Category: Mac

Surprise hit: the math guy

Theodore Gray, Wolfram Research, for Mathematica. Demonstrating an integral live? “Okay, so it’s math, but look at the typography! Everything looks better in Mac OS X, even that. Yes, this is useful for math students; the homework of the world doesn’t stand a chance.” He’s going to get a lot of high school students hitting the Hotline servers tonight looking for this one… Now showing animations. “I was whipping something up in the background. I would never try to do this on any other operating systems.” A sample of animation of potential around a threeD polygon. “This would have been great for designing a vacuum tube. It’s too bad they didn’t have Macs and Mathematica.” (!)

More devs

“Next up, Palm.” Tom Bradley, COO of Palm to show off new Palm Desktop beta. The engineer from Palm is very engaging, much like a pine board. Instant Palm Desktop from the Dock menu, drag and drop VCard and VCal from Palm Desktop to a file (scattered applause). “How do we sync in OS X?” Hotsync demo. No word about infrared sync. “You can now download the public beta” (scattered giggles from the crowd, since the server’s only been allowing a handful of people on at a time.

Now Apple’s Mike Evangelist about Final Cut Pro 3.0. (What a great name! The 80s and 90s were about weird job titles, the 00s will be about ideal last names for business!) Demo of Final Cut Pro. Realtime effects engine, color correction (oohs and ahs. I gotta say, I’ve never done digital video and the workflow is boring the hell out of me, but I can appreciate the complexity of what they’re doing as a programmer.)

Adobe’s news

Maine: “1 down, 49 to go…. We know that Texas is going to be a challenge, but we’re working on it.” Now Mac OS X: Same screen shots we’ve seen since since 10.1. A new UNIX Based badge. “We’ve seen more and more Unix programmers become Mac programmers, and more and more Mac programmers become Unix programmers.” (I can attest to that.) Last three months a focus on getting developers to ship apps, and “the floodgates have opened.” 1500 apps in October, 2500 apps in January (after 10.1 came out). Microsoft Office for Mac OS X (polite applause–then Steve says “and I just wanted to give them a round of applause.”) What’s up with Adobe? Shantanu Narayen, executive VP of Adobe comes on stage. “All of our applications are going to take advantage of the Mac platform.” This morning we announced After Effects 5.5 is now shipping for OS X. Russell Brown: Illustrator 10, InDesign 2.0 (native Photoshop files with transparency, autowrap around photos, export to XML), GoLive 6.0… waiting for…”Why don’t we take a look at Photoshop. It’s real, it’s almost here…” Lots of automated stuff with AppleScript. Spellchecking in Photoshop of editable text. InDesign 2.0 is now release candidate. “I think we’re the poster child of applications for OS X.”

First: the state of the mac

Here comes Steve. People in the store are applauding. “We have some great stuff to announce today, so let’s get started.” He starts with the update: iPod: Between November 10 and December 31, 125,000 iPods sold. And they’re building more. Retail stores (the crowd here applauds). 40% of the customers buying CPUs in Apple stores don’t already have a Mac. 40,000 people at MacWorld. Last month Apple retail stores had 800,000 visitors (over 27 stores). “Last update: the great state of Maine.” (Every 7th and 8th grade student and teacher gets a networked wireless iBook.)

Waiting for the tree to shake

The screen just lit up but no audio yet–oh, there we go. Music: “Runnin’ Down a Dream” from Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever album; “Shakin’ the Tree” (the Peter Gabriel version)… suddenly I’m not clear whether this is from the video feed or whether the guy in the store is playing it from iTunes. There must be eighty or a hundred people packed into the theatre here in McLean. I’d like to pause and thank Apple’s enlightened policy of putting unrestricted Airport access in all of their stores. Closeup on a guy’s woodgrain custom PowerBook in the audience; a couple of water bottles next to an optical mouse and flat panel screen on stage. There’s an old iMac at the center podium, away from all the flat panel machines (probably to be used for the obligatory Photoshop shootout). Gee, an old iMac–wonder wy they chose that to be center stage. (Foreshadowing with hardware placement, a new trend at MacWorld keynotes.)

Waiting for Steve

I’m blogging from the Apple Store in McLean, Virginia, waiting for Steve Jobs’ announcement about the new product lineup. They’ve pulled up a bunch of extra chairs for all the Apple fans. There are three other PowerBooks (another Pismo, a Titanium, and an iBook) all surfing away while we wait. I’m going to try to realtime blog the announcement–we’ll see if my machine keeps up. What did I do on my road trip? Sat on my butt and watched a satellite transmission from San Francisco.

This is a long update…

Updates: Mac OS X 10.1.2 (build 5P48) is out. That’s a long download over a modem. Features include Applescript 1.8, so I’m going to go test Manila Envelope to see how it works with the changes.

Cool Yule Retail Stores

We visited the new Apple Store in the Cambridgeside Galleria today with our friends Charlie and Carie. Being able to wander around in a space like that and play with all the cool tech is really great. It had an unexpected effect: Lisa is now fascinated with digital video! We talked for a long time with the store clerk, who was great, about the DV cameras, how they work, and what the path is for getting them into the Mac to edit them and then burn them to DVD. That might be a really cool thing to have if we’re on the other side of the country (of course, then our parents would have to get DVD players–details…). I actually heard Lisa say, “If we get you a new computer, can we get it with a DVD burner?” I tell you: more visits to the Apple Store are definitely in the cards. 🙂

Classic installer weirdness

Weird experience just now: I installed the latest classic Mac OS update (9.2.2) while running Mac OS X. I doubleclicked and ran the installer; it quit all processes IN MY MAC OS X session (except the Dock) and then logged out OS X when it was done. Surely it could have just dumped me back into X and made me restart the Classic process. Frankly, though, I’m amazed it worked at all.

Biting the feeding hand

This is one of the braver statements [WSJ, subscription required] that I’ve seen from Steve Jobs recently: “We’re baffled that a settlement imposed against Microsoft for breaking the law should allow, even encourage, them to unfairly make inroads into education — one of the few markets left where they don’t have monopoly power.”