Apple Homepage, Circa 1997

Over at tuaw, they have a gallery obtained with the wayback machine of Apple.com going back all the way to 1997, and it sure has changed since then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve-O-Lantern

With Halloween quickly approaching, some great photos have emerged of a Jobs-O-Lantern.

More as well as templates available here.

iPhone Coasters

For $60 you too can watch in awe as iPhone icons absorb the condensation from your glass. See the amazing Jobs-ish sight here.

Apple’s announcement roundup

New Macbook Air:
Faster processor, faster memory, Nvidia GPU, and a mini display port. No mouse buttons.

 

 

Image from TUAW.

 

 

 

New Macbook:

Aluminum shell. A bit thinner. Includes a Macbook style keyboard, mini display port, dvd burner, motion sensor, and an Nvidia GPU. It now includes an LED displa and a glass trackpad. There are now no mouse buttons.

 

 

 

 

Image from AppleInsider.

 

 

The MacBook Pro has had a bit of an upgrade inside, as well as the improvements of the other macs, including slightly better battery life because of the LED screens.

 

This is the new Cinema displat, with a builg in iSight webcam as well as a Mini DisplayPort.

Safari 3.1.2

Safari, the default browser on every new Mac, was once the fastest browser available, arguably on any platform, at least out of beta. Now, however, it has some competition.

With Chrome using the WebKit rendering engine, as well as a new java engine, Safari has lost its speed advantage. Firefox has caught up to Safari on certain benchmarks, and Opera has always been faster on certain pages. Safari has to win on features, or else it needs to speed up. Unfortunately, Apple focused on form over function. Safari offers nothing over other browsers, there are no features not available elsewhere. Apple needs to do better with the next version to make it a competitor against Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and the Chrome derivative browsers(Iron and Chromium).

Potential Safari Redesign in iPhone 2.2

A screenshot from iPhone Atlas shows a redesigned Mobile Safari, with the Google button not available without clicking first on the address bar. The search button is gone, which makes sense, and the refresh button is now embedded in the address bar. Looks promising, and there are no obvious Photoshop marks.

App Store Rejection Chart

Gizmodo has a great chart showing the process that it seems that Apple follows when deciding to reject or accept an app.

Available here:

http://gizmodo.com/5051273/how-apple-picks-which-apps-make-it-to-the-app-store

The Cake is not a lie

Well, now that I have you portal fans reading, its safe to tell you that this is actually about real cake. iPhone cake.

This was created by Nick Bilton and Danielle Bilton for a cupcake decorating championship. Details here.

Windows Live and the Future

Windows Live represents a huge leap forward for Windows and software integration. Currently, Windows Live Mail is integrated with calendar. Photo Gallery recognizes people from your contacts(with some training). Those same contacts are kept in the online services as well as in Windows Messenger and Windows Live Call. All of the services integrate well with Flickr, and can be extended to add Picasa support. SkyDrive, with a bit more storage, could be the online equivalent of a flash drive. Live Mesh is the new remote assistance service, allowing tech support to be handled largely remotely. The potential for these services integrating closely with Windows 7 is huge. While Windows 7 will not come with these apps, Microsoft could just provide an easy link to install them. While I don’t know much about the new Windows 7 UI(current builds just use the Vista UI), if something like a Windows Live sidebar gadget were to emerge in Windows 7, it would make the Live services amazing. Somehow I don’t think that Apple’s ads will be too successful when Microsoft can counter iLife with Live.

4GB iPod nano

A 4GB iPod nano has apparently been shipping in small quantities to markets outside of the US . The idea was for a cheaper nano with less storage. No word on pricing.

Apple Recalls really small USB power adapter

Apparently those really small adapters:

Have the prongs breaking off and sticking in power sockets, creating dangerous situations(in small percentages). Apple is recalling these and will exchange them for good ones.

Apple’s Ultracompact USB Power Adapter Exchange Program

This could have been pretty bad, but Apple's quick reaction and free replacements will probably prevent this becoming as big as the Xbox burning power cords.

Fake MacTablets

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a gallery of fake MacTablets available here.

MiGhty Docs

Offline google docs on an iPod touch or iPhone, sounds great right? Yes, it is:

(Image from download.com)

MiGhty Docs is a free app store application that caches all of your google documents data(except for presentations). You can read them in the program, but it is read-only. It syncs data whenever you open it and have an internet connection. Available in the apple application store.

iTunes 8

So, Genius, HD TV shows, Grid view, and the new visualizer, the main new features of iTunes 8, look very impressive.

The Genius sidebar will ask you for permission to send your information to Apple, but thats not too weird now. It then has to startup:

This has been going for a few minutes, but I suppose a couple thousand songs should take a while.The visualizer is nothing short of amazing.

 
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Pictures cannot properly show how impressive it is, so for the visualizer I can only suggest that you try it out for yourself. I almost don't want to switch out of it so I can get screenshots for the rest of this post. It is similar to the magnetosphere visualizer but a bit more polished and a bit better.

The genius sidebar is less impressive. The recommendations are all to buy songs, not songs in your library, but when I ask it for recommendations in my library, it tells me there are none for some of my favorite songs, although some more mainstream ones work well. For instance, Fire and Rain by James Taylor gives Babylon by David Grey and Big Yellow Taxi by the Counting Crows, which I feel are both good recommendations. It gives 25 by default, but that can be changed.

Up to 100 recommendations, which is fair. More than that would not be a recommendation for most libraries, just a selection of a large portion. So the Genius function is impressive when it works.

The new grid mode makes things a bit easier to use and navigate through. As for HD TV Shows, I think its a good idea, and I wonder what the quality will be(in terms of bitrate).

 

Overall, this is a really great update, and frankly is very impressive all around. This will probably make me change from windows media player to iTunes for my main music player. Nice one Apple :-).

Rock On!

Well I'm sure all of you Apple fans out there watched the keynote, right? I guess some of you had better things to do, so here's a summary:

1. New nano, slim and tall, with an accelerometer

2.HD iTunes shows

3.New itunes visualizer

4.New ipod touch, not much different, has external speakers

5.Genius recommendation playlists in iTunes 8

I'll be reviewing iTunes 8, and when I get around to upgrading to the new ipod firmware(with genius support), I'll review that too.

More Apple Update(s)

Turns out that the iTunes 8 early leak was a hoax. Sorry about that. You can still probably expect iTunes 8 tomorrow.

Update on Apple

Lots of rumors have been going around about the Apple event tomorrow, and I thought I would sum up the links here:

iTunes 8 accidentally leaked(unconfirmed) Gizmodo

iTunes 8 Mockup Kevin Rose's blog

New iPod Nano Gizmodo

Happy Speculating!

(Based on the accuracy of the past predictions, I would be fairly confident in a new touch, new nano, new touch firmware, itunes 8 genius sidebar, grid album layout, and maybe a new iTunes visualizer)