Pondering the Rest of the Apple Announcements (very good article from NY Times tech writer, David Pogue)

In its keynote on Monday at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple took the wraps off enough new features and products to cover a mummy parade. I wrote about the highlights, and reviewed the new laptop — but that wasn’t the end of the food for thought. Herewith, some further reflections.

FDDP


The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.
Sign up | See Sample

MacBook Air. Only last week, I wrote about my own personal electronics stash. I noted that I really don’t need the DVD drive in my current MacBook, and wouldn’t mind shedding the weight — but my alternative, the MacBook Air, doesn’t have enough storage for my photos and videos.

Well, surprise: Apple has updated its MacBook Airs. Now they have a faster chip, faster graphics, more memory, USB 3 jacks and — here’s the kicker — greater storage capacity, up to 512 gigabytes. And the price has dropped by $100. Hmmm.

Dictation. As soon as Apple mentioned that talk-to-type would become a standard Mac feature in the new Mountain Lion software, I thought of the MacSpeech folks. These poor guys have been trying for over a decade to bring speech recognition to the Mac; eventually, their product, now called Dragon Dictate for Mac, was bought by Nuance. And now that dictation will be baked into the Mac, who’d buy Dragon?

O.K., well, first of all, Dragon is still far more accurate, since it tunes to your particular voice. Second, it works even when you’re not online; the Mountain Lion dictation requires an Internet connection.

And finally, Nuance provides the dictation service for Apple’s gadgets — so Nuance is the beneficiary of this deal, too.

Still, the WWDC announcements reminded small software companies everywhere that their efforts could be duplicated by Apple at any time. Think of Growl (very similar to the new Notifications feature of Mountain Lion); the Classics app (whose bookshelf design was borrowed for iBooks); Instapaper (now made obsolete by a new feature in Mountain Lion’s version of Safari); and so on.

I guess that when you dance around the footsteps of an elephant, you live with the knowledge that you might get trampled.

FaceTime over cellular. In iOS 6, the new version of Apple’s mobile operating system, you’ll be able to make video calls wherever you are, even over 3G cellular networks; until now, it’s been Wi-Fi only.

Why did it take so long? Apple points out that unlike voice calls, data transmissions generally don’t require continuous, steady, uninterrupted connections to the cell networks. Your data consumption is usually in spurts: a Web page, an e-mail download and so on. When you use a cellphone, your phone generally hands off from tower to tower as you move — or even, sometimes, when you stay in one place; until data connections can be made continuous and uninterrupted, video calls won’t be satisfying.

In other words, it took the cellular companies a couple of years to fine-tune their networks to handle uninterrupted data transmissions. (And by the way, not all of the carriers have done so — it’s likely that not all carriers will support FaceTime.)

Mail. In iOS 6, on the iPhone and iPad, you’ll now be able to attach a photo or video to an e-mail message you’re writing.

Sounds pretty obvious, I know. But until now, you had to begin that process in the Photos app. You’d choose the photos first, tap Mail and then land in the Mail app with the photos attached to a blank outgoing message. A little backward, really.

The Mail app can now open password-protected Office documents, too.

Laptop backlash. There’s a lot of reaction to the new 15-inch MacBook Pro — the one without a DVD drive, hard drive, Ethernet or FireWire. A lot of people are complaining about what’s missing. (And no news of a new 17-inch laptop, either.)

A lot of people have noted, too, that you can’t upgrade or service the new laptop yourself. The memory and storage that comes installed the day you purchase it is the memory and storage you’ll always have.

It’s a movie that we’ve all seen before. Over and over and over. Remember when Apple killed off the floppy drive? The dial-up modem? The removable battery?

Trust me — I’m among the complainers. I screeched when they killed off the dial-up modem; it was in a day when Wi-Fi was not ubiquitous by any means.

But we, too, are gnats on the elephant. We have alternatives to Apple stuff; if we don’t like the package deal Apple offers, we don’t have to buy Apple.

In the end, of course, Apple will turn out to be right about the death of common technologies, because it’s both the cause and the effect. It decides that some technology is ready to be put out to pasture — and then, because it eliminates that feature, its observation comes true. That technology fades away, as the rest of the industry follows suit.

Apple’s motto might well be an adaptation of the old Chinese curse: May you live with an interesting electronics company.

Helping Tame the Paper Storm

Both of my parents passed away within the last three years. My father saved, I think, every piece of paper he ever got. There were five file cabinets filled with everything from memorabilia and research information on a myriad of topics, to tax returns to business documents, to bank statements, to receipts. I knew, as trustee and daughter that I had to do something. I could not take home file cabinets filled with documents. I knew I could probably throw away a few file cabinets worth, but frankly, I was nervous. I had no idea how I was going to deal with all the papers, and many of them I knew were really important.

As I tried to think about how to deal with this paper storm, I remembered my accountant who scans everything. When I go in to do my taxes, I watch him put piles of different sized papers in his scanner and within seconds they are scanned in and he hands me back my originals. I had never used a scanner but wondered if that would be an option for me. I called and talked to him and his secretary and started to search for a ScanSnap immediately. I ordered it overnight because I wanted to get started quickly. I had two weeks to go through every piece of paper that my sisters and I had not thrown away (about 2 1/2 file cabinets filled left), turn them into PDFs and call the shredding company (they wound up shredding over 400 pounds of documents).

I now have 2,472 documents in  Mom and Dad’s Electronic Filing Cabinet.  Most of these I may never need, but if I do I have them organized as if they were in a paper file cabinet and can find whatever I want. I wound up taking home less than one banker’s box of documents – deeds and important original contracts and such that I thought were important to keep. I also had all of my parents’ photos, and when I realized that I could scan in photographs I really had a party. I scanned in all the photos (many hundreds) that I thought others would want and will be distributing discs of photos to family members when I have the time to sort them further!

I then decided that the trust should buy my sisters scanners because we are all paper monsters, and so I did that. So far I’ve spent time with one sister helping her get started with her de-papering process which I hear is still going well.

But that is not even the best part of this story. When I got home, I decided to go through my own documents. To date I have scanned in nearly 2,000 of my own documents, shredding many many pounds of paper, AND while I was going through figuring out which documents to scan, which I needed to keep in paper form (and by the way, I even scan them in so I have everything electronic), and which could be tossed, I found out that my home, which I had refinanced five years ago, had NOT been put back into my trust! So thanks to my ScanSnap, if something happens to me, my estate will be in order and my daughter will not have to go through the lovely process of probate trying to prove that my intent was to put my house into the trust!

By the way, my parent’s banker loves me because every time she asks if I have something, I find it electronically and e-mail it over to her – she’s amazed at how organized and efficient I am and I love to hear that because that’s never been something I’ve been praised for before.

My life is so much neater and easier and more organized because of my ScanSnap. It is now, and I believe will ALWAYS be, one of my most prized possessions!

Everybody ScanSnap Entry – $3,000 Prize Winning Submission

Prize-winning entry in ScanSnap contest. ScanSnap makes excellent products. I use their S1300 scanner (with superb software), together with Evernote Premium to help tame my paper deluge.

Webinar on how to best switch from MobileMe

I have many of their books, including quite a few by Joe Kissel, who'll be offering this webinar this Saturday, June 16. Every book I've bought from Take Control has been excellent.

  • Dennis


________


Good day!

Adam Engst here. As a public service for those still dealing with the upcoming MobileMe shutoff, Take Control author Joe Kissell will be giving a free TidBITS Presents "Adieu MobileMe" online presentation about how to deal with the loss of MobileMe services, whether that involves switching to iCloud or using services from other companies. As publisher of the Take Control ebook series, I'll be hosting the presentation, and you can join us on Saturday, June 16th, at 12 PM Eastern (9 AM Pacific, and 6 PM in Paris, France, where Joe lives). If you can't participate live, you can tune in later.

http://tidbits.com/tidbits_presents.html

Joe wrote our "Take Control of iCloud" ebook last year, and he has updated it a few times since to keep it in sync with Apple's changes. For TidBITS Publishing (publishers of the Take Control series and the TidBITS Web site), it has been our best-selling title by far since it was released, helping many thousands of Mac users make the transition from MobileMe. Despite that, and despite various TidBITS articles about the transition, we're still hearing anxiety from people who haven't yet made plans for after MobileMe goes dark on June 30th, whether those plans might involve switching to iCloud or replacing MobileMe's services with those from Google, Dropbox, ZangZing, and others.

http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/icloud?pt=TBPRESENTS

Joe's presentation on Saturday is exactly the sort of talk that he gives at major conferences like Macworld | iWorld and the MacMania cruises, but we're making it free for all comers. Those who attend live will have a chance to ask questions and help guide the discussion. Again, all of this will be free, though we hope it will encourage people who wish to switch to iCloud to purchase "Take Control of iCloud."

This is an experiment for us, since although we've done many point-to-point online presentations for Mac user groups over the years, we've never tried a webinar for what could be hundreds of simultaneous viewers. We'll be using Google+ Hangouts On Air, since it seems to combine a decent live experience with automatic recording to YouTube, but we're unsure of how it will work for everyone. For instance, we believe that anyone can watch live, but you'll need a Google+ account (and need to be logged in) to add questions to the Hangouts On Air post. And, alas, Hangouts On Air doesn't work on iOS yet (you can view the YouTube video on the iPad afterward, though).

If you have time on Saturday at noon Eastern, do join Joe and me, and bring your MobileMe questions. As you'll see on the TidBITS Presents landing page we've set up, the link to the live presentation won't be available until we start it. If you need to communicate with us outside of Google+, send me messages via Twitter at @adamengst. To add this event to your calendar, download this .ics file and import it into iCal or BusyCal on the Mac, or into Calendar on iOS.

http://tidbits.com/tidbits_presents.html
http://twitter.com/adamengst
http://tidbits.com/resources/2012-06/TidBITS-Presents-Adieu-MobileMe.ics

See you on Saturday!

cheers... -Adam

Apple's new laptop heralds 'Air-izing' of all MacBook Pros

Computerworld - Apple's new Retina MacBook Pro is a harbinger of future changes to the company's laptop line, analysts said today.

And those changes could come as soon as October.

"It's pretty clear that as some of the technology in the MacBook Pro with Retina becomes more available and at a lower cost, they will drive those technologies down through the rest of the line," said Ezra Gottheil of Technology Business Research.

Apple launched the new MacBook Pro Monday at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), and touted the notebook as thinner and lighter than the standard MacBook Pro, boasted of its high-resolution display -- dubbed "Retina" to match the marketing label used for the pixel-packed screens on the newest iPhone and iPad -- and highlighted the move to SSD (solid-state drive) storage.

Like the MacBook Air before it, the Retina MacBook Pro also lacks an optical drive. That omission, along with the shift to a SSD rather than a traditional platter-based hard disk drive, let Apple shrink the thickness of the laptop.

Most early reviews of the Retina MacBook Pro have been glowing, and have universally singled out the display, which sports a total of 5.1 million pixels

While the MacBook Air has long been the benchmark thin-and-light laptop -- to the point where Windows PC makers have taken to trying to replicate it with "ultrabooks" -- the MacBook Pro line has been a very traditional kind of notebook.

That will change.

"Every once in a while, Apple completely rethinks things," said Frank Gillett, an analyst with Forrester Research. "This [MacBook Pro] is the first of an entire overhaul."

Both Gottheil and Gillett pointed to how Apple handled the MacBook Air, which debuted in January 2008 for between $1,799 and $3,098, as the template.

It wasn't until October 2010 that Apple fleshed out the Air line-up with both 11- and 13-in. screens, and dropped prices. The least-expensive 11-in. MacBook Air was priced at $999, the first Mac notebook under the $1,000 barrier, while the priciest 13-in. was reduced to $1,599.

Analysts see the new MacBook Pro as like the original $1,799 MacBook Air: Expensive, packed with the newest technology and using Apple's most-forward-looking design.

Its DNA -- the omission of hard disk and optical drives, the thinner form factor, the high-resolution screen -- will be used to clone a revamped MacBook Pro line. At some point.

"They don't have enough supply of the Retina screens to use it across the entire line," Gillett said, explaining why Apple limited the redesign to just one model.

For proof, one has only to look at the shipping delays for the Retina MacBook Pro.

Webinar: PocketWizard and One Speedlight Portrait Wonders – with Rick Sammon - June 19th

FREE LIVE VIDEO SEMINAR
Join special guest Rick Sammon and host Joe Brady to learn how to get spectacular portraits with just your camera, a single, off-camera flash and a pair of PocketWizard TTL Radio Triggers. Elite Photographer, Rick Sammon, will be live in studio to show you his impressive techniques and answer your questions. Join us Tuesday, June 19th, for this free broadcast sponsored by PocketWizard.

Mark your calendar for 1PM Eastern Time on June 19th!
Please note that there is no pre-registration.
Simply go to this page on June 19th at 1PM EDT,
enter your E-Mail address, Postal Code and Country
and the live streaming video will begin!

Date: June 19th
Time: 1pm Eastern, 12pm Central, 11am Mountain, 10am Pacific

Join Us Live

Editorial Fashion Shoot Taken and Edited Entirely With The iPhone 4S

Back in 2010, Lee Morris set out to prove that you don’t need expensive camera gear to be a photographer by doing an entire fashion shoot using an iPhone 3G; while people were impressed, many nevertheless said that the use of professional studio lighting and post-processing negated the point he was trying to make.

In the above video, photographer Nick Fancher followed in Morris’ footsteps by also doing an entire fashion shoot on an iPhone, only he used nothing more than a reflector and the in-phone editing capabilities of Snapseed and Adobe Photoshop Express for all of his lighting and post processing needs. Even the models, make-up artists, and assistants were all working for trade, meaning that Fancher didn’t spend a single cent on the shoot itself. Considering all that, the results are pretty impressive.

(via Fstoppers)

  • EmailShareThis