512 Pixels

The biggest UI change in the upcoming, still-in-beta Windows 7 is the system’s new taskbar.

Up until Windows 7 showed up, the taskbar was not much more than a way to manage open windows and applications. But with the new OS, the taskbar is now an application launcher. True, the old Windows taskbar could hold shortcuts to apps, but it was nothing like the Dock - the whole “mini-launcher” section was kinda janky. The Mac’s Dock was a far better application launcher - allowing users to place their favorite apps at the bottom or side of their display for quick access.

On the flip side, the Dock sucks at telling users what windows are open in Finder. In fact, unless a folder is minimized, there is no visual feedback in the Dock that the folder is open somewhere on the screen. Of course, Expose and Spaces help with this shortfall.

As with most things, the middle ground is the best… and Windows 7 is aiming for a taskbar that takes the best of the Dock and adds it to the best of the old Windows UI and create something that is a useful windows manager and a great app launcher.

Gizmodo takes a look at what’s changing with Windows 7:

The challenge of learning a totally new Windows behavior is the cost of getting this huge step forward in UI. The superbar makes Windows way more conducive to running tons of applications, since it’s actually possible to find apps and precisely the window you want in a second, no matter how bad the shitstorm on your desktop is. In this sense, it’s a better application manager than the Dock, from which, generally speaking, you can’t do much more than jump to open applications or close them.

It’s true that it’s actually less necessary for the Dock to be a superpowered wunderkind—Spaces gives you multiple desktops to work on, and Expose is pretty fantastic. It’s faster, though if you’ve got too many windows, the thumbnails are too small to be useful. Aero Peek solves this issue nicely by letting you quickly cycle through full-screen windows. The superbar has a button in the bottom right corner that works sort of like an OS X Expose hot corner, instantly making every window transparent so you can see the desktop—clicking will actually clear everything away.

From Apple’s 1st quarter results:

Apple sold 2,524,000 Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing nine percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold a record 22,727,000 iPods during the quarter, representing three percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone units sold were 4,363,000, representing 88 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.

“Even in these economically challenging times, we are incredibly pleased to report our best quarterly revenue and earnings in Apple history—surpassing $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time ever,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

They seem to be doing just fine in this economy.

Computerworld has posted collection of Apple ads over the last 25 years. Highlights include Get a Macintosh, Lifesavers, and Super Computer.

Failures include Lemmings, and John Sculley’s open letter . Lemmings makes me want to curl up in a ball and cry under the bed.

Ellen Feiss still remains outside all categories - the whole thing is just plain weird.

I had not seen several of these, and had never seen the phrase “ The power to be your best.” Some classics though - like the Intel Bunny and the Intel Snail are missing from the list - as are the first iPod ad and the  HAL commercial.

The low-end $999 white plastic MacBook White is running a little closer to its shiny unibody cousins as of this morning:

- Processor moved to 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo with 1066 MHz frontside bus from 2.1 GHz Core 2 Duo with 866 MHz bus - Standard RAM increased to 2 GB (two 1 GB sticks) from 1 GB (two 512 MB sticks) - Graphics switched to NVIDIA 9400M with 256 MB of shared memory from Intel GMA X3100 with 144 MB of shared memory - Bluetooth version updated to 2.1 from 2.0. - 320 GB, 5400-rpm hard drive option added

I believe that Apple is slowly getting all their hardware ready for Snow Leopard and Open CL.

Macworld, looking back at their very first issue 25 years ago:

A lot of the ideas introduced in that first issue seem remarkably normal today. The very first feature article, “A Tour of the Mac Desktop” by longtime Macworld contributor Lon Poole, includes an illustration of features I can see on my Mac screen today: a menu bar with an Apple logo in the left corner, a window full of files and folders represented by icons and names, and a desktop area.

The difference, of course, is that today these concepts are absolutely common. Back in 1984, that first article had to carefully explain the concept of the desktop; its entire first page was devoted to a complicated metaphor about trying to drive a car with a keyboard instead of a steering wheel.

And today, dozens of companies are still trying to figure out why Apple’s user interfaces are just so damn good.

As part of their “ The Macintosh at 25” series, Macworld asked several pundits which Mac was the best ever . The answer? The Macintosh SE/30:

There was a time when every new Macintosh equaled or bettered all aspects of every previous model. The Macintosh SE/30 came along very close to the end of that era, representing the apex of the original Macintosh form factor. Sporting every bit as much horsepower as the phenomenally expensive Macintosh IIx, the SE/30 was like a V12 engine shoehorned into a Honda Civic. Though future models with the original upright shape were released, they were all tagged with the derisive moniker Classic. The SE/30 bore no such shame. It was and is the undisputed king of the original, iconic Macs and, therefore, of all Macs for all time.—JOHN SIRACUSA

Here’s a funny tidbit about the machine:

Apple had indicated the presence of a 68030 processor by adding the letter “x” to a model’s name, but when the Macintosh SE was updated to the 68030, this posed an awkward problem, as Apple was not willing to name their new computer the “Macintosh SEx”. Thus, “SE/30” was the name chosen.

In case you’ve been under a rock all day and missed it:

Apple Insider:

Microsoft has had to keep Windows a general purpose, one-size-fits-all product that it can license to every PC maker on earth apart from Apple. Microsoft’s business interests often fail to align with those of its licensees, resulting in skirmishes with its OEMs.

Some people say that the environment Apple creates by controlling hardware and software is bad, but Apple has avoided the issues Microsoft has faced by dealing with dozens of companies, all running Windows on literally thousands of different products.

The real winner here? Mac users.

Gizmodo:

Comparing the two makes it perfectly clear just how much has changed since 2001, and what we hope will come tomorrow: Flash, blogs, bigger monitors and broadband internet.

New York Times:

The program began in November 2006 as a test, and Google later expanded it to some 800 newspapers, including major dailies like The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune.

But the amount of newspaper ad space sold via Google was small, newspapers and industry analysts said.

“Financially, it was negligible for both Google and publishers,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “None of these deals amounted to much.”

A friend showed me this video over breakfast, and it is still haunting me:

It’s over 5 minutes long, but stay until the end. (It was used at an internal Sony/BMG summit in Rome last year)

Look, I like Ars Technica as much as the next geek, but stuff like this has be about ready to remove it from my Google Reader ever-growing list of feeds:

For those unfamiliar with the concept, jailbreaking allows users to gain read-write access to a device’s entire file system and removes the limits set by Unix jail. Despite misunderstandings to the contrary, jailbreaking does not have to do with application theft, cracking, or warez. Jailbreaking simply opens up the device to a number of third-party applications, including Unix command-line utilities and many applications that do not meet the stocking requirements for Apple’s App Store. These applications are distributed by their developers through the open source Cydia project, which provides a GUI front end to Debian APT.

Don’t get me wrong, I find the fact that my cell phone runs Unix very, very cool. And I like Erica Sadun’s writing and respect her work in the field of getting the iPhone and iPod Touch to do things Apple never meant for them too, but story after story after story on jailbreaking, hacking, unlocking and pwning the iDevices is getting old. Real old.