• Sync with iPhone 4 to enjoy your favorite music, movies, TV shows, books and more on-the-go
• Sync and read books with iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4 and iBooks 1.1
• Organize and sync PDF documents as books. Read PDFs with iBooks 1.1 on iPad and any iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
• Organize your apps on your iOS 4 home screens into folders using iTunes
• Faster back-ups while syncing an iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
• Album artwork improvements make artwork appear more quickly when exploring your library

I got excited about the first point there, not because I’ve ordered an iPhone, but because if my Mac can sync with one, I should have the iPhone 4 icon.  However, I don’t…

Looking in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources reveals the old iPhone icons and plenty of Mac and iPod Touch/iPad icons, but no iPhone 4 icon.

I think this means Apple will be releasing either a ‘point’ update for iTunes (perhaps 9.2.1) or another small update somewhere else along the way.

It’s true that Apple have been pumping out some great mobile devices since 2007, but each year at WWDC we see more and more iPhone and iPhone OS stuff than we do Mac hardware and OS X development.  Since the iPhone launched back in 2007 we’ve had two revisions of OS X in the form of Leopard and Snow Leopard (while there has been three (almost four) releases of the iPhone OS), and these have been treated somewhat like an afterthought to the big iPhone/iPod Touch news.

Even in the Mac hardware we’ve seen Apple take a very mobile attitude since the turn of the century.  Look at TV, you’ll see MacBook Pros and PowerBooks and TiBooks all over the place.  All the while the iMac has really taken over as Apple’s main desktop system, even that came with a handle when it was first introduced in 1998 and now the iMac is so slim that it’s very portable in itself (OK fine, you couldn’t sling it in your rucksack, but slinging it in the car is a hell of a lot easier than slinging a Mac Pro in the car!).

In January Apple announced the iPad, and in less than 60 days it has sold 2,000,000 of them!

I’ve just been watching some of the videos from the D8 conference and Steve Jobs was asked this questions by Walk Mossberg:

“Is the tablet going to eventually replace the PC?”

This was Steve’s reply:

“PC’s are going to be like trucks, they’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value. But they’re going to be used by one out of X people.  And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy, people from the PC world like you and me, it’s going to make us uneasy because the PC has taken us a long way, it’s brilliant.  And we like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, I think it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people.  And because it’s change, and a lot of vested interests are going to change and it’s going different.”

Check out the video here, the question pops up around 3:53

So, Steve at least can see a time when the PC is going to be less important.  He is reluctant to give an estimation, but could we see Apple starting to roll the ball now?

With the increased attention on Apple’s mobile devices such as the iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad, increased portability of the Mac platform, the mobile hardware, and dropping the Apple Design Awards for Mac applications, I think Apple are stating their position for the future: Computing is going mobile, and we’re here to lead it.

After some searching, I found some magic AppleScript to do the job for me!  After some remembering, I managed to execute that AppleScript on the command line.  Here’s what I did:

$ osascript -e "get volume settings"
output volume:0, input volume:50, alert volume:100, output muted:true
$ osascript -e "set volume output volume 50"

The first command showed me what the current settings were, and the second command allowed me to change the volume to 50%.

I’m not sure what update brought this, over the past few weeks we’ve had the 10.6.3 update, though I suspect it was the recent iTunes 9.1 update, I’ll check with my Mac Pro back in Aber, I haven’t updated the iTunes on that in a couple of weeks…

Image is copyright Apple.

Dropbox offers both free and paid for storage online, the free storage has a limit of 2GB, whereas paid sotrage has a limits of 50GB and 100GB depending on how much you want to pay.

If you use the free option, you’ll start off with so much storage, and if you invite friends to join the sservice, Dropbox will add more storage to your account!

If you want to help me out, click here

Dropbox also integrates really nicely with Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, it feels just like another folder on your computer.  Drag and drop stuff into the folder (or cp/mv on the command line ) and Dropbox will sync it to it’s online servers.  If you go to another computer that you’ve installed Dropbox onto, it’ll download any new content!  They also have a nice web interface incase you don’t have permission to install the software on your computer.  Lastly, Dropbox allows you to share files with other Dropbox users, which is really quite handy!

# search for all instances of an executable in $PATH
function whence {
for i in `echo $PATH | sed "s/:/ /g"`
do
/usr/bin/ls $i/$@ 2>/dev/null
done
}

It’s nice and straighforward, nothing complicated about it at all.  In fact, to let everyone on your system use it, you could just stick “#!/bin/sh” at the top and stick in a file in /usr/bin !

Today, I wanted to find a man page, the sysidcfg man page to be precise.  Instead of doing the usual trick (`find / | grep sysidcfg”), I thought I’d modify `whence` to look for it for me, and seeing as it’s no longer `whence`, I called it `whenceman`:

# search for all instances of a man page in $MANPATH
function whenceman {
for i in `echo $MANPATH | sed "s/:/ /g"`
do
/usr/bin/find $i/ 2>/dev/null | grep -i $@
done
}

As you can see, it’s very similar, and you could do the same thing by putting it in /usr/bin so everyone could use it.

Anyhoo, I’ve found an answer, and I think it’s rather good.  It’s called Gruml.  It basically replicates Google Reader functionality using a local app.  It’s in beta at the moment and it does feel quite “beta-ish”, but I’m hoping for a Mail type solution where I can view my old feeds and entries offline if I want to.

Gruml has some nice features that should be really good when it matures:

• Tweeting articles
• Post articles to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and more
• With the help of another blogging app (like MarsEdit) post articles to your blog
• Post notes
• Organise articles into folders

Overall, I’m quite impressed, it’s won a place on my Dock and will open when I log in, it *should* place itself next to Mail too.

First up, I’d like to say that the lack of an SD card reader really doesn’t bug me. All my photos are stored in iPhoto, I transfer them there via a cable from my camera. And this is, perhaps, one of the reasons why people seem to hate the fact there is no viable file system on the iPad. Windows users are used to dragging files around, Mac users (with the introduction to iLife) have enjoyed the magic of self-organised photos, movies and music. Windows users have applications available to them, but many don’t see to use them, Mac users seem to like the increased productivity iPhoto and iTunes gives them.
I believe in a number of years, all these files will be gone. File space and network speeds will mean that compression is no longer needed, so people will only have to concern themselves with Photos, Documents, Music, Spreadsheets, Movies, etc…Apple know that the desktop isn’t ready yet, but the mobile platforms of today are.
Having said all of that, Apple have created an accessory for connecting a camera via USB or by using a SD card.

The lack of Flash doesn’t worry me either. I visit very few sites that require Flash to get the most out of the site. Most Flash on the web seems to drive adverts. It’s a shame that Flash games won’t run, but I tend not to play games that often…
Flash videos can go, with the introduction of H.264, YouTube doesn’t need Flash and neither does a number of other sites offering video streaming.

iPad. I guess it could conjure the image of an Apple branded nappy:

However, I feel the name has slightly more technical and historical background.
In the late 1980′s Xerox PARC’s Mark Weiser coined the phrase “ubiquitous computer”, a term to mean “computing all around us”. He believed that we were entering a new era in computing. We’d had the mainframes (one computer to many people), we’d had desktops (one computer to one person), but now we were entering the ubiquitous era, with many small (perhaps task specific) computers serving many people in everyday life.
PARC created three devices in the early-mid 1990′s, the tab, the pad and the board.
The tab, a small palm device that ran applications on a server and the GUI on the device, it encouraged computing on the go and had the vision of always being connected to the network.
The board, similar to an interactive whiteboard today, allowing many people to interact with it both over the network and physically.
The pad, a smaller more personal board, one could use a tab to drive a board. Pads ran on workstations with forwarded graphics.
Today’s iPad, in my mind, fulfils pretty much what the Xerox PARC Pad tried to accomplish almost two decades ago. The iPhone/iPod Touch is similar to the tab.

The iPad’s hardware is something to marvle at. Whatever Apple have in there it’s super power efficient as Apple claim the iPad will last for ten hours on a single battery charge, and it all squeezes into an incredibly thin package.
The tablet is powered by a 1GHz Apple A4 chip. The A4 chip is a CPU and GPU all on one chip. I’m guessing the added bonus of having this combination is perhaps less power consumption and added room in a cramped space. I can see the next-gen iPhone having an Apple chip. The A4 drives all of the applications and the 9.7″ screen which runs at a 1024×768 resolution.
The three capacities given are 16GB, 32GB and 64GB, each costs $100 more than the previous.
Apart from that, I think it will be interesting to see the first break-apart.

Pricing isn’t too bad. The 16GB model is $499 as of 31/1/10 that’s £312.79! Perhaps Apple will up this to £350, though I fancy that they’ll charge around £400 for it.

I’d like to see how the iPad is recieved when it is released. I’m also looking forward to seeing the second and third generation iPads.

So what’s new?  I’ve left Camberley, worked for the MoD over the summer and am now back in Aber living with Faye (hopefully a film of the flat coming soon).  Since being in Aber I have bought a new desk, a new chair (which is annoyingly not here), a pair of new monitors and a new shiney computer.

Let’s talk about the monitors to start off with, two 22″ things from Samsung (SyncMaster T220 apparently), here they are:

As you can see from the picture, a nice wide desk that is also quite long.  Plenty of room for lots of crap!

So, that are these screens attached to?

• 2 x Quad-Core Xeons (5500)
• 6GB of RAM (DDR3 1066MHz)
• 3 x Hard drives, (1 x 640GB, 2 x 500GB)
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 120
• 2 x DVD±RDL/DVD±RW/CD-RW drives
• Wi-Fi & Bluetooth

Guessing that you’ve either heard me shout it about, or have guesst that, yes, it’s a Mac Pro!  Here’s some pics of it:

I do love it,  I’ve quickly found that 6GB of memory isn’t very much at all, not once you start ripping DVD’s and starting up virtual machines….I’ve found that the 64-bit apps do run quite a bit faster, and don’t really take up much more memory than their 32-bit equivilants.

I still have my trusty MacBook, I’m running ChronoSync to keep the two machines in check, though I’m hoping to develop an open alternative in the next year or two.

Some last pictures before I finish this off, one of my main desk, and another of my desk from last year:

How exciting!  I may get it around Tuesday (fingers crossed), so that’ll mean I’ll get to install it before I go back to Aber next Friday