A Valentine to Macs

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.

A convert to Logic

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.

Weekend Edition: Manic gesticulation

I've spent the last week mouseless, eschewing a handheld pointer in favour of living and working completely on the trackpad of a MacBook Pro and the multi-touch screen of an iPod touch. I did this pretty much on a dare: last week I said the MacBook Air's trackpad was large enough that I could imagine using it without the fallback of a mouse, and I decided to put that to the test. I don't have a MacBook Air yet, so my mouseless week had to be on a borrowed MacBook Pro (I'll buy one when Apple updates the trackpad -- soon ... soon ...). I've also made a point of using the iPod touch as much as possible, for instance when posting to the Australian Macworld forums.

Australia on the iLife map

Well, that kind of came out of nowhere, didn't it? With little fanfare and even less fuss, Apple Australia flicked the switch on its iPhoto printing service this morning, meaning that for the first time ever Australian customers have the full feature set for our digital shoeboxes. And not a moment too soon -- we've been paying full price all these years too. It appears that the books at least are beeing printed overseas, so it's not a matter of Apple Australia having done a local deal in that regard -- just that Apple US has discovered international shipping. It's a little less clear with the prints, as the ordering process doesn't indicate they're shipping "from abroad" as the books do, plus a little "Print @ Fujicolor" logo appears on the print ordering page, indicating that Apple might be subcontracting that work out to www.fujicolor.com.au — which offers the same range of print sizes at comparable prices. This should mean that the prints are delivered fairly quickly. I'll be ordering a bunch, and I'll let you know when they arrive. The next question is of course printing from Aperture, Apple's somewhat higher-end application that does much the same as iPhoto but for professional photographers. In the US, Aperture users have the same range of services available as iPhoto users. In Australia, not yet. For all we know, that's this afternoon's news.

Apple calls off the attack dogs

The gold standard of Apple rumour sites has, for a long time, been the threatening letter from Apple’s lawyers. It meant you were onto something. So, with plenty of advance information floating around about the MacBook Air, arguably dampening the impact Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote revelations, why did Apple stopped suing? Has Apple suddenly got a conscience?

Dark ages of telecommunications