11 January 2005, mid-afternoon
So the rumors were true. Damn. Rishi is going to bust a nut.
The Mac mini looks like a 3” tall CD drive. A short cube. All the connections, DVI and VGA. The Mac mini fits in the palm of your hand. Hook it into your own keyboard and mouse, or Apple’s. Comes with Panther and iLife 05. Price point:$499 $599.
Live updates of Jobs Keynote address at MacMerc.com. The computer is supposed to be available on January 22nd. The rumors about a new word processor called “Pages” were also true apparently. And the rumors about the iPod flash player were also apparently true.
iPod Shuffle: really tiny (smaller than most packs of gum), no screen, weighs under 1 ounce.
Apple has updated their homepage:iPod shuffle, Mac mini, iWork. I suspect 2005 is the year Apple takes over the world.
[17] Apple Computers
20 September 2004, early evening
So, for those of you who have been reading this site for sometime may recall, my copy of Apple’s email client stopped downloading my mail. I have been making due with Mailsmith, Thunderbird, and other clients all the while hoping one day my “Mail” would just start working again. Today I got sick of waiting. Well, I also only had 5 more days to demo Mailsmith.
After scouring the discussion boards at Apple’s web site, I came to the conclusion that perhaps one of the emails on 1and1’s servers was some how corrupt, and that this was causing Apple’s email client to choke. My solution was to download all the emails I had been saving on the 1and1 server. ( I had been keeping them there in the hope that when Mail started downloading email again, it could grab them all.) I used a clean copy of Mailsmith to do this, and when I grabbed all the mail, I exported it all into an mbox file. My 1and1 server was now empty of all email.
That was all I needed to do. Mail is now happily downloading my email. I imported all the mail that has been collecting all these months, and things are back to normal. I feel good.
Life | Apple Computers
21 May 2004, terribly early in the morning
I haven’t been receiving mail recently from a mailing list I’m on. In the past there have been issues with the list, so I didn’t think much of it. Shima mentioned a few days earlier she had forwarded me an email, which I also didin’t get. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and quickly forgot she had mentioned forwarding me anything. Tonight, for some reason, I thought I should send myself an email. I did so, and waited for it to arrive. It did not.
1and1 is pretty useless when it comes to any sort of support. I’m not paying for my space, or my email addresses, so who am I to bitch? I thought, if there was a problem, I should try and figure out as much as I can myself first. I logged onto their webmail client, and discovered a whole lot of mail that I had not seen. Apparently, Apple’s email application, Mail, suddenly stopped downloading email. Or was the fault on 1and1’s side? I had hoped for the later case, because I had a lot of faith in Mail. I opened up Entourage, Microsoft’s email client for the Mac, and tried to download my email with it. All my email messages arrived, one after another. So, for some strange reason, Mail has suddenly stopped downloading my email.
Has this happened to anyone else? Can anyone recommend any other nice Mac email clients? I may go back to Entourage if I can’t solve this problem.
[7] Life | Apple Computers
28 April 2004, mid-afternoon
Apple realeased several updates today for those products related to its online music venture.
There is a new release of quicktime which promises dramatic improvements to ACC. There is also a new lossless encoder that will encode songs to some apple format which is about half the size of the equivalent CD audio. This would still be quite large for most people I imagine, but could be good if you have a big iPod but a small CD collection (or if you have a giant hard drive).
There is a brand new iTunes, which has a slew of new features. You can read more about them at the iTunes site itself. The update looks promising. One of the more interesting features is posting your playlist online, and the ability to vote other people’s playlists up and down the online playlist charts.
Finally, if you own an iPod, grab the new iPod updater to take advantage of the changes made to iTunes.
Update: Jim Heid provides a more compressive review of iTunes 4.5.
Apple Computers
21 January 2004, terribly early in the morning
The 4th iPod TV Spot is freaking wicked. You should check it out, it’s the best one they have done so far. I like break dancing, Apple, and iPods a lot though, so there may be some bias here.
[1] Interesting Links | Apple Computers
19 January 2004, late afternoon
I’ve been mucking around with my iPod since it arrived yesterday. I’ve been ripping my CD’s for the past few days, and am probably a third of the way done now. Right now my iPod is just filled with my albums. I’m not sure if I can get my entire CD collection on the iPod, but here is hoping. (I’m probably going to rip all my ‘fan ban’ chinese cd’s at 128 bit ACC to save space.)
You’ve probably read plenty of stuff on people raving about how great their iPods are, so I will try and tell you some things I’ve noticed that apple could improve on. First, the touch wheel is really sensitive, a bit too sensitive. It seems far to easy to accidently have your iPod do stuff while it is just sitting in your pocket. Secondly, I don’t like the way apple has engineered the syncing mechanism. It works nice if you want your iPod to mirror your iTunes music collection, but if this is not for you there are no real alternatives besides manually managing your music. I was hoping that I could upload all my albums, erase them from my hard drive, and then select some play lists in iTunes that I want to iPod to keep in sync with. I am hoping Apple will improve the syncing in a new release of iTunes.
All that said, the thing is very nice. I’m liking it so far.
[5] Life | Apple Computers
19 January 2004, the wee hours
My iPod arrived today. Well, it actually arrived last tuesday, but it was a long process getting it from my home in Toronto up here to Waterloo. I’m playing music from it now. So far, so good.
[2] Life | Apple Computers
9 January 2004, mid-afternoon
I have ordered an iPod! There has been much talk on my part about getting one for quite some time now, so I decided with the announcement of the 15 gig model i’d bite the bullet and buy it. (My thinking is that with no big iPod announcements at Macworld that there would be no changes to the iPod for some time.) The iPod is in Shanghai, China right now. I’m waiting for it to arrive here.
Life | Apple Computers
