Dear All - Cor!! Two mailings in one month. Must be quiet at MacDoctor Towers. Actually it is a little quieter, which as it's the summer is jus' fine. Today I have some news from the Apple Macintosh WorldWide Developers' Conference held last week in San Francisco, news of some new products, and some updates. If you use this mailing as the trigger to reply to me on some matter - you might consider the hard working electrons of the internet - and delete the text that I sent to you - after all I know what it says, I wrote it! :-) Now to the news: 1. WWDC - San Francisco This event is one of the three or four events each year at which Steve Jobs makes a keynote Presentation (using Keynote software I hope, rather than Microsoft's Powerpoint!). Two main announcements were expected and made, and any number of rumours which came to naught. First announcement was of the replacement for the G5 tower machine (ie a big box that sits under your desk). OK, next comes some technical stuff which many of you will want to skip! The Mac Pro is a 64-bit machine, which features two Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" chips, for up to twice the performance of the Power Mac G5 machines. All Mac Pro configurations include: two Dual-Core Intel Xeon microprocessors, eight fully buffered DIMM slots, one double-wide PCI Express graphics slot, three full-length PCI Express expansion slots, four hard drive bays, two optical drive bays, five USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire 400 ports, two FireWire 800 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, optical digital audio input and output, analog stereo line-input and line-output, and a headphone minijack., and you can buy them starting today. A few of you may need the power of this "fastest ever Macintosh". Prices range from (but this is difficult to say as Apple are offering something like 5 million different build-to-order configurations) about ã1440 (incl. VAT) to over ã4500 (dual dual-core 3.0 GHz processors, 2x 500 GByte hard disks, faster video, 8GBytes of RAM, etc etc) Second announcement is of the next major upgrade of OS X to be numbered "10.5" (codenamed Leopard), to be released in the first half of next year, with developers being seeded this week with early-release copies. There are hundreds of new features, and this list is just a short summary of some interesting ones: 1. Time Machine is an automatic backup of everything on your Mac, and allows you to "go back in time" to find lost files, restore settings, and generally cut down on those heart-pounding, hair-pulling, "why did I do that? moments. ("Only 26% of users back-up data" says Steve Jobs ââ¬âàI sincerely hope that that figure is higher amongst my clients). 2. Spaces lets you group related apps together on your desktop and then quickly move between up to four of these spaces with a simple key press. 3. Dashboard will be enhanced with a new Web Clips feature that lets users create an automatically updating widget out of content on any Web page. 4. iChat will allow you to display slide shows and Keynote presentations within chats, as well as to have some fun with image filters and backdrops. 5. Virtual Desktops Create different spaces for different applications to work together. Can drag info from one desktop to another 'virtual' desktop. 6. Very powerful way to create To-Do's. ToDo lists from Mail items. Easy to create notes. Add to-do's to emails, incoming, outgoing Mails. To-Do's work with any application in the system. 7. Next generation Front Row and Photo Booth built into Leopard. 8. A proper guest account, which doesn't need a password, but which cannot be logged into remotely. For more details, go here, for example: http://www.macintouch.com/specialreports/wwdc2006/index.html 2. New products that have caught my eye 2.1 Eye TV Elgato have released a USB plug in aerial socket and TV decoder, allowing you to watch terrestrial TV on your Macintosh (requires OS X 10.4). ã70, and requires an external aerial, but reviewed well 2.2 Google's Picasa Web Albums Uploaders Google released Picasa Web Albums Uploaders for Mac OS X, two utilities for uploading photos to the Picasa Web Albums service. The package includes Picasa Web Albums Exporter, an export plug-in for iPhoto that provides uploads, drag-and-drop, new album creation, and storage checks. Also included is Picasa Web Albums Uploader, a standalone application that can add photos not in iPhoto, add captions to photos, and search your hard disk for recently-added photos. The Picasa Web Albums Uploaders package is free for Mac OS X 10.4 and requires a Picasa Web Albums account. This forms part of Google's increasing set of software offerings that mean that the old days of buying software to load on your machine may be dying. Google also offer Word and Excel look-a-likes. Following on from this idea is the fact that there are increasing numbers of niche software products for the Macintosh ââ¬âàwhy not have a think about 2 or 3 things that you'd really like to do on your Macintosh, and I'll reply if I think it can be done or not. (To cook breakfast you need a recent MacBook Pro, turn it on and use it for an hour or so, turn it over and it is possible to cook an egg (albeit slowly) on the underside of the machine! 3. Avid acquires Sibelius Avid Technology has announced that it has acquired Sibelius for approximately $23 million in cash. The London-based Sibelius is a leading music applications software company with products for professionals, educators, and students who want to use computers to write, teach or learn music. The company sais that Sibelius will function as unit of its Digidesign audio division and that it will continue to develop and market its own line of software, including exclusive and targeted product offerings that combine a range of tools, including Sibelius software, Digidesign Pro Tools Academic software, and M-Audio keyboards, microphones, and other audio peripherals. "In the short term, this acquisition will allow Sibelius and Digidesign to combine the strengths of their respective sales and education channels and reach a wider audience with offerings that cover the entire spectrum of computer-based music creation ââ¬â including composing, notating, arranging, recording, editing, mixing and finishing, publishing, and distribution," Krall (CEO) said. Sibelius' core product line comprises software tools for editing and arranging music notation in both electronic and printed form. The software is targeted to [sic] a wide range of customers, including professional musicians for composing and creating scores for film and TV, orchestral performances and recordings; educational institutions for teaching music at all levels; and individuals who need to provide musical notation as a means to publish their work; the Sibelius product line also includes applications for teaching and testing music in elementary institutions up through the university level. 4. HP universal drivers for some of their printers Hewlett Packard has released Universal Binary editions of drivers for various printer models, including but not limited to: ââ¬Â¢ PSC 1310 Series ââ¬Â¢ PSC 2100 Series ââ¬Â¢ PSC 2300 Series Go to http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/support.html and search for our printer driver model to see if it has a new Universal driver. 5. There is no Item 5 today. Oh, yes there is. Apple Computers are becoming cheaper than PCs. There's another reason for PC people to moan! A recent review showed that Apple machines (like the new Mac Pro, and servers) are now cheaper in equivalent formations than the machines from Dell! Not only better, but now cheaper! 6. Security Update Security Update 2006-004 for OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is recommended for all users and improves the security of a number of system components. 7. Quark 7.01 is released Quark Inc. released QuarkXPress 7.01, which adds support for Intel Macs to the desktop publishing software. This Universal Binary update requires Mac OS X 10.4 with a G4. G5, or Intel chip. 8. MS Office 2004 updates Microsoft have issued a number of security updates to Office V.x and 2004 recently. The latest for Office 2004 is 11.2.6. 9. The end of Virtual PC Following its take over of Virtual PC a year or so ago, Microsoft has announced that it has halted development on a universal version of VirtualPC for Mac. In a statement on Monday, Microsoft said it "has made the decision not to move forward with a Universal version of Virtual PC at this time." -- via News.com. VirtualPC has long-been the king of the hill for Virtualization on Macintosh. With the Intel transition, however, came competitive pressure from Parallels, which has since released the final version of its Workstation product, VMWare which is showcasing a beta of its solution at WWDC, and Apple's own BootCamp Microsoft has claimed that to port VirtualPC to Intel would be much like creating and re-writing VirtualPC 1.0 all over again. 10. Item for sale One of you has just replaced his ether-net-worked Brother HL-1670N laser printer with an HP colour laser printer (that's the way to go, Jim!), and the Brother printer is now available. The attraction of this machine is that it comes with an ethernet port which means that it can be connected to your router and available to all the machines on the network. The printer is three or four years old and it's in very clean condition. I wouldn't sell it to you as a heavy office printing work-horse, but for light office duties it will suit you well, I think If interested, let me know. (I don't want to post it, so I'm hoping to find a local home for it!) 11. New iPods, new (laptop) Macs, this september?? Rumours abound of new iPods and new MacBook Pros (already!!) to be announced this september. Any questions? Let me know! Anything you'd like me to write a note on? Let me know! Best wishes to you all, and thanks for being Mac users hugh