TUAW pointed to this site earlier today, which explains how to make an apple pie that looks like a Mac mini. This is amazing:
We’re certainly not the first to put an Apple logo on a pie, but we think this implementation raises the bar a bit. Unlike a regular pie, you need to start with the top piece since you need to use the pan as a cookie cutter before you line it with dough. Roll out your dough for the top, and press springform frame onto it to get the right shape.
No matter how many times I read this:
The slipping economy will force Apple to address a glaring omission in its lineup: the lack of a lower-priced laptop, said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research Inc.
“Apple is facing the possibility that as the economic news gets worse, that they’re increasingly pricing themselves out of an important market,” said Gottheil. “Economic conditions are accelerating this.”
Mac sales have yet to slip due to the economic meltdown, but we’ll see how the company does with holiday sales. But even if the company has a rough quarter, Apple doesn’t get “forced” into much.
Ars on their new 24-inch Apple LED Cinema Display:
The real nicety of the display is that Mac OS X knows when you have attached the display to use its integrated devices. That is, when you’ve hooked it all up, it will use the iSight in the display instead of the notebook’s, and it will use the USB audio on the display and disable the output on the notebook. That is, until you plug a set of headphones into the port on the notebook, at which time the display’s speakers will disable and route the audio directly to your ears automatically.
Reporting back to investors, Needham Co. analyst Charlie Wolf notes that Apple moved from selling just 61,000 Macs to small businesses in the spring to 188,000 in the three months of Apple’s summer quarter ended in September.
The gain boosted Apple’s share of the field from a modest 1.9 percent during the earlier season to a significant 5.6 percent in summer. It was enough to not only give Apple a new level of influence but also to carry the company through a tough period: where Mac shipments to regular home buyers suddenly cooled in growth from 53.6 percent quarter-to-quarter from the spring to just 9.1 percent in the summer, the small business spike represented nearly all of Apple’s Mac growth at about 97 percent of systems leaving warehouses and shelves.
There are also a variety of subtle enhancements to program operation, including the ability to apply graphic styles additively. A few changes to the panels include a modification of the Appearance panel’s operation–it’s now an attribute editor, allowing you to toggle visibility or adjust parameters like opacity, blend mode, and fill color–and the addition of a basic Separations preview panel for pre-preflighting color. Adobe improved (some might say “fixed”) Isolation mode, where you drill down into objects to selectively edit, to keep from tossing you out if you deleted the only object in the isolation set. Live preview on clipping masks makes working with them a bit easier, and the Smart Guides now have little readouts that display basics like object dimensions.
The Obamafy Photo Booth Plugin puts your face on Obama’s poster. Here’s mine.
This tool shows you how popular a Google search query is in each U.S. state, giving a ranking like the one you see in the left column. It then compares this ranking with other ways of ranking states, like average income or population density, using Spearman’s rank correlation. The middle column shows the results of these comparisons, with the strongest correlations listed first. High numbers (close to 1.0) mean that the rankings “line up” closely, which may indicate a relationship between the search query and the ranking metric. For example, mittens tends to be searched by users who are in northerly states (high latitude) and states with a lot of frost. Low numbers (close to –1.0) indicate a negative relationship – that is, the rankings are close to being opposites, as in “yoga” and “VotedForBush.”
I took some pictures of my Color Classic today:
TUAW turned up Apple’s “Xserve Field Guide.” This guide is design to assist on-site technicians with Xserve hardware issues. It’s good, but not heavy duty on the high-end information.
Click here to see some screenshots of the guide. On the left, the desktop version (as rendered on the iPhone), and on the right the iPhone-optimized version.
From the NY Times:
It’s a long way from $700 billion, but the media start-up Six Apart is introducing its own economic bailout plan.
The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program offers recently terminated bloggers and journalists a free pro account (worth $150 annually) on the company’s popular blogging platform. In addition to the free yearly membership, the 20 to 30 journalists who are accepted will receive professional tech support, placement on the company’s blog aggregation site, Blogs.com, and automatic enrollment in the company’s advertising revenue-sharing program.
James and John of the RetroMacCast mentioned on their show this week a document titled “Inside Macintosh” they found. Here’s a bit from the preface:
I nside Macintosh is a three-volume set of manuals that tells you what you need to know to write software for the Apple® Macintosh™ 128K, 512K, or XL (or a Lisa® running MacWorks™ XL). Although directed mainly toward programmers writing standard Macintosh applications, Inside Macintosh also contains the information needed to write simple utility programs, desk accessories, device drivers, or any other Macintosh software. It includes: - the user interface guidelines for applications on the Macintosh - a complete description of the routines available for your program to call (both those built into the Macintosh and others on disk), along with related concepts and background information - a description of the Macintosh 128K and 512K hardware
Touch Arcade, on why some games are faster on a Touch:
The most clear difference is that fact that the iPod Touch’s processor was quietly boosted to 532MHz (up from 412MHz) with the 2nd generation model introduced in September. Meanwhile, the iPhone 3G, Original iPhone and 1st Generation iPod Touch continue to run at the original 412MHz.
I can’t decided what I think about this. The Touch has been pushed as Apple’s gaming device, but the iPhone is the flagship product, and does a lot more than it’s touch-based iPod cousin.