&*Open Source Typical Mac User Live

 

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Welcome to the Typical Mac User Live show. My name is Victor Cajiao and I am your host this evening. My regular Podcast Typical Mac User Podcast can be found at www.typicalmacuser.com and that shows is released weekly on Tuesday nights.

 

 

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Today it's me and all of you talking about the Apple and Mac Annoucemts from this week, getting your first impressions and anything else you want to talk about.

 

iMac

The new iMacs are aluminum as expected, have a glossy glass screen, and again as expected, are thinner. Interestingly, the 20” inch model has been trimmed by a couple of pounds but the 24” model has gained nearly a pound.  

 

• I’m not yet sure about the black back or border around the screen. 
• It turned out the spy photos of the new keyboard were indeed real as Steve joked about.

 

• Of interest, the F3 key is now the Exposé key and F4 the Dashboard key. What this means to existing keyboards we’ll have to wait and see. $49A wireless version is also available and notably has a compact, laptop-like design, which Steve says will suit wireless keyboard users’ work habits. $79 US As predicted on rumor sites.

 

• Apple has indeed cut the 17” iMac from its lineup. But many also predicted the demise of the Mac mini, which itself saw upgrades, albeit without the fanfare. So if you don’t need, or more importantly want, a 20” monitor, the Mac mini is for you.

 

 

• In his keynote Steve said there are two 20” models and one 24”. On the Apple store there are in fact two 24” models. As expected, the base 20” model has been price aligned to the old 17” model.

 

• The most interesting piece of news is the inclusion of a FireWire 800 port on all models. It had been strongly rumored last year that Apple was to drop FireWire altogether. The inclusion of FW800 testifies FireWire is here to stay and that Apple is expecting to sell a lot of iMacs to professional Mac users (who currently are the major users of FW800). Regarding ports, it would have been nice if the iMac had four, not three, USB ports on the back. Even the Mac mini has four. You just never seem to have enough USB ports.

 

 

.Mac

• Apple said it would address .Mac’s shortcoming and it has sort of . Storage has been increased from 1GB to 10GB and the monthly data transfer limit raised to 10GB.

• Web sites can now be mapped to your own domain name, although you need to do that through iWeb. -
• The new Web Gallery feature looks impressive, but as pointed out by several listeners this week it has some quirks that need to be worked out.
• iPhoto and includes slide show, mosaic view, carousel view, access restriction, and can receive photos from other people and from iPhones. But it does require the latest iPhoto to setup. But do these changes go far enough? I Considering you’re still forking out US$99 for services that are free elsewhere, and that I have it, I"m not sure if this is good investment for everyone .

 

iLife ‘08

• iLife finally gets updated, and has skipped the ‘07 version. iPhoto has been redeveloped to allow you to group your photos by events.
• When you upload from your camera to iPhoto, it now automatically groups your photos by date. From there you can split or join those groups to form events. This is a great idea and will make managing your photos a fair bit easier.
• Most importantly though, it will let you get back to using albums the way they should be used, i.e. for collections of events rather than for individual events. This will also make creating photo books easier.
• You will still use Smart Albums for setting up albums of people (using keywords).

 

 

• The interface has seen some nice improvement, but one we’ll all rejoice in is double clicking a photo now zooms it to full window view rather than going to edit mode. Clicking it returns to thumbnail view.

 

• Other useful features include photo hiding, improved

• search some great new editing tools including a before and after view, publishing to .Mac’s new Web Gallery
• Also there is a new  hardcover books now include a dust cover.
• It's great to have the ability to adjust both shadows and highlights on a photo, this is a huge improvement over the last versin.
• Probably the best new feature though, the one that will save the most time, is photo customizations can now be copied from one photo to another, rather than having to recreate them (which meant jotting down the settings and re-entering them).

 

• I did notice one big annoyance of mine still exists in iPhoto—when scrolling, the month still displays in the middle of the window, thus obscuring some of the photos. Interestingly, that does not occur when scrolling the new Events view.

 

iMovie is all new and looks even easier to use.

 

• Videos are now catalogued in a new video library—although there was no indication if it includes videos that are no longer on your Mac. Hopefully it does (and of course tells you to reconnect or reload them).

• Like iPhoto, videos can also be organized by event. 
• You can upload videos to youyr dot mac or even YouTube.

 

• On the  .Mac Web Gallery, you can put videos in multiple resolutions, like Apple does on its videos, which is really cool and professional.  I suspect this new iMovie is going to kick off a whole new round of home movie editing.

• iWeb is starting to mature. For instance, it now has web widgets which allow easy addition of Google AdSense and HTML snippets for things like YouTube. I might finally give iWeb another look. However I still think it's one of the most useless applicaitons on a Mac. Sorry Rapid Weaver blows it away due to it's lack of flexability as to where you put the web pages.

 

 

GarageBand has a new “Magic“ feature, which lets you jam along to different music styles which have customizable bands.

• You guys heard the recording I made with this feature in 12 minutes. A great practice tool, get creative tool etc. What’s super cool is that if you set up a record loop, each time the loop restarts, a new take is recorded and at the end you can choose which take to keep.
• Garage band continues to be a great app for anyone wanting to explore music.

 

 

 

 

iWork ‘08

• The new iWork is here and as rumored, it includes a spreadsheet. Althouhg this version of iWork gets much closer this version of iWork is neither  MS Office killer nor a replacement. It is for those who don’t need MS Office and its bloat of features and who don’t need an Office work-alike. I don't use MS office on my mac, I hate MS office on my mac, it's perfect for me.

 

• When Steve said that Numbers is “the spreadsheet for the rest of us” it consequently means iWork is not here to replace Office where it belongs, just where it doesn’t need to be. If that’s you, you might have clicked your last Office icon.

 

 

Pages’

 

• Pagess' biggest shortcoming had been that it didn’t work like a word processor. It was a page layout application, and a very good one at that. Unfortunately, for many people who bought iWork as an affordable alternative to MS Office, Pages often ended up gathering dust because simply writing a letter or an essay was, well, not simple enough.

 

• Rejoice now, because Pages has a word processing mode. This feature alone will go a long way to helping establish iWork as an alternative to MS Office (again, where it’s not needed). Pages has borrowed a couple of features from Office though: contextual format bar and change tracking.

 

 

• Finally, after what seems like years of rumors, Apple has included a spreadsheet application in iWork. And as long rumored, it is called Numbers. And as hoped, revolutionary. Apple has realized the “rest of us” usually use spreadsheets for smaller works that we include in reports and so forth, rather than massive multi-sheet accounting behemoths.
•  Numbers is “just a spreadseet,” but what sets it apart from Excel and the rest is that it is spreadsheeting for publishing. It is WYSIWYG and uses a page layout approach to creating spreadsheet documents. We all knew Apple would revolutionize spreadsheets, and now we’ve seen how.

 

 Keynote

• Keynote has a few new features; the most notable for me was the “Instant Alpha,” which lets you select only the area you want to show in your images. iWork could become Apple’s software jewel, even above iLife.

 

• If I was Apple, I wouldn’t be adverse to porting iLife, or at least some more of its apps, to Windows. However, there’s no way I’d send iWork to the dark side. With Numbers’ revolutionary approach to spreadsheeting and Pages finally being a word processor, it is a killer app in its market space. Also, importantly, iWork already reads the new MS Office file formats.

 

 

iLife. Incredibly, despite the inclusion of Numbers, iWork ‘08 is AU$20 cheaper than iWork ’06. The U.S. price, though, remains the same, at US$79. Ditto iLife.

 

iWork is finally a must-have for many of us, and is a superb value. Mine will be here tomorrow! I think I’ll have to “play hookey,” as they say in some parts of the world.

 

Mac mini

 

 

The great thing about the cutting of the 17” iMac is it helps keep the Mac mini alive. It has for a while been rumored to be following the Cube into history.

 

You could almost feel the collective sigh of relief across the Mac community when it was

discovered the mini was still a wanted member of the Mac family. mini

 

also saw some useful upgrades as well as the Airport Extreme going to Gigabit speed

 

 

 

 

 

SHOW ENDING:

 

Next week Rob Walsh from Today in IPhone will be my co-host and we are going to geek out on the iPhone with Rob. I haven't talked extensively about the iPhone on this show, so it's probably time, and who better to do it with than Rob from www.todayiniphone.com

 

 

The Typical Mac User Podcast can be found at www.typicalmacuser.com and that shows is released weekly on Tuesday nights. This show will be release in my sream late tonight. If you haven't subscribed to that show yet, head over to the web site at www.typicalmacuser.com and hit the ONE BUTTON iTunes subscription.

 

For now this is your Host Victor Cajiao saying, enjoy the rest of your Sunday