Jim Barraud

I have to admit this years Macworld keynote was pretty lackluster. There wasn’t that sense of “Apple’s done it again!”. It was more “Oh, that’s nice”. Anyway, here’s may take on what was announced.

Apple TV Take 2
The new Apple TV looks pretty sweet. With the ability to download content directly to it, sync it with my mac and rent feature films this could easily replace countless stacks of DVD’s in my house as well as move out some media equipment. That is if it would work on my TV. I’m not in the High Def age yet so that leaves me out in the cold. But when the time comes to buy that new TV, an Apple TV will also be in the shopping cart. Out of all the announcements Apple made today, I believe this to be the most significant and exciting.

Time Capsule
This is a fabulous idea and I totally want one. But oh wait, I purchased an Airport Extreme that has the ability to hook up and share a USB hard drive. And before Apple released Leopard, the ability to sync time machine with this connected hard drive was a touted feature. Then when Leopard was released to the wild, the feature was dropped. Awesome, 50% of the reason I purchased the Airport Extreme was dropped. Thanks Apple. The optimistic side of me is hoping that a 10.5.2 update will resurrect this feature and that it wasn’t dropped in order to make selling this product more viable.

iPhone & iPod Touch updates
I don’t have either of these so I really don’t have much of an opinion. But I think charging iPod Touch owners $20 for a software update that provides additional apps that already exist on the iPhone while providing a software update that offers significant new features to iPhone users for free isn’t right. And the fact that all new iPod Touch owners get this update for free doubles that. If I was an iPod Touch owner I’d be pretty pissed.

Macbook Air
It’s a gorgeous machine. Beautifully designed and I love the simplicity of it. But it’s not a sub-notebook. It’s a notebook, just a lot thinner with less features. I think having it as thin as it is with the footprint of the 12” Powerbook would have made this a killer product.

10.5.2 Update
It wasn’t announced or released and it’s the only thing I really wanted. There are a slew of stupid annoying bugs in Leopard and I’m praying it will fix most of them. The most significant of which would be fixing iCal.

It’s been about a week, and I’ve been surfing along nicely on my new Airport Extreme(n). There are some significant improvements when compared to my original Airport Extreme.

The most notable new feature for me is the ability share USB Hard drives. Before the new Airport arrived, I purchased a two new usb Hard Drive enclosures for some drives I had lying around and a 7 port USB hub specifically for the new router. With the hub I’m able to plug in multiple drives as well as my printer and have them all accessible wirelessly. This has allowed me to move my entire iTunes music library off my MacBook Pro and onto the external Hard Drive that is shared wirelessly. And with the 802.11n speeds, music & videos stream beautifully (as I had hoped).

But I may have set hopes too high. I also attempted place my entire iPhoto library on the shared drive, and while it technically worked, it was far too slow to be usable. Just scrolling through the library would introduce the never ending beachball. I’m hoping that Apple plans to leverage this new wireless sharing ability with iLife 07. You can now share from computer to computer with the iLife 06 apps, but it would be nice if they were built to recognize a centrally shared library and had the smarts to handle multiple users using the same library.

A future benefit of the shared drives will be once Leopard comes out. With it’s time machine backup feature, you should be able to have your computer automatically backed up without the need to physically plug-in an external drive.

I should also mention that it seems to share any type of storage media that will plug into the USB port, such as the little USB keys that are all the rage. It even seems to mount media cards that are plugged into an external media card reader. My printer that is shared has a built in media card reader and any media cards that are plugged into it also mount, which was a nice surprise

Some other things I like:

• Increased range. (I now get full signal bars anywhere in my house)
• More reliable printer sharing. (The previous Airport was always a bit flaky for me)
• Nicer Admin Utility.
• Shared drives automatically mount when your on the network.
• 3 Ethernet ports. (as opposed to 1 on the previous airport)

So far the only real issue I’ve come across is getting my Nintendo DS lite to connect to the network. It seems to be because of the Airport’s new “Transitional Security” that combines WEP and WAP. Even though I enter the WEP key, the DS still won’t connect. This seems to be a common issue with gaming consoles in general. And since I’m in no way turning off wireless security, my solution has been to plug in my old Airport Extreme into the new one and create a separate network which the DS can connect. I’m hoping that a firmware update will resolve this issue.

Over the past couple months I’ve made some hardware upgrades of note. A bit of technological sprucing up if you will.

I’ve personally upgraded from a Powerbook G4 1.25GHz to a Macbook Pro 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo courtesy of my fine employer. It’s the perfect machine when it comes to web development. With the ability to run Mac OSX, and 2 instances of Windows XP (one for IE6 and the other for IE7) simultaneously on the same machine, productivity has definitely increased. I’ve recently installed an instance of Ubuntu, for no other reason than that I can and too see what the kids have been talking about.

The wife has just upgraded her iBook G3 800MHz to a Macbook 2GHz Core 2 Duo (white). She’s very happy with the new computer and is enamored with the two finger scrolling. It’s the little things ya know. And now that we both have iSights, we’ll be able to do some video chatting while I’m at the office or away on business. Well, that is once Apple fixes this bug that’s preventing it from working over anything except a local network. This purchase was funded with sale of my PowerMac G4 Dual 1.25GHz and the pending sale of my Powerbook G4 1.25GHz.

Speaking of selling things off, once I receive my new Airport Extreme, I’ll be selling off my old Airport Extreme. Sure the new one is faster and has more range, but it was the ability to setup network shares via external USB hard drives that was the clincher. Perfect for sharing files with the wife and setting up some automated backup solutions (come on time machine!).

And while I’m at it, I might as well mention my new Nintendo DS lite (onyx). I got this little badboy from my colleagues at the hive as a 30th Birthday present some months ago. It’s been glued to my side since.

And then there’s the upgrade to this site. I’ve gone with a simpler design and layout, and the usual promise to update it regularly.