Mark Gilbert’s Blog

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.

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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.

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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.

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At the end of October I wrote a little bit about my experience with Leopard, and the little problem I managed to make for myself by not backing up data before an install. I also promised a more detailed look at Leopard itself rather than just my problems with it. Someone pointed out to me last week that I had yet to do the follow up, so here it is.

Personally I think Leopard is ahead of Tiger in most respects. Things are better organised and in a more logical fashion, for example, firewall settings now come under the ‘Security’ section of the preferences, rather than ‘Sharing’ as they did in Tiger. Parental controls now have their own section, rather than being hidden away in the accounts settings.

The look of the OS has changed too, the menu bar is now semi-transparent, rather than the older opaque style of Tiger, and the same applies to the Dock, it is now semi-transparent and reflective. No just shiny reflective but real-time reflective. Nice features both of them, but they serve no real purpose other then iCandy.

The bigger features include the much anticipated Time Machine, Boot Camp, and Spaces.

Time Machine automatically backs up everything on your Mac by default to an external hard drive of your choosing. It can be either USB or Firewire and does not have to be present all the time, obviously Time Machine will only back up to there when the drive is connected. You can specify which files are excluded from the backup so that pointless files are not wasting backup space. The whole process is absolutely seamless, it really is a case of set and forget. Running quietly in the background files are copied, with the oldest backup being erased once the drive gets full. Backups are done hourly and are incremental once the first full backup has run. All this leads to a solution which is much more likely to be used by the average user, which can only be a good thing. Your machine can be completely restored from a Time Machine backup with the help of the Leopard install disc, complete with permissions intact.

Spaces is Apple’s implementation of virtual desktops. The number of spaces can be configured right up to a 4 x 4 grid of them down to the simple 2 spaces. Moving between them is simple enough, control and arrow keys move you around, or click the spaces icon to see an expose-esque overview of all spaces and click the one you want to switch too. Applications can be bound to a specific space so that each time you open that application it runs in a particular space, which is a nice touch.

Boot Camp, everybody knows what it is by now, so I’ll not go into that. What I will say is that it is included with Leopard and no longer available for standalone download. It remains essentially the same as the downloadable version, but with an updated driver set and some minor bug fixes.

The interface for Front Row has seen a revamp, with the large reflective spinning thing gone, and a new, rather more minimal interface in it’s place. Personally I like it, it ties in nicely with the Apple TV interface and makes navigation easier. Some people don’t like the new design and have even reverted back to the FrontRow build that comes with Tiger, but for me, I’m sticking with it.

Printing has been massively simplified, adding my networked printer really was a doddle, I had no problems at all with all the required drivers installed automatically for me.

There have been a whole host of UNIX changes under the hood which I wont go into here, and security has been revamped, again I wont go into that here, but have a read to find out what changes have been made.

Sadly since upgrading to Leopard I have seen more crashes. Application crashes in Safari in particular I’m seeing more frequently than with Tiger, but the 10.5.1 update seems to have fixed most of these.

I’ve had only minor problem with application compatibility, and nothing like the problem users of Windows Vista have been experiencing.

All in all it’s a most worthwhile upgrade for users of Panther and Tiger, and Apple’s attractive pricing on their family packs makes the purchase very tempting for users with more than one Mac in their house.

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Well as I expected I bought Leopard on launch day. I was wanting to go away with my other half somewhere for the weekend, so Birmingham seemed like a good choice. So at 17:30 I was in a large queue outside the Apple store in the Bullring. Time went by and the Queue which I thought was big as it was, got even larger, about double the size it was when I joined.18:00 rolled round and the doors opened, and people were let in in small groups, maybe 50 at a time. I was in there earlier so I just went in, bought the family pack for £129 and got out, besides I had a table booked for dinner at 21:00.

So we got back to the hotel and I had some time, so I decided I would have a go at installing it on Kay’s laptop.  You have to understand I was quite excited at this point, being the little boy inside that I am, and I broke two golden rules. These rules are “always backup” and “repair your disk before attempting an upgrade”.Things did not go well, I ran the installer, used the disk utility to do a permissions repair but not a disk repair, chose an upgrade install and the installer stopped with an error before getting anywhere. So I rebooted and was going to Google the problem, but the chimes came, as did the Apple logo and the spinning gear, then the unit powered off. Tried again, same thing. “Shit, Kay had all her first year Uni work on there” was the thought that went through my head. I booted off the Leopard disc again and ran disc utility, tried a disk repair and it failed with an error in the catalogue file.The install would now only give me the option of erase and install, instead of archive and install and upgrade. I could not erase the drive, I hadn’t backed anything up and erasing the drive and installing a new OS would make chances of data recovery small. I had to get the laptop up and running again with no data loss, losing everything was not an option. So I tried a safe boot, nothing from that, ran fsck from the terminal on the installer disc, and still nothing. Finally I knew I would have to wait till I got home, put the laptop into target disk mode and copy the data off using my iMac.

So when we got home I put the laptop into target disk mode and plugged it into my iMac, but the disk didn’t mount. It showed up in disk utility as being available but the partition couldn’t be mounted. My only hope at this point was to try something hardcore. If the disk was appearing as a volume but wouldn’t mount I could still perform tasks on it to try to fix it. Disk Warrior was my weapon of choice and after a lot of thinking and grinding disk warrior managed to have a go at repairing the volume. To my relief Disk Warrior repaired the drive and when I turned the laptop back on it booted into Tiger. At this point I backed up the main user folder and tried again with another upgrade install. This time the install went through as normal and after a little while the unit rebooted back into Leopard.

With mine I made no such mistakes again, all data backed up and an erase and install option, after an upgrade gave problems with software I already had installed under Tiger. So I sit here typing this from Safari 3.04, not the beta with my lovely Leopard OS. It is very nice, the user interface is much more consistent than with Tiger, Time Machine makes backups easy and really is a set and forget backup solution. Spaces makes organising your desktop easy, complete updates of many applications such as Safari, Mail, Front Row, and others. Have a look at the full 300 changes at Apple’s website. Well, I’m pleased with Leopard and it was worth the wait, I’ll give a more full view after a few weeks.

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Apple have now officially confirmed Leopard will ship on October 26th at 18:00. I presume that will be Pacific time making the launch time 11:00 in the UK if they stick to the same schedule. The UK Apple site simply states October as the release date and doesn’t go into specifics. There’s time yet to get all the details out though, I’m sure we’ll know soon enough, and as usual I’ll post it here.

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I already posted about the fact that Leopard would hit sometime at the end of October, but now there is some serious momentum to this rumour. Both ifoAppleStore and ThinkSecret have had some confirmation from their sources  that October 26th will indeed be Leopard release date. Apparently a 18:00 launch looks likely as Apple did previously for Tiger. Roll on the 26th when Apple can finally let the cat out of the bag.

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According to ThinkSecret Apple OS X 10.5, known to most as Leopard could drop sometime in the week beginning 22nd October. As usual sources are not disclosed as I’m sure people may lose their jobs over the leak, but they seem fairly sure. So all being well all us Mac users should have a new kitty cat to play with by the end of the month.

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According to Apple, their new Leopard OS will feature the ability to safe sleep your OS X session when switching to Boot Camp, then when you come back from Windows your OS X session is restored to where you left off. Hardly earth moving but cool non-the-less. It’s a feature I would use, I hate having to end my OS X session when I switch back to Windows to play any games.

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Well, I never thought I’d see the day, Apple’s Safari browser is now available for Windows as well as OS X. You can download a beta of it from Apple’s site.The reasons they have done it are obvious, with iTunes and iPod already a huge hit among Windows users a browser is the next logical step, maybe, or maybe I’m just barking.Either way I shall be installing it at work and having a play with the Windows version later.

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Apple have today pushed out through software update the latest version of iTunes, iTunes 7.2, which includes support for the new iTunes Plus. iTunes Plus is really standard itunes tracks minus DRM, so it maybe should be called iTunes Minus, makes more sense to me.

With iTunes 7.2, preview and purchase iTunes Plus music—new higher-quality, DRM-free music downloads from participating music labels.

Currently the iTunes Music Store doesn’t show any DRM music, but that will likely be released later on today.Sources suggest that you will be able to upgrade your current purchased music library to the new iTunes Plus format, which is always nice. The price of this DRM free lovelyness will be 99p in the UK, and $1.29 in the US, so yyou do pay more for DRM free music, but at least you have the choice.Cheers

Rumour has it that the end could be nigh for Apple’s diminutive headless machine. The rumour mill is churning thick and fast on the back of an Apple Insider article slating the Mini for becoming only a memory very soon.

I have owned two Mac Minis in my time and both were very good, it was the original G4 Mini which brought me over from Windows. I simply bought one as an experiment to see what they were like, and I’ve never looked back since.

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Since news gets to me a little slower here in the middle of the French countryside, the cows are not big on tech news, I only just learned that Apple have announced that they are delaying OS X Leopard until October 2007. They cited the reason for the delay as having to pull key developers and QA people off the OS X team to work on the iPhone. As a result Leopard has been delayed so the iPhone can be released on time.

This does go against what Apple previously said as late as March, that Leopard was still on for an early June release.

Oh well, at least I’ll have more time to save up for both the iPhone and 10.5.

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Currently it would appear that the 8-core Mac Pro is only available in the US since I could find no reference to it on the Apple UK site. Still the machine is an absolute monster. Boasting two quad core Intel Clovertown chips it really is a monster of a workstation.

to quote Apple, “Consider the bar officially raised”

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Apple today released Boot Camp 1.2 which adds, among other things, Vista support. Boot Camp 1.2 also updates some drivers for trackpads, AppleTime, audio, graphics, modems, iSight camera
Support, and the Apple Remote which now works with iTunes and Windows Media Player. A Windows system tray icon for easy access to Boot Camp information and actions has also been added. The list of changes does not stop here, but more can be found at he above link.

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Apple yesterday released the latest update for their impressive OS X 10.4 OS. This update has been a long time coming and fixes some general bugs as well as adding some more specific improvements which are detailed at Apple’s site. The update is on both Software Update and as a stand alone download, so happy updating.

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Yes it is indeed true, Apple have advised people to wait off on upgrading to Vista. Not because there’s really nothing new in Vista, but because iTunes 7.02, the most current version of the software doesn’t work correctly under Vista. Users are reporting that they cannot play some purchased music and are having problems synchronising with their iPod’s.

I must say I’m a little disappointed in Apple on this one. They have had a lot of time to prepare a Vista compatable version of iTunes and it makes me really wonder why they haven’t got one ready. Seems sloppy on their part.

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Today Apple released it’s first coloured iPod Shuffle. They will come in pink, green, blue, silver and orange. Other specifications remain unchanged though. Availability is immediate and can be bought through Apple’s retail stores and online. Pictures are up at AppleInsider.

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On Tuesday Apple announced the iPhone. On Wednesday they’re being sued by Cisco Systems over the iPhone trademark. Straight after the launch Cisco said it would most likely settle over the iPhone trademark, which it acquired in 2000 when they bought Infogear technology. However Apple said “We think Cisco’s trademark lawsuit is silly” and they were confident they would prevail if the dispute ever went to court.

Here’s hoping thet it gets sorted,the last thing Apple needs for it’s latest device is a long drawn out trademark dispute. They have already got a huge level of brand awareness in the iPhone name, and to have to change at this late stage in the product develoment cycle could be problematic.

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Say hello to Apple Incorporated. As of today Apple will now be called Apple Incorporated instead of Apple Computer, presumably to reflect the fact that computers are not all it does now.

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