News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
Within minutes of Apple's announcement in the wee smalls of Wednesday that the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines of portable computers had been updated with Intel's latest and greatest "Penryn" processors, based on a brand new 45-nanometer fabrication process that very nearly defies the very laws of physics, the rumour sites were abuzz with the news that these machines would be superseded sometime later this year. It has to be some kind of record. The source of the rumours was someone at Intel, who reportedly told someone else that in a few months Intel will be replacing "Penryn" with "Montevina" and by this time next year doesn't expect to be selling any more Penryn processors.
Matthew JC. Powell | Feb 29, 2008
Have you joined or even just visited your local Macintosh User Group? Do you know what a Macintosh User Group is, what they have to offer or where to find them? Macintosh User Groups, commonly referred to as MUGs, are just a group of ordinary Mac users, just like you and I, who get together to discuss and learn things about their Macs. There are active groups throughout every state and territory within Australia, in the capital cities as well as many in regional centers.
Nicholas Pyers | Feb 25, 2008
One of the challenges Mac users face is trying to sync their mobile devices with their Mac. In a recent forum post, I asked readers for some input to an upcoming column on smartphones. Due to the space constraints of the print version of Australian Macworld I won't be able to cover sync solutions in that feature so I thought I'd pull them together in this post. I'll take a browse through the world of sync solutions for the Mac and cover Mobile Phones, Windows Mobile, Palm, BlackBerry and the rest.
Anthony Caruana | Feb 24, 2008
Now that the Blu-ray Disc versus HD-DVD stoush has been declared a non-starter (without the market ever really having much of a say in it) does that mean that the future of content delivery has been decided? Hardly. Battles are still raging on a number of fronts and few surrenders are to be found. Concessions, however, are many. For example, 20th Century Fox has released a number of DVDs in the USA which include "digital copies" of the main content. This may seem an odd sort of terminology since the DVD itself is a digital copy. But the emphasis in that terminology should be not on the word "digital" but on the word "copy". The "digital copy" is a version of the film optimised for use on devices like Apple TV and iPod touch. I specify those devices because, in the case of Fox at least, the copy is still protected by Apple's FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) technology, just as if it had been downloaded from the iTunes Store. Which means it won't play on any non-Apple devices.
Matthew JC. Powell | Feb 22, 2008
A minute's silence is in order, we think. We ask all the Mac faithful to take some time out, just now, for just a minute, to think on those who have fallen. Those who fought the good fight but will fight no more. Yes, we're talking about the Apple channel. Long have they held the fort against all and sundry. Long may they yet. But we fear they may not. A recent story from Glasgow, Scotland tells why. Apple a year ago expanded its chain of Apple stores in the UK into Glasgow, Scotland's largest city.
Fleur Doidge | Feb 21, 2008
This morning Apple very quietly and discreetly announced that it was discontinuing the Xserve RAID, and that units currently in the channel are the last that will be sold. It made this announcement so quietly, in fact, that as I write this at 2pm there has still not been a press release. In its place Apple will be selling RAID systems manufactured by enterprise vendor Promise via its online Store, and Promise's RAID systems have already been certified for use with Apple's Xsan distributed storage product.
Matthew JC. Powell | Feb 20, 2008
Astute readers will have noticed that we didn’t manage to complete our scheduled review of high definition DVD burners. Yet. Now that Toshiba has announced an unconditional surrender in the HD wars, we can claim we held off because we didn’t want to give readers a bum steer to a soon to be dead format. However, we’ll come clean -- we didn’t know what Toshiba was about to do until we read about it, just like you. And so we reach the conclusion of perhaps the briefest media format war.
Ian Yates | Feb 19, 2008
New owners of mobile phones revel in their clever and multiple abilities. It's not just a phone, it's also a GPS, and a web browser, and a music player, and ... sigh ... a camera. The big plus to taking shots with a phone camera is the "sneak factor". Very quietly, very slyly, you can take shots with your phone’s camera a lot more inconspicuously than using a digicam. Which brings in many issues relating to privacy and security and explains why some locations ban the use of mobile phones outright.
Barrie Smith | Feb 18, 2008
Listen — do you hear that? That distant pounding, gradually building and becoming more insistent? That is the sound of a thousand terrible things headed this way. Are you scared yet? You shouldn't be. Yet. But you should at the very least understand that the days of not having to worry about problems like security and viruses and Windowsy stuff like that just because you're on a Mac are soon to be over, if they aren't already. This is far from being an entirely bad thing. For one thing, every user of the internet with an awareness of -- and tools to combat -- malicious software is one less point of weakness for the bad guys to target.
Matthew JC. Powell | Feb 15, 2008
I confess. I lied. In AMW Podcast 7 I claimed to have had fifteen Apple computers. It turns out it was only 13, or more accurately 12. Unless you count the three Blue and White G3s still running at two of my workplaces that I have sole responsibility for. The first was in fact a greenscreen Apple IIe around 1983. It seemed a step backwards at the time because I'd had a little fun before that programming CoCo -- a Tandy Color Computer -- in BASIC. But the school I was teaching at used AppleWorks to run everything so I thought I'd get on board. A couple of years later a colleague ushered a select few of us into a back room, closed the door behind us and unlocked a cabinet. Inside was a funny-looking square box with a tiny B/W screen that I recognised as one of those new Mac things -- a 512KE actually. What the criteria were for membership of this arcane group I still don't know, but I sometimes got to use this sacred Mac. Writing this today in Pages on my 2.16 Intel Core Duo 24-inch iMac seems along way back to poking words into MacWrite on that 9-inch screen.
Keith White | Feb 14, 2008
Former Apple CEO Gilbert Amelio once famously remarked that "I thought I was leading a company; I didn't realise I was leading a cult". If he thought that job was difficult, imagine what it must be like for Steve Jobs. Where Amelio was leader of the cult, Jobs is the object of its worship. Think of it as the difference between being the Pope and being the Messiah — I know which I'd take. Name another CEO, company founder or Chairman who is expected — indeed, required — to change the world on at minimum an annual basis. Michael Dell? Bill Gates? Steve Ballmer? Rupert Murdoch? Robert Iger? Samuel Palmisano? Does anyone even know who he is? All of these people have great responsibilities and a duty to shareholders to drive their companies. Jobs's burden is different. He is expected somehow to be a few steps ahead of the world, living in the no-too-distant future, bringing tomorrow to us today. Which is not to suggest he is the only person in the computer industry expected to innovate. Google, Amazon, eBay ... any number of companies innovate and do so successfully, What's different for Apple and its CEO is the expectation that it can happen on demand. If anyone but Apple had released a product as successful and groundbreaking as the iPhone last year they'd still be dining out on it. Apple is already copping criticism for not having a 3G version out yet. Compare it to, for instance, Paul McCartney. Some decades ago McCartney wrote some pretty darned good music. Now he's in his 60s and puts out the occasional listenable bit of work. It's not amazing, but it's pretty good and leaves most contemporary "music" for dead. But because it isn't as good as the Beatles it may as well be rubbish. No-one else has to be compared with the Beatles.
Matthew JC. Powell | Feb 13, 2008
Having being involved with software-based music recording since 1993, I've been around the block a few times with pretty much every application out there. I started out on the fully MIDI-based Cubase Score, progressed to Cubase Audio ("I can record audio directly on the computer and EDIT it -- unbelievable!") then onto Pro Tools LE with side-stops in Soundtrack, Ableton Live, Logic (circa 1999), Sibelius, GarageBand and Sequel. Since 2001, Pro Tools LE has been my workhorse and from the first few hours of using it, its work flow appealed to me immensely. I was smitten.
David Holloway | Feb 12, 2008
Myvu has announced that its Crystal video goggles now work with the iPhone. The Crystal glasses require a new cable which costs $US24.95.
