I received this book for review on a whim. I assumed it would give interesting and insightful ideas for blogging - not! While the book gave 100 ideas for blogging, they were for personal lifestyle blogs designed to invoke comment and conversation. That’s fine for some, but I simply didn’t care for the touch-feely personal ideas the author had.
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When Apple changed it’s name to Apple Inc., it wasn’t only celebrating it’s victory over Apple Records and the Beatles, it was branding itself as more than a product; rather a philosophy. Apple enthusiasts have been talking the Apple way and “Think Different” for a long time, of course. Apple products are well known for being easy to use and understand.
Apple came out with the iPod and for the first time successfully extended its brand of computers. The Newton was a failure because it was too complex to understand and too difficult to use. At the time, I thought the iPod was a joke. I had a Nomad Jukebox which easily worked with Mac and PC, had replaceable rechargeable batteries, and easily fit into existing CD cases. The iPod was overpriced, less powerful, and less compatible. I was wrong because it wasn’t about how functional it was, but how people felt about it. It was the same concept of the disposable camera: more expensive than buying film but easy to use.
With the iPhone, I still believe it is an inferior product. (more…)
“Reach out, reach out and touch someone. Reach out, call up and just say hi. Reach out, reach out and touch someone. Wherever you are, you’re never too far.” Sure, I’m dating myself, but that jingle has always been stuck in my head. This was the slogan of the old AT&T of 1979. Of course, since that time, AT&T was broken up, and then merged together yet again. Instant Messaging and Texting have replaced picking up the phone. However the desire to reach across the miles still remains, and anyone who has tried to provide or receive technical support over the phone knows how inadequate voice can be to communicate technical problems.
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The Blue Pixel Guide to Travel Photography: Perfect Photos Every Time
Have you ever bought something that says “one size fits all” and it fits? Yeah, me too. Something that attempts to appear to everyone in reality appeals to no one. This book was designated by Peachpit as “beginner/intermediate” but I found most of it too difficult for me as a budding photographer and those things I did learn from the book probably would have frustrated an intermediate user. When I think “beginner”, I want to be walked through the very basics. Schloss started the book expecting that you had a small arsenal of photography equipment. This book isn’t for someone who has a $300 digital camera, but someone who has a much more advanced digital camera, light meters, multiple lenses and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t understand.
This book is geared towards someone who already has a photography kit and wants to learn tips and tricks on how to travel with their equipment. For example, Schloss mentions you should ship your clothes to your destination and then carry your camera equipment on the plane. Clothes can easily be replaced, camera equipment can’t. This advice is not for someone that is bringing the family digital camera on a trip to Grand Canyon.
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I am at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which is Apple’s major conference for software professionals and network administrators. It is always a fun time, as it gives us a chance to learn about Apple’s newest technology straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Much of what we learn is “privileged” information and can’t be talked about in public, but the keynote presentation, which covered some new features in MacOS 1.5 (Leopard) has been made public. You can learn a lot more about Leopard at Apple’s web site.
While Leopard is certainly a nice operating system and a definite improvement over Tiger, there’s not too much that is truly exciting from a user perspective, the way, say Spotlight was in Tiger. From a developer perspective, there is a lot of cool new features under the hood that will make for some really great applications in the year ahead, but as an end-user, Leopard doesn’t offer very much that is new beyond some “eye candy” and some evolutionary improvements in the Finder and built-in applications (such as Safari), including a more 3-d look in the Finder and some new ways of browsing files and networks.
While watching a Steve Jobs keynote is always a highlight, this year wasn’t nearly as exciting as years past, probably because there was nothing hardware-related. When you think about it, the last truly “new” Mac Apple introduced was the Mac Mini, almost three years ago. Since then, all new Macs (with the slight exception of the Macbook) have been the same old form factors with faster and different internal hardware (moving to Intel was a big deal — but of more interest to geeks then normal users). Consistancy and solid improvement over time are worthy accomplishments, but “exciting” they are not. The iPhone was pretty exciting, but there was no news about the iPhone at WWDC beyond Apple’s encouragement for developers to write web applications for the phone. Many developers have been very disappointed with this because a “web app” is just a glorified bookmark in the iPhone’s Safari browser — it is not a real application that would show up on the phone’s main screen.
Still, keep in mind that WWDC is not as much for the public as for software engineers, and like I said before, there are many under the hood improvements in the OS I can’t talk about, and these promise some brilliant new third-party applications in years ahead….so don’t replace your Mac with a Dell just quite yet 