Category Archives: Apple

It’s a Mac, Mac, Mac World

Macworld ExpoMacworld Expos have not excited me very much since the mid-90s, though every summer, when the East Coast edition rolls into New York City, I make it a point to head over to the Javits Center and see what the Mac industry has to show for itself. Inevitably, I find myself bored after no more than an hour or two of browsing the aisles, and this year was no different. Actually, that may be good news, considering the comedy of PR errors that preceded this year’s New York show (which demonstrated that Apple has no particular desire to see an Apple-focused trade show in New York thrive). It’s kind of a success story in itself that the show floor looked crowded and that everyone seemed pretty upbeat.

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EMusic versus iTunes

eMusicIn just a few days of having a trial membership to EMusic, I’ve already downloaded more songs than I have in months of browsing the Apple iTunes Music Store, and this in spite of how much my bias towards all things Apple wanted to like the that Mac-only service. Once or twice a week, I would browse its catalog, hoping that I would come across some music that was remotely interesting enough for me to shell out 99¢ or more, but more often than not, I came up short — the albums I wanted were missing, or their track listings omitted crucial songs. I think I bought one album and three individual songs from the iTMS, for a grand total of about US$13.

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R.I.P. C&G

Casady & GreeneI have a soft spot for utility software — especially for the Macintosh — because the authors, engineers and publishers who work in this niche almost always seem to be real fans of the computing experience. The very nature of utility software — those little add-ons and enhancements that subtly or significantly alter the behavior of the operating system — is one of tweaking, of altering the way of things in a particular, sometimes obscure way so that the universe seems just a tad bit more in order… and it’s usually the most devoted computer geeks who will tweak.

Utilities make computing more efficient and personal, and especially with those programs written for the Macintosh, they make things more fun. Which is why I’m so sad to see longtime Mac utility publisher Casady & Greene shutter its operations.

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Week in Review

Later this afternoon, I’m leaving for a 3-day trip to Montréal on the occasion of a good friend’s bachelor party. The number of things I know about Montréal are few: it’s clean, everyone speaks French, they have a famous jazz festival which I fear that I will be forced to attend, and it’s generally cooler than New York — at least it had better be, because it’s sweltering here. I imagine my experience will be somewhat like the experience I had in Syndey: pristine, elegant and pleasant, yet small and mediocre. I’m such a snob! Anyway, I’m looking forward to it, and keeping an open mind.

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A Flock of G5s

PowerMac G5It’s hard to know when I can trust myself when it comes to applauding new Apple announcements, but I had that same familiar excitability come over me when Steve Jobs unveiled new PowerMac G5 desktop computers at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference today. From the online images, these new machines look dead sexy — sleek, angular and forbiddingly cool. In a way, they remind me of the industrial design language that informed high-end stereo systems in the 1980s; I’ve also seen a few recent automobile dashboards modeled in this fashion. Maybe it’s time I broke out my stash of skinny ties.

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Rebuild the Desktop

Rice Bowl IconLast Thursday, I dropped off my PowerBook G4 ( Titanium) at Tekserve for a little upgrade. Its original 30GB hard drive had been bursting at the seams for a while, and so I finally bit the bullet, forked over a few hundred dollars and had it replaced with a new, 80GB model. The always-helpful Tekserve technicians encased the old one in a portable FireWire drive so I can still access the data on it, and they gave me a fresh installation of Mac OS X Jaguar on the new one. So today I’m spending the day installing everything from scratch, from applications and utilities to fonts and all of my old documents.

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That Ol’ Time UI

Parents: The Anti-DrugIn a weekly email question-and-answer column, NY Times advertising reporter Stuart Elliot addressed a reader’s question about this online ad for the “Parents: The Anti-Drug” campaign. The reader remarked on the fact that the ad was “designed to recall the display from the early Macintosh computers,” and wondered whether it was meant to be “lifeless enough to drive away teens, but familiar to the eyes of young parents like myself, who grew up with the Mac and its display quirks.”

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The Exploration Is Over

IE for MacThis Friday the Thirteenth turned out to be kind of a bad one for the Macintosh, as today Microsoft confirmed recent rumors that it is discontinuing that platform’s edition of Internet Explorer. This, coupled with the Redmond behemoth’s recent announcements that IE will no longer be a standalone product but will instead be entirely integrated into future versions of the Windows operating system, confirms that the Clinton-era Department of Justice was right to sue for monopoly abuse and that the Bush II-era DOJ was wrong to settle the suit so willingly. This is a decision that surely would never have been made in 1999. (Thanks Ralph Nader!)

With its 95 percent share of the internet browser market, Microsoft’s cancellation of IE amounts to a kind of condemnation of the Mac platform. It remains to be seen whether the strategy that Steve Jobs has pursued with Apple over the past few years — shooting for consumer dollars while half-ignoring the common wisdom that the Mac and Windows machines should be as interoperable as possible — will bear fruit through this unfortunate turn of events. Things don’t look so great, though I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Safari will continue to keep up with the ever-changing demands of the Web browser market.

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The ‘i’ Is for Indie

It’s a relief to me that earlier this week Apple finally gave a presentation to independent music labels on the subject of getting their music into the iTunes Music Store. As these first-person notes on the meeting suggest, the company is serious about diversifying the content for sale via their breakthrough foray into music retailing. That’s great news, because as I mentioned when the store debuted, its offering of actually interesting music leaves much to be desired. If enough indie labels come aboard — and all signs indicate that they’re champing at the bit to do so — it will exponentially improve the value of the iMS, at least to my mind.

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’N’ Sync ’n’ Sync ’n’ Sync

iSyncThe latest version of Apple’s iSync will synchronize bookmarks across multiple installations of Safari. So if you have a Macintosh at work and a Macintosh at home and you pay US$100 for Apple’s .Mac service, you can always have your bookmarks handy without even having to think about it. This new iSync feature is an attempt at solving a crucial problem with which I’ve been living for five years, but unfortunately it seems like a case of ‘close but no cigar.’

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