Mark Gilbert’s Blog

Also quietly out of the door today was Microsoft Office 2008 for OS X. Updates to all the usual suspects are included however Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications is not supported in Office 2008, which some have suggested in Microsoft’s way of not fully supporting Office under OS X without explicitly having to announce that they are ceasing support.

Personally I think there is very little that MS Office 2008 can offer that current alternatives such as NeoOffice and Pages cannot.

Cheers

Two updates in the film arena today. First off Apple have announced that starting today if you’re Living in America (boo) you can now rent full films. Every major studio going ha signed with Apple, including Touchstone, Miramax, MGM, Lionsgate, Newline, Fox, Warner Brothers, Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Sony.

30 days after a DVD is released it will appear in the iTunes store and will cost $3.99 for new films and $2.99 for archive titles.
Current HD releases will start at $4.99 with archive titles at £3.99.
All types of title will stream over the net so you can start watching straight away, and UK support will be coming later this year.

To go with all this Apple have also announced an update for AppleTV, this will bring HD support and full Dolby 5.1 surround, along with the ability to buy films directly from the AppleTV interface without a computer required.
The update will be released in a few weeks and will add the support to all existing AppleTV units.

Cheers

The next big announcement at Macworld 2008 is the new Time Capsule. In basic terms it is an Airport Base Station with what Apple refer to as a server grade hard drive inside to do Time Machine backups. It comes in two different capacities, 500Gb and 1Tb obviously you want the 1Tb version, Time Machine backups can be quite large.

This is something that users had been crying out for since Time Machine was introduced in OS X Leopard, however support for backing up to Airport connected drives was apparently removed, and now we know why.

Cheers

Well once again Macworld here and brought with it a whole host of new goodies.

First off the Macbook Air. Essentially a thinner version of the existing Macbook, but ohmygodhaveyouseenit? It is simply stunning. The features are as follows;

• 13.3″ widescreen backlit LED display
• Backlit keyboard with ambient light sensor
• 80Gb HDD as standard, upgradable to a 64Gb solid state drive
• 2Gb RAM
• 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo as standard with the 1.8 GHz upgrade option
• 802.11n
• 5 Hours of battery life

Things to note are no optical drive comes with the machine, but then at just 0.76″ at it’s thickest down to 0.13″ at the thinest it’s sort of expected, and when you realise it weighs just 1.36KGs it really is a very good prospect.

Cheers