Tips From Tony Blog

(Dateline Macworld Expo, in San Francisco)

‘This is a VERY PRELIMINARY review of what I have seen so far, and I will undoubtedly have a more-informed set of opinions later on.
Steve Jobs’ Keynote Speech

No, I did NOT attend the keynote speech this morning… I wasn’t willing to spend that much money. I had a lot of fun DURING the keynote, though. I was at the big Apple Store a few blocks away, reading the online blogger notes that described what was going on inside the auditorium. I was gleefully shouting out the high points to the Apple employees gathered around me in a crowd. My picture is going to be a in at least twenty publications!

The Quicktime broadcast of Steve’s speech is now available for your pleasure - It’s well-worth watching.

In the meantime, just head on over to apple.com and browse the featured pages.

iPhone - The Newton Returns!

I was one of the uber-geeks who rushed out to buy the Apple Newton MessagePad when it first came out in 1993 - Nothing like it had been seen before, and it was a brand-new platform that borrowed nothing from anything else… Unfortunately, it shipped before it was fully-cooked, and when the Palm Pilot came out with a much simpler set of goals that were easily attained, the MessagePad was dropped from the market. The Palm Pilot was ALL about simple integration and exchange of data between the computer and the Palm Pilot. The Newton was a closed system.

Apple evidently learned a bitter lesson from the experience, and has waited almost ten years to attempt a whole new interface again. When Steve Jobs announced this morning that Apple had created the third major interface redesign, he listed the mouse-based interface, the iPod scroll-wheel, and the new iPhone interface. He tactfully avoided mentioning that OTHER major interface… The Newton’s pen-based system. Ah, well. He’d probably kick me in the shins for saying such an awful thing!

The new iPhone will be able to exchange just about any information between the computer and itself. Once it’s there, the new interface makes navigation so easy that you don’t even need a manual. That’s an enormous accomplishment. Yes, I’m planning to get two of them for our household, once they start shipping in June.

It’s Safe to Buy an Airport Base Station Again!

For a few months, I’ve been urging people to hold back on buying any kind of Airport Base Station. I knew that Apple had stopped production a long time ago, and they had to come out with something new. The new ones are really cooooool… They work faster, with greater range, and they can share multiple printers AND multiple hard drives!

They’ve finally given the Airport Extreme multiple Ethernet ports, just like any cheaper, modern router.

AppleTV

I’m trying really hard to see this delightful piece of hardware from the viewpoint of the average, non-nerdy household. It’s going to do VERY well and is going to sell a lot of big-screen TV’s. It’s hard to fault it when it is so sweetly designed. Yet, I’m sad because I want one so badly, but towering geeks like me can’t really USE it, at least so far.

At this moment, I have at least fourteen high-definition movies on my Mac - Not ONE of them will play on the AppleTV box. The modern age demands support for more and more standards, and the AppleTV supports only two - MPEG4 and H264 Movies. I’m bummed! I want to play files that I find all over the Internet - Waaah!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 11:17 pm and is filed under All posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.