mindplunge

The Apple iPad

Today Apple finally revealed it’s Tablet. After months (even years) of speculation about this product, Steve Jobs presented the new mobile device. The Apple iPad. Here’s my two cents…

I’m a big fan of Apple products. I love the iMacs and iPods. I’ve been a Mac user for over 20 years and I was excited about this new product. My excitement was toned down a bit this afternoon as more information became available about the iPad. Some (missing) features that got me concerned:

• No multitasking
• No flash
• No camera
• No USB ports

Multitasking is a big thing for me. It’s a big let down if you can’t run two or more applications at the same time. No support for flash… Lots of content these days on the internet are flash based. Even in Steve’s demo you would see ugly white space with the missing plug-in icon. Hmm… A camera would be nice. I guess iChat is a no no on the iPad. No USB ports(?). It sounds like a pretty closed system and I can see the idea behind it but this could mean you are losing a lot of potential buyers.

I’m sure the web browsing on the iPad is phenomenal, much better than browsing on a netbook. The Calendar app really looked useful. So did the email app and the photos app. Again, the experience of these apps will be much better compared to a netbook.

I really wish it had a watered down (snow) Leopard OS. The iPad is basically an iPod touch on steroids. I guess when it comes out by the end of March I should test drive it. It still looks like an awesome gadget but I have my doubts when it comes to using the iPad as a productivity tool…

Live Video Stream Apple’s WWDC 2009 Keynote

With just 15 minutes away from the highly anticipated Keynote speech (tablet anyone?) I found this most viable video feed. Most A-list bloggers are using AJAX to report live from the Keynote (Ars@WWDC and MacRumors.com) but here you can see a live video feed. Enjoy!

Boxee: the greatest thing since sliced bread

Last week everything fell into place. Somehow I discovered hulu.com. I thought: wow, great concept. Finally a way to watch all my favorite shows. A few weeks ago we decided to ditch Dish network (our satelite TV provider) simply because there was nothing on TV (600 channels, go figure). Most shows can be viewed online these days so why pay Dish $70/month if I can access the content for free? Right?

Then I came across this link at popurls: The end of TV. YES! Simply brilliant. It’s called Boxee.

On a laptop or connected to an HDTV, Boxee gives you a true entertainment experience to enjoy your movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr.

This weekend I got the 40G Apple TVatv. Hacked it with atvusb-creator and uploaded Boxee on the atv. It took me a little while to get it all working but the great community at the boxee forum helped me out. Altering my profile xml file and I was good to go! All my shows back on TV.

Now I can watch the things I want, when I want. Another great thing is adding your own RSS feeds (video or audio, even torrents!). So today I added the Dutch news (NOS journaal) as a feed and I’m able to watch ‘het 8 uur journaal’. Simply amazing.

Obama was right: A Change has come to America, it’s a new Dawn.

Automator + iCal + Transmit = score!

Scheduled tasks on a PC are easy. With a Mac it’s easy and fun! I needed to make daily backups for a client to our local server. Leopard comes with Automator, a cool app to , you’ve guessed it, automate tasks. Since I’m using Transmit as my dedicated ftp client it gets only better!

Automator has Transmit defaults build in. As stated on Transmits website it’s not in the library anymore but you can find it under the ‘Internet’ submenu of your library. Another place to look is ‘Most Relevant’ and ‘Most Used’.

setting up an workflow in Automator is pretty intuitive and you should be able to crank out a workflow within minutes. Now comes the sweet part. Rather then saving it as a workflow you can save your task as an application. To set up a scheduled task open iCal and create a new event. In the ‘alarm’ section select ‘open file’ and pick your newly created application. You can manually set the time when to launch this, in my case 3X a week at midnight.

When waking up my files are downloaded to the folder I told it to, zipped up and renamed with a date stamp. Life is sweet…

The new iPod Nano + iTunes 8

Today Steve Jobs revealed the new iPod nano (8BG and 16GB) and a new version of iTunes. A new feature is ‘Genius’.

Say you’re listening to a song you really like and want to hear other tracks that go great with it. The Genius feature finds the songs in your music library that go great together and makes a Genius Playlist for you. It’s like having your own highly intelligent, personal DJ.

iTunes 8 is not yet available as a Software Update but you can download it directly from the Apple’s website.