Apple's "Let's Rock" Round up..

Well folks the wait is over and I am here with a brief summery of Apple's Let's Rock event. Putting all the rumors to rest about his health Steve Jobs makes his appearance and boy he makes it with a nice slide. I must tell you its always great to have Steve on stage. And now back to the summary of Lets Rock..

Apple release the new iTunes 8 with the Genius Sidebar. According to Steve Jobs "Old browsing wasn't efficient", he means to say that Genius will change the way you browse your media. Well in essence this Genius sidebar will add some eye candy and make it easier for Apple to get some business with 'buy this song' available in the sidebar!! You got TV show in HD in iTunes now. I think its great news.

Next up Jobs pumps up the iPod Classic up to 120 GB and will be available for $249. The highlight of the event is probably the announcement of the 4th generation iPod Nano. I must tell you this thing looks absolutely stunning and boy its got everything you want in a music player. Jobs calls it the thinnest iPod ever with new Genius playlist, shake to shuffle feature and its gone green too. Its got great battery too with 24 hours of music playback and 4 hours of video playback. Nano 4G should be available soon in probably 9 colors with 8GB model for $149 and 16GB for $199.

What about the iPod Touch, much to our expectations Jobs announced the newly updated iPod Touch that is slimmer and its got a stainless steel case too.

Features of the new iPod touch are

• Hardware Volume Controls

• Built in Speaker

• Built in Nike receiver

• User interface now has the new iTunes Genius Sidebar

• Battery life is at 36 hours of music playback and 6 hours of video playback.

If you are one of those who always had a complain about the ear phones bundled with your iPods, you may be in some great luck this time around. Jobs announced the new $79 earphones which should have great audio quality. Going by its features, I bet it should. These new in ear phones have 2 drivers each, a woofer and a tweeter and they come with three ear buds of different sizes so that you can find the one that fits best in your ear.

I thought Let's Rock was an opportunity for Apple to deal with the copy and paste thing in iPhone and iPod Touch. But sadly though the new firmware 2.1 for iPhone/iPod Touch announced with a lots of bug fixes like improved battery life, fewer dropped calls, faster iTunes backups but no mention of copy and paste. Lets see if the new firmware 2.1 fixes the bugs its supposed to when its released this Friday.

To sum up, except for the new iPod Nano 4G, Let's Rock didn't seem to rock as much as we expected it too. Before I take leave don't forget to download the video of Let's Rock which will be available soon on iTunes. Lastly all the pics posted here are courtesy Gizmodo. And boy did I forget ... its my Birthday too :-)

Attack of the Clones!!

The Clones have attacked... don't get me wrong, didn't you hear about the Mac-Clones and hackint0sh ?? Basically a Hackint0sh is a PC that runs Mac OS X, now that is supposed to be illegal. And if that was not enough, Psystar, a little known company had successfully launched Mac-Clones called the OpenMacs and OpenPros and made a pretty good profit for itself. All this happened in and around April this year when Apple was busy with the launch of iPhone 3G and then MobileMe.

In July Apple sued Psystar saying it was illegal to ship PCs with Mac OS X preloaded. Psystar, paying a little attention to this continued to sell its Mac-Clones. And now, as it turns out Psystar has counter sued Apple claiming that the EULA itself was in violation of antitrust laws!! Psystar also seemed to have problems with Apples pricing of its products. Now what is interesting to see is where is this heading towards ??

An interesting point here is that the law firm representing Psystar had earlier sued Apple for patent infringement and Apple had to settle for a 10 Million Dollars out of court settlement. What happens this time around is what everyone will be waiting for...

Apple's "Lets Rock"

Okay folks lets get ready for the next big event from Apple. Apple has confirmed the event named "Let's Rock" on September the 9th. The moment this was announced there have been rumors as to what this event has in store. Apparently "Let's Rock" will have the new updated models of the iPod music players with prices cut down for some other models as well. This even looks like the Apple's chance to cash in the holiday season sales.

As for the rumors, thanks to Kevin Rose's prediction some of the rumors have been put to rest. It looks like the new iTunes 8 is gonna have Genius feature that will generate playlists containing songs that will have similar qualities to other songs, only time will tell how much of this is true. The event's title may not be appropriate for this but there have been discussions that the MacBooks might be updated as well, thanks to the rise in demand for MacBooks.

What about everyone's favorite Job's Keynote. There have been serious talks about Steve Jobs health and may not have his keynote this time around, but I can bet on it he will have one. Steve Jobs has been doing this for the last few years, announcing new iPods every September. This time around we might see new iPods, higher capacity versions of the Slim Nanos, lower prices of the existing iPod Touches. And if we know Apple's history we might be in for a few surprises too.

Now the question is where to catch the action ? There are dozens of blogs that do the live blogging of Apple events but the one that is my favorite is the one at Gizmodo. The event will be held at Yerba Buena Center of Arts at San Francisco at 10 PDT , Tuesday. The Gizmodo team will start the live blogging of the event 45 minutes earlier to the starting of the event on Tuesday. So people Lets Rock this September 9th.

Apple: From Windows to Mac...

This is not a switcher guide to Mac OS X but it should serve as nice reading for anyone who is looking for Windows like apps on Mac OS X. Lets face it, we are so used to Windows that no matter what we always want an app similar to the one in Windows. We don't like change. As it turns out there is a world that is beyond windows and there are apps that do much more than their counterparts in Windows. Lets now look at the apps that make you get started with the wonderful world of Mac OS X..

Lets begin with TextEdit, it is a text editor for Mac but unlike Notepad in Windows TextEdit can handle rich text. This is a very handy tool if you need to write down some text. You word processing need are taken care of by Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, although I must admit that Office for Mac doesn't look as comfortable to work with as it is on XP or Vista. If you are used to MS Office just remember that you got one for Mac as well. My personal favorite is iWork'08. iWork'08 is a wonderful and equally powerful replacement for MS Office. Working with iWork is a wonderful experience, be it creating or editing documents or creating Keynote Presentation, iWork has got it all. Most importantly iWork has support for .doc files created with MS Office, so everything is seamless and works zippy.

Once you are done with your basic text editing and word processing you face the never ending browser war. Mac OS X has got the best browsers you can think of, from Opera to Firefox or Camino to Safari. I personally recommend Safari for three simple reasons:

• Web page rendering in Safari is fastest when compared with other browsers.

• Safari is very light on system resources.

• Private browsing in safari allows you to browse without leaving any tracks what so ever.

Image Editing is where the Macs excel. There are zillions of Image Editing apps available in mac and naming a few is extremely difficult. However the ones I use more often are Pixelmator, Picturesque, Xee and ofcourse the very best Preview. And then there is the mother of all : Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Mac. Photoshop on Mac runs much faster than on Windows. There is practically nothing that you can think of and couldn't do to an image on Mac.

Now comes my favorite part, p2p client on Mac. There is only one app that i'd recommend in this category and trust me when I say this, nothing works better than Transmission on Mac. This is my favorite app in all the categories. Transmission works so smoothly on Mac that no amount of description will justify it but let me try this description : Transmission on Mac is like Knife on Butter.

Heyy what about Multimedia ?? Well, you got iTunes, the best music management software on the Earth, QuickTime Player, the best media player cum video converter and VLC, the everyone's favorite media player that needs no codecs to play any files that you throw at it. What else does anyone need ?

There are several categories of app that I've deliberately left behind with a hope to cover them in my future articles. Macs are beautiful machines but the apps they've got make them equally productive. When you get a Mac, think of change, adapt to it and then you will know that once you go Mac you never come back!!

Apple: The Push and Pull of MobileMe

MobileMe as we are aware is a premium email service from Apple which has replaced the earlier .mac service or lets put it this way, MobileMe takes .mac service to the next level. With push notifications, it has been referred to as the Exchange for the rest of us. For those uninitiated, push email is a service that pushes the email to the email client the moment it arises at the server. This is a superior technology to the traditional pull email service where the email client has to manually check for the new mails at the server.

MobileMe was launched on July , the launch was delayed by more than 48 hours, poor Apple guys, they must have had the toughest times in their careers in setting up MobileMe cloud. The earlier .mac members were upgraded to MobileMe, subscribers now have @me.com with an alias @mac.com. jack@mac.com is same as jack@me.com as both point to the same account. The euphoria and the excitement was put to rest when subscribers started to experience sync problems. Calenders and Contacts were not being synced automatically, there were no push emails and boy, the problems continue till date...

Apple's image was badly tarnished and the customer friendly Apple announced 1 month free extension of the service to all of its customers. A week later Apple has further extended it by another 2 months. After having said all this lets now look into some of the problems I have encountered with MobileMe with Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• MobileMe has a really cool interface, thanks to the magic of AJAX.

• Any changes made to contacts, calenders will be reflected in all your Macs, iPhones and PCs.

• Dragging and droping of emails to folders is possible and gives you a desktop like interface.

• iDisk allows you to store and share your files with your friends and family.

• Photo Gallery allows you to share you sweet memories with your friends and famiily.

Cons:

• Most of the times the changes I made to the contacts and calenders were reflected but at times there were sync problems.

• Sending a file as an attachment via the web interface has not been possible to me even to this date.

• iDisk via finder is not responsive and uploading even smaller files takes a lot of time.

• No filers or rules for emails.

• Gmail beats mobileme hands down.

Having said all this, I still have faith in Apple and rest assured, these little problems with mobileme will be sorted in the next few weeks if not months. Good luck Steve... mobileme is good but as of now gmail is great :-)