Steve Jobs unveiled his latest product at Macworld 07, the iPhone. It looks like a real winner although I do see a few problems with it such as cost, network locking and 3rd party applications.

Though these things aren’t going to worry people with deep pockets, availability will. Right now it looks like you aren’t going to be able to purchase one for a while. The release dates for the iPhone at the moment are:

United States : June 2007
Canada : Late 2007 to early 2008
Asia : Sometime in 2008
Australia : Maybe 2008?

And even when you can, boy it looks like it’s going to be expensive. It’s makes sense that it would be expensive, given it can do everything except walk your dog. But bear in mind it’s going to cost you:

US $499 - 4GB Model
US $599 - 8GB Model
2 Year contract + data plan required

We know that data plans don’t come cheap and the requirement of a data plan will most likely make this a phone not many university students will be able to afford, however as Steve said at the keynote, as the product matures over a couple of years it will become cheaper and eventually everyone will be able to afford one.

The iPhone looks great, performs great (we think) but we aren’t going to know much until it is actually available and if Steve opens the phone’s OS for development, it’s going to become a very powerful phone.

Apple sure are hyping up Macworld more than ever. I think we will see some really exciting stuff on January 8th and I hope one of them is an iPhone!
With Macworld being only a couple of days away I thought I’d share my predicitons with you.

iLife ‘07 and iWork ‘07 (Numbers)
I think we can expect this to be a certainty from Apple as we generally see iWork and iLife refreshed at the beginning of the year. Apple filed for a trademark on the name ‘Numbers’ a few months ago which will probably be the name for their spreadsheet app which will be added iWork. All the apps will see incremental updates and we maybe possibly see a new addition to iLife aswell.

Apple iTV
On September 12, 2006 Apple announced they were building a media set top box that would stream your iTunes bought content to your TV from your computer (Mac or PC) as well as any other content you had. Steve demoed it at the Developer’s Conference and it looks like Front Row for your TV. This will be announced without a doubt.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
As in my experience I have noticed that Apple tend to under promise and over deliver when it comes to the public, I am 99.8% confident that Leopard will be available at Macworld. At the last Apple Developer’s Conference, Steve was up on stage making jabs at Microsoft and criticizing them for how long it was taking to release Vista. Steve said that Apple will be releasing Leopard in the first quarter of 2007. Now that Windows Vista is available for business users and will be publicly available on January 30, I think Steve would have had the Leopard development done and ready to release, just so he can brag that Leopard is out before Vista.
As far as features go, we already know about Time Machine, Spaces, Spotlight update, etc however Steve said this was only the tip of the iceberg. I predict we will see major updates to the Mac OS interface and we may also see some big improvements to the Finder. Rumors have been floating around about a new graphical interface called Illuminous which will replace the current Aqua in order to compete with Windows Vista’s Aero glass. Other rumors say that Leopard is going to push the hardware pretty hard so you probably won’t want to install it on anything other than an Intel Mac. The likelyhood of a new graphical interface I think will be the biggest improvement to Leopard. One that I will welcome with open arms.

iPhone
Ok. We know that it won’t be called an iPhone, but the idea of an Apple made phone really interested me. I don’t think anybody knows why, we just know that Apple make great products and I think we all want a phone that won’t crash and be locked down with bluetooth send restrictions, etc. I imagine a phone with a stripped down version of OS X on it that will sync my iCal and Address Book information aswell as iTunes songs and hopefully some other surprising innovations that have never been implemented in a phone before.
I don’t think we will see an iPhone an Macworld but who knows. Maybe Apple have been working really hard over the holiday break.

iPod Cinema
I think Apple will have by this time finally made an iPod that actually does video well. I work in an Apple store and the one thing I hear a lot from customers is that the iPod doesn’t do video well, which I agree, it doesn’t. Archos, Creative and others off much better video players and i think it is about time the large iPod got an update and who knows, maybe it will be called ‘iPod Cinema’.

Those are my 5 big predictions for Macworld ‘07. I think that we won’t see much else because Apple would have been working really hard to get all these things, especially Leopard ready in time. We only have a couple of days to go.

Leave your predictions in the comments below.

This is a really simple and nice looking widget that displays your current disk usage on all disks connected (including Firewire, USB and Network mounted drives).

I am quite impressed with it. I love how cool it looks on my Dashboard.

You can download it here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/diskspace.html

Handbrake is an open source video encoding application for Mac OS X that is easy to use and turns your regular DVDs into high quality H.264 MP4 files compatible with VLC and Quicktime.

I get 22 frames per second on a 2.16GHz MacBook Pro with 2 gigs of RAM using high quality settings and 2 pass encoding. Your speed comes down to the speed of your hard disk in most cases. There are 3 ways of doing your encodings and here are my results with each approach:
1) Rip straight from the DVD disc and encode to H.264 on the fly.
Avg Speed: 18 FPS
2) Rip to main hard drive using MacTheRipper, then encode with source and destination files on the same drive
Avg Speed: 22 FPS
3) Rip to main hard drive using MacTheRipper, then encode, making destination an external firewire 400 drive
Avg Speed: 30 FPS

Whilst the differences in speed are only a few frames per second, you can see that the third way is almost 2x faster than method 1. So if it takes you 4 hours to encode a movie, those few frames add up over time making a big difference to the time it takes to complete, almost halving the time you would normally have to wait.

The first way is obviously going to be the slowest, as the processor has to decode the DVD CSS and encode the H.264 at the same time. The second approach of ripping to the hard disk first and then encoding afterwards would seem to be much faster, but on a computer with dual cores there isn’t much difference. Surprisingly the third technique was the fastest, the reason being because if the destination and source are on the same hard disk, the hard drive’s read head has to constantly switch between reading and writing almost simultaneously, therefore making the drive thrash around seriously degrading performance. Using 2 drives means one can just concentrate on reading, whilst the other can just worry about writing to disk.

The machine I am using only has a 4200 RPM drive. Using a much faster 7200 RPM drive would probably give much faster performance so if you have two fast hard disks in a machine, use them. H.264 encoding does takes a lot of power and time to complete, so you are probably best to leave your rips running overnight.

If you are interested in encoding movies for your iPod, you should try Instant Handbrake, which is available here.

The iTunes Music Store has gone Live in New Zealand. “The NZ Apple site www.apple.co.nz now goes to www.apple.com/nz AND we have our own iTunes Store!! Wooo Hoooo!! Prices are NZ$1.79 per song and around $16-$17 per album. Which I think works out cheaper than the Aussie store. Although the selection is rather limited at the moment. Hopefully this should improve over time.” Surprisingly, the New Zealand online store has an option to purchase the Product Red iPod nano - where Australia’s still doesn’t. Looks like we’ll be getting that one soon.
Original here.

I want to rant a bit about the reasons why I think Linux is not ready for the Desktop. There are many reasons important to me which I will outline in this article. Anyway I use a Mac because, to quote the advertising, ‘it just works’. I don’t have hack my system using a Terminal to get things working. I am afraid to say that after years and years of hearing Linux fanboys say “Linux is ready for the desktop” and me wanting to whole heartedly agree, I am here to tell you boys and girls that no it isn’t ready. Really. Linux isn’t really for anyone’s god damn desktop.

So let me firstly tell you about my experience with Linux. About four years ago I switched from Windows to Linux. The initial experience was nice. Moving from monthly reinstalls of Windows over to the Linux was a breath of fresh air for me. Well at least until I wanted to do anything. It was an experience which lasted a good three or four solid months and was completely void of Windows. I had many problems but I did give Linux a chance. Actually I gave it four chances, those being: Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware and Suse. In the end I did go back to Windows because although it was buggy and crashed a lot and got viruses… at least I could install an application without using a monolithic package manager and I could get a broadband connection up and running every time. With Linux, it was a very very different story.

The reason I am just so jaded with Linux is because it’s crap. Linux is crap second rate software that may or may not improve in the years to come. It’s buggy, has none of the polish that is absolutely critical to a desktop operating system and has been playing a never ending game of catch up that I don’t see it winning anytime soon.
And my opinion: Spotlight > Beagle, InstallShield > Synaptic/APT/RPM.

Many of the features that Linux touted such as stability and speed are no longer selling points for me and I don’t see why I should use it for anything other than a file server on an old PC in the corner of the room.

Recently I installed Fedora Core 6 on a friend’s laptop. After installing it I got Flash, Win32 Codecs, Audio, Real Player, Windows Media Video, VLC, and that was a major major pain to get all those working. It took me a whole day and I feel really bad for my friend because he would have a solid system if it weren’t for a few details. I asked him how he liked Fedora and he said, “Linux really drives me crazy man”. Are you listening Linux developers? Listen up because he is right:

• Wireless networking is not supported
• Microphone recording jack doesn’t work
• Automatic discovery of DNS settings doesn’t work (why?)
• Installing applications sucks
• Some menus are still confusing
• Big lag between starting an application and having it actually open

Those are the problems we had with his laptop it is completely unacceptable for a modern OS and rather disappointing.
Fedora is not completely bad though. His Fedora Core system looks nice and so far is my favourite of all the distros I have tried. Compared to the eyeball burning shit brown theme of Ubuntu, I have to say that the Fedora team have done a great job with their default theme. The menus are nice and I really like the DNA wallpaper. However, eye candy does not offset the problems with usability. If you plug in an ethernet cable connected to an ADSL router, you would expect to have internet right away with a computer right? Not with Linux. Every time I start up Fedora I have to manually open my router’s admin page in Firefox and get my ISP’s DNS server IP and copy and paste it into the network settings before it will let me browse the web. And it never remembers these settings. I have no idea why but it frustrates me to no end. I was on a forum looking for answers and someone said this:

“the gui doesn’t really work properly, you have to use the Terminal to configure that because the gui overwrites the .conf file on boot”

This is the spit and polish that you expect from an operating system and if Linux wants to fight with itself about whether the command line or GUI rule the system’s configuration settings, let me know when someone wins. I am tired of trying Linux distributions and my DNS problem seems to be a recurring issue. It has happened on every distro I have tried. I’ve read about other people having the same problem and all they seem to get is a useless response from some ‘elitist’ Linux user who usually points them to a “How To” page which looks like it was designed with frontpage sometime in the early 80s. Needless to say pointing someone to a mountain of difficult to read how to pages does not solve Linux’s shortcomings. I want to say to people, “Dude! No it’s not you, I have the same problem too!” but normally I’m too frustrated with whatever problem I might be having at the time to bother leaving a comment.

If you have gotten this far through my rant then thanks for reading my article. Feel free to leave your thoughts on this.

When Linux community all pull together and stop winging over petty licensing issues and they finally manage to get the Linux desktop finished, let me know.

Back in the day when Apple first introduced smart playlists into iTunes I thought they were a good idea, but not terribly useful in practice. I have a music collection approaching 10,000 songs and it’s a breeze for me to find anything I want. But as time goes by i’m finding it difficult to find songs that I want to listen to, my collection has just grown too big. I have playlists that were built slowly by searching for a song, dragging it to the playlist and repeating the process. This is painful, time consuming and has ultimately left me with a jumbled mess of playlists. Most of these now have been relegated to the place in the sky where deleted playlists go. Surely there is a better way.

Create a smart playlist in iTunes. Choose these settings:

You should now have a playlist that will give you good songs to listen to. The rating rule will give you good songs, and the last played not in the last 2 weeks will ensure you don’t listen to the same thing over and over. You need to have at least a few songs rated for this to work properly and hopefully they aren’t all rated at five stars. The above playlist is a generic example but you may also want to add rules that exclude certain artists. For example in mine I don’t include The Eagles or Linkin Park. Those are bands I like but don’t want to listen to all the time so rather than re-rating the songs, just exclude the artist from the playlist.

My custom playlist has been great for me, while letting it loop on random I’ve found some old bands I haven’t listened to in a while like Daft Punk, Jack Johnson and some old Blink-182 songs. The cool thing is as soon as you listen to a song it disappears from the playlist, so you can be sure you won’t get bored and new songs will appear every day.

Another useful smart playlist is “recently played”. If you want to know what songs you have just listened to (because it disappeared after you played it) then do this:

Now you can just check your ‘Recently Played’ playlist to find what that catchy tune was!

Hopefully you learned something from this article. If you have anything to add, please feel free to leave it in the comments below.