Comments on MacWorld
I know that you're all waiting for my stories about Israel. Right now, I don't really have stories. What I do have is about 450 photos. I want to set up some cgi photo album so I can just upload them all. Let me know if you know of any.
In the meanwhile, there was this thing called MacWorld Expo San Francisco that happened while I was away. I only got to see the keynote this evening. Some comments are due.
iProduct integration. That's nice, although considering that I don't use iPhoto or iMovie or iDVD, I'm not terribly impacted. But it is about time. I was looking at iPhoto when it first came out, and saw the (two) choices for a slide show's background music. Pathetic. It's now fixed. The other cause for rejoicing among many is the fact that Apple's now selling iDVD. I always find it funny when there's a company that has a product that people are clamoring to buy that refuses to sell it. NAI and PGP was one that came to mind. That finally came to a happy ending. Now Apple and iDVD.
Safari. I'm looking at it, and using it to type up this entry. It's looking like a pretty decent web browser, although it's committing the user-interface atrocity of sheets descending from metal windows. From Apple's Human Interface Guidelines on Sheets: "Don't use a sheet on a window that doesn't have a title bar. Sheets should emerge from a definite visual edge." Metal windows don't have a distinct title bar, and don't have a definite visual edge for a sheet to emerge from.
Keynote. I don't do many presentations, but I looked this over, and it looks decently powerful for anything I'd need to do. But this is a bold move by Apple. This is pretty much a big dare to Microsoft to drop Office. On the other hand, as a software developer, I'm always a bit wary of an OS maker introducing software. Apple's been pretty good at not abusing private APIs in its software products, but when I look at /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/, I'm always wondering.
12" PowerBook. The iBook has a challenger. When I first saw this, I was asking myself, "What's the difference, now, between the iBook and the PowerBook?" Things used to be simple. The iBook was 12" and a G3, and the PowerBook was 15" and a G4. Then the iBook got a 14" model, and now the PowerBook gets a 12" model. Suppose we compare the 12" with combo drives (since that's the only optical drive they have in common). Now it's $1300 vs $1800. G3 vs G4 (almost same speed). 128 vs 256 RAM. 30 vs 40 hard drive. Radeon 7500 vs GeForce4 420 Go. The main capability differences are AirPort Extreme and built-in Bluetooth. It's a more-of-the-same deal. Plus, don't forget a PC Card slot (which can be a really Big Deal for some people). I'm sure that some people are drooling over a G4 in an iBook shaped package. But I don't really see the appeal here.
17" PowerBook. The auto-backlighting keyboard is cool. The GeForce is cool FireWire 800 is très cool. A 17" screen is too damn big. Really! What in the world I'm supposed to do with a screen that size is beyond me. How can you consider that portable? My 15" PowerBook has the perfect screen size.
So overall, I'm not overwhelmed by what I saw. On the other hand, I'm certainly not underwhelmed. Hmm. I guess I'm nicely whelmed.
I'm still hoping that the price of a gigahertz TiBook with SuperDrive will be pushed down to the point where I can afford it...