Finally, some good news to counter the unfortunate news on the Leopard-front, albeit on the 10.5 Server side of things. I guess beggars can’t be choosers, right?

If you’ve been keeping up with all the new (non-surprise) features of Leopard, you probably have heard about the new iCal Server. It’s an open-source, open-standards server that promises to help users publish, schedule, share, collaborate on events, instead of simply posting and subscribing to events through the iCal client today.

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Earlier this week there were reports of a new iPod game, “iQuiz” surfacing on the French iTunes store and then quickly disappearing. Well I was just on the iTunes US store (12:51 AM PDT 4/24/07) and saw the game featured on the main page and for ONLY $0.99? I of course clicked through immediately and the resulting page showed the standard price of $4.99. Unfortunately when I tried to buy a copy it reported that the item was no longer available. Bummer. Not sure if this means they are launching it today and just getting it set up or if it is another fluke. Just in case I grabbed a screen shot (below) and a screen capture of the preview video. Basically this looks like an updated version of the iPods previously built-in “name that tune” style game with a much improved interface and graphics. It also claims to have the ability to create and share your own quizzes, so that should prove fun.

Update: Well… Looks like it is official and it’s only $0.99! Great price, but no scoop here. Darn. Looks like I just caught them setting things up in the wee hours of the morning.

by James Alguire

I’m reporting this week from the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas (www.nabshow.com), where cool things are happening in the world of video editing and podcasting. NAB hosted it’s second Podcasting Summit, further establishing podcasting as a legitimate and viable content delivery method. Sessions held Saturday and Sunday covered podcasting essentials, encoding tools and techniques, demystifying RSS, distribution strategies and metrics, marketing your podcast, and the legal issues of podcasting. Serious podcasters should consider attending this event next year.

On Sunday, April 15th, at the Venetian Ballroom, at the Venetian Hotel, Apple hosted a special event, basically a keynote presentation followed by a finger food reception. During the keynote given by Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of Applications Product Marketing, Apple announced a brand new product, Final Cut Server and an updated version of Final Cut Pro Studio (FCPS 2). By now there are many web sites commenting on the new products and features, so I’ll just summarize here and provide links to the appropriate pages at Apple’s Web site.

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CNet.com reports:

For once, the rumor mill was right: Apple will be delaying Leopard, the next release of Mac OS X, until October.

The company said in a statement Thursday that because of the push to get the iPhone out by June, it had to pull engineers from the Leopard development effort and reassign them to the iPhone. As a result, Leopard won’t be finalized until later this year, and only a preview version will be available at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Looks like maybe Apple should have named it after a slower cat.

Apple’s official statement

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

Editor’s comment: Has Apple been having their water imported from Redmond? Seriously, they couldn’t just use some of their vast cash reserves to hire some additional developers? I guess Steve was really serious about the dropping of the whole computer from the Apple name. I love iPods, the Apple TV, and the iPhone as much as the next Apple fan, but come on. Apple’s roots and the heart of company are in the OS and in the glorious systems we get stuff done on each and everyday. Has Apple lost sight of that in lieu of the consumer success of the iPod? Leopard has already had the longest development time of any OS X update to date. I don’t think Apple is giving us the whole story here. Let’s just hope they don’t pull another play from Microsoft’s rulebook and start ripping announced features out of 10.5 just to try and make their new ship date.

If you’re like me, your desk is a tangle of cables amidst a swarm of hubs and docking boxes. Now Belkins has a solution for at least part of this problem.

Beginning in May, Belkin will be offering a family of desktop USB hubs, and an iPod dock, which go into that round, cable access hole that is cut into many desktops.

The “Front-Access In-Desk USB Hub” fits into a 3-inch access opening. It features a stylish, angled column of four USB ports for easy connection of your digital camera, mouse, or any other USB device.

Belkin also offers in-desk USB hubs which have the ports flush with the surface of the desk. A 3 port unit for the 2-inch access hole, and 4 ports for the 3-inch.

Finally the “In-Desk Dock for iPod” provides a convenient docking port for a wide range of iPod devices.

Each of these Docks supports USB 2, and has a suggested price of US$39.99.

Two of the “killer” applications that led to wide adoption of personal computers were word processors and spreadsheets. There are many different projects from Christmas letters to personal budgets that can be created with these applications. The two most popular applications on the Macintosh in this area are Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, but if you want to buy these applications they can be fairly expensive. The latest Mac version of Microsoft Office (which also includes Powerpoint) costs more than $300.

So what if you could get a word processor and a spreadsheet for free? Better yet, what if I could share those documents with my mother in Cleveland? What if I could help her with her monthly budget spreadsheet by both of us going to the same website with an internet browser? What if I want to work on a novel with a friend in Paris? What if my mother or my friend could see as I made changes in the shared document in real time? If that sounds too good to be true then you have not yet had a chance to use Google Docs.

Google bought a shared document product from a company called Writely and then also created internally a spreadsheet application to create Google Docs. These applications work surprisingly well. They even have revision control so that you can roll back changes that your friend makes to the novel. I could have used this when my best friend from high school and I “collaborated” on a story (He kept killing off characters I introduced).

You will need to use the Firefox browser (or other modern browser) on the Mac as these applications will not work with Internet Explorer or Safari.

Just in case you missed it… Apple quietly added the 8-core “Octo” Macs to it’s line up of Mac Pro systems.

More details available on Apple’s Mac Pro website.

At a press conference today in London, England, EMI and Apple announced that they will sell unDRMd music starting in May, 2007. Sorry for the scattered look of all of this, but I wanted to get it posted as fast as possible:

Quick notes:

Jobs: Need to take online music distribution to the next level:

* need to address interoperability

* audio quality: new versions of songs, higher quality 256kbps AAC $1.29 / track. easily upgrade entire library for $0.30/song; album = same price.

EMI: DRM music is going to be available to all retailers.

Jobs: Apple reaching out to other labels–hopes 1/2 of songs will be DRM free by the end of the year. The right thing for the customer in the future is to tare down the walls of interoperability.

Q: Is this more complicated for consumers?
Jobs: People are going to have a choice and set iTunes to pick one. We don’t want to take away anything–want to give consumers the choice. We think consumers are going to choose the higher quality.

Q: How will this impact the iPod/iTunes relationship?
Jobs:Always been able to play the mp3s. We compete on best music store.

Consumer groups:
Jobs: not offering anything here today that consumers can’t get already on a CD.

Are you giving green light to file sharers?
EMI: “need to trust consumers” this doesn’t diminish fight against piracy, key is to give consumers a compelling experience, trust them, educate them, grow sales rather than diminish them.

EMI: hopes that this will grow sales–the main point of doing it.

Jobs: EMI is pioneering something that I Think is going to be very popular.

Jobs: We’re not offering something different. All CDs are provided unprotected and in high quality. Protecting CDs–Sony tried that, it didn’t work out so well.

Q: Are other majors standing in the way of this?
Jobs: There are always leaders ad there are always followers. opportunity for everyone to win: customers win; music companies get more money by providing more value.

Video DRM free?
Jobs: Video is different. They don’t offer video DRM free today, so I wouldn’t hold them parallel right now.

Do you expect fall in iPod sales:
Jobs: No link broken. Always been able to rip and copy to iTunes and put on the player they want to. No real link. Success based on whether people think we have the best and easiest to use music store and music players. Not going to do anything different. Want to be the best music store and the music player.

What’s the point of DRM on cheaper tracks, why not remove it completely?
Jobs: For customers that are price sensitive, we don’t want to tell them that we’re taking something away from them.
EMI: not everyone cares about sound quality.

Will consumers feel cheated?
Jobs: music lovers have a choice, they can go whatever way they want to go. More choice. Life is a balance between total freedom and simplicity. Try to strike the maxims–we think we’ve done a good job of that.

How will it work with other music services?
EMI: we only set wholesale prices. We hope this will help to generate growth.

File size on iPods because of larger file size?
Storage sizes go up prices go down.

How can you justify 20% increase in price?
Jobs: exactly same price as yesterday. New product offers more features, higher sound quality; more flexibility, so higher price. Consumer gets to choose.

Official press announcement here:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/02itunes.html

I’d like to share some brief thoughts about an application I discovered about a month ago (via the magazine MacUser here in Britain) called Scrivener. You can find it on the web at

I’d been using Word or Pages to write my essays for some time, but was always aware that I didn’t feel entirely comfortable writing in those environments. But then I happened to read a review in MacUser UK for Scrivener. It is a brand new app from Keith Blount, a writer who learned Cocoa and became a developer so that he would have an application he could enjoy writing in. Naturally I was intrigued, so I downloaded the trial copy.

From the start, it was obvious that Scrivener had a very different philosophy to the staple word processors. In some ways, it isn’t even a word processor; it’s a draft-builder. Instead of worrying about formatting, Scrivener lets you work on your draft—the actual text—and manage the whole book/essay/play as a large project rather than a continuous flow of paragraphs and pages.
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Have you heard the old joke?

When a person speaks two languages we call them bilingual, when they only speak one language what do you call them? American.

Now that joke may not apply to you but odds are that you don’t speak as many languages as your Macintosh. And if you don’t happen to speak Azerbaijani, Breton, Croatian, Esperanto and/or Tongan then those languages are taking up space on your hard drive. Even if you remember Spanish, French, or German from high school you may not ever plan to look at an application with the user interface set to that language. If you could delete those language files then you would save disk space. How much disk space you will save will depend on how many applications you have installed and how many of those applications come with a multilingual interface. On my computer I saved 2Gb of storage space. A friend saved 4Gb by deleting those files.

One tool that makes it easy to delete the unneeded bulk of both language files (as well as binaries compiled for a processor chip that you computer does not have) is the free application Monolingual. Select what you want to keep and what you want to delete and then press a button and what. Of course, before you do something like this a backup is always recommended.

Editors note: I will second Chris’ recommendation for having a good full backup prior to running Monolingual. You may remember a time when I recommended Monolingual on the Maccast prior to them adding Universal support. Needless to say some Intel Mac owners were not too happy. The application is Universal now, but still caution is always smart when modifying your system at this low a level. I personally avoid the need to use a tool like Monolingual by doing a custom install and only loading the desired dialect when I re-install OS X (which I will do when Leopard is released).