Wordpress for iPhone was not working for some reason so I finally restored my phone and all is well.
I did end up losing my SMS messages but whatever.
Hopefully I’ll be more incline to blog now that I can do it from wherever I want and whenever I want.
Of course I’ll probably end up with a shit ton of typos thanks to the iPhone keyboard :)
me.com
It’s the rumored new name for Apple’s over-priced .mac service. I pony up the $99 every year to keep my .mac account active, mainly for the photo and video sharing features integrated into the iLife suite of apps. It’s not really worth it but it sure is convenient.
Gruber has been reporting on the new domain and all of the major rumor sites have been speculating major changes to the service.
What I’m hoping for is Apple’s entry into the social networking arena.
I know it sounds crazy to think that Apple would stoop so low as to join the ranks of MySpace but I’ve managed to convince myself that it could be a huge coupe for Apple. Here’s the logic behind my insanity:
It’s easy to publish from iLife. Imagine customizing your me.com page in iWeb instead of ghetto-hacking it like MySpace. Publishing images and videos from iLife are just a 1-click process. How about sending pics (and maybe even video) directly from your iPhone to your me.com page. It would be super easy. Taking it a step further, say you’re watching a podcast on your AppleTV and you want to tell the world about how amazingly awesome it is. A few clicks of the Apple Remote and it’s on your me.com page with the latest episode embedded and ready to watch. The possibilities are limitless.
Factor in the Apple/Google partnership and you’ll see all kinds of embeddable apps integrated into the service.
Some of these ideas are more realistic than others. Heck, you can even do some of them now with a little HTML & CSS knowledge.
So why would Apple want to get into this game? Easy, to sell Macs. We all know how hip and trendy Macs are these days, and their numbers are on an uptrend with no end in sight. If you want to be cool, you’ll have a me.com page. If you want a me.com page, you’ll need a Mac.
But maybe not. I could totally see Apple letting Windows users have access to most of the features mentioned above. They’ll fall in love with them and end up ditching their PC’s and coming over to the light side once they see how much easier it can be on the Mac.
Of course I could be completely off my rocker as usual. I guess we’ll find out in a week… the longest week EVER!
OK. I got one. Figured I’d see what it’s like to blog on the damn thing. A little annoying but I guess that it’ll become more enjoyable as my typing improves. Seems to be improving already.
Talk at you later!!
I just upgraded my Wordpress! Now I get to use all the great new… features… wait…
…my links are all screwy…
…damn it…
JENI!!!! HEEEEEEEELLLLP!!!!!!!
Eh, at least I got the iLike & iTunes things looking good in my sidebar.
[UPDATE]
All fixed! Thanks Jeni for hooking me up w/ a temp solution til I could get it all fixed.
I’m pissed.
I went and dropped $90 on the new Guitar Hero and I’m really disappointed with it. It just doesn’t have the same vibe as the first two. It’s as if Neversoft ripped the heart and soul out of it and replaced it with utter lameness. They shoulda stuck with Tony Hawk.
My biggest gripe is with how the controller handles fast picking. It doesn’t. In GH 1 & 2, I was able to use a guitar pick to pick the strum bar. Now if I use a pick, the strums don’t register. The motion is too fast for the strum bar or something. You actually have to press the strum bar up or down. This makes it so that your strumming hand can never be more than 2 inches away from the strum bar. It’s so aggravating. This means no Pete Townshend windmills or Billy Joe Armstrong wood-sawing strums. Most people will probably miss this bug completely since it only comes up if you are playing the game as you would a real guitar (which most people don’t do). I haven’t seen any mention of it online yet either, so it’s probably not a big enough problem to warrant a recall or software fix (if that’s even possible).
If the strumming thing wasn’t enough, I think the graphics have made a turn for the worse. In addition, there really isn’t anything new in regards to game play. Of course, I haven’t played online yet so I can’t speak about that new aspect of the game. The last thing that pissed me off were the videos. I purchased all of the videos that were available and they were all a total rip-off. Each one was like 2 minutes long… if that. Much shorter than the ones on the original two games. Needless to say, they didn’t go into too much detail about the making of the game or the recording sessions.
Overall, the branding of the game is all over the place and it doesn’t have a cohesive feel like the second one did AT ALL. The segueway videos had the completely wrong vibe to them as well, playing more like anime than like a gritty rock saga.
The one thing it does have going for it is the songs. They rock.
Overall, this train wreck has officially jumped the shark. Bring on Rock Band!!
Apple finally announced an iPod with enough capacity to hold my entire music collection with enough room to spare for tons of video and photos too. Yup, 160GB of pure Apple love with soon be in my hands. In addition, since I’m lucky enough to deal directly with Apple through my MGM gig, I was able to get the Apple employee discount from my contact at Apple.
Now all I’m waiting on is for my Sprint contract to run out so I can add an iPhone to my collection of Apple gadgets.
I wonder if I can just have my paycheck deposited directly into Apple’s bank account. It would make the whole buying process go so much quicker.
[UPDATE]
So, I’m loving my new iPod. The capacity is immense. I have around 20,000 tracks on it (thank god for the search feature), 30+ movies and I still have 30GB+ available.
Initially the performance was a bit slow. Navigating from screen to screen would take a couple seconds of loading. CoverFlow took even longer. Apple has released 2 updates for it since I got it and the performance has improved a bunch. Syncing is still excruciatingly slow. It took me 7 minutes to sync this morning. 30 seconds just to mount and unmount the drive. The only thing I was adding was 3 podcasts. The progress bar always shows what’s being updated and it’s always the same songs and files that haven’t changed AT ALL. I don’t get it. Hopefully they improve the syncing. Until they do, I’ll have to be sure to get it done well before Jeni comes to pick me up in the mornings.
One last note about CoverFlow, they need to add the ’skip to letter’ functionality to it as flipping through a large library takes FOREVER. Good thing I don’t use CoverFlow that often.
Over the past couple of weeks, Mac fans have been so tied up in the announcements from D5 and WWDC that it seems like a key component of the Apple buzz-factory is being completely ignored… the Apple website.
After a few days of getting used to it, I can really start to see how much thought, time, and effort went into the latest site overhaul.
Let’s take a closer look at what makes this such an important focal point in the big Apple picture.
I’ll start from the top and work my way down.
First up is the site width. Huh? Why does this matter? Well, the new Apple site is designed at 980 pixels wide. Much wider than it’s predecessor which weighed in at around 750 pixels wide. This gives much more room for content. This in turn (however unconsciously) gives the user a less claustrophobic experience. It also allows for less scrolling since line breaks in text are not as frequent as with a narrower page.
Another feature running throughout the site is the use of javascript or AJAX/Web 2.0. Apple has added functionality on the site that looks and feels like Flash but is much less taxing on your system resources. I’ll highlight those features as I come across them.
Next is the navigation system. Wow! The world’s most mimicked tabs in web history are gone! It’s about time. They were getting long in the tooth and were very Jaguar-looking. Get it? Tooth… Jaguar? The new nav is a neutral gray and it floats on top of the pages almost as another layer instead of chopping the top 50 pixels off of every page; this allows page colors and backgrounds to fill the entire browser window. This also frees up the page designs to be whatever they want to be and not worry about clashing with those shiny aqua tabs and pure white nav background. The different button states such as mouse-over, mouse-down, and so on feel really nice and natural… even if you can’t physically “feel” them.
The categories in the nav are also a bit more intuitive, sectioning off the site into the most basic of categories.
Capping off the right side of the nav is the shinning star of the entire site. Once deemed pretty much useless to me and the rest of my Mac friends, the Apple.com search tool is now a force to be reckoned with. Not only does it search apple.com, it also searches the entire iTunes catalog. What’s more, it incorporates suggestive search in much the same way as Spotlight does on the Mac. Only the web search seems faster than Spotlight (go figure). Start typing “iPhone” for instance and it quickly narrows down and displays the most popular search terms along with a thumbnail and description. But wait! Instead of clicking the result you want with the mouse, use the keyboard’s up and down arrows to navigate to the result you want and hit the “return” key to go to that page. If you hit return without navigating to a suggestion first, you will end up with all of the search results on a well laid out results page with categories that you can collapse and expand depending on what you’re looking for. If your search returns items from the iTunes database, you’ll be able to horizontally scroll through those result’s album art just like on the iTunes Store home page. Very sexy.
So, if you’re complaining that the new Apple site makes it harder to find stuff, use the search. After all, it’s there for finding stuff.
Moving on…
Going through the different sections, I noticed that the Store seems to be the section that has changed the least (apart from the iPhone section). Digging down even further into the store, I noticed things like “Your Account”, “View Cart”, “Order Status”, etc. haven’t even been updated to the 960 pixel width. I’m sure they’ll be updating that part soon and it still works as it always has.
Next is the Mac section which is a new section that incorporates everything related to the Mac including hardware, software, and accessories. You navigate through this section using a beautiful scrolling thumbnail navigation area. I call it an “area” rather than a “bar” because it’s too dang tall to be a bar. Plus, “area” sounds more important. The scroll bar in the Mac nav area can be clicked on, to quickly jump from category to category or, you can grab the slider and move it left and right. A very nice implementation of advanced javascript. The rest of the Mac page is chock-full of content related to the Mac. The “Latest in Mac” and “Mac@work” side bars also incorporate beautiful sliding javascript mouse-over behaviors.
In the footer of this page and most of the pages on the new site is a path or “bread crumb trail” which allows users to backtrack all the way to the Apple home page. The footer is also filled with a bunch of links to different sections and pages as they relate to the page you are currently on.
With the exception of the iPhone page (which hasn’t changed much at all except for the page width), the remainder of the sections incorporate a similar layout to the Mac section although the iPod + iTunes section is the only other section that sports the nice thumbnail navigation area. In addition, the Mac, iPod + iTunes, and Support sections all have featured videos that are relevant to the section you are in. So the Mac section has video features on cool stuff in Leopard, the iPod + iTunes section has movie trailers and iPod ads, and the Support section has video tutorials. All of these videos are in QuickTime of course but instead of the default QuickTime controls, they use a a simple CSS controller, which compliments the new site design nicely.
Both the Downloads and Support sections have made it much easier to find the most popular content in those areas. The Support section has it’s own search bar but it doesn’t incorporate the suggestive search and the search results have not been updated to the new page width and design.
OK, now on with the negatives… I mean negative. Yes, so far I have only been able to find one negative. Where the heck is the Trailers page? Wasn’t it easier before when you could click on the QuickTime tab and go to the trailers from there? No. No it wasn’t. Just enter in the word “trailers” into the new search in the nav and it pops right up. No need to go through another page to get there. If you really want, you can go to the Mac section,
slide on over to Applications, click on the QuickTime icon and the go to the trailers page from there but then you would miss out on the cute little trailer icon in the search results! Apple.com/trailers still works too and, if you’re like me, it’s probably already cached in your browser. The trailers section by the way has been beautifully redesigned as well which makes sense being one of the more popular areas of the site.
Overall, the new site was a very ambitious project which doesn’t seem to be getting the praise it deserves. I mean, not even a press release or mention on the site itself about all the great new features! Pretty unfulfilling to the web team at Apple, I’m sure. Being a web designer myself, I can only imagine how long the planing and production of a site like this would have taken.
In conclusion, I can see a familiar strategy coming from apple which originated from the first iPod. With every product Apple releases, they apply their design concepts and conventions so that individuals can become familiar with how “iStuff” works. The new site is no exception. For many potential customers, the web is the first place people will come in contact with Apple design. The more it mimics the Operating System or the Apple way of making things work, the easier it is for consumers to take the plunge and spend money on an actual product.
Once again Apple has used the latest technology to marry both form and function without being overly flashy just because they can be. Great work Apple.com!
[UPDATE] Apple has since completely updated the iPhone section of the website with much sleeker demos and photos in addition to its overall layout and design.
[UPDATE 2] Once again, Apple has updated the iPhone section of the website and is now more inline with the Mac and iPod +iTunes sections with regards to its design and layout. It also features and amazing guided tour of the phone. Man, that thing is so well designed, it’s nuts.
So I was able to play around with a PC the other day that was running the new Windows Vista Operating System. For those that don’t know, Vista as the successor to Windows XP. It’s widely known that Microsoft “borrowed” a lot of the user interface features directly from Mac OS X. Being the Mac geek that I am, I was super curious to try it out.
Well, you know what? They did an AMAZING job!! Don’t get me wrong, underneath it’s still just as annoying to use as any previous version of Windows but man, is it pretty. The glass interface does something that has always been a pain to do in an OS… transparent windows. The problem in the past is that once you start knocking back the opacity of window backgrounds, any text in that window becomes difficult to read because of what lies behind the window (other windows, documents, desktop wallpaper, etc.). Microsoft was able to solve this problem by blurring anything that lies behind it. This makes it so that there are no hard lines or sharp text to compete with the readability of the text or other elements in the foreground window.
The other thing I really thought was nice was the level of detail they put into the little things such as mouse-over states of various UI objects such as buttons and input fields. This is very Mac-like but it seems that Microsoft really understood what Apple was trying to do and took it to the next level.
The one thing that I really didn’t like was the 3D window rolodex thing. This was Microsoft’s answer to Exposé. In my opinion, they really missed the mark on this one. Exposé allows you to see all of the open windows by pressing a function key. All of your windows shrink down and you can quickly see anything you have open and bring it to the foreground with the click of your mouse. The Vista version makes you scroll through the windows so it takes longer to find the one you want. There is an option to see all of your windows at the same time but they are small thumbnail images so it makes it hard to distinguish similar-looking windows. The one thing I do like about the Vista version of this feature is that when you activate the 3D rolodex thing, it includes your minimized windows in addition to the windows that you have open.
So that’s all I was able to get out of my time using Vista. I’d love to spend more time with it so that I have more ammo for my arguments on why it is an inferior OS to the Mac platform. Maybe next week I can sneak back on.
Of course I’m a die-hard Apple fanboy (proud of the label) so it’ll take a lot more for me to make the switch but I sure hope we see some of the transparency UI stuff in Leopard. I doubt it but it would be nice.
Well, it’s ordered and now all I have to do is wait.
What is it? Check it out here.
So, Apple released the iPhone on Tuesday and of course my initial reaction was… “OH MY GOD!! I NEED ONE NOW!!!”
Well, now that I have come down from my MacWorld Keynote high, I have decided to not purchase the thing when it comes out in June.
I have been holding out for a large capacity iPod for months, using my Shuffle and Meg’s 4th gen until I could get my hands on one. If I get the iPhone, that would completely defeat the purpose of my waiting. I mean, the thing has a maximum storage capacity of only 8GB. How the heck is that enough space? It’s not. I’m quickly coming close to 20,000 songs and vids. I need no less than 100GB of space.
I’m pretty confident that Steve Jobs will release a high capacity iPod with all of the iPod features found in the iPhone by years end. Well, I’m hoping for that anyways.
In the mean time, I can mess around with my buddy Abraham and make this kick-ass iPhone countdown Widget. It’s only compatible with Mac OS X Tiger.
Enjoy!!
[UPDATE]
Forget all that stuff I said. I’m getting an iPhone.
[UPDATE 2]
OK, my final decision is to wait. Dear Lord, I am so confused.
