thursday 21 september 2006

Dear All -

A number of items today, my holiday, a new iMac, and some updated machines, some other snippets that have
caught my eye recently.

0.	Holiday

Please note that I will be on holiday for the working days of 25-29 september. Back in the office on monday
02 october 2006.


1.	Cordless VoIP phone

In addition to using the built in speakers and microphone in your Macintosh to use Skype, you could also use
a USB-wired handset, or even a wireless handset like this:

	http://www.keyspan.com/products/voip/vp24a/homepage.spml

Already some companies are offering a 'phone for the house/office that works just like your current 'phone,
but uses your broadband connection to make the connection - not using the computer. Vonage are one such
provider.


2.	Pipex and Bulldog

The Pipex Group has just boosted the size of its broadband customer base by a significant amount. Pipex has
paid £12 million to acquire the roughly 118,000 residential and small business customers from Bulldog who
Cable and Wireless have had up for sale for some time. An official announcement can be read on the Bulldog
website.

Additionally the ISP Toucan has been acquired for £24 million from IDT Telecom, further boosting the company
portfolio. Pipex is reported to have seen pretax profits double to £3.2 million in the last six months on a
turnover of £119 million. The acquisitions give Pipex something like 570,000 broadband customers, and a total
of 1,140,000 customers overall.

Part of the deal with Cable and Wireless sees Pipex signing up to use C&W LLU network which already has a
footprint of 800 exchanges, this deal is thought to be worth something like £250 million over five years.


3.	Keyboard shortcuts

AppleCore Solutions have announced the release of "The Complete Book of Mac OS X Shortcuts," a new PDF ebook
that contains over 1,500 Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts for 16 Mac OS X applications. It also has a comprehensive
list of operating system shortcuts and a table that fully clarifies Mac keyboard symbols and their meaning.
It is probably the most comprehensive publication of it's kind available, says the company. The Complete Book
of Mac OS X Shortcuts is priced at US$25.



4.	New and updated Macintosh computers

Apple have announced a re-vamping of their iMac range with new processors, and a new top-end machine the 24"
iMac. This has a screen 30% larger than the previous top-of-the-range 20" machine - still one of the best
machines ever made by Apple (in my opinion!)

The miniMac computers have also been updated.

A machine codenamed iTV has been pre-announced (a VERY rare occurrence by Apple) for release next year - this
will sit in your living room under the TV and accept information from your Macintosh computers around the
house to play on your hifi or television.

Some software updates have been announced - notable QuickTime, ITunes, and FrontRow

(The new version of Windows, called Vista, is being tested on Apple hardware - it runs faster than on PC
products from Dell or HP!)


5.	New iPods

Apple have announced new iPods - a new Shuffle, new colours for the Nano, and a new 80 GByte video iPod.


6.	New Skype video

Skype have released a second beta version of the software which supports video conferencing (like iChat) but
cross-platform.


7.	New Office 2007

Some early details about Microsoft's upcoming Office 2007 for the Mac have been announced.

As expected, Microsoft is coding the next version of Mac Office as a Universal Binary application, allowing
Intel-Macs to run the application natively.

At this stage, Microsoft Mac Business Unit has only just finished the transition to Apple's X-Code development
environment which is required to deploy a Universal Binary application. The next milestone is expected to be a
refresh of the user interface, which remains in development.

According to the article, the new version isn't expected until the third quarter of 2007.


8.	Windows XP on an Intel-based iMac

Earlier this week I loaded Windows XP (and all updates) onto an Intel-based iMac using the parallels Desktop
software, and the client then loaded Sage accounts, Microsoft Office 200, and (of course) Norton AntiVirus
software. In about 2 hours and for less than £300 the client had a Windows XP machine inside his iMac to run
some not-available-for Mac software. One or two small problems to iron out - the keyboard has the @ key in the
wrong place! Otherwise VERY impressive.


9.	Previous Newsletters

These are (or will be shortly) available on my website at http://www.themacdoc.co.uk/pastemails.html



Any questions? Let me know.

Best wishes to you all, and thanks for being Mac users

hugh