of the Week post)

Adium is a chat program that was first developed in 2001 by college student Adam Iser. Since then, it has had a long and confusing developing cycle, involving name changes and version number mix-ups. As of this writing, Adium is at version 1.1.4, and is currently the most popular IM solution for Mac OS X. While there is virtually nothing wrong with it, one frequently requested feature is A/V chat, which is being worked on as I write this. Adium offers almost complete customization, from message styles to contact list windows, dock icons to sound sets. It is also open source, and completely free. Is there anything wrong with it?

Adium is available for download here.

Ryan Block, editor of Engadget has posted his predictions about Macworld 2008. From the post:

“…a day doesn’t goes by I’m not asked at least a few times what inside dope I’ve got on what Apple’s introducing at Macworld. My stock response is (and always will be), “Everything I know is published on Engadget.” Now, I’m also not usually one to grasp at predictions (just not my thing), but what the hell. If you’re curious as to what I THINK — and not necessarily know — will go down at MW08, here’s the shortlist…”

Some of the predictions are pretty interesting, certainly things I wouldn’t think about, such as refreshes to the Cinema Display and different video outputs on the laptops. While Ryan has said that the list are guesses, I am sure that the chief editor of the most popular tech blog on the Internet is likely to know at least something about Macworld.

I’d like to put in my opinion on some of the items that Block addressed also.

Number 1 - iPhone SDK: The SDK, which has been promised by Jobs already, is sure to be given an official release date, as well as more insight into what the SDK really is. Hopefully the SDK will be powerful enough that Apple will have to continually shutdown third-party apps in every firmware update.

Number 2 - The Slim Laptop: Already been covered.

Number 3 - iPhone 2.0/3G: Something that everyone is pretty much expecting, the 3G iPhone has already been confirmed by the AT&T CEO, and Steve Jobs himself has said that the 3G iPhone will be out next year.

For the remainder of the predictions, you can go to Block’s site and read the predictions there.

Note: The above picture is a mockup from MacNewbTube that has been used in previous posts.

Dear Apple,

We love your products. Some of us get our paychecks writing because of you and your products. The amount of care you put into your products is visible, sometimes, but other times it just feels like you build the products that we so graciously buy half-heartedly.

I myself have had numerous problems with my Apple purchases. I received my Macbook Pro January of this year, and from day one I had a problem. I realized that it would not play DVDs. I promptly sent it in to AppleCare, and within two weeks I had it back. Since then, I have not experienced much problems with it, until recently, when a slew of problems have all shown up instantly.

The Macbook Pro, since its creation and release in early-2006, has experienced numerous issues, and I myself have fell victim to a few of them. About 4 months after I purchased the Macbook Pro, the fan began to act up. After the installing of a third-party application to detect the fans’ speed and temperature, and it was then that I discovered that one of my fans was completely unresponsive, and that the entire computer was relying on only one fan.

The next issue I can’t blame on Apple entirely. In the Northwest during the Fall, we are victim to strong winds and along with that, power outages. As I left for school in the morning, I left my Pro plugged in to the Magsafe adapter, while it was asleep. Throughout a series of power outages, my Pro stayed charged, but asleep. When I used it on a Friday night, in my bed while it was unplugged, I shut it off. The next morning, I realized my Macbook Pro was completely inoperable unless plugged in. I, for the second time, called AppleCare and began the lengthy process of sending my Mac in for repair. I’m not blaming this issue on you, however, this event spawned a new set of problems.

My grandmother, who is quite tech-savvy, let me borrow her white Macbook while my Macbook Pro was in repair. I have had it for roughly 10 days, and already there has been a problem. I have treated it excellently, almost exclusively keeping it in a case when it was not sitting on my desk. But the plastic trim at the end of the Macbook, near the trackpad, is slowly coming off, leaving a disfigured area near the trackpad.

Around the same time, I also noticed that the Magsafe adapter that came with the Pro, which as you will remember I have had less than a year, is beginning to malfunction. I have discovered that I am not the first to experience problems with it. The wiring around the Magsafe end of the power brick is now exposed, and is only functional around 33% of the time.

Note, as I mentioned earlier, that people receive their paychecks from writing about you and your products. I am one of those people. I blog about exclusively Apple news at applereporter.com. But my experiences with Apple products have been less than satisfactory, to say the least. My next item on my Wish List, which I am vigorously saving up for, is an iPhone. But will I be subject to the same problems on the iPhone as I have been with my Macbook Pro? I hope not, because both are beautiful and quite functional products, but based on my previous and current experiences, I’m not sure I can safely trust that my iPhone would be durable enough to last even past a few months.

I urge you Apple, please take the time to actually work on your products. Do not be so eager to ship things out quickly, think back to the original Macintosh, which Apple spent years on creating before they released it. I am not saying that the products right now are horrible, on the contrary, I believe them to be some of the most useful and aesthetically pleasing products I have ever seen in my life, but instead, I ask that you think about the quality of your products and how, with a little bit of time, your consumer model could change from the generic fanboy who will buy your products, regardless of the quality of the products themselves, to the regular computer user, who should not have to be afraid of bad quality.

Sincerely,
Kristian Freeman
http://www.applereporter.com

Open source project ies4osx allows IE to be run on a Mac, using Wine emulation. Conveniently, the program comes bundled with Darwine, the port of Wine libraries to OS X. For those of you who have been wondering from the beginning, “Why in the world would I use IE on my Mac?”, IE, being the most commonly used browser worldwide, is infamous for ruining web design templates and CSS style sheets. So for the web designers out there, this download is worthwhile so your web pages, which work fine in Safari and Firefox, can also be tweaked to work on IE. Ies4osx also allows you to install multiple versions of IE, from IE 5 to IE 7. Overall for web designers, it’s not a bad idea to grab ies4osx.

Microsoft’s long in the making Office 2008 suite has been previewed a little bit more on the Microsoft site, and there are some new features that have not yet been seen. One of these is iPod and iPhone integration with Powerpoint, for easy sharing of presentations using the photo viewer. Also announced is compatibility with the Apple Remote, and other features, all of which can be viewed here.

Aspyr, primary porter of popular PC games to the Mac, has announced that the ported version of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock will be coming to the Mac December 10th. No word on system requirements yet, though I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the best features are Leopard only.

The game will come with a USB-operated guitar controller, similar to the ones used for other systems. The price has not yet been announced either. Is anyone planning on purchasing it?

Update: The article has hit the front page of the Apple section of Digg, and along with that a lot of new information from assorted people has come in.

Panic, the company behind brilliant apps such as Transmit, Coda, and Unison, have updated their popular icon organization and customization tool CandyBar to version 3.0. With the new update, there are many added features that make CandyBar an amazing and fun experience to use. First off, CandyBar 3.0 is compatible with 10.5 Leopard, so for those who don’t like the new icons for Leopard, you can customize them as well as the Dock, just as you did with Tiger. CandyBar also has a new UI, making it easier to browse through the icons you’ve downloaded. Along the same lines, iContainers, the standard for icon sets, can now be used with Quick Look, for simple icon viewing. All the icons are now 512×512 also.

CandyBar 3 is shareware, and is limited to 15 days and 250 icons. It can be purchased for $30 a copy, or $19-$24 for an upgrade (see page.

For those of us who follow Mac news religiously, you may have seem the various reports of ways to change your Dock (in Leopard, to be exact). Most of these require going into the App’s file contents and using Terminal to change things, and overall it’s just complicated. But for those of you who want to be able to change their Dock, a new app by Whimsically Plucky Software called DockChanger offers the ability to change your Dock theme instantly, without any file managing or Terminal config. It also comes with 90 themes built-in, and the option to download a new set of themes each month. DockChanger is this week’s App of the Week at Apple Reporter.

DockChanger is shareware, 10 Dock changes for free then $10 for no restrictions.

Inquisitor, the popular search enhancement tool for Safari, has been updated to version 3.0, build 50, and is now usable on Leopard. Because earlier versions of Inquisitor made use of the InputManager folder which is no longer available in Leopard, it has taken some time for it to be updated.

Inquisitor, as previously mentioned, enhances your search bar on Safari and auto-completes the phrases and offers suggestions. This is useful in many different ways, as you can imagine, and follows the same lines as Quicksilver in terms of time reduction and increase of productivity.

Download is available here (download will start upon opening link)

Apple has posted their Black Friday deals for this year up on the Apple Store. While there are no extravagant deals on the expensive items, there are many small price cuts that are sure to appeal to a variety of shoppers.

Here’s a list of some of the most important cuts (note: these are not all of them):

• Macbook, save up to $101, now from $1048
• iMac, save up to $101, now from $1148
• Apple Bluetooth Headset, save up to $21, now from $108
• iPod Nano, save $11, now from $138
• iPod Shuffle, save $11, now from $68
• iPod Classic, save $31, now from $228
• $100 off Office 2004 with mail-in rebate, and with purchase, only a $6.95 upgrade fee to Office 2008

For all the great deals, either visit the Apple Store today, or download this simple image containing all the deals below.

As every Mac user has probably realized, the Dock is probably the most used part of your Desktop during your daily computer use. Everyone has different docks, some with apps that I’ve probably never even heard of. But I thought I would post my dock, and I would hope that everyone else would do the same. If it’s really cool, maybe I can add it to the post so other people can see it too.

Apps in order: Finder, Safari, Mail, iTunes, iPhoto, Adium, iChat, Colloquy, Address Book, Coda, Pages, Photoshop, Netnewswire Lite, Marsedit, Final Cut Express HD, and then my stacks: Downloads, and my Home folder, and then of course, the Trash.

Don’t just look at this and say, oh that’s cool looking. Use this as a forum to share your favorite Mac apps with other people, maybe even something that will save someone an hour of their time everyday. The choice is yours, whether to participate or not.

Here at Apple Reporter, we’re going to start a new segment called App of the Week. Each week, I’m going to outline a new application that you should check out for yourself. Whether it’s cool looking, convenient, or something you never thought you could do with your Mac, there are many apps out there that everyone could use on their Mac. The first of these is called Adium.

Adium is a chat program that was first developed in 2001 by college student Adam Iser. Since then, it has had a long and confusing developing cycle, involving name changes and version number mix-ups. As of this writing, Adium is at version 1.1.4, and is currently the most popular IM solution for Mac OS X. While there is virtually nothing wrong with it, one frequently requested feature is A/V chat, which is being worked on as I write this. Adium offers almost complete customization, from message styles to contact list windows, dock icons to sound sets. It is also open source, and completely free. Is there anything wrong with it?

Adium is available for download here.

This is what Adium looks like on my computer.