Check out this post by Gizmodo, showing off part of Apple’s display at WWDC:
Apple stationed a little bit of eye candy in the Moscone Center lobby: a 5x4 matrix of Cinema Display monitors, set adorned with thousands iPhone app icons. The twist? Whenever someone purchases the app, it pulsates.
Apparently it’s not quite real-time, but the effect is extremely slick. Grouping the icons by their approximate colors creates a subtle gradient, which is a nice touch.
A few days ago, John Gruber wrote:
Also, in Mac news, I’d bet a small amount on a refresh to Apple’s notebook lineup, with a branding change where the “MacBook Pro” designation is used for all aluminum models,and just plain non-Pro “MacBook” is used for plastic models.
Gruber was right. The new 13-inch based notebooks both have backlit keyboards and FireWire 800 ports. The 15-inch got a new display panel, but lost its ExpressCard/34 Slot. All of the machines are faster, built-in batteries (like the 17-inch model) and all 3 sport lower prices.
Jolicloud, a new Linux-based OS out for a select group of netbooks, generated some buzz after screenshots of the interface were leaked a few months ago.
The OS looks great, and ties in to web services easier and better than probably any other OS out there. TechCrunch took it for a test spin:
Even when you run Jolicloud for the first time, everything is quite visual, making it easy to navigate even when you’re not familiar with all the buttons and processes. Compare it to switching from Windows Mobile 6 on your smartphone to the iPhone OS: it’s incredibly easy to get used to, and it’s just a better general user experience, particularly if you use a lot of web applications.
These days, it’s just a matter of time before new gadgets get taken apart for their guts to be shown to the world. Here’s what the inside of the Palm Pre looks like. Pretty.
With the best release notes ever:
In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.
How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.
Electronista, discussing a leaked Best Buy memo:
An unusual aspect of the memo is Best Buy’s proposed marketing angle, which describes the OS as more than “just a ‘Vista that works,’” with benefits such as improved simplicity, performance and productivity. The memo may thus be a tacit admission that Vista was flawed; prior to the Service Pack 1 update, the software was frequently accused of problems like driver incompatibility and slow file transfers.
Wired has put together a slideshow of Palm’s best - and worst - products.
Gizmodo seems to think that the company’s new WebOS is a diamond, the Pre’s hardware is the rough:
Think of it like this. The software is agile, smart and capable. The hardware, on the other hand, is a liability. If Palm can get someone else to design and build their hardware—someone who has hands and can feel what a phone is like when physically used, that phone might just be one of the best phones on the market.
From a piece over at TechRepublic titled “10 reasons why Linux will triumph over Windows,” from back in February:
Out of the mouths of Microsoft comes the proclamation that Windows 7 will run on any hardware that would run Vista and even slightly less powerful hardware. Slightly less powerful? What exactly does that mean? Well for one, Windows 7 will have no luck in the netbook market. And since XP is dying, the netbook market will be owned by Linux. Netbooks are not gaining enough power to run anything from Windows but the watered-down version of XP. Netbooks are not going anywhere, and consumers (both home and corporate) have their limits on how many hardware upgrades they will make to fulfill an operating systems’ needs. As of Fedora 10, the minimum system requirements look like something out of the mid ’90s.
The Apple Cafe was to be a high-tech cybercafe where you could order healthy food while videoconferencing with people at nearby tables, surfing the Web, and pulling up movies or TV shows on a small kiosk screen at your table.
This week, my work-supplied MacBook Pro is having its logic board and optical drive replaced, so I’m using a 1Ghz Titanium PowerBook (pictured here) as my main machine for a while. I figured hauling my aluminum iMac around would be a bad idea.
With a 1Ghz G4 and 1GB of RAM, this TiBook (the last revision of the series) exceeds the minimum requirements for Leopard. While the 64MB of video RAM is pretty wimpy, it’s enough to get the job done. Regrettably, the TiBook shipped with a 4,200 RPM hard drive - which is miserably slow. To add insult to injury, the drive seems to be on its last legs. With its low-end specs and a slow drive, Leopard didn’t run well on the machine. I may try again once its new 5,400 RPM drive comes in later this week, but for now the TiBook is running 10.4.11.
Engadget reported last night that Dell is discontinuing the Dell Mini 9:
We just got off the phone with a Dell customer service rep who told us the same thing a handful of our tipsters heard: the Mini 9’s being phased out, with its official “End of Life” possibly as soon as Monday.
The Dell Mini 9 won some heavy-duty geek cred by being the best netbook out there to hackintosh. Outside of it’s amazing ability to run OS X, it wasn’t that unique - there are far better netbooks out there.