I think we can say with some amount of certainty that we’ve now got a third Stevenote that we can count on each year. Macworld, WWDC, and now an annual fall Special Event for Apple to unveil their holiday 2008 iPod lineup. However, this year’s keynote really didn’t deliver that much overwhelming or mind-boggling or anything like that, as Apple’s lineup appears to have taken its respective stereotypical roles.
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Tags: album artwork, Apple, Genius, iPod nano, iPod touch, iTunes, Keynote, Special Event, Steve Jobs, visualizer

If there’s one way to summarize one of my biggest questions about what was announced at Steve Jobs’ keynote on Tuesday, this has to be the best way. Overall, this year, I was never really excited about this year’s keynote, and there’s not much there to excite me. Time Capsule definitely looks interesting, and (when I can afford it) may actually improve my recent 1.5 Larry-head rating on Time Machine, although I’m not in a position to get it for the time being. I have a number of qualms about the MacBook Air, and as for the Apple TV, iTunes rentals, and iPod touch/iPhone updates, I’m maintaining a solidly neutral stance on those.

Now, hold on Douglas, you’re thinking, why aren’t you coming out and either praising or bashing Apple the way you normally do? Well, for most of these, I can see pros and cons on both sides, so for me, the jury’s still out on my opinions of these. I’m holding off until I get a chance to play around with things before I start to come to conclusions, and I will be sharing these conclusions on this weekend’s “Macworld in review” episode of PreviewCast, and later elaborating here on my blog.

As for trying them out, that’s what I’m going to be doing tomorrow! Indeed, tomorrow, I’ll be going with the Aragon group (about six of us in total, plus chaperones) to Macworld to tour the exhibit hall for the day. This will be my third consecutive excursion to Macworld’s Expo floor, and according to what all the websites are saying, we’ll actually be able to play around with the new stuff, rather than just looking at a rotating object in a bullet-proof* glass case. Which actually sounds exciting.
* I have no idea if the case was bullet-proof or not, and am just making this up.

However, this year, I hope to spend some more time talking to the people whom I really think should be the stars of the show: all of the little developers. (Merlin Mann likes to call the “little devs” section of the show floor Tiny Town.) It’s THEM that make the show possible, because it’s their contributions of their applications that helps the Mac platform succeed. So, I’m hoping to spend more time there this year.

I have one class tomorrow–Calculus, my first period class. After that, the group of us are carpooling up to the Millbrae BART station and taking BART to Powell Street, a block away from Moscone Center (and right next to the SF Apple Store). Last year, we tried to drive to Macworld and had the worst nightmare with parking. We’ll get there shortly after the 10 AM exhibit hall opening, get all checked in, and then have just under four hours to do stuff to our heart’s content. We’ll gather up around 2:15 to head back to BART and catch a 2:30 train back to Millbrae, and then we’ll drive back to school and get back there around 3:30.

I have not yet exactly decided what I’m going to do there. (Well, actually, I have, but I want to save some stuff to talk about in an “after Macworld” blog post!) However, I definitely intend to visit a number of booths. I plan to definitely check out Office 2008; after all, I don’t feel right truly making fun of something until I’ve had the chance to play around with it with my own hands, and I also want to find out, in plain English, what “Special Media Edition” means. I also want to find out if the Omni Group is offering any nice discounts on their new OmniFocus, which sounds like a really exciting app (and did you hear that it won a Best of Show award), and of course come home stuffed with a Macworld 2008 shirt. (I outgrew my Macworld 2006 shirt. As for my Macworld 2007 shirt, in February, it got a huge red stain after an alcohol thermometer broke in Chemistry class and splattered all over my shirt. Yeah, Macworld 2007 was just NOT a good one for me.) Oh, and I intend to gather up as many freebies and handouts as possible! There was some great stuff last year, so I wonder what I can scrounge up this year.

There’s also been lots of other things happening in my life recently, which I’ll try to catch up on in other blog posts, as it is time for me to hit the hay.

However, I will close by mentioning that this is my 300th blog post since I resalvaged this blog back in October 2006. My blog has had a number of incarnations before that, but I’ve never been able to keep a blog steady enough to keep going continuously for 300 full blog posts, which have been put together in 15 months. (You math whizzes can figure out that I’ve averaged out at 20 posts per month, or about 2 posts every 3 days. It’s not quite at one-post-per-day, blog365ers, but it’s pretty doggone close.) Thanks to the many of you who have been subscribing and sticking with my various ramblings. I do this blog mostly for myself, but it’s great to be able to bring you along for the ride and be able to share things that may interest or entertain you.

Tags: Apple, Aragon, BART, blog, exhibit hall, expo, itinerary, Keynote, Mac, MacBook Air, Macworld, News, opinion, plans, School, Time Capsule, Webmacster87.info

Well, it’s the morning of Steve’s annual Macworld Keynote, and this year, I seem strangely unenthusiastic about the whole thing. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve just been too preoccupied recently, or maybe because I think the name “MacBook Air” is the dumbest rumored idea that I’ve ever heard. However, fifty-three weeks ago, on the eve of the keynote, I posted some Stevenote Funnies for your pre-keynote enjoyment. I’ve got a few more for you this year.

Most of these videos, by the way, are from the All About Steve collection by rmoisescot, and I certainly don’t want to hog any credit for doing anything but turing this up in a YouTube search.

Boom!

Pixar (not that Steve has any conflict of interest…)

Woo!

The Best in the World (so why doesn’t the market share agree…)

Really Cool

Premature Specification

And finally, although it’s not necessarily a funny, here’s a look back at the intro of the Power Mac G4 Cube, a great idea that never made it for some reason.

Enjoy these videos, and hopefully the keynote! Me? I’ve got a very busy day at school today, so I’ll just be surprised when I get home.

Tags: funnies, Keynote, Macworld, Steve Jobs, Videos

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