A Penguin in the Orchard

The new rules for buying a Mac

May 8th, 2008 - 7:25 am by Tony Steidler-Dennison
Tags: mac

(Via Macworld.)

The world has a lot of unwritten rules: In social etiquette. In baseball. And in buying computers. For years, we have unquestioningly followed numerous unwritten rules when buying a Mac. Like many customs, these rules were once based on a foundation of facts and reason. But in the past few years, many longstanding Mac truths have been upended. All Macs run on multiple-core Intel processors now. iMacs are no longer hobbled by crippling feature limitations. And speedy external peripherals have drastically lessened the need for add-on cards.

In other words, the old rules no longer apply. If you’re planning on buying a new Mac, you need facts about the modern lineup—so you can choose the computer that’s right for you.

In this article, we take a look at some common assumptions and explain whether they align with today’s realities.

      

Posted in Apple | No Comments »

AT&T Blocking Out June 15-July 12 for 3G iPhone Launch?

May 7th, 2008 - 9:58 am by Tony Steidler-Dennison
Tags: 3g, att, iphone

(Via Mac Rumors.)

Last year, AT&T limited employee vacation requests between June 15-July 15 in anticipation of the original iPhone launch which took place on June 29th, 2007.

Today, Boy Genius Report publishes another AT&T memo that is again restricting vacation requests, this time between June 15th and July 12th 2008. The reason for the restriction is “to ensure adequate store staffing and to give everyone an equal opportunity to benefit from an exciting product launch.” AT&T expects “heavier than normal customer traffic” in their stores due to an “exciting Summer Promotional Launch”.

Of course, speculation points to Apple launching their new 3G iPhone during that time. The timeframe is consistent with a previous report that claimed that Apple was targeting “on or around June 27th” to approximately coincide with the one year anniversary of the iPhone launch. Meanwhile, the NYTimes believes that the European launch for the 3G iPhone will be “by the August summer holidays” according to a person close to the situation.

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference takes place between June 9-13th in San Francisco, and could serve as the launching ground for the next generation iPhone.

      

Posted in Apple | No Comments »

Flickr Find: Twitter in Mac OS X developer tools

May 7th, 2008 - 9:57 am by Tony Steidler-Dennison
Tags: flickr, leopard, mac, osx, twitter

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

An avid reader of TUAW, Chris Thomson, sent us a link to a Flickr picture (being the nosy people we are, we clicked the link). What we found surprised us — a Twitter Quartz Composer composition was included as a part of the Mac OS X developer tools for Leopard. “Twitterverse,” when tweaked right, can be used as an OS X screen saver and display all of your friends tweets in a graphical way.

Full story here.

      

Posted in Apple | No Comments »

Apple releases fifth iPhone SDK beta

May 7th, 2008 - 9:55 am by Tony Steidler-Dennison
Tags: iphone, sdk, xcode

(Via MacDailyNews.)

Apple has released the fifth beta version of the iPhone SDK which includes Xcode IDE, iPhone simulator with Open GL ES support, Interface Builder, Instruments, frameworks and samples, compilers, and Shark analysis tool.

During Apple’s Q2 08 conference call on April 23, CFO Peter Oppenheimer said that the SDK has already been downloaded 200,000 times and is currently being used in one-third of the Fortune 500 companies to develop applications for the iPhone/iPod touch.

      

Posted in Apple | No Comments »

Apple continues seeding test builds of Mac OS X 10.5.3

May 7th, 2008 - 9:54 am by Tony Steidler-Dennison
Tags: leopard, osx

(Via Ars Technica.)

Another test build of 10.5.3, 9D27, was released last night to ADC members. This comes just one week after build 9D25, two weeks after build 9D23, and three weeks after build 9D20. The release notes included in the latest build indicate that the 10.5.3 update will include well over 200 fixes and improvements in total when it becomes available. The latest build adds nine additional fixes to the tally, the majority of which are network related.

The first testing build was released to developers in late March and has seen frequent updates since then. This breaks from Apple’s previous record of seeding a build to ADC members early on and then slowly increasing the frequency of test builds as the update nears completion. A weekly cadence like we’ve seen so far usually indicates imminent release. However, while the release notes indicate no known issues, Mac Rumors reports anecdotal evidence of stability issues.

      

Posted in Apple | No Comments »

Steidler.Network addition

May 5th, 2008 - 10:58 am by Tony Steidler-Dennison
Tags: Baseball, Blogs, steidler.network, tumblr

A new site has found it’s way into the steidler.network. Play Ball is a tumblelog about the only game that really matters. It’s a true tumlelog - a river of news, photos, video, and original insight into baseball. It’s hosted with the Tumblr service and, as such, doesn’t (yet) allow for comments. If you visit and would like to comment on what you see, please feel free to contact me by email using the link on the front page.

Update: Given the “river of news” nature of Play Ball (more than 170 entries in the past four days), consuming the site in an RSS reader is well-advised. Subscribe here or from the RSS links on the site.

      

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Feeds back up

May 5th, 2008 - 10:52 am by Tony Steidler-Dennison
Tags: .htaccess, feeds

If you’re reading this in a feed reader, the Penguin feeds are clearly back up. They’ve been down for a few days, while I worked through some .htaccess hackery to account from the move to the mac subdomain. Old subscriptions at http://steidler.net/feed and new subscriptions at http://mac.steidler.net/feed should now both be working.

Thanks for your infinite patience.

      

Posted in Site | No Comments »

NewsGator shares details on upcoming NetNewsWire 3.2, 4.0

May 5th, 2008 - 8:04 am by Tony Steidler-Dennison
Tags: netnewswire, ranchero

(Via Ars Technica.)

Brent Simmons of NewsGator gave Ars the scoop about some interesting updates on the way for NetNewsWire, the company’s premiere RSS reader for Mac OS X.

In January NewsGator announced that all of its consumer products, including NetNewsWire, were going free. NetNewsWire 3.1 was released that same month, but Brent isn’t one to let a version sit for very long. Citing NewsGator’s new focus on “[taming] the information overload problem,” Brent is working on NetNewsWire 3.2 and 4.0 almost in tandem, with a decent set of changes and new features already lined up for both.

In NetNewsWire 3.2, Brent has rewritten the RSS parser he’s been using more or less since NetNewsWire’s debut in 2002 (yep, NNW was slinging RSS before you learned the meaning of the phrase “feed syndication”). This and other fixes should let NetNewsWire 3.2 consume one-third the memory, especially for heavy feed users who can’t stop clicking “subscribe.” Brent said he’s shooting for a July release date, possibly sooner, but we aren’t allowed to hold him to that.

Full story here.

      

Posted in Apple, Software | No Comments »

Starbucks rolling out free Wi-Fi for iPhones, slowly

May 5th, 2008 - 8:02 am by Tony Steidler-Dennison
Tags: iphone, starbucks, wifi

(Via Macworld.)

iPhone users who need a speed boost over the EDGE connection find the phone’s Wi-Fi functionality quite handy. The only problem is locating a hotspot to use it on. However, Starbucks and AT&T struck a deal earlier this year that will see the coffee retailer’s Wi-Fi hotspots, currently served by T-Mobile, switched to the AT&T network. And that carries potential benefits for iPhone users.

Some iPhone users have reported that the newly launched AT&T hotspots are offering free Wi-Fi access to all iPhone users, as long as you have a valid iPhone phone number with the provider. Unfortunately, the situation is not quite as straightforward as one might hope.

I decided to take a little firsthand look, visiting four Starbucks in the Metro Boston area. I found only one offering free Wi-Fi for iPhones—the Davis Square, Somerville location nearest my home. I snapped a screenshot of the login screen (shown below), which accepted my iPhone’s phone number without question and logged me in with no trouble.

However, of the three subsequent Starbucks I visited, two were still using T-Mobile’s service to provide Wi-Fi access. The third, a Starbucks ensconced in a Barnes & Noble store in Boston’s Prudential Center, had an AT&T hotspot available, but was not offering free Wi-Fi to iPhones.

Full story here.

      

Posted in Apple | No Comments »

We know 3G is fast, but what else?

May 5th, 2008 - 8:01 am by Tony Steidler-Dennison
Tags: iphone

(Via RedEye.)

Hold on, Jimmy. Things are about to really start moving.

I was sitting here thinking about what we really haven’t talked much about and that’s 3G and its specific applications.

Let me explain. We know that the 3G iPhone is the next iPhone. No matter what it looks like, no matter what fixes we get (better volume, bluetooth, etc.) — the power of 3G is the speed of the network.

No breaking news here, but we haven’t really delved into the power of a faster network on the iPhone and how that could impact our everyday use.

For example … We know that with 3G we’ll be surfing and e-mailing and talking on our phones without interruption. A high-speed network can do that.

We also know that mobile video is a big part of 3G, it will just come down to how Apple implements it. Are we talking about AT&T’s mobile video offerings or Apple’s implementation of a much more powerful iChat?

Surely, we’re talking about the ability to download much more in many more places — tie the 3G launch with the Starbucks-AT&T tie and you’re talking about high-speed mobile internet pretty much non-stop — even in areas where the 3G network lacks. Does that mean we’ll be downloading movies on the fly? Podcasts? I think both are quite possible at the very least.

Full story here.

      

Posted in Apple | No Comments »