This is the thread for the Macworld 2006 keynote speech from Steve Jobs...

All girls all over the world,
original Mad Stuntman pon ya case man!
I love how all girls a move them body,
and when ya move ya body, and move it,
nice and sweet and sexy, alright!

Woman ya cute, and you don't need no make up,
original cute body you a mek man mud up. (x2)

Woman! Physically fit, physically fit,
physically, physically, physically fit
Woman! Physically fit, physically fit,
physically, physically, physically fit
Woman! Ya nice, sweet, fantastic
Big ship on de ocean that a big titanic
Woman! Ya nice, sweet energetic
Big ship on de ocean that a big titanic
Woman! Ya nice, sweet, fantastic
Big ship on de ocean that a big titanic
Woman! Ya nice, sweet, fantastic
Big ship on de ocean that a big titanic

(Hoping for a new Intel Mac Mini, and, well, my iBook G4 is looking a bit slow in comparison with my sister's Dell, even if it is much shinier)

exciting stuff!

15" intel Macbook - order tomorrow, ships Feb (thinner, dual core)
iPod FM receiver
iWork/Life '06
New remote of some type
Photocasting (iPhoto)
OS X.4.4 w/new widgets

Oooh, what is this?

Widgets can kiss my phat arse.

(i do IMAP on mail with exchange server and it's ok - no access to server side stuff, but that's not IMAP anyway is it?)

i smell a mashup

Hmmm... I'm using it with a WU imap installation on a Red Hat 9 box and it wants to re-sync for inexplicable reasons. Admittedly, I haven't sat down with the server to tune it in awhile.

iPhoto isn't shit, but it's not that great. This update seems to make it more like Picasa.

Really? Clue me in!

Erm, there is this thing called Flickr

fuck FM, i want DAB :)

"The Performance of Photoshop in Rosetta isn't going to be powerful enough for a professional ... it's fast enough for those of us who use it occasionally."

i like it. i really like it, actually.

I was hoping for MacciWaki, you MacMook.

GF present ass at newsdesk for booting.

1:36 PM - "The power adapter is magnetically held in. When the cord gets yanked it just pulls right off. This will safe us a lot of hassle with having to fix your notebooks. Patent pending!" Always thinking of yourself, Steve.

And make the screens better.

$1999 1.67 Code Duo, 512 MB RAM, 80GB, 4x superdrive, Aiprort Extreme. $2499 for faster model."

hosanna!

given that, in 1996, my mate newcastle andy nearly destroyed my 5300 two hours after i bought it by getting the power lead caught around his docs, i think this is teh ace.

macbook is lovely. stet, you come round here instead ... just run straight into my boot, will you?

though at least it DOES have FW of some sort...

Apple's love affair with Firewire is going nowhere anymore.

Not according to Apple's official specs.

And it's tight that they make you pay for universal versions (I mean, Aperature came out like a week ago!).

Agreed. I figured that modems were going away because there isn't one on the new iMacs either (it's a separate USB dongle)

fuck's sake. pass the acoustic coupler.

I think putting a modem on the dongle is smart BTW.

Dongle sounds preverted.

Yeah, I don't mind the lack of a modem. In the year and a half since I've had my PBG4 I've used the modem exactly once. Though instead of the dongle-modem, I'd rather have a PCMCIA card (ack, it's a ExpressCard/34 slot whatever the hell that is) just so I don't have to carry anything else around.

Lack of FW800 pisses me off, but I suspect that the 17" MBP (whenever that is) will probably have it.

"The now-famous Strasbourg Tests put MagSafe on the map. To summarize what nearly everyone already knows, over 600 live French Alpine goats (their bodies are very much like humans) were shot under controlled conditions: no anesthetic, same shot placement from animal to animal, and with blood pressure and heart rate monitors to determine the Incapacitation Time (a measure of how long it took a goat to cease functioning after the single shot was delivered). MagSafe Ammo worked - better than anything else."

MaccerBook?

http://files.gtanet.com/images/777.jpg

no i don't. what stet said, basically :)

http://www.overyourhead.co.uk/images/misc/dumb-omg.jpg

http://www.p42.org/ALDERON/omg.jpg

No, I leave it in my laptop carrying case all the time. I don't need a dongle at home, so when I go on the road I just put my laptop in the bag and my dongle is waiting for me when I need it. That's Packing 101.

All this doesn't explain the myriad of things that I've lost while traveling. Especially that Movado watch.

Why do you think it's shit? I quite like it. BUt then again I know little about other (good) photo programs.

re: Aperture. Depends on what you do. If you only use PS for color-correction, true 'digital darkroom' work, it should be a fine replacement - if you don't need compositing tools or perspective control, why bother with Adobe?

On the other hand, I've heard bad things about the handling of digital RAW files compared to Adobe CameraRAW that haven't been ironed out. And Adobe just dropped the beta on a direct Aperture competitor (that's getting raves from the people I know who've used both).

and do you think they're abandoning 12" and 17" models?

and what will happen ot the ibook line?

I highly doubt it. Apple tends to stagger out PowerBook (fuck that MBP name) models to incorporate changes/lessons learned from the other models. Remember that the 15" Aluminum PB followed the 12" & 17" AlBooks by 4-6 months.

There's no way the 17" PB is going away. They're very popular with the wanna-be indie film set out here - every coffee bar in LA has got some permanent resident with one who's sawing away on one with his magum opui open in Final Cut and Final Draft.

My guess is that the 17" MPB will be announced at the NAB show along with Final Cut 6.

I can't imagine even wannabe directors having the patience to deal with a 17" PB in a rendering situation on a large project. Or any project. Can you even pretend to run Motion on a PB?

Which of course, makes me wonder just how Rosetta is going to chow on apps like Motion. It's exciting to hear speed bumps of 4x, but what's the situation? Opening a 50 page Word document, or plowing through some serious rendering? Why even put Intels in a tower (PowerMac) until you have all the chip-intensive apps running native code?

Like I was saying earlier, all the native versions of Final Cut, Motion, etc. will most likely be announced at the NAB show in April

Nothing much new in iTunes update other than the obnoxious ministore (edit menu or shift apple m to disable)

10.4.4 is downloading now

whatever happened to the "lotsa colors" thing that apple used to do? i'm sick of silver this and white that.

The Google widget is AMAZING!

In all seriousness, I haven't actually found anything different yet.

6000 pictures from 5megapixel cameras on my dual 2Ghz PowerMac (1.5gigRAM) is not fast. Launching results in the beachball. Flip over to editing and it dogs. Flip back and forth between CS and iPhoto and there is more dogging. Is it intolerable? No. But I expect more, especially no beachball.

Not to mention that iDVD is a processor/memory hog. If that's running in emulation on a new McBook, I'd be interested in seeing the "4x" improved speed.

Not really. I took that many shots in 6 months. I expect a photo library app to account for all the photos I might take over the next few years without beachballing.

Battery life under 3 hours kind of kills the idea of more than one DVD from NY to LA.

More to the point, if you are shooting that many, what need is there to keep them all in a central library?

(And dare I say it, consider editing your stores. When my iTunes library started beachballing on my old Mac, I deleted crap I didn't listen to.)

Because I regularly need to look through my entire archive of photos.

When my iTunes library started beachballing on my old Mac, I deleted crap I didn't listen to.

See, to me this seems ridiculous. Why should I lose data in order to meet the needs of technology? It's perfectly feasable to write a photo library app that remains responsive even with 10,000 photos or more. Just as it's perfectly feasable for iTunes to handle 50,000 songs. It's a failure of the software developers that is the problem here, not the magnitude of my data.

And I have to express skepticism of the need to look through a 6000-strong archive at any moment. Anyone doing that has a real file system set up - I archive images on a FireWire drive, transfer them to my internal media drive when I need to work on them, and then transfer them back.

The rewrite (iPhoto 6) should help substantially.

Andrew, I shoot at 2227x1704 minimum and have no slowness problems.

Also, blaming iPhoto for slowness in importing is kinda BS. Blame OS X, USB, the camera etc.

Can anyone give an example of a photo application that doesn't suck then?

YAY

hosanna!

Hosanna indeed.

Also image importing from a camera does seem better on a pc. having your camera appear as another drive within Windows Explorer seems to work out pretty well, and the wizard is good too. i was a bit disappointed by the image handling on my 12" ibook g4 (which i love anyway...)

but i've definitely seen hints on how to improve things - i think it's all down to the fact that iPhotos preview panes are way too flexible - if you set it and KEEP it at a tiny thumbnail there's probably a way to optimise for the smaller sizes

Windows Explorer DOES do a much better fucking job of dealing with devices and photo collections than the Finder. I haven't run around with Picasa but I bet it uses iPhoto as a wetnap. Fuck "widgets", get me a filesystem and directory indexing that works faster than a three-toed.

TOMBOT could you head over to my "My PC died - should I get a Mac?" thread and advise, please?

I mean fuck it I've been an Apple Evangelist for 90% of my life and frankly the market talks, if all personal computers are going to run on the x86 instruction set then at least I'll should get some hardware that lets me have options about my choice of OS and applications. iTunes + an integrated LCD isn't a good enough reason to nonsensically emasculate myself from being able to use Windows or Linux apps sans porting/emulation.

as soon as Apple made some programs that don't suck
FCPro, DVDPro, and Motion are all pretty fantastic, and despite the issues I have with iTunes, it's pretty damn good as well. iLife also has some faults, but overall it's a pretty great suite of products. What software company does it better?

FWIW, I'm a total Apple apologist.

All the complaints about iPhoto are totally valid to the point where I just drag 'n' drop image files off my camera to a folder that I make -- also because I don't like the user-specific profile thingy at all (it's MY computer... God help anyone who uses it OTHER than me... why the hell do I need a user profile for MY computer?). The idea of using Aperture as a RAW import appliction is probably more attractive to me than using it as a standalone edit suite -- which obv. makes it not worth the 500.00 is costs...

The dashboard is full of widgets that you can add or delete onto it. The idea of a widget is a tiny, simple application to solve a simple purpose. For example, here's the widgets on mine:

- A calculator
- A 'stickies' widget. Just a little piece of paper where I can write notes that are automatically saved.
- A calender
- Something that pulls the weekly weather report

The idea is to get quick information easily. Who wants to go into the applications folder and pull up a calculator? Or load up weather.com everytime you want the weather? Etc. Just click on the dashboard, and your widgets are all loaded.

They're kind of like Firefox plugins. Anybody can code a widget, so there's hundreds of them. You can get widgets that convert between units of measurement, translate things, pull from an RSS feed of your choice, check the CNN headlines, load up dictionary.com's word of the day, etc. It's a really nice feature.

What other user? HOPEFULLY THE ADMIN USER

god help you if you are logged in all the time as an admin.

http://widgets.yahoo.com/

I've never seen any need to use iPhoto, honestly. I shoot RAW and import them to my second (media) internal drive. Preview in preview, do a basic edit of what I've got, archive everything that's left to a small firewire drive dedicated to photos. Any further tweaking or printing is done through PS with the files from the media drive, PSDs are also archived to the firewire drive.

Yeah you should definitely add 3-4 steps to everything you do, on an OS which by default doesn't even enable root, and also wear a tinfoil hat when you take a shower, because you NEVER KNOW.

I quote from OSx86: The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is an updated BIOS specification developed by Intel. Designed for use with trusted computing, it allows vendors to create drivers which cannot be reverse engineered. It also allows operating systems to run in a sandbox, delegating networking and memory management to the firmware. Hardware access is converted to calls to the EFI drivers. The EFI BIOS is used to select the operating system, replacing boot loaders.

Fuck Steve Jobs and Intel in the fucking ass for this. See you guys at newegg.com, I guess!

You don't have to go into the applications folder to pull up a calculator, just build/download a hack that lets you customize your Apple menu and poof there's your fucking caculator. Which you used to be able to do, prior to OSSOVIETRUSSIA, without building or downloading hacks or technically breaking something in the system to enable you to do it. Widgets = an ass backwards, insane method of re-enabling a feature USERS HAD TO BEGIN WITH BEFORE APPLE DONE WENT GATESIAN, except taking up more energy on the computer.

I mean, why not just build your web app...STRAIGHT INTO YOUR DESKTOP???? Eh eh? Wink wink?

I'm sorry I come on Mac threads and get so bitchy but for crying out loud I spent a lot of money on my computer, in fact the LAST of my own money for several years and the thing is a nightmare. The amount of work I've had to shovel into just making the thing work like it SHOULD work is amazing. It's like Jobs et al have absolutely no respect for Mac users; they're all idiots who need to be babysat and kept away from anything that alters or customizes their own purchased computer without Big Daddy Steve's approval. Which is kind of completely the opposite of what I used to have with Mac, and yeah iPhoto is the worst program I've ever used in my entire life.

The amount of work I've had to shovel into just making the thing work like it SHOULD work is amazing

There is an amazing amount of work involved trying to make it work like OS 9, yes, especially if (not that I'm saying you do) people insist on working against OS X. As for the babysitting thing: it's always been that way. You couldn't even open the first Mac without a special tool.

Word 6 is still the worst program I've ever used.

I don't even know what the last part of this sentence MEANS

OH YOU POOR SOUL, WORKING AGAINST THE OS, JUST DO WHAT IT WANTS YOU TO DO! AFTER ALL, THAT'S WHAT YOU PAID FOR!

completely insipid

Tombot, though, is dripping frothy drool on the floor.

I don't understand ally's complaint about the calculator. Put it in the dock, right? And if the dock gets too crowded do what I did. I made 2 folders, one called Applications and one called Utilities. I aliased everything I actually use or want access to into one of those, and stuck those two foldres in the dock after a dividing line. Now with a control click on those folders I get pop-up menus of everything I need. I think I did this because in OS9 I used to use pop-up windows, remember the tabs on the bottom of the screen?, with applications in them.

Someone, esplain.

Oh and Nathalie you can change the interface, I dunno if you know that but if you dislike Aqua (which I wouldn't blame you for) you can download little hacks that can let you make it prettier!

I guess I don't mind the interface simplifying because (either by chance or kool-aid) I think roughly the same as Apple, so it works how I expect. Except the Dock, which I still hate. I'd have gone nuts without Quicksilver.

Anyway, sounds like you did what you could to make OSX like OS9. In my own way I did the same thing, I hated "users", I hated "home" I hated having 2 folders called Applications. I moved all kinds of things around and messed some stuff up. I think it would've been better to give in and start w/ OSX like OSX. That's why I refuse the simplification preference in InDesign where it mimics Quark's key commands.

The whole libraries and invisible files scam is a Mongolian Clusterfuck of the first order.

I hate how the OS decides where my applications and "utilities" have to live. And I hate how any sort of preference for sub-categorization leaves me vulnerable to bullshit Unix quirks i.e. what Allyzay said. The GUI should be totally transparent to this kind of masturbatory code jujitsu.

As for using iPhoto, it's not me who's cranking out 1,000 pictures per year on the digital camera. Blame my wife for that, and sorry, but I don't drink enough Apple Kool-Aid to buy into the fact that 1.5 gigs of RAM simply isn't enough to run iPhoto well below capacity.

all this bitching and OSX is still superior to XP on every level.

EXCEPT god forbid you click on the tab and accidently un-tab it, it just became a normal window, and god forbid you close it again...

Or it makes it hard for people who brashly move ahead without reading about what it does? Honestly, I could kind of care less at this point where my music is stored since I listen to it in iTunes now. In fact, I only have this option disabled so I can split my library between internal and external disks.

Tom's criticisms are otm but its not the file system it is the fucking Finder which badly needs a rewrite in the next version.

I'm coming from Linux so I'm just amazed that anything works without me wasting 3 hours of my life.

The HUGE diff between the tabbed folders of OS9 and aliased folders in the Dock of OS X is that one could DRAG a file to the tabbed folders to open it with a certain program, or to file it away in a certain subfolder. i.e. USING the drag and drop properties of the Finder for something other than, I don't know, moving your HD icon out from under the Dock AGAIN.

er, no, it's unix ;)

this is the point, dudes and dudesses: OS9 had reached its limit. how many of you still use it on a day-to-day basis? stet and i both do, and COMPARED TO X, IT IS TEH MAMMOTH SUX0R.

yes, X is confusing at first. but i happily accept its quirks and foibles because it allows me to multitask properly; because it doesn't have a barking-mad way of assigning and then "losing" half my RAM; because it doesn't crash very much (in fact, hardly ever); and because, on the whole, it feels like i'm using a modern OS with bags of potential, rather than a clapped-out one that was being s t r e t c h e d to the absolute limit.

tombot was absolutely right upthread (or was it on the other thread? i forget) about today's OSes not behaving as you might want - but, once again, i'm happy to sacrifice that for the increased power.

I don't think people should have to "get used to" their OSes and programs, unless those OSes or programs are offering a significant technological change ... This is not the case here.

to me it is. ally, honestly, take it from me as one who uses OS9 for 40 hours every week: it really is wank compared to X.

What does that have to do with Library folders and iTunes and the Dock? Oh right, nothing.

dig the msg count on Mail.app!

I would if I enlarged the Dock to take up like a quarter of my fucking screen but as it is I basically see a red dot that tells me if I've got unread mail or not. DUD

The database can handle up to 25,000 photos in ideal conditions - it doesn't say how large those photos are, so I assume it's just maxing out the storage capacities in some other way. That doesn't mean it can handle 25k photos on any machine capable of running iPhoto.

i thought apple realized the rest of us could not give a flaming shit about terms like "top level directory structure" back in 19 fucking 84!!!!!!

go back and read my post and stop trying to be smart. what i'm saying - and i'll type slowly so you can keep up - is that SHIT CHANGES, BUT SOMETIMES IT'S WORTH GETTING USED TO THAT SHIT CHANGING BECAUSE THE END RESULT IS BETTER.

Here's a complaint. How come so many installers don't have an easy uninstall? You delete a program and there's still mysterious libraries lying about.

Don't make me look forward to Vista. Don't do it.

(maybe the Nintendo Revolution will have a rich text editor and web browser)

The new one is "robust" because it doesn't crash a lot -- and when one app crashes, it doesn't take the whole fuckign shebang with it. But if you like waiting for umpteen extensions to load when you crash right on deadline, don't mind me.

xpost. I don't know what you mean by "fucks up a path". or what buscarring is.

I don't get this thing where people pretend that it still takes hours to get anything working in Linux. Either they've not used Linux for about five or ten years,* or they're doing *something* wrong.

* it's scary to realise that it's nine years now since I first used Linux, and at least seven since I first installed it on my own PC. And I know JW has used Linux in the past five years at least, because I can remember when he used to be ILX's resident Debian cheerleader.

OSX is so much better, and our user base of 60+ users (even the older ones) are happier with it than OS9, for so many reasons. i can't tell you much easier it is to admin that number of people too on OSX. OS9 - forget it. the users can do what the fuck they like throughout the system CHEERS. OSX - the system is locked down, and the Users can do what they like in their sandbox. arrange aliases of applications blah.

There's nobody mentioning the word "toy" in this entire thread apart from you, TB. So who's reading out of context?

Actually I'm not sure 7 is better than Win95. IIRC it had even lamer networking support.

xpost. not on this mac here it don't :(

some of you I know are computer engineers, so explain why the usability of OS 9 (and apple's supposedly hippie steez of doing things, and letting you innovate on top of their OS without the danger of being made obsolete or forcibly shut out) has to get the heave-ho just because the OS is all of a sudden multi-user and memory is allocated and managed properly?

xpost 7 was/is better than win95, my CS roommate and I had a bake-off to see who could build and upload a web page faster, and I even had to, yes, reboot in the middle.

(for email we used Pegasus Mail, apparently because it was the only cross-platform email program that supported Netware email)

(xxpost)

As someone who, as you know, is used to Linux, where you can bolt a variety of graphical interface programs onto the basic system, I don't see why Apple couldn't have just rewritten the OS 9 interface to work on Darwin. Presumably the only reason is: they didn't want to.

the "Finder" as we now know it is the old NeXT file browser, except broken so that both old NeXT people hate it and Mac people hate it. But Avi Tievenan wrote it, and he's head of Software at Apple, so it stays. In his justification, the OS 9 Finder was a heap of mangled code, and it would have taken them years to rewrite it for NeXT.

xpost:

i'm no engineer, so my layman's acceptance of it followed this pattern, and took about a week or so to basically "get": 1) oh, right, it's unix; 2) unix has its own way of doing things, which is a little alien, involving libraries and paths and stuff being where it expects it to be; 3) ach well, fuck it, if i have to be a little more organised about where i keep my shit then fine. that's the price of progress. i mean, as an end user i'm happier dealing with X's foibles than i am with 9's.

i guess that because i'm not trying to innovate, i've been able to accept a lot more quickly. and i'll admit it took me a little while longer to get my head around networking/the Shared folder/the Public folder/the VAST irritation of not being able to make aliases to files on other machines. (or, rather, the irritation of being able to make them, but then not open them without manually mounting the other machine's disk first.)

there is actually very little implemented in microkernelish manner in OS X.

In response to why pre-OS X sucks:
http://mac-news.net/desktop/219/bomb_s.jpg

Memory, I/O and process communication is quite a lot, though. And I/O in particular is a weak spot. Beachballs ho!

xpost It doesn't matter now, I'm pissy and irritated. You could say "hey presto look here's a free Finder replacement that works with every version of OS X yet is exactly like OS 9" and I'd tell you to go to hell because computers are so very very stupid and so very very far from the coolness I once imagined would be possible; no "Dark Castle" moments of revelation or "what's a mouse?" in the last 15 years, screens still 72dpi, you still have to "save" things for fuck's sake. Also, no auto-masturbator.

I've seen this about, oh, maybe 2x in my life. After having worked at a place that had nothing but Macs (including those cute little turtley ones from 1873!), owning 2 Macs prior to OSX, etc etc. Just FYI if that's going to be your argument. I mean mine in return to that wouldn't involve a picture, since my iBook doesn't have the courtesy of showing me a cutey little bomb exploding when it decides it's just time for it to go into a coma.

Or just install Growl and dig the system-wide notifications...

Ugh, I hated tabs in OS 9. I don't use it much now, but I loved DragThing

Personally I'm still waiting for taligent, copeland and OpenDoc.

another thing they're slowly getting a grip on is real multitasking. that you really can let the apps get on with their long process (photoshop filter, cd burn) and switch to something else in the meantime. ok, so fewer tea breaks, but still

I've found that this is also a big problem training Windows users moving from Win9x/ME to XP. We still have users whose instinct, when an application crashes, is to pull the power cord.

I love it tho

AND I LOVE YOU TOO, CO-ZEN

make of that what you will.

the annoying thing is (and this has to be an entirely unrelated thing) that these same m4a files also (temporarily) lock up my ipod. the Ricky Gervais podcasts, if you pause them and let the ipod go to sleep, it's fucking hard to re-wake the little bugger. apparently i'm not the only one with this problem. last time i had to re-attach to the mac, though usually the menu/select reboot works.

Admittedly, this is a problem with the library (well-written programs should know how to handle corrupt input without falling over), but given that the same files cause problems on your Mac and your iPod, it could well be the files' fault.

I think if you want easy to use and you're not really doing much beyond word processing, web browsing and managing an iPod then a Mac of some stripe is the best purchase.

Apple mac threads with Ally & TomBot on them are always awesome.

Also, fuck gmedia's "mtron" and its useless shitty installer!

But lets be honest here, this argument applies to about 5% of the population, the 2% who do what you do and the 3% who need what I need. No one else gives a shit and for 95% of computer purchasers, either a Mac or PC would do 'em just fine.

Anyway, 99% of the crashes on os9 were because of crappy corrupted fonts anyway.

*
Re:Well, Gates WAS a "Person of the Year"
(Score:1)
by Overly Critical Guy (663429) Alter Relationship on 01-12-06 15:38 (#14457740)
Interestingly, Apple is very close to surpassing Dell in market value. Right now it's Apple: $72,301,066,720, Dell: $72,912,111,560. Apple keeps going up, while Dell has been down recently. Imagine the press coverage over Apple surpassing Dell in market value.
--
Slashdot dupes an article SIX TIMES [tinyurl.com]
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
o
Re:Well, Gates WAS a "Person of the Year"
(Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on 01-12-06 15:43 (#14457793)
Yeah, no kidding, especially after Michael's "Jobs should just wind down the company and distribute the assets to the stockholders" remark.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

FWIW, iPhoto '06 says it supports 250,000 photos.

250K!!!!!!!