AudioBoo: Spill Disasters

This is just another quick AudioBoo recording in which I describe my beverage spilling woes.  Very exciting.

And the winner is…my next laptop:

Apple’s new Macbook Pro.  Just announced a few minutes ago, it has all of the specs I was looking at from the HP HDX, the 7 hour battery only found in the Macbook Pro 17″ before, 4 gigs of DDR3 ram, etc.  The chart (from Engadget) is below.  Only $1699, $300 less than previous Macbook Pros and it’ll probably be bumped down to $1599 with a student discount.  I’m very happy that I held out on buying anything until WWDC.

Now I’m just waiting for iPhone news.

Laptop shopping

It’s become painfully obviously lately that I need a new laptop.  The ol’ black macbook (with a Core Duo, not even Core 2) isn’t cutting it anymore.  I’d also like something with a 15″+ screen.  So, check out the Macbook Pro, right?  Not so much.  They’re expensive!

I’ve done some looking around lately and my two most viable options are the Sony Vaio FW and the Dell Studio XPS 16.  The Dell has better components (DDR3 RAM, RGBLED display) but costs a few hundred more than the Vaio.  Despite all of that the lowest end Macbook Pro costs several hundred more than either of them.  The biggest problem is that I like the looks of the Pro more than any laptop on the market, but that really isn’t worth the extra $500 considering I’d be sacrificing a faster CPU and bigger default HDD.

So honestly I’m kind of stuck.  I’ve found that I mostly use my MacBook for work stuff and therefore I’m running Windows on it 90% of the time, so going with a PC laptop seems the best route.  Still, none of them seem perfect.  From what I’ve heard the Vaio has really loud mouse buttons and a less-than-desireable trackpad.  The Dell is…well, a Dell.  It’s got a leather accent on it which treads the thin line between cheesy and classy.  It’s also covered in glossy black finish which would indicate to me that it’s a magnet for fingerprints, even moreso than my black matte macbook.

What’s a geek to do!  Any suggestions?

Apple’s Keynote at Macworld ‘09

This year’s Apple keynote had a lot riding on it – firstly because Apple announced that it would be their last at a Macworld event, and secondly because Steve Jobs bowed out from doing the presentation which left Phil Schiller holding the bag.  As always there have been a ton of rumors leading up to the event (including seemingly outlandish claims of an iPhone Nano, or a tablet computer of some sort), but I don’t really want to spend much time on the speculation.  I wrote a post a few weeks ago stating what I thought would go down and I have to say I’m pretty happy with my predictions.

The first thing Schiller announced was a new version of iLife.  iLife ‘09 looks to be a solid follow-up to the famous Mac suite even though only a few applications were demonstrated.  He started with iPhoto, which now lets you sort and categorize your images in a few new ways.  The first is called Faces, and what it does is scan your iPhoto library for, believe it or not, people’s faces.  This is all done with face recognition software, and it lets you group photos by the people in them.  For example if I had a bunch of images of my niece Lilly I could have a Lilly section of my iPhoto library.  The second new categorization feature is called Places.  Places lets you use geo-tagged images (or images tagged manually) to group photos by the place from which they were taken.  If you recently took a trip to Dublin, Ireland for example, all of those images would be grouped in the Dublin section under Places.  They also announced that you can now easily upload your photos to Facebook or Flickr, and your Facebook friends can even tag your images with the people that are in them, and that information will be synced back to your iPhoto library.

Next up was iMovie.  iMovie now incorporates a lot of the features that many people were upset about it missing from iMovie ‘06.  It uses the same interface, but it incorporates a timeline and lets you do some cool new things as well.  First off, you can now drag and drop clips together without having to split each clip individually.  For example, if I have one clip that I want to play in the middle of another, previously I’d have to split the second clip and put the first in between the two parts of the second.  Now I can just drop the first right into the second without splitting anything, and iMovie does the work for me.  It also lets you use just the audio from your clips, letting you mix bits and pieces of audio from your entire recording.  Add to that my favorite feature, image stabilization (it will come in very handy with the Flip Mino HD) and iMovie ‘09 seems to be a very solid upgrade.

Garageband ‘09 was also shown, but I don’t really use that application too much so I figure I’ll just stick to what interested me for the sake of brevity.

Next up came iWork ‘09, and iWork.com.  iWork.com is an online sharing service that lets you share your iWork projects with your friends or co-workers, and is platform independent.  The interface looks just like the iWork app itself, and it enables discussions to be held on the status of the project, or comments to be added if there are changes to be made.  As far as I know however, you can’t actually edit the documents from iWork.com, just view them.  Right now the service is in beta and is therefore free, but Apple is planning on charging for it down the road.  I don’t think that’s a very smart decision because it seems to be the sort of feature which, if bundled with the purchase of iWork ‘09, could be the factor that persuades unsure users to go ahead and purchase a copy of the suite.  As a separate charge it might end up being unsuccessful in the long term.

Obviously iWork.com is just the beginning.  Each of the apps in the iWork suite (Pages, Keynote and Numbers) will see significant updates for the ‘09 release.  Pages is getting a feature similar to WriteRoom’s which lets you have full-screen text editing, as well as a new outline mode and more templates.  Keynote has new transitions, and even does automatic animations with a feature called “Magic Move.”  With Magic Move you can have an object on one slide, and then the same (or more) object(s) on the next, and Keynote will automatically animate these images from slide to slide.  Apple has also added a new app to the iPhone app store called Keynote Remote.  This application lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a remote for your keynote presentation, letting you switch between slides from the device as well as view presentation notes.  It’s odd to think that my favorite feature from the iWork ‘09 suite would be an iPhone app, but this is it.  Finally, Numbers is getting more formulas, advance charts, and of course additional themes.

Next up came the 17″ Macbook Pro unibody.  This announcement came as a surprise to no one.  Much like the other Macbook updates, the Macbook Pro 17″ will finally get that nice aluminum and black bezel design.  It also comes with either a glossy or matte screen, and it packs a whopping 8 hours of battery life.  The only downside is that the battery can’t be removed, a major gotcha for a lot of folks out there.  There isn’t much else to be said about the 17″ Macbook Pro, except that it’s $3,000 so I’ll never be able to afford one. =)

Lastly and, in my opinion anyways, most importantly, was the announcement that iTunes is finally going DRM-free.  As of the keynote there were 8 million songs switched to DRM-free, with the promise that the entire iTunes library would also be by the end of the year.  The only problem is that Apple seems to have buckled to the record labels in order to get this deal done as now their music will have variable pricing.  Some tracks will cost as much as $1.29, while others will be as cheap as $0.69.  Phil Schiller assured the crowd that there would be many more 69 cent songs than dollar 29 ones, but only time will tell if he was being truthful.  In the meantime I’m going to scope out some of the albums I’ve been meaning to purchase to see if I an get a DRM-free deal on them!

Apple’s Notebook Event – 10/14/2008

Alrighty so let me first apologize for not getting a post up on Thursday.  I was kinda busy this past week so I never got around to it.  Instead, I’ve decide to record a video of what I would have written about on Thursday, which as you might guess was Apple’s notebook event from this past Tuesday.  Here you go, she’s a two-parter:

Apple Notebook Event – 10/14/2008 (Part I)

Apple Notebook Event – 10/14/2008 (Part II)

Now Playing:
Canibus – Curriculuum 101
Saints Row 2, Call of Duty : World at War (multiplayer beta)