Last Friday was iPhone day across the nation, Apple was launching their biggest product in their company's history - a new cell phone. For years there were rumors about "What if Apple designed a phone, what what it look like, and what would it do?", we found out a lot 6 months ago, but starting last Friday we know. It is the kind of phone I would easily trade any of mine in for and have.

Over at my development project blog I wrote a pretty detailed review of my thoughts on the iPhone. Check it out out there.

Tags: iPhone, Apple

Apple released a new version of Safari today at the Developer Convemtion, well sort of, it's really a public beta release, so it's not an official version yet. If you downloaded it and kept using it as you had previously you'd almost think it was the same. And for the most part it is. Actually, one of the most exciting things about this release is not a new feature at all but a version that can run on Windows XP/Vista. Why is this exciting for a Mac user? Well for a few reasons I can think of.

• Windows users can once again finally see their websites look awesome. Every-time I look at aliased fonts in IE & FF on Windows, my body shudders, I can't explain it.
• Web Developers can more accurately develop on a single platform for all browsers (even though that platform is Windows)
• With Safari on Windows, we should see more website supported in Safari rather than 'Coming Soon' or your browser is unsupported messages.
• This should once again push MS to have better CSS support. Some of the coolest CSS features work awesome in Safari, lets start seeing in all browsers already.
• A larger Safari base (which in turn shrinks the IE user base). What's better than seeing Windows users love Apple software?

While these are just great reasons for Safari on Windows, there are actual feature in this new version of Safari. Simple but cool and interesting.

Resizable Textarea form elements

Just click and drag the lower right corner 'grabbers' and stretch. Kind of cool, there are so many times I've wished I could do something like this. Only drawback is it can break your layout, and since this is proprietary to Safari, will you have to use proprietary markup to control it? Hope they don't go there.

Awesome Find Feature

Who'd-a-thunk the Find feature would be so cool? I love it. Try it out now!


Default RSS reader. I'm not totally sure if this is new, but in the preferences window, you can choose a reader for RSS feeds to load into.

If you use 1PassWord, it will not work in Safari 3, which I am sure the developer knows by now, an error lets you know that it's not going to load. Also this version of Safari breaks MailPlane, but there is a workaround for now which to enable Rich-Text Editing in the advanced preferences.

So have you found anything else new? Let me know.

Tags: browser, Internet, software

It's been just about a week now and everyone has heard about Apple offering DRM-Free music from iTunes. As usual there are people who love it, and those who still have something to gripe over. First - this is going to be a great change in how media is sold, once Apple shows how well DRM-Free music is selling the other labels will be on board in no time. Along with Amazon & Microsoft selling DRM-Free music, sales will boom for the industry and then maybe we can put this whole DRM thing to bed.

Apple has integrated a pseudo service into iTunes called 'iTunes Plus', which offers higher quality non-drm music files for only $1.29 or if you already purchased the song, it's just .30 cents more. It's actually a pretty good deal. Better quality, freedom of usage - it's what we all wanted! The people have spoke, and the industry actually listened - this is unprecedented!

Surely there is something wrong here though, it can't be as good as it sounds, what's the catch?

This depends on who you talk to. If you ask me, I say we've reached the ultimate compromise. It seems even though the files can be played on any device (provided it supports AAC format), the iTunes files carries your account information including your name, email and other data about you. People seem to be up in arms over this 'privacy' issue. A number of articles being written that are either criticizing Apple and saying iTunes Plus isn't all what it should be and be careful because you can be tracked. Are users hoping they could post their music back up on Napster again? Why even bother getting upset over this? This is equivalent of going to a retail store and the cashier asking you for your address at checkout. It's so they know where their users are coming from. In this case, where their users are going to - only in the event they have to. What do you think about it?

Tags: music, drm, iTunes

Apple has announced colored versions of the 1GB iPod Shuffle. The same colors used on the Nanos. Still on $79, the iPod Shuffle is a screeless music player which plays your music in constant shuffle mode.

And it's only for Cingular... ugh!

Well, I guess I won't be getting one since I use Verizon and the disappointing Chocolate phone which I just signed for another 2 years, with a year and half left - and there are no indications CDMA will be supported. Beyond not being able to use it, this thing looks sweeeeeeet! Oh man, I am blown away.

The iPhone is 3 devices wrapped in a single unit: It's an iPod, it's a phone and it's an internet device, the interface is the dessert topping. The interface consists of a full screen and no physical buttons. To interact with it you use simple gestures with your finger, like tap to select something or sliding your finger up like a flick to scroll. It also support multi-touch which you can use for other actions like zooming in a picture. This device also knows which orientation it's at, being either landscape or portrait will give you slightly different views depending which mode you are in. If you are listening to music, you can turn you phone on its side and scroll through your albums with Cover Flow. Movies are always displayed in landscape view.

The phone portion looks amazingly simple to use - so straight forward that my business partner who can never figure this stuff out should be able to use it, and use it to its potential with out asking too many questions. One of the best features is the random access to your voice mail. What is it with Verizon (I assume the other services do this too), where I have to listen to my old messages before I can listen to my new messages? The options are so backwards that I sometimes don't even want to see what the caller had to say but just call them back and see what's up. That's how bad the voice mail is. Good job on that Apple.

The internet features are pretty cool - I don't know if any of these services are extra in terms of retrieving mail or getting on the internet - I suppose they shouldn't be because its using a local Wi-Fi connection or hot spot - but you never know with these phone companies. It's not a huge selling portion to me but it's got huge potential.

The other big ticket item is the appleTV box which I find very cool. It's a little box about half the height of a MacMini, which has a wireless device that looks for local computers and iTunes running. You sync to to and can view movies, listen to music, gaze at your photo collection, listen to podcasts and video podcasts all on your HD television. It supports 720p resolution which I know some HD fanatics will piss and moan over. I can just hear it - 'Where's the true 1080p...", blah blah. This is the first device of this kind from Apple so relax. One nifty feature which Jobs explained in the keynote was the auto syncing ability. If you are say subscribed to a show on Apple iTunes, you can have it auto download those unwatched files to the appleTV box and watch when you are ready. A TIVO like experience but limited to what you have paid for or what is running on a someone's computer.

Other than that only an updated Airport Extreme was released but not mentioned at the keynote.The new device has a new form factor and looks just like the appleTV box, maybe so you can stack them. It also support the same 802.11 a-g and now n standard.

s For all of those many, many rumors floating around I guess about 90% of them were wrong. I love it when we are all wrong, makes this that much more fun.

Like an extended Christmas, MacWorld in January is usually the best of the year. New products announced and readily available for purchase. I don't usually go rumor hogging, but there are so many big possibilities that I am pretty damn excited. The big one is the phone, is it here? or is it not? I say its here but it won't be everything to everyone. Either it will be simply under featured or not everyone will be able to use it because of some restrictions. And what is it called? Not iPhone since that's been used by Cisco/LinkSys. Also rumors are saying it will be some sort of iChat mobile phone which I really like.

Another product that was already annoucned is the iTV which is a streaming video box for your iTunes movies. We should see this either released or more fully realized than previously. I personally don't need this since I have a tower with all my iTunes videos and a MacBook Pro which I can stream movies over through FrontRow. But for users without multiple computers this is a really nice device.

It's also rumored that the MacPro Towers will start coming with 8 cores. I'm still running my trusty G5 which I won't be replacing anytime soon... at least I don't think. Another possible introduction is some sort of tablet based Mac. I'm not too keen on this tablet PC format overall, it somehow seems too business like for Mac users - like the PDA has become.

On the software side, we should be seeing a nice preview of Leopard, with iChat, Time Machine and some of those other newer features. Apple will also roll out the yearly iLife and iWork packages. The only rumor arouns is some sort of charting or spreadsheet application that will be part of iWork. I'm not looking for too many features in iLife or iWork, I would like to see iDVD run a bit faster overall, it takes so long to burn a movie. iTunes 7 just came out so it not likely there will be any update here, but maybe some new movie studio will finally come along and sell their wares.

It's 10:18AM, and the show is around 1PM Pacific, so there is time to actually get some work done. Watch MacRumorsLive for minute-by-minute updates. Later.

iTunes now has sections for Best Selling items of 2006 in each of their major categories. Each section has 4 lists of 15 items, 2 listing the top sellers and 2 lists with editors and staff picks and favorites of the year.. except for music which has about a gagillion songs and albums listed. It's unfortunate the lists are this predictable and uninteresting as top sales, I think I would have liked to seen lists like top downloaded Free Items or which TV channel had the most downloads combined. Here are some of the top movers and shakers form iTunes lists.

Music

Best Selling Album: How to Save a Life: The Fray
Best Selling Song: Bad Day: Daniel Powter
Staff Favorite Album: Taking the Long Way: Dixie Chicks
Staff Favorite Song: Crazy: Gnarles Barkley

TV Shows

Best Selling Currently On: Lost: Lost Season 3
Best Selling in Library: Dave Chappelle: For What It's Worth
Staff Favorites Currently On: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 2
Staff Favorites in Library: FireFly Season 1

Music Videos

There aren't any lists in this section but simply what they felt rounded out the top videos for the year.

AudioBooks

Top Selling Book: How To Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less: Nicholas Boothman
Top Selling Show: Stephen Colbert's At The White House Correspondents Dinner: Stephan Colbert
Editors Pick - Non-Fiction: The Life & Times of The Thunderbolt Kid: Bill Bryson
Editors Pick Fiction: The Emperor's Children: A Novel: Claire Messud

Podcasts People's Choice

Podcasts: Staff Favorites

Like the video music section, there is a general round up of favorites by you and iTunes. I thought this would have been an interesting category to see some data from but iTunes provides none. Maybe to avoid cat fights among podcasters, or because of the poor way they manage top subscribers (by clicks on the subscribe button.. did they ever fix that?).

Apple posted a new Mac/PC ad where they put aside their differences for a moment. Cute.