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Written and submitted from the area around the Regents Street Apple Store using my Three 3G wireless modem.
Category: Apple
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A great birthday present : Pixelmator
Today the long anticipated Pixelmator image editing application for the Mac was released, and for me it is quite a birthday present. For a long time I have used Photoshop which was too complicated for my needs, or Photoshop Elements which was just too windows like.
Pixelmator the product of London Brothers Saulius and Aidas Dailide is just perfect for my needs – and boy does it exploit the modern Macintosh system exploiting OS X’s core image technology and making use of that powerful GPU you have sitting in your Mac, it is fast and looks beautiful.
For just over £30 if this does not win awards this year there is no justice.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
I loved Appleworks ( previously know as Clarisworks) and it has been finally retired with the addition of the numbers spreadsheet to Apples iWork suite. Not sure where the MacDraw like drawing application replacement is but never mind.
The long life of Claris/Applework is both a reflection on the perceived dominance of Microsoft Office and a focus on Apple else where, but it is also interesting to note that is was always a very popular application all the way to its end because it was very simple, fast and well integrated. I have only just managed to stop my wife using it exclusively and moved her onto to Pages/Word.
Few users of Office use more than 10% of the capabilty of their applications and while in a business seeting there is always someone who might use more, this is not the case for the vast major of home office, and personal users.
I’m sure there are lessons for GIS designers in recognising the demand for simple applications that offer 10% on the functionality of a tool kit desktop GIS system but to 99% of the users – there are still people hanging on to their copies of ArcView 3.x I’m sure?
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
Categories
Would you join the line for an iPhone
Well clearly a rhetorical question if you don’t live in the US, but I might for the experience.
What do I mean, well you meet a different type of person than in your average supermarket line, case in point Robert Scoble reports on meeting Bill Atkinson in the line outside the Palo Alto Apple Store.
Bill was one of the original Mac team and created MacPaint and Hypercard. I absolutely loved Hypercard, and could spend weeks developing stacks, embedding tiny 160×80 quicktime movies and sounds. Before web tools, Hypercard established the principles of hypertext and multimedia applications we are now so familiar with.
I even used Hypercard as one of the main tools of the PhD I did not get round to finishing…
It would be worth joining the line just to meet Bill !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Happy listening to the Macbreak Weekly podcast today, and was surprised to hear a really good discussion on the potential of LBS, PND’s and the rumour that Apple may be developing a standalone GPS device – unlikely methinks.
Still it was not so long ago that if you used a mac you were geographically challenged and lonely in the geospatial community.
Now… well, I’d say around 50% of the audience of the recent Where 2.0 conference were using MacBooks.
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
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Apple Store Kingston opens Saturday…
The long awaited Apple Store in the Bentall Centre Kingston, opens this Saturday. I happened to be in New York in 2002 for the opening of the first Apple Store in SOHO, and now I will be able to walk to an Apple Store – that’s progress !
And yes it is Steve Jobs making a call outside the store on his mobile.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
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Coming to a sad realisation
By a long way the funniest of the Apple Get-a-Mac campaign videos, “Security” gets all nasty at Vista’s new approach to application level security – Very Funny and a good reminder for my old friends in Southampton to pop along to the new Apple Store which opens on Saturday – Get there early for the T-Shirt !!.
Me, I’m waiting for the Kingston Apple store, quite fancy a job on the genius bar..
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
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“Not too shabby, is it..”
I want one on these… but can I really wait a year !! Interesting that one of the main apps chosen by Steve Jobs to demonstrate the Apple phone was Google Maps !!
Wifi, Bluetooth, iPod functionality, and very useful mobile browser based on Safari, and of course a user interface to die for..
Very, Very Cool !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
A few hours before the keynote and already the PR pieces are flowing, little detail yet but Geophoto from Ovolab looks interesting, a iPhoto related tool for managing your images geographically on a globe.
I still think Apple may thinking along similar lines themselves… remember that in October hackers found references to GPS within the latest release of iPhoto.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
According to almost everybody on the internet, at 10am PST on the 9th January next year, at the Moscone Center Steve Jobs will introduce the iPhone, perhaps one of the most anticipated products ever from Apple.
There is much speculation as to what the phone will look like and its functionality, and this tends to focus of the “ipodness” of the phone – to me what is interesting are two things is particular, the potential that the iPhone will be should SIM free and that it might contain as well as a camera a GPS.
Actually I think the fact that the iPhone is likely to be sold SIM free and not tied to a network contract is the most important part of the whole iPhone story, – If this does turn out to be the case it will a direct attack on the already crumbling “Walled Garden” model of the operators – a major deterrent in the development of LBS so far.
In the walled garden, you buy a phone at a subsided price from the network operator in return for a service contract, and less obviously a set of applications and services selected and controlled by the operator. So if you want to make use of a music download service, you must use the operators one, likewise want to use LBS then you the one the operator provides.
Of course it is possible to buy phones today SIM free, but the marketing behind Apple and the buzz the iphone will create will I believe shift the market more towards an “open” model, where greater innovation in LBS applications can take place. There is clear precedent for this, just think what the online market might look like if we where all still accessing the net through CompuServe or AOL’s or even Apples eWorld (Anybody else remember that ?) environments.
A couple of months ago there was much excitement when hackers noted the latest version of iPhoto suggested support for co-ordinate metadata to be attached to photos – now what if the source for the photo was the camera in a “smart” iPhone and the metadata came from an onboard GPS chip-set – again this could lead to a future potential market of tens of millions of LBS capable devices.
Well it has me excited !!
Written and submitted from the BA lounge at Heathrow airport, using the BT Openzone wifi broadband internet connection.