Cross-posted from PreviewCast.com:

Hello everyone,

With Macworld coming up this week, I thought I would take an opportunity to share what we have planned for our super awesome exclusive special stand-on-your-head-while-eating-deep-fried-pickle-hearts-and-singing-a-Mozart-sonata-at-the-same-time practically-drop-dead PreviewCast coverage of Macworld 2008: Absolutely nothing!

That’s right, PreviewCast is doing absolutely nothing in terms of live coverage. We will have absolutely no audio, no video, no photos, no tweets, no holograms, no SuperPokes, absolutely nothing to give you an experience of what it’s like to be at Macworld San Francisco 2008. Why? Because the entire internet is already doing the SAME THING!!!

Just hop on Google or Upcoming and take a look! Numerous websites and podcasts are doing lots of stuff at Macworld, whether it be tours and interviews on the show floor, interviews after the keynote from celebrities whom have had a significant overdose of exposure to the patented reality distortion field, and so many podcasted special events that you could get lost just in the few blocks surrounding Moscone Center and enough to force me to give my entire life’s savings over to BART if I was to try to take care of all of them and try to produce something for PreviewCast.

So guess what? We are not doing anything special for Macworld 2008 until after the show is already over and the initial hype over whatever Steve plans to spit out of his mouth on Tuesday has calmed down. PreviewCast #049, to be recorded next weekend, will be when we give our take on the announcements.

I will indeed be spending at least a day sometime at the Macworld Exhibit Hall, but guess what I’m going to do there? You’ll never believe it, but I’m actually going to enjoy myself! I’m not taking a camera (one disappeared there last year, and I’m still taking the heat for that), I’m not taking a microphone (unless I get the urge to record myself singing folk tunes in front of the Apple booth), although I am taking my laptop just to enjoy some free wifi, which is hard to find nowadays. But yeah, by eliminating myself of the burden of responsibility of recording and capturing the Macworld experience, I will actually be able to enjoy the Macworld experience! And isn’t that just what the point of it all is?

If you are interested in some Macworld coverage for you to get the illusion of being there, might I recommend practically every other site on the internet.

Enjoy the keynote and the festivities. And don’t worry, I will still be doing a bit of Macworld coverage, albeit from a distance, on Webmacster87.info. Stay tuned next week for PreviewCast #049.
–Douglas Bell
Co-Host and Editor, PreviewCast
http://www.previewcast.com

Tags: 2008, announcements, coverage, internet, Macworld, Personal, plans, PreviewCast, products, San Francisco, Steve Jobs

Hallelujah my prayers and feedback comments from the last eighteen months have FINALLY been answered! Google has just launched IMAP access for Gmail, bringing the revolutionary service into the 21st century, finally, and I’m just so excited that at last I’ll be able to enjoy fully synced up access between the Gmail web interface and my Mail client. I am happy happy happy!

Only one problem now. I’ve still got 113 message in my Mail.app account, and if I end up replacing the POP sign in with the IMAP sign in, what will happen to all my old e-mails? Hmm, I’ll have to figure this one out after I get back from Long Beach…

UPDATE 10/28: I’m going to have to take all of that back. Gmail’s IMAP integration is rather clunky and ended up causing more problems than it solved. I’m back to using Gmail POP, which I’ve kind of gotten used to.

Tags: announcements, excitement, Gmail, Google, IMAP, Mail, News, prayers

Us Mac users may have teased Windows lovers because it took Microsoft 5 years in between the releases of Windows XP and Windows Vista, but now we’re a little guilty of lengthy releases too. Mac OS X Tiger was released on April 28, 2005, and now Mac OS X Leopard will be released on October 26, 2007. Exactly 2 and a half years, which is half of the length of the interim between XP and Vista.

In preparation for the upcoming release of Leopard, I will be doing a 5-part series on my blog this week taking a look back at everything that has happened over the last 130 weeks. I was originally going to make this a single article, but after getting so many ideas, I have decided to split it into five posts covering five different categories of events. If you have any additional ideas of significant things that have happened during the last 910 days, leave them in the comments. (Although note that I will be out of town for a portion of this week; I have this full series pre-scheduled.)

In this first part of the Tiger-to-Leopard series, I cover the significant events affecting Apple themselves since Tiger came out. Be sure to check out the other articles in the series.
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Tags: announcements, Apple, article, history, iLife, iPhone, iPod, iWork, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, Tiger-to-Leopard

Ugh, not another one of these:

Does Steve Jobs like making these big keynote announcements? Call me crazy (Hi, Crazy!), but didn’t he just do one of these last month? And then, another one like two months before that? And then, every time Steve plans one of these announcement keynote things, the rumor websites go wild trying to predict things, and looking at what Apple Legal has censored, etc. MacRumors’ rumor roundup has links to all of these places where the legal geniuses have triumphed. You know something, Apple? If you hate rumor websites that much, how about you stop with the keynotes and announce new products like everybody else does? Just randomly pop it on your website one day and issue a press release–it’s painless! You would totally catch the rumor websites off guard!

Okay, whatever, so it’s another big keynote coming up tomorrow, and this time it’s all about music again. And it’s right before the holiday shopping season again. This is starting to sound like a pattern, right? Apparently not, since everyone is complaining again that iPod updates are “overdue.” How long will it take these websites to figure it out–Apple sells most of its iPods during the holiday shopping season, which is why they annually revamp the lineups right before the holiday quarter starts. I don’t see what’s so hard to get here. This is a big reason why I continue to do podcasts: because a mainstream press can be very stupid a lot of times and I feel it’s my duty to get out some stuff that makes a bit more sense. *sigh*

But one of the things that I really want to remind the Apple/Mac news stream is that rumors are rumors. This means that they’re rumors, which means that they really aren’t confirmable, which is why I tend to make my predictions based upon what I’d like to see, not based upon what will happen, because if I say something “will” happen, and it doesn’t, I’ve now successfully reduced my credibility. That’s why I make predictions based on things that I’d like to happen, which means there’s no credibility involved whatsoever. How many times have you seen a rumor be right? You could probably count them on the fingers of one hand, with the last time that I can personally recall being the Intel Macs announcement from June 2005. And Apple always throws something out that you can’t predict. Who would have expected Apple to have ZERO Mac announcements at Macworld 2007? Who was thinking that Apple would do a .Mac Web Gallery–and that’s it? And nobody was ready for the announcement of Safari for Windows. Rumors are rumors, and not much else.

So with that downer, what would I think would be more likely to be seen tomorrow? Again, this is just personal opinion, with absolutely no factual backing. Let’s tackle the rumor roundup one by one:
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Tags: announcements, Apple, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Keynote, music, rumors, Steve Jobs

No, I’m not talking about the next season of new cars. For one thing, I wouldn’t call 95% of the cars out there “worth it”, mostly because their gas mileage would make any non-American laugh with their fingers pointing, and for another thing, I really don’t care about cars anyway. Nevertheless, yesterday, Apple released iLife and iWork ‘08 (along with some other new stuff, which aren’t the focus of this article), which Steve Jobs claims to be their biggest updates ever to both releases. But after spending a couple of hours today following the announcements through Engadget’s live coverage, rubbing my eyes all over the Apple.com website, watching demo videos and tutorials, and all that stuff, I’m ready to judge for myself if iLife and iWork ‘08 are really that substantial, and if they’re each worth their respective $80 upgrade price.
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Tags: 2008, announcements, Apple, documents, GarageBand, hardware, iDVD, iLife, iMac, iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb, iWork, Keynote, Mac, Microsoft Office, movies, Numbers, Pages, photos, podcasting, presentations, PreviewCast, Software, Special Event, spreadsheets, Steve Jobs, web design

Well, let’s face it. Tomorrow is a special event-style Steve Jobs keynote, and for like the first time since Apple has started doing these special events, they’re actually planning to talk about the Mac, instead of music. We didn’t do a PreviewCast this weekend because I was busy doing something else. But, I guess I shouldn’t let the day come without expressing some opinion of what I’d like to see be announced, particularly with the rumor websites going crazy again. You know what? I think I’m getting sick of rumor websites. Maybe I should stop subscribing to them. Oh wait, I’m a Mac podcaster. Damn.

Now, let’s get one thing clear: this is not a rumor list. The stuff that I’m talking about or speculating on here has absolutely no source backing it other than my wild imagination. I’m not even calling this rumors, I’m calling it a wishlist, because it’s stuff that I’d like to see (or not see) relating to the aging Mac lineup.
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Tags: announcements, Apple, iLife, iMac, iPhone, iWork, Mac, Mac mini, multi-touch, PreviewCast, Steve Jobs