October 14 Apple Event – New Notebooks

The fact that Apple is updating its notebook lines appears to be the worse kept secret in technology. People were talking about an October 14 event last month and some websites already claim to have pictures of the new cases. There is even a lot of discussion about a new manufacturing process where the new MacBooks will be carved out of a single piece of aluminum* which should make them stronger.
Today Apple sent the official invite out for an event on October 14, 2008 at 9:30 a.m. where they intend to put the “spotlight on notebooks.” I’m set on computers for some time but a friend has been seeking my advice on a new MacBook and I’ve been telling her to hold off.
I routinely ridicule people for making wild speculation of new Apple products but that never stops me from doing it myself, so here goes:
* All of the MacBooks (Pros, standard, and Air) will now be aluminum. There will be no more plastic laptops;
* All of the MacBooks will feature the LED screen probably standard or, at least, as an option;
* Despite speculation, there will remain to be Pros, Airs, and standard MacBooks.
I would love to see the prices drop to have one model at $999, but I seriously doubt it will. Apple has never been a company to play the margin game. I think they are more likely to say, “Hey they are so much better and still the same price!”
What do you think? Sound off in the comments.
* Am I the only person that wishes I could say the word “aluminum” with a British accent? Maybe Don McAllister should screencast THAT.

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Macworld Bound 2009

Last year I was fortunate enough to get to spend a few days in San Francisco at the Macworld Expo. I must admit, however, that my Macworld experience did not follow the usual path you would expect. I spent the majority of my time slumming the halls meeting tons of great readers, podcasters, developers, and other miscellaneous mac geeks. Indeed, I would have to say the best part of the experience by far was all of the great people I met and new friends I made. I made a point of finding people to eat meals with, visit events with, and even troll the display booths with.
For the benefit of this website, getting to shake hands with individual developers and have them answer my questions made a huge difference in my ability to report and review for the past year. Another nice benefit of the trip was my inspiration for the resurrection of the Mac Roundtable which is doing quite well again.
I had so much fun that I just recently booked travel arrangements for my return. If any readers are going to be up there, let me know. I’ll be there Tuesday through Thursday. I thought about going to the Steve-Note but when I realized the extra expenses for that would be about $450 plus a night on the sidewalk, I decided I could avoid the reality distortion field for another year. Also, if you are planning on heading up, don’t miss visiting Macworld Bound, where you can get great tips and information for your trip.

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Doozla Contest – 1 Week Left

There is still one week on the Doozla contest. Don’t forget to get your entries in!

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Wiretap Anywhere Review

In a different lifetime I was a studio musician and spent a lot of time with microphones and soundboards. As a result, I’m a bit of an audio nerd. The thing is, I remember how hard analog audio was to pull off. But today we live in the digital age and suddenly Audio gets much easier. This week I’m looking at Ambrosia Software’s latest application in its stable of audio tools, Wiretap Anywhere.

To put this application in layman’s terms, wind the clock back about 80 years and imagine one of those old telephone switchboard stations. You have a board on one side with incoming calls and the operator would then physically connect the plug into where you wanted the call to go. “Oh hi Eunice. You want to talk to Doc Jones about your lombago, let me patch you in.” Now imagine that same concept but much cooler on your Mac and instead of just patching one call, you can patch five calls into one line. That gives you a rough idea of Wiretap Anywhere. With it you can take any audio generated by your Mac and pipe it across to any destination. Do you want to share your latest GarageBand project with your pal in Walawala over iChat? Its simple. You just set a line from GarageBand to iChat and you are in business. If you are a podcaster and want to get a Skype call, your local microphone, and some funky iTunes background music into your audio application but leave your system alerts out of the recording, it is simply a matter of making the proper connections in Wiretap Anywhere.

Wiretap Anywhere turns all of your applications into audio inputs which you can then mix and combine and patch into any application on your Mac that accepts an audio signal. The concept is not really that complicated but, depending on your level of audio needs, extremely useful. You can put the individual source applications to their own channels or you can mix them to a combined stereo signal from within Wiretap Anywhere.
One use that I particularly enjoyed was routing my Midi keyboard, Logic, and iTunes into one feed for recording. Pulling this off “back in the day” would have have been possible without some very high end, and expensive, recording equipment.

In some ways it is like Soundflower. It is just easier to configure and more stable. The interface, presented through a preference pane, is obvious. I’ve been putting Wiretap Anywhere through its paces now for for several weeks. Processing and redirecting all of this audio did not seem to cause any latency problems for me. Ambrosia knows audio. For about 10 months now I’ve been recording my reviews on another Ambrosia product, Wiretap Studio.
Wiretap Anywhere is certainly not for everyone but is an excellent tool for for people who need this sort of granular control over their audio. A license will cost $129. If you are interested, there is a demo version available from Ambrosia Software’s website. Ambrosia also has some nice tutorial videos to give you a better idea of how to use the application.

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Apple Notebook Sales Soar

AppleInsider reports today that one in five notebooks bought in the back-to-school period were Macs. A lot of Mac owners secretly worry about the bad old days when Apple marketshare was abysmal and people were talking about chopping up the company. With growing marketshare (especially with college kids), and the increasing OS irrelevance with cloud based computing, I think those days are over.

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Vintage Mac Sickness

Lately, I’ve come down with the vintage Mac bug. “Back in the day”, I first started using the original toaster style Macs. I then made a regrettable side turn into PCs before being able to return to the fold. The thing is, I still miss my old 512k Mac. The one with the tortoise and the hare preferences. The one that said “hello” to me when I turned it on.
I realize that this sickness is purely nostalgic. My “underpowered” MacBook Air can do more computing than an entire room full of networked vintage macs. Nevertheless, I’ve now caught myself several times haunting the vintage Mac sales on ebay and watched several very familiar looking old Macs sell in the $50-$100 price range. A part of me wants to buy one of these really badly. The problem is, I have no clue what on earth I’d do with it. I certainly don’t have space in my home office for another computer and I have no idea how anything I would write on a 20 year old computer could even get onto my current rig. Frankly, I’m afraid to ask if anybody does use these old machines productively because I suspect it would just enable me. As things currently stand, every time I get tempted, common sense seems to take over. Does anybody else have Vintage Mac Sickness?

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Doozla Contest

You can read my review of Doozla right here. The nice folks at Plasq have agreed to let me give away two Doozla licenses. So I’ve decided to do this with a contest. Download the Doozla demo and send me your kid’s masterpiece. My 6 and 11 year old daughters will then pick their two favorites and the winning artists will get Doozla licenses. Send the pictures to me at email link on the left and mark the email as “Doozla Contest”. I can’t wait to see the creative kids in your world produce. I’ll announce the winners next week.

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Doozla Review

Plasq, the makers of Comic Life and Skitch, is one of those developers where you should just automatically download their new applications. So when Doozla was released, I put it on the family iMac and I’ve watched my kids enjoy it all year.

Doozla is a drawing program aimed firmly at the little ones. When you first start it up there are four icons that send you into its four drawing functions. The top icon leads to a virtual coloring book with a several fun images the kids can color in with the mouse. My six year old reports this is her favorite part of the application. Another icon leads to a blank canvas and gives you a variety of simple to use tools for drawing pictures and adding text. Another of the opening icons brings you to a screen with a variety of colorful backgrounds upon which you can add your drawings and finally, there is a fourth icon that allows you to take an iSight picture and mark it up. My kids found this particularly fun when marking up a picture of their dad. That is right: they had me with big blue hand drawn glasses and lipstick.

Behind all of this fun is a fancy bit of programing. Doozla uses curves, not pixels, to draw so using the mouse, even the youngest Mac geeks can make smooth lines. You can run it in full screen mode so the kids don’t stumble into things like … I don’t know .. the system preferences or terminal?

Doozla is like Skitch but for kids. If you are looking for something fun on the Mac with your little ones. Give it a try. The application costs $24.95 and you can download a demo at plasq.com.
You can listen to this review on Surfbits episode 179.

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Guest Post – Slife Review

By John Chandler
Like many Mac users, Merlin Mann holds a strange power over me and I am compelled to do whatever he suggests. A few weeks ago on MacBreak Weekly, his pick of the week was Slife. Like Merlin, I had taken a look at the program before and didn’t think it would be of much benefit for me. But Merlin gave it a second chance, and so, like Merlin, I did too. And, like Merlin, I’m glad I did.
Slife is a free program that runs in the background and measures how you spend your time. After it has been running for a while, you can go back and evaluate what you’ve been up to. It gives you a visual breakdown of what apps you’ve been working in, hour by hour, as you can see in the image to the right. It can be helpful…and guilt-inducing.

That was my first impression of the program when I saw it a few months ago. It didn’t seem to offer much…other than guilt. Now that I’m using it, I am finding a lot of benefit to mingle in with my guilt. Besides showing what programs I use, it can also show a breakdown of what documents and websites I’ve been lingering on:

If you do work where you need to track time for clients, this, of course, can be useful. But, it is also helpful to get a good idea of how much time I’m spending on certain things. I can define the values I want to hold, but seeing the reality of where I am spending my time is an opportunity for me to be honest with myself and then begin to grow from there.
All of this is nice, but what makes Slife worth the CPU cycles is a feature called “Activities”. You can lump programs and documents into different activities, or categories. So, for instance, if you want to know how much time you spend social networking, you could lump Facebook.com, Twitter.com and iChat into a single activity. Any combination of apps, websites, and documents can be measured.
Defining activities could become tedious and eat up more time than it is worth. I have found it best to define some general categories to get an idea of where my time is going — creating, collecting, connecting, and planning:

Right now these are activities are defined only by apps. I don’t think I will take the time to define them further by websites or documents. It’s not a perfect system, but it gives me a good opportunity to reflect on how I am spending my time.
I’ve had Slife collecting data for about two weeks now. In another week or two, I’m going to start reshaping my workflow around what I am learning. I’ll share some my journey on Creativityist — you are welcome to come along for the ride.
A special thanks to MacSparky. I stumbled on his blog early this year. I am always pleased to see a new post appear in my reader, and I appreciate the voice he brings as an avid day to day Mac user.
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A note from MacSparky.
I just want to thank John for contributing this post. I’m now in week one of what looks to be a three week trial and having friends like John help keep things interesting on MacSparky is absolutely priceless.

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You’re a PC. That’s Great!

The day job has been keeping me busy as of late. When I finally got a moment to check my RSS feed, I found a lot of jabber about Microsoft’s latest ad campaign where they “take on” the long running Apple adds. My first thought was, so what? Why do so many Mac people get obsessed about what Microsoft is doing? Despite the fact that I love my Macs, I don’t tell people to buy them. If windows does it for you, by all means use Windows. If Linux rocks your world, rock away. Just because I don’t evangelize, doesn’t mean people around me tend to buy Macs. I would like to think that is more a result of them using my Mac and seeing the results I get from it more than anything else. Regardless, I think as a community, us Mac users need to stop getting so obsessed with Windows and just enjoy our Macs.

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