The Limited Edition 4GB iPod Nano

The 9th September's Lets Rock event by Apple, that brought in the refreshed iPod lineup was an eagerly awaited one. Despite rumors and concerns, Steve Jobs, proving them false and highly exaggerated, took the stage and delivered the keynote. Now since I (and all other MacBoys) always keep scouring the web for rumors (and of course, facts) related to Apple, I pretty much know what will be happening at such events. But there's always a hope for something - that li-tt-le something, that the God would pop out with his magic wand, something that had been completely covered, away from the eyes of the world and rumormongers. In terms of an Apple event, I always wait for the ever-famous "One More Thing".

But this time, Apple chose to disappoint its followers on that. There was no One More Thing that in this event. Well, not exactly. Though there wasn't any mention about it, there are reports that talk about a 4GB version of the iPod Nano. Though this is not as big as One More Thing, but let me be happy, for this was something that surprised me. Officially announced, were the 8GB and 16GB versions.

The lickable (check this ad out, those things 'are' lickable) iPod's 4GB versions are appearing as Limited Editions in a few stores like this one in Netherands. Available in all 9 colors and at a price of €119 (roughly translates to INRs. 7740) according to a comment by an Apple's spokesperson appearing in this website, the 4GB model is a limited edition model and has been made for some international markets.

Now that gets a little exciting. I hope Apple includes the India in that list of international markets and we have the 4GB model here.

Hoping to buy this Nano sometime soon.

(I know, I had promised myself not to ask mom and dad for anything else after the MacBook, but come on, I'm their only son ;) )

4 Quick Short Posts: Part 2: Lets Rock

Apple held its media event, "Let's Rock" on 9th September in San Francisco. I was very much excited about it and had reminders set up to remind me (just in a rare event if forgot) about it. Now since I can't actually go and see the proceedings, I experienced it vicariously via live blogs. It was nice to see the God take up the stage for the ever famous Keynote. (I know Apple events have Steve Jobs addressing the keynote, but the stories of his ill health made us - the Macboys, worried if there'll be a Stevenote this time or not).

It started with a screen saying "Talks of my death have been greatly exaggerated" and Steve Jobs informing the world that he's fine now. He later revealed some facts and figures about the iTunes Music Store and then came what was most awaited.  The refreshed iPod lineup and iTunes 8. The rumormongers had been very much correct about new iPod Nano design and the new features bundled in iTunes 8.

The iPod Nano received a feature additions and cosmetic changes. Shedding the "chubby" form factor, the new version is longish, some what like the 2G iPod Nano's. It has an accelerometer that brings in a slew of new features. For one, it allows you to shake-to-shuffle - you can shuffle your songs if you give the Nano a slight shake. It also brings in automatic screen rotation - the screen's orientation changes depending on how you hold the Nano. The screen is bigger than the previous generation iPod Nano's. There are also changes to the UI in the underlying software. The most notable change is the range of new colors in which the Nano will be available. Apple is marketing it very appropriately as Nano-Chromatic.

In short - sweet. I wish to buy one of those soon. I like the silver, gray and red colors (I shortened the list, I wrote all the available colors earlier :) ).

The iPod Shuffle, without an explicit mention, also got updated to new brighter colors. Though the rumored 4GB bump is still a rumor and didn't make it to the final product.

With the redesigned iPod Touch, Apple made an entry into the gaming market. The new iPod Touch, with firmware 2.1 was launched as a gaming device. It sports very crisp and delicious graphics. A Nike+ receiver has been built in to this device. I hope to see a good wide range of games for this platform.

Also launched were new accessories for the iPods. Of them, the most notable was the new dual-driver in-ear headphones.

Coming to iTunes 8, the latest major update to Apple's flagship jukebox software. iTunes 8 has a new offering called the Genius. This is one pretty feature that was missing from iTunes. It recommends you music that goes along well with other songs in your library. It requires an iTunes Store account to work. It stores your listening data on Apple's servers and as other users add their listening profiles, the Genius gets smarter giving you better recommendations. You select a song, click the Genius button and in the sidebar you get your recommendations based on that song. The Genius sidebar is a drawer that you can open and close to save screen real estate. The Genius "is" smart and does offer you proper recommendations most of the times.

Besides, there is one new way in which you can browse your library. I personally do not find it preferable over the Cover Flow view, but it can be useful at times. It shows your media in a Grid view. They items are grouped in this view, the default grouping criteria being the album. Songs from one album are placed in one group with the album art of that album showing up. Hovering the mouse over that tile shows up the option to play that album. The grouping criterion can be changed to Album, Artist, Genre and Composers. This view makes the listening experience similar to listening to an audio CD on a player.

There were new additions to the iTunes Music Store. The store now has HD TV shows. It would be interesting to see Heroes, Lost and such in HD.

With that, allow me to move on to the next part of this series of "short" posts. :)

[This post is part 2 of a multipart post, read part one, three and four by clicking on the links]

Safari 4 to Allow Saving Web Pages as Applications

Apple, last Friday released the latest version of its Safari web browser - Safari 4.0, to the developer community. Amongst the new feature additions, there is one feature that will appeal to the general users.

On the Mac, Safari 4.0 takes the well known Web Clip feature one step ahead by allowing web pages to be saved as independent Mac apps. These pages, or site specific browsers, can be run independent of Safari. This functionality could be earlier achieved by a few third party apps like Prism and Fluid, but having it built in to the browser will be an added plus.

With the current scenario in bandwidth availability, saving web pages had become a thing of past or an uncommon affair. This feature however might bring Mac users back to saving pages. It would be interesting to have an independent app for commonly visited websites like Twitter, Google, Facebook and such. It will free the users from the hassles of having unmanageable number of tabs open in a browser. Though it is unclear as to when Safari 4.0 will be available to the general users, this feature will be liked by all.

Apart from this, the new build will have a new "Develop" menu, a redesigned Web Inspector, and JavaScript debugging and profiling options. It also carries over features from the new build of WebKit which include support for HTML 5. It will also support CSS gradients, reflections, masks and named canvases.

Never Saw This On apple.com

Did Apple leave it that way by mistake? Or did I catch them updating the contents on this support page. 

The links on the page point to https://ossuat.corp.apple.com/EXPERT/getProductList.do which currently return a "Can't find the server" error on Safari.

Whatever be it, I never saw something like this on Apple's website before.

A College Assignment was Never so Much Fun

Having a Mac has its own frills and tons of advantages. What you can do is limited only by your creativity. I sure knew that, but recently when I had to submit an assignment at college, I found a cool new way to complete it using my Mac.

Now since our college does not accept typewritten assignments, I had to write it manually. After some research on the internet, I collected information and organized it in Mac's built in text editor TextEdit. After adding in my knowledge too, it started getting quite lengthy. I usually avoid printing unless it is absolutely necessary and to write looking at the Mac seemed time consuming. While trying to figure out a better way to do it, I found the Speech option in the TextEdit's Edit menu. I quickly configured System Preferences to start and stop speaking selected text by a key combination and reduced the speed at which Victoria (Victoria is  a voice in Leopard, which I felt was the clearest) would speak. And there you have it - Mac dictates and I write.

But keeping up with that speed while writing was not my cup of tea. Besides, it would either repeat the entire selected text when I asked it to speak again, or I would have to reselect the text omitting the part that I've already written. I knew I had seen a solution to this while playing around with Automator.

Command+Space > Typed "au", hit the Return key, and Automator was up and running. I created a workflow that had actions arranged this way:

• Get contents of TextEdit document
• Text to Audio file

Opened my document in TextEdit and executed the workflow and I had an AIFF file on my desktop. I opened it in iTunes and now everything seemed in place. I could see the text in TextEdit if required and had iTunes dictate to me the contents. With the media keys, it was not necessary for me to keep iTunes as the frontmost application. I could pause the playback whenever I felt Victoria was speaking too fast and could resume it with the press of a key. I could complete my assignment very quickly that way.

Completing an assignment was never so much fun :)

The Day the Mac Finally Arrived

29th July, 2008. The date will be recorded as an eventful day in my history - as the day the Mac finally arrived. It was definitely one of my happiest day. One of those when I literally shouted out "YaY!"

Not that it came to me as a complete surprise but after almost an year of rejected and postponed demands, when you finally get something you always yearned for, you do feel extraordinarily happy. I've been smiling with a smile so big, that at times I myself feel that my smile would extend out my face.

So finally, let me introduce to the world my cute little MacBook, which I got as a birthday gift on my 21st birthday.

It is a 13.3 inch white MacBook, with 2GB of RAM and 160GB of hard disk space and Intel's X1300 graphics chipset and a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor powers this beautiful machine.

As a true Apple fan, the MacBook was welcomed home with an un-boxing ceremony, pictures of which have been uploaded to Flickr.

Because I understand the value of this gift, I've decided I wont ask my parents to buy me anything, well not at least anytime soon. I'm just trying to be a good son you know ;)

All this family stuff reminds me of another promise that I made to myself -

"I'll never buy my children a Windows based PC. They will be iChildren. Smart Mac Kids ;)"

I even got a WiFi router so that I can use my internet connection on my Mac anywhere in the home. Ever since I laid hands on this beauty, I've been very happy. Mom says I'll put on weight because of that happiness. :) Well, perhaps they will never understand how it feels to free yourself from Gates and Windows. I've fallen in love with every single thing on my Mac, right from the way the icons on the dock bounce to notify you of certain events, to the screws on the sides. One of those things that I love a lot is the Apple logo on the lid that glows when I'm using my Mac.

With that and another sweet Welcome to Mr. Mac, I would end this post which also happens to be the first to be composed on the Mac.

Another Example of the Mac-PC Clash

A few days ago, I came across this very funny video somewhere on the internet. I won't say much about it, let it speak for itself. 

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

___________________________________________________________

Apple fans would understand it better, and if you laughed only because of things coming out of the envelope, go, get to know the good things first.

Some see Something Missing, I see a Revolution

[Ahh... my first tech related post.]

Keeping it aside and coming back to the topic. The unclear title- "Something Missing"

Though i'm quite late in writing about it, but today i realized something, a revolution which many people are failing to see.

Well, a few days ago, Apple released its latest addition to the MacBook family - The MacBook Air.

Amazingly thin, actually the thinnest notebook ever, Aluminum body, 3 pounds weight - So beautiful!

13.3" Glossy LED display, Ambient Light Sensing illuminating keyboard,

2GB standard memory, Solid State Drive, Intel Core 2 Duo, Slimmer battery - So much, in So Less Space

Hidden ports, Mono speakers (thoughtful people use earphone, stereo enabled), 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR

See the complete tech specs here.

True, So Many Innovations, So Little Space.

So far so well, people were amazed at its introduction, but then soon it dwelled in that the beautiful MacBook Air lacks an Optical Drive. It was disheartening for some, but on the other hand there is a group of people, including me, who see an upcoming revolution in this.

In this age of connectivity, where we have WiFi, Bluetooth and most more importantly, the Internet, the removal of an optical drive can be viewed as a revolution instead of a shortcoming. With Online backups, online file sharing and storage services and a lot of bandwidth at our hands, we just do not need to search for optical disks anymore. As for applications, the increasing bandwidth makes downloading them convenient too. And anyways if you have a good computer, you do not need to re-install the OS every 3 months ;) and hence, no re-installing of applications too.

I personally have started to get into this phenomenon of not using the optical drive as much as i used it previously. Backups, application downloads, files, etc - the internet does that all for me. I wish to see my photos, there is Picasa and Flickr and lot many photo sharing sites, i need information - Wikipedia is ever ready to help you, for other files there is MegaUpload and 4Shared. For videos - YouTube.

Plus, I don't have to bother about managing them, no more creating local folders for images of different events, tagging them, no more creating text files for storing information, no more local folders for videos, no more grouping files together by their type locally, the above services do them more gracefully and conveniently. Or still if I can't find what I need, just a simple Google search proves helpful. Just as we have web based emails, we have web based storage for every other thing too.

We just need to see things differently, instead of getting disheartened for lack of something, try to see the newer avenues that have come up. The world is no more what it was when you started reading this post, it has changed a lot. See things in a different way, you'll never find anything missing.

Oh, by the way, just how the hard-bound diary, got transformed into this online blog!

Amazing, and so true.

By the way, for just those who can't afford to assimilate all this, the MacBook Air takes care of them by this wonderful feature called Remote Disk.