David Beach's Blog

Apple MacBook is Here

Ah yes... here we go. Apple has released their much anticipated MacBook today. Very very nice. It seems that black is the new white, which only makes sense as they are following the ipod's lead. I dig it. Dual Core, small, light, thin (1.08 inches thick), built in iSight (webcams are the future), 13" screen, great specs. These things are so sweet that if I got one, I'd have a difficult time mucking it up with all those stickers. Starting at $1,099, it's still priced high for a an ordinary laptop, but this isn't an ordinary laptop.

Okay, I'm not getting one. I'm not getting one. I'm not getting one... (It will sink in at some point) I'm going to Italy and I just bought a car... I'm not getting one...

Best Mac Mouse

It's the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000. Okay that's out of the way.

I've been searching for a better mouse than the extremely disappointing Apple "Mighty Mouse." That thing is a pile. The left/right buttons are unintuitive, the side buttons are uncomfortable and get in the way, the little scroll ball is a pain in the ass. It doesn't scroll up for me, and the side scroll happens on accident, plus it's  too easy to click. All in all, it's a bad design and a very bad mouse.

So last night I searched all around for what people thought the "best mac mouse" was. I could not find any information. MacWorld had terrible content as did Mac Addict. Review sites were not helpful either. I literally spent about an hour trying to find what was considered to be the best mouse for a mac. Totally frustrating!

Finally, I narrowed it down to two wireless laser mice. The Logitech MX Revolution Cordless Laser Mouse and the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000.

I decided to go with the Microsoft mouse because Merlin Mann of 43 Folders uses one (he's a great filter for this kind of thing... does a lot of the work for you.) and it was a bit cheaper than the logitech.

So far, It's fantastic. For all of you frustrated Apple Mouse users out there. Give this one a shot. I'm sure you'll be happy about it. And for those Mac journalists/reviewers who still carry a grudge over Microsoft for some lame reason, get over yourself.

Apple Inching Foward

I know this is old news by now, but it's all coming together. You can see it now like a ballet in slow motion. Apple is creeping into your living room and more and more into your life. First itunes, then the iPod, then the Mac Mini, then Front Row, then downloadable TV shows, then Intel, and now we have the iPod Hi Fi and the new Mac Mini. Two products clearly designed to be out side of your home office and into your home. You know, the part of your house where you actually live. It's like their product road map is unfurling before our eyes.

At first look the Hi-Fi seems like an odd choice. That's what the iPod economy is for right? Why compete with all of your accessory partners? Well if you take a step back, I think it's about two ideas that head in the same direction. First this product clearly is not a computer. It doesn't really have computer parts. It has portable stereo parts. Apple has moved their brand into your living room and it has lined up a new set of suppliers and partners in the consumer electronics space. At the same time.

Next you have the Mac Mini. I think anyone who first saw it thought the same thing... "Damn! I'm gonna hook that sucker up to my TV!" Now they made that function a feature. It is the new DVD Player with the world connected to it. Download shows, use the net, play your music, watch movies, photos, networked. It's all there!

OK, this is getting good. You can see the pattern. The coming months and January are going to be interesting times for us and Apple. I think we will see the next generation of the company emerge.

Now for the question... do I get a Mac Mini? It's so damn tempting! I know what I said about gadgets this year, and I need to stick to it... but if my DVD player happens to break, I can't be held responsible.

Macworld SF 2006

Since Jane went to Mexico for the weekend, I brought the kids along with me to Macworld on Friday. We dropped Janie off in the morning at the airport then took the train up to the city for the day. My first impression was that it was so much smaller than years past. It's probably been a few since my last Macworld, but I definitely remember it taking up both north and south halls of Moscone center. Perhaps the last one I went to was just the south hall as well, but for some reason it was more noticeable. It also seemed that the majority of the booths were iPod related. This makes me wonder where Apple would be without the iPod... scary.

It was sort of funny to see all the people crowded around the new iMacs and "MacBooks," I mean there really wasn't anything new there.  Just Intel inside... what, were they somehow measuring the clock speed of an import of a large iPhoto library? (that's a geek joke... you're supposed to laugh at that.)

It was good to go though. I love the Mac. I always have. My first computer was an Apple. Perhaps it's the designer in me, but I'm so drawn to the aesthetic that keeps getting better and better. Sure some stuff ticks me off, like how inclusive Apple is about their services, and how they can be arrogant about their products, but that's easy to ignore when they seem to do such a good job of delivering what I'm looking for (or didn't know I was looking for).

The best product I saw there was an iPod accessory. There were tons, but the new Griffin TuneCenter is pretty cool. It's an iPod dock that's wireless, has a remote and connects to your TV and stereo. It can play and display anything on your 5G iPod video. You can access your photos, songs, and videos through an onscreen display. It even connects to the web to play Internet radio... only $99 bucks.

There was some other nice stuff. I liked the demo I saw for Delicious Monster's DeliciousLibrary. I'm going to try it out. I've seen it before, but it looks like this new version has a pretty seamless interaction with Amazon's API. Inspirational to say the least.

I watched the iLife demo and was entertained with how easy everything looked and how it all tied together so nicely. Good good. I went home and played with iWeb some more. It's definitely doing some cool stuff on the back-end, I mean the drag and drop media placement and all is sweet. I can see the potential, but until they allow the ability to sync and upload to any web server, It's useless to me. .mac isn't that great.

That's it for now. I welcome any comments. Uh... yeah. Jane comes home tomorrow so all will be back to normal. I'm still working on that other blog idea. I'll reveal it soon. L8.

Quick Post about Apple iWeb...

I picked up Apple's iLife 2006 this evening. The new features seem worth it. But I have to tell you that iWeb doesn't appear to be usable. From what I can gather, you pretty much need to use it with .mac. They don't give you any other ftp option. You can write out your site to a folder, but then I guess it's up to you to upload it to your own server. I haven't checked out how the pages are generated so I don't know how well they're optimized for search engines either. Also .mac won't let you use your own domain. This means that your iWeb homepage url will look like this: http://web.mac.com/yourusername/iweb/yourwebsite/ or some crap. Why? The blogging tool also doesn't seem appealing. I really don't want to edit my blog in-line or have it appear to be in-line. It's actually not natural. The ability to blog needs to be available from anywhere at anytime. And so having it part of the browser funtion or on a server makes the most sense still.

I'm not going to totally trash it yet. I'll go to Macworld and watch the demo and then I'll try to build a site with it to see if I'm wrong, but first blush isn't that appealing. The podcast feature is decent in GarageBand (are there going to be that many podcasts?) and so are the new features in iMovie and iPhoto, so I'm happy with the purchase, but I was hoping iWeb would have been much more.

"So go ahead. Join the blogging revolution with iWeb. Viva la you!"

Okay back to regularly scheduled programming...

Update: I just realized... There is no comment function on an iWeb blog... WTF?

New iMac G5

I picked up my new iMac at work on Friday. Apple delivered it there. It's the 20-inch screen 2.1Ghz, 250 GB HD, 512 MB RAM version. It's a thing of beauty. Great big screen, super fast. It includes a double-layer SuperDrive, built in iSight camera, a Mighty Mouse, plus this new interface to media files called Front Row. It also comes with a remote control for Front Row that attaches magnetically to the side of the screen. Another little feature is some software called Photo Booth. It's a silly application that uses the built-in camera and some image filters to take photos of you sitting in front of the computer. If you have kids, they'll love it.

We're passing along my older iMac to my brother. He needs it.

Anyway, it's a nice machine, I just need to get it up to the Mystery Room to load it up with my files and software. I'm also planning to use as many Apple features as possible. I set up my itsbeach.com mail with with their Mail app, and I'm going to try to use iChat with Jabber and YIM. iCal as well.

Star Wars III on My iPod

I bought Episode III last night and immediately ripped it and put it on my iPod. Because I could. I doubt I'd ever watch the whole thing that way, but it's nice to know it's there. Concert films and music videos are a natural for the gadget. You don't need to constantly watch it, the sound entertains you enough. But it's cool to look down and see the flickering image.

I'm a little disappointed about the USB 2.0 situation considering that my two year old iMac does not have USB 2.0.  So moving files to the iPod takes a considerable amount of time. The new iMac looks nice, but I really don't need it right now.

DVD Ripping Next for iTunes?

I'm watching The Empire Strikes Back on my iPod. It looks great and sounds even better. This was a really easy thing to do.  I used HandBrake 0.7.0 beta. It took awhile but it was worth it. I encoded the VIDEO_TS  folder to 320 x 240 MP4 with aac audio. It took over 2 hours to rip. The final file size is about 550 mb.

So the question is, will this be a feature of iTunes soon? And if not, why? Why have an iPod with video if the video is difficult to come by? If I can encode my CDs, why not my DVDs as well? I don't see why not. But I'm sure there are a lot of lawyers out there who can.

Will iTunes soon be selling movies? Will there be a way to get your TV shows off your Tivo or other DVR device? Do people want this? I think I would. I see lots of opportunity here. Even the opportunity for better distribution of independent productions. I think this is just the beginning... funny how Apple has a way of starting revolutions.

Apple, Negativland, and Other Stuff

I've been meaning to write something for a couple of days. I was in the middle of a post yesterday and my machine restarted on its own. So that killed the buzz.

I was going to go off on Apple and how I just purchased a 4GB iPod nano with a tiny color screen, and now for $50 bucks more I can get a 30GB pretty damn thin iPod with a bigger color screen that can play full frame video. WTF!? I feel ripped off. It's even worse now because of all the trouble I went through the day before with the scratched up broken screen. I'm disappointed in myself.

I think I'm going to sell it. The 4 gig nano with in-ear headphones and a white armband case for $225. It's a steal. I'll post it on Yahoo!'s internal stuff for sale email list and it should be gone in a few minutes. Then I'll be rid of it once and for all.

I'll order the new pretty one and will be happy until at least until January Mac World, when they announce the $199 ultra thin 80GB video iPod with phone and camera. It's the size of your big toe!

Right now I'm watching my brother Adam play his sax with his band The Uptones live online at iMusicast in Berkeley. They sound great! The video isn't stable though. It's not easy to watch. Still good to see them.

Today at Yahoo! we had another TechTalk. Mark Hosler of Negativland was there to discuss their work and their viewpoint on copyright infringement and media manipulation. I showed up late due to the fact that I had to work, but it was so good to have him here. Afterward Ken Hickman, Chad Dickerson, Mark and I chatted for a bit. Subjects included answering machines, cyber kids, ourmedia, oil, war, travel and some other stuff... I must say those guys are pretty cool.

I don't think I've discussed some new Yahoo! product lately. One of my favorites is Yahoo! Podcasts. It's a slick site and indicative of the direction we seem to be going with new services. Well designed, focused, user contributed, and open. My Swedelife podcast is available. Pick it up and amaze your friends. One thing I think they need to do is to keep track of the podcasts that you subscribe to on the site. Seems like a big missing piece of the puzzle. But hey, that's why it's a beta.

Speaking of Swedelife and going full circle with this post... Apple iTunes finally sucks in the Swedelife podcast. It took them six weeks or so. I guess they were too busy finding new ways to piss people off with their ill timed iPod product releases.

Installed Mac OS X Tiger

I installed Mac OS 10.4 Tiger yesterday. It came in the mail from Amazon. I got the $35 rebate. Always looking out for a deal. I think something that's important to keep in mind about this is that despite the hype of this release, it's not OS XI. Don't get me wrong, it's good. It's faster, the integrated spotlight desktop search works better than any I've used, dashboard widgets are cute, and Safari RSS is nice except that it's still Safari. If you're a mac user with a G4 or higher machine, you should get it. If you have a G3 or lower... get a new mac. Or, well, Dell has awesome deals going on right now. I'd love to try the iChat AV with the cool looking conferencing, but I don't know anyone else with a iSight or webcam connected to their mac. I'm sure it's super. What's up with that? I'd use iCal but I don't have a .mac account, nor do I want one. (I have enough to deal with online). Plus, again, the power of it is that you can interact with others with iCal. I have no reason to do that and no one to do it with (though I wish I could).

itunes still rocks. Though I wish they'd have a podcast strategy. I'm also getting tired of the brush steel thing. Heck, I was tired of it in '96. And I wish that the front end of the OS would have changed just a bit. Something new to look at would have been nice. Some new interaction. Bottom line, OS X Tiger is pretty much the same. An improvement, yes, though I'm still left wanting more. However with all things new and mac... you have to have it. Brand loyalty is a burden sometimes, though I still wear it with pride.

Oh and I found out today that I may be going to Bangalore, India for a week or so to work on something I'm cookin' up. More on that later.