Apple Keynote: Response

It’s that time again. The Mighty Steve has delivered his opening keynote for WWDC, and unveiled Apple’s latest raft of products. All, erm, three of them?

As anyone who knows me, or who’s read this site for any length of time will know: I’m a big fan of Apple. I use an iPod. My home PC is now a Mac Mini. There’s something about their products, applications, and philosophy that just appeals to me. I use Windows all day at work; OS X is a nice antidote for that when I come home.

So what do I make of these three products? Perhaps more importantly, in the case of Apple’s new hardware, does it matter? These products aren’t aimed at me. The Mac Pro is an awesome looking machine, with a fantastic spec, but I don’t want one. I’ve just relegated my Dell workstation to file server-dom, so why would I spend the best part of £2000 on a machine that I’ll not drive to its fullest potential. Yeah, I’d like one, but this machine doesn’t put my credit card in jeopardy.

The Xserve is the same story: It’s not for me, I’m not supposed to be interested, and I’m not. But if someone offered me one, I’d take it.

So, well done Apple - your migration to Intel is complete, and you’ve got two very nice looking high spec products to offer to those that need it.

The third product is far more interesting for me though. The Leopard features on display are things I’ll be using when the product ships. And yet it’s interesting to see that many features weren’t on display. By the sounds of it - and despite their tongue-in-cheek digs at Microsoft - Apple are quite annoyed that Microsoft have stolen many of their ides for Vista. As a result, it sounds like they don’t want to unveil a whole new set of innovations before Vista has shipped.

Or maybe it’s the opposite of that - maybe Apple want to wait until Vista’s launched, and steal Microsoft’s ideas this time? I doubt it, but who knows? One thing is for sure, Apple’s bravado and taunting of the Beast of Redmond is certain to annoy more than a few people, and draw the collective attentions of faithful Windows users, for better or for worse.

Awesome to the Max(DSL)

Last week, I migrated away from Plus.net and moved to IDNet. I'd heard excellent things about their service and support, and figured things couldn't be any worse than Plus.net, so they were worth a go. Don't get me wrong - Plus.net are fine for the more casual user, but their bandwidth throttling was driving me insane.

Part of the reason for moving was my damned impetuous nature. Knowing that MaxDSL was available to me but that Plus.net couldn't tell me when they'd process my upgrade, and that when they did upgrade me I'd still be throttled down to a fraction of the awesome bandwidth available to me was too much!

I've so far been hugely impressed with IDNet. When I encountered a minor hiccup on migration (I'd been emailed the wrong password) I called their support line, and someone phoned me back within 15 minutes. Not only that, but the guy that phoned back was polite, intelligent, and a credit to his company. It even turned out that the password I'd originally selected was the one they used, but I'd completely forgotten it.

BT's MaxDSL kit is still working its voodoo (apparently it tries to calculate the maximum speed for your line over a ten day period), but it looks like my download rate will be somewhere around 6.5mb. It's peaked at 7.5, but the line was unstable so it's dropped again. I remember fondly the days when a 56k modem seemed like an awesome upgrade (oh, how excited we all got about V.90) so to jump from a 2mb connection to a 6.5mb connection seems unreal. I can now (pretty much) stream the HD trailers from Apple's site.

So excuse me - I have more trailers to download. Nothing interesting; I just like to watch the little bar fill up before the video stops playing!

Host move

I'm moving the site to another host I've moved the site to another host to try to resolve a couple of issues I'm currently having with it. Hopefully this should result in a bit of a speed increase too.

Please hold tight - the ride shouldn't be that bumpy, but you are advised to keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. See you on the other side…

…right: move done. If you're reading this then your ISP's DNS servers have picked up my new location and all is well. If you're not reading this, I can say whatever I like about you…

My new host is A Small Orange. Time will tell how well equipped this miraculous fruit is and whether it's up to the job, but their staff are second to none. The support experience so far has been an absolute wonder, and if the hosting is half as good as the support, things will be fine. 

Skobee

I'm currently using 30 Boxes to organise my gigs and things, but Skobee sounded like it might make an nice alternative. The idea of setting up individual events sound like it should be more efficient - no need to page through lots of empty days to find the particular event I want.

The problem is, Skobee appears to be US only at the moment. Which, as I think I read somewhere, sucks. Shame, I'd quite like to give it a go too. Yes, I know I could stick a US zipcode into the signup form, but that's not the point. Until Skobee is made internationally compatible (or at least compatible with the UK), I can offer no dazzling insight into how well it works. 

Flickr and Media Center

I wanted to harness Media Center's ability to display photos, but don't actually store anything locally; a while back I made a call to use Flickr for my photo storage, thus ensuring that I had an off-site backup of all my photos.

This was something of a problem. Flickr don't actually give you an easy way of downloading all your images, but this is what I wanted to do to use them with Media Center. Ashleigh had suggested using Little Syncr, but that app doesn't actually download any images from Flickr in the first instance, but rather syncs everything up moving forward.

Enter FlickrDown. This little app has handily downloaded all of my Flickr images to my local machine, and I can now display them using Media Center. I'll have a play with Little Syncr later to see if that's a good bet for future Flickr activity :) 

PlayStation 3 delay confirmed

Oh dear, oh dear. This could potentially cost Sony an aaawful lot of money. Oh, and another post from Digg - getting bored yet?

Edit - Let's add a little more meat to this post shall we?

What does this mean for Sony? Quite a lot, I would think. Europe won't see the machine until well into 2007, Christmas 2006 will see a newly launched PS3 up against an established Xbox 360 with all the trials and tribulations that a new hardware launch brings (limited stock, incomplete line-up of games, potential bugs and hardware problems). Not to mention the fact that the launch price is extremely likely to be far higher than the 360's price point at that time.

And none of this takes Nintendo into account. Sony better have a pretty stellar launch line-up, and a price point that can't be refused…

Update - As Joystiq have said, the article doesn't say much. I stand by what I said though, and still predict a late 2006 launch for PS3.

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