So I’ve got Leopard and so I have Boot camp, and I bought a copy of Parallels to run Windows on my Mac Mini. The only thing I haven’t bought is the Windows OS. I want to get XP Pro But I’m having a hard time finding a boxed copy for less than $130, the same price as Leopard. Vista Ultimate is more like $250 new. Hmm… only one flavor of Leopard, which is pretty much ultimate by nature. Since Microsoft has announced that they will end production of XP on June 30, I’m faced with the choice of buying a soon to be obsolete (in Microsoft’s own words) OS or one that is rather buggy and tends to break hardware (hence it’s nickname Hasta La Vista).
Infoworld is circulating a petition for Microsoft to continue XP production, but what Microsoft needs to do is make a smarter, leaner single flavor of Vista that is the same price as Leopard (Yeah Right!)
While the Vista sucking issue is bringing users to Mac OSX and various flavors of Linux in droves, I need to get Windows just to run some obscure Windows only shareware apps. In fact, come to think of it I might even be able to get by with XP Home edition, that should cost less than Leopard.
I must admit I did a spit take when my 9 year old granddaughter looked over my shoulder while I was doing some work in GarageBand and said “That what we use to make our podcast, Pa-Jay, do you want to see my Podcast?”
“Actually, it’s a Vodcast. Go to my school’s website and I’ll show you,,” she continued. Sure enough when I went to the Fox Hollow elementary school’s website, There was the third grade Podcast page, and there was my grand-daughter showing how to make cookies for all the interwebs to see. Her classmate and best friend, Maddy shows how to make chocolate ice cream from vanilla with a bit of alchemy involving cocoa powder. Phillip shows us how to get a girlfriend. Apparently the trick is to buy a potential girlfriend a ring for exactly $114, But first you have to look cool by wearing a long-sleeve button shirt and don’t tuck it in.
Technically the students are using Apple’s GarageBand to make “enhanced” Podcasts. All of the podcast have a title and a series of still images with a voice-over by the students and background music from the royalty-free music included with the iLife suite. And then thy are publishing the Podcasts to the school’s website using the iWeb application.
Apple is making a serious impact in higher education with it’s iTunesU initiative. It’s nice to see that podcasting is being used in primary education as well.
As a person that makes podcasts for a living it’s nice to know that at least my grand-daughter knows what I do, even if the rest of the family hasn’t quite figured it out.
It may be surprising that Rush Limbaugh has Mac Pro computers, but it’s not so surprising that he would think that he deserves concierge service from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Limbaugh appealed to Jobs during his radio program on February 12th.
“‘Mr. Jobs, please help me.’ I know we don’t agree on anything. You love Algore — and by the way, I’ve got no problem with him now, but can you put me to somebody that can get this going, because I know it’s gotta work for most people. What am I doing wrong?”
Mr. Limbaugh said that he was a fan of Apple’s computers but has been having a problem on the computers since upgrading to Leopard. After the OSX 10.5.2 update failed to solve his problems, Rush felt it was time to directly appeal to Jobs for tech support.
Limbaugh didn’t disclose the exact nature of the computer problem, but said “Mr. Jobs, please, I just ordered six brand-new Mac Pros: four for me and two as gifts; maxed out, Blu-ray drives. I’ve loaded ’em up. Our whole office here is Mac, and I just want it to work because I love them — and these two things that aren’t working would seem to me, as a novice, to be a simple fix, but they’re not.”
Rush’s broadcast engineer, Mike Maimone said, “You don’t understand it. Jobs has you tagged. He’s making sure your computers don’t work. If you put out this appeal to Steve Jobs and ask him to help, his reply is going to be, ‘Mr. Limbaugh. Do us a favor and endorse Windows.'”
Perhaps the McCain campaign statement that they didn’t want an endorsement from Rush, would also apply to Apple.
Do you want to sit-in on lectures from some of the most prominent professors at the most prestigious universities? You can at Apple’s iTunes U. iTunesU harnesses the power of podcasting for education.
By simply going to the iTunes Music Store in iTunes and clicking on the iTunesU link you can access courses and lecture from hundreds of colleges and universities. You can listen to Astronomy 101 at Stanford or the Philosophy Of Love at MIT, all without touching the parents nest-egg.
Course lectures aren’t the only thing at iTunesU. How about Mozart’s requiem sung by the Duke choir or art exhibitions and discussion from the Museum of Modern Art or video guitar lessons from Little Kid’s Rock?
While you may not be enrolled or paying tuition or have a diploma to show for it, you can say that you took engineering coursework at MIT and still pass a lie detector test.
Okay,they did the iTunes Music Festival London last year too, but that doesn’t make this years iTunes Live: London Sessions any less provocative.
According to Apple:
“Over 11 magical evenings, starting on Thursday February 21st, 2008, iTunes will host a series of unique recording sessions. More than 25 of the world’s most talented musicians — including KT Tunstall, José González, Tom Baxter, Roísín Murphy, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Spiritualized and many more — will perform solo and collaborative sets in London’s legendary AIR Studios. The performances will be recorded and sold exclusively on iTunes in March.”
By recording live performances and selling them it erases any doubt that Apple is indeed in the music biz. Hopefully, the blokes at Apple Corp. records are too busy counting their money from last years settlement. to notice this new turn of events.
BTW, looking at the artist pictures on the Website, since when did Nick Cave start sporting the sleazoid mustache?
Apple has never encouraged anyone to modify their computers in the slightest way, in fact, dire threats of warranty violations abound at every turn. So that’s why its strange to see Apple actually linking to mod sites on the Mac Mini page.
Apple released a major upgrade to its Aperture professional photo editing software. Some of the new features are; highlight recovery, color vibrancy, local contrast definition, soft-edged retouching, vignetting and RAW fine-tuning as well as smooth publishing workflow to a .Mac Web Gallery for viewing on the web, iPhone, iPod touch and Apple TV.
Another new feature is “tethered” shooting, which is the ability to shoot images directly to a Mac from a camera via USB or FireWire and save the photos directly in an Aperture project.
Aperture 2.0 is available now for $199 at the online Apple store.
The price is a hundred dollars less than Adobe’s Lightroom photo editing software and trumps many of the older Adobe product’s features.
Aperture can also handle Adobe’s .DNG format files for smooth integration with Photoshop, but Lightroom still has the advantage of being a cross-platform application.
Both programs have free trial downloads, so you can compare the programs side by side.
Aperture 1.0 users can upgrade to Aperture 2.0 for $99 and recent purchasers of Aperture 1.5 (Jan 1-Mar 14, 2008) can upgrade for $9.95.
The Mac blog site Macenstien reported last week that Apple would not be purchasing a booth at this year’s National Association of Broadcasters convention. Apple has traditionally had a huge presence at the annual event which is held the first week of April in Las Vegas. The NAB is the largest convention for broadcasters, video professionals and filmmakers in the US. Apple has used the convention to launch it’s professional video and film applications like Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio.
