iPhone: the wait may well be over...

The features, the 3G, the integrations with my Mac, the *price*.. and of course the age of my old Hello Moto Pebl.. all this adds up to a big hunk of geezelouiseitstimetobuytheiPhone...
Here's the WWDC Keynote in 60 seconds (courtesy of MahaloDaily):

Mac Geekery for the week...

Reading Gruber's Daring Fireball and catching up on some of the good stuff out of the August 7 Mac event.. and the mini-controversy that ensued as a result of some of the questions asked by reporters in the Q&A afterward... well, really the controversy is more the result of the zealous blogosphere, as pointed out by Jason Snell at MacWorld. All the same, here are some good links--

Snell's recap of the whole thing-- dubbed "Stickergate"
audio of the "Stickergate" question and answer
audio clip of Jobs talking about why Apple doesn't make cut-rate PCs

Ooooh.. new Mac Stuff!

Was a long, engrossing day at work, and only at the tail end of the day did I get to do a little browsing and.. lo and behold, what did I find but a bunch of announcements from Apple! Oh, that's right, it is Tuesday, isn't it?

New iMacs.. all aluminum and glass enclosure.. they're beautiful!
and... finally finally-- a new iLife!

Watching the Announcement video off the Apple site..
Have to say, Steve is rather overusing the phrase "taking it to a whole new level"..

From Steve's description of iPhoto, it's going to be hard to avoid running out to the Apple store and buying the damn iLife '08 tomorrow!

43 Folders

Still up... banging away on my work laptop... so late now the thing is trying to phone home for whatever middle-of-the-night updates/eavesdropping data exchange it normally does, I suppose. Frigging thing keeps chiming in with a dialog box, complaining that it can't find it's desired network path...

Reading this note about Google Desktop from Merlin Mann on 43Folders.com does my heart good. It's so nice to read a tech pundit who can use the English Language-- has fun with it, even.


I can remember, during a seminar in graduate school--back in the bad old dial-up days of the mid-90's-- William O'Rourke lamenting the affect he perceived email to be having on the average American's already insufficient proofreading habits: "It's all too easy to just hit Send," he said.

And sadly, with the advent of text messaging, and all the ascii short-hand that all the kids seem to be doing these days [insert basic example here]-- and my own sad examples of often downright poor usage here in this space, I fear curmudgeonly O'Rourke was right.

So while I think my friend, Dr. Funkhole, could give him a run for his money, all the same, it's a refreshing read, whenever I get the chance.

Also-- the more I read from Merlin about Quicksilver, the more I think I may need to look into it.
The thing to do the last couple of days-- following Merlin and John Gruber's example-- has been to install the new Google Desktop for Mac OS X.
I've always thought, much as I like Google's other offerings, that Google Desktop didn't present itself as anything much better than what I already get with Spotlight on my Mac. Of course, on a Windows machine (like this work laptop-- which is STILL trying to phone home, BTW), a better, more intuitive local search utility is MOST desired. But on my Mac? Thanks, but I think I've already got that.
And the reviews so far from both these guys seem to bear that out.
In fact, Gruber's latest note is more severe:

I don't think I could cover all the bets that would be placed on "Uninstalls Google Desktop before it finishes indexing"

But as I said, Merlin's thing is QuickSilver-- and as he says in his note-- if you think you've got everything you need in Spotlight, you haven't been exposed enough to QS.
So put it on the list of things to consider...
after wiping the drive and a cleain reinstall..
which will come after I buy a new, 320+ gig external hard drive so I can store at least one complete image of the hard drive...
which will probably come sometime after Leopard is release...
which may not happen until after the June WWDC... hmmm....

More Apple/EMI DRM Comment

John Gruber this morning, in response to an article by Bill Thompson of the BBC:

When you’re wrong, just admit it. It’s easy, and it adds, not detracts, to your credibility.

Gruber also links to this note by David Weiss making the point I was working toward yesterday so much more elegantly and succinctly.. I really need to get my writing chops back...

Apple has decided that the enormous moat it has in DRM is not as valuable as making customers feel unlimited by their technology....

So what of Buffet’s moats and competitive advantage analysis? I think it
still holds, it’s just that Apple’s sustainable competitive advantage is their
deep trust in the inherent value of their products and the experiences they
provide. Almost no one has that these days.

Is the wall coming down?

Great post here by John Gruber about the announcement by EMI that, beginning in May, they'll be selling DRM-free versions of their licensed music on iTunes.

$1.29 USD for drm-free music with twice the encoding quality. And full albums stay the same price. And iTunes offers upgrades of existing purchased music.

The cracks in the wall really started back in February when Jobs wrote his (maligned in some corners) position paper on DRM and posted it to the Apple website. There were lots of people (Cory Doctorow chief among them) who questioned Jobs' sincerity in that move-- surely this was just another way for apple to increase it's monopoly.

So much for that conspiracy theory. Doctorow doesn't seem to understand that if you make things easy and high-quality, people are willing to pay for that-- not everyone, but a large-enough segment of the population to run a thriving business on. Leave the pirates be-- as Jobs pointed out, for every DRM scheme, there will be a 12-year-old kid who can break it in under 30 minutes. But making music cheap and easily available and easily manageable, once purchased-- not limiting the number of times you can burn your own music to CD, or laborious 'authorization' processes for your different devices-- wipe away all of that and let people pay for their music, and then leave them alone... the services that allow this to happen will be the big winners... Hopefully, Apple continues on this course.

"Can I at least get a clean goodbye?"

Give a listen as Bill Gates gets pissy after an interviewer asks him about the "Hi I'm a PC" Mac ads...

umm.. okay, Bill..