First off here are the Day 2 pictures
Now that the show is over officially, I’ll give my overall review of the show. Brian will give his review here
My overall impression. Apple was accurate with it’s theme of the show: Something in the Air
Hello Everyone. As always, I had less time then I thought to do a detailed post. Expect that later today. I did about 75% of the show on Thursday and arrived home dead tired after a great meal at a local restaurant.
Here are my photos so far. Why is it version 5.?. Well, it’s my fifth Macworld and it’s day one.
Brian’s been blogging quite a bit about Macworld: Check out his thoughts as well.
I’m writing this from the Media Center at the show, starting day 2. In general, I was unimpressed with the show so far. The fact I was able to see most everything in about six hours is evidence there wasn’t anything to write home about, figuratively and literally. I’ll reserve final judgement until I finish the show. My initial thoughts is “evolutionary” not “revolutionary”. I have a term for stuff like this: “with sprinkles”. It refers to that episode of the Simpsons in which Homer gets enticed to eat donuts because it now has sprinkles. Most of the items I saw added a few bells and whistles and called it a new product. Many vendors said “Now we are compatible with Leopard” or “Now for iPhone”. Yawn. We kind of except that, it’s been out for a while.
More later!
So you didn’t get an iPhone? Sorry. Maybe it was the cost. Maybe it was your cell phone contract. Maybe it’s AT&T’s coverage where you live. Or maybe you just don’t like buying a 1.0 version of anything. For me, it’s all the above.
However, with all those smug people walking around with their $600 Newton 3.0’s you can one-up them. What you have right now can be better than an iPhone. Yes I said it–you’re better than they are. At least my therapist is telling me to deal with my jealously by saying this.
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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…)
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 
Last year I got great feedback on my postings about MacWorld, but people wanted more details. As you know, Brian Best has been posting his experiences so I’m going to mirror his style a bit. So you might ask? How do you get ready for Macworld. Well, I’m a bit of a worry wort for those that don’t know. Always get anxious before a trip. Afraid the house will burn down while I’m gone. etc. So how does one prep for MacWorld? Glad you asked. As you can tell this isn’t a vacation. That happens after the show!
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This article originally appeared in The Lawrencian:
With blinding speed, companies upgrade their technology products and this holiday season will find lots of consumers with new computers, MP3 players, and printers. The hidden side effect of all this progress is tons of electronic waste. E-Waste consists of working monitors, computers, and printers that get stuck in the closet, basement, or garage until you move or decide to do spring cleaning and drag the item to the curb.
Fortunately in Lawrence, when e-waste is taken to the curb, it tends to disappear before the garbage trucks come to dump it in a landfill. A landfill is about the worst place computing technologies can go. E-waste contains lead, mercury, cadmium and other hazardous materials that affect the water we drink and the land we farm.
Before putting your e-waste to the curb, try to find a place to donate it. Lawrence is both cursed and blessed with a glut of good working computers. In Lawrence, most organizations usually won’t accept computers older than three to five years nor will they accept Macintoshes, though such computers can surf the internet and word process. To be fair, many organizations get many computers and don’t always have the IT resources to utilize donations. If you get “no” the first time, try calling a few weeks later as needs may have changed. Obviously ,reuse is not only a worthy goal but often leads to a tax deduction
If you can’t donate your e-waste, you might contact local, regional ,or national recycling companies. These places range from above board, noble and ethical to the downright sleazy. The sleazy operations charge you a small sum of money, they take what can be used to resell it for a profit and then take the left over and put it in a landfill. Ironically, the landfill might be the safest for the items as the alternative can actually be worse. Some “recyclers” take e-waste and use third-world labor to remove the valuable metals with techniques that are both dangerous to humans and the environment. These operations make sneaker sweatshops look like a walk in the park, pardon the pun. In fact, the Basel Action Network, www.ban.org, found computers from the Kansas Department of Aging in Lagos, Nigeria as well as various confidential data on donated hard drives .
To make sure your recycled computers end up in the right place, Bob Akers, Marketing Director of Surplus Exchange, www.surplusexchange.org, recommends asking five questions: 1)What happens to the items turned in to recycle?, 2)Are any retired electronics sent overseas?, 3)Can the recycling center offer a certificate of destruction?, 4) Do you have a reuse program? If so, how is it structured? 5) Are you approved by the EPA or KDHE? - Do you have letters of support on file? Non-profit recycling organizations like The Surplus Exchange are able to give you a potential tax deduction if they are able to use the equipment you donate. Given their civic mentality, they realize the value of older equipment and use older equipment to help non-profit organizations.
Even though manufacturers push consumers to buy new computers, they often ignore the impact to the environment. States such as California, Arkansas, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota have e-waste laws on the books and Washington currently has pending legislation. Seeing the trend of moving to reduce e waste, companies like Dell and Apple will take your old computer back at no charge (HP charges a fee), hopefully to be recycled. On the manufacturing side, organizations like Greenpeace are campaigning to reduce the hazardous materials used in electronics. In fact, Greenpeace has created an Apple parody site at www.greenpeace.org/apple to encourage Apple to be more “green”.
If you have trouble ecologically disposing of your computing technology don’t rule out simply giving it away on online forums such as Larryville’s swapmeet (www.larryville.com), free classified ads online (craigslist.org) and in print (ljworld.com), and Freecycle (www.lifeinlawrence.com). Free computers go quickly on these forums, working or not. Computer hobbyists love to take a crack at fixing computers.
However you choose to get rid of your e-waste, be careful of any data that is contained on the system. Items such as hard drives, PDAs, and cell phones need to be completely erased of data. If you can’t securely erase the item, work with a recycler that will. If your computer won’t boot and thus you can’t erase the hard drive, remove the hard drive and save it as a backup or have a friend completely destroy it.
Whether you decide to donate your compute, recycle, or simply give it away, you can help prevent e-waste from piling up and damaging the environment.
So the next time you look at that stack of computers in the basement or in the office closet, think about the environmental impact of those units and what you can do to make sure the e-waste doesn’t end up back in our drinking water.
Yeah, Macs can be very, very annoying, sometimes. Especially when the annoying thing is a bug in Apple’s own Safari web browser. Even worse, when this bug occurs, the resulting error dialog is inaccurate, blames the user for the error, and is about as non-helpful as an error dialog could be. It is, to summarize, about as un-Mac-like as it could be.
This error is the result of a real situation that any web surfer runs into on ocassion: sometimes a server is just plain busy, and rather the rejecting the connection entirely, it sends partial data and then gives up. When this happens, you can usually just hit “reload” and the page will then load just fine.
Anyway, click here to view the offending error:
Let’s pick this horrid error message apart, a line at a time.
Safari can’t open the page “http://support.apple.com/batteryprogram”
This is the most accurate part of the error message.
The error was: “lost network connection” (NSURLErrorDomain:-1005)
An overly technical explaination that is meaningless to the average user and doesn’t really explain what happened. The error code only adds insult to injury.
Please choose Report Bug to Apple from the Safari menu
The user has just been told that an error occured. Rather then be given tips on solving the error or an explaination of what is going on, they are instructed to stop what they are doing and contact Apple to report the error. Very unfriendly, especailly given that this is not a bug in Safari, and reporting it to Apple is a waste of everyone’s time.
Of course, Safari’s inability to properly handle dropped HTTP server connections is indeed a bug. Maybe if everyone who saw this stupid error dialog reported it as such to Apple, they’d fix it, right? Or at least improve the error message…
“Note the error number and what you did before you saw this message.”
“Well, I jacked the flux capicitor up to 48 gigawatts and set the phase dilation matrix to 110% of nominal.”
Really, I clicked on a link on a web page. You know, like every user in the history of Safari who has stumbled across this dumb message.
I don’t want to be accused of simply whining, so in that spirit, here are two ways Apple could handle this common and predictable situation (dropped HTTP connection).
The easy way
Just change the error message to actually be informative and useful:
Safari can’t open the page http://support.apple.com/batteryprogram. This often happens when the web site you are trying to visit is very busy. Please click “Try again” to try to open the page again. If this problem still occurs you may wish to wait a few minutes and try the site later.
Follow by two buttons: “Try again” and “Back to previous page” (or something like that).
This error message clearly tells the user what happened in non techie detail, and gives two logical and helpful suggestions for what to do next.
The hard way
Considering that the usual reason for these errors is a busy or slow server on the other end, Apple should have Safari automatically retry the connection when this error is encountered, ideally without the user even seeing what is going on. They could provide a preference in Safari’s advanced settings to control this behavior, giving the user the option to turn on or off “automatic busy site reconnection” (or whatever Apple calls it) and setting the maximum number of retries before giving up (I would set a hard maximum of 5 or 10, to avoid turning Safari into a DoS tool.)
(this post cross-posted to my own blog at mikesilverman.com
