greenthinks

Chris Pirillo on Apple and MS:

Don’t underestimate Apple; they’re moving hella quicker than Redmond these days. Front Row isn’t close to an MCE competitor today, but it won’t take much to tweak it to deliciousness. Pretty soon, I expect Apple to start selling computers that are “iPod-compatible.” Watch it happen, folks. This isn’t about surfing the Web anymore – it’s about having a lifestyle that doesn’t require you to think or reprogram. The days of the blinking 12:00 are long gone, but it’s obvious Microsoft and its vendors don’t know that yet.

Russell Beattie:

Infinite Loop – I caught the West Wing on television for the first time in a long time (since the election, I think, I stopped watching it since then really). It dawned on me how ridiculous it is to focus a television show on such a unique individual as the President of the U.S. And now they’re doing another one with Gina Davis? So wacky. I was thinking after this morning’s Apple keynote that Hollywoood should create a show loosely based on Apple computer, no? It’d have a enigmatic, yet complex leader, various VPs with ranging agendas, crisises would not involve asteroids hitting the earth or Norht Korean terrorists, but blogs leaking confidential product plans and competitors launching similar products, IP theft, etc. You could have cameos by luminaries in tech. You’d have a picture-perfect antagonist in a Gates-like Billionaire of a competing company, etc. Quirky programmers and French-born directors of Engineering would add a light element. How much more drama could you want?

Terrific.

The conventional wisdom about Apple’s announcements tomorrow says that Apple will be introducing some new iPods. Maybe a new set of higher end iPods and perhaps a pink Madonna iPod nano.

Some people have been talking about a video iPod, but most experts have poo-pooed that idea, saying that Apple would need to re-engineer its online store for movies and that bandwidth, and the deals with movie studios necessary for such an undertaking, are not in place.

However, today another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Every week on Tuesday Apple updates the Music Store with new music. This week Tuesday came and went with no new music, no newly released albums, no new additions from older catalogs.

So even if the more conservative prognostications are accurate, it seems that Apple is at least updating the iTunes Music Store as well tomorrow. It may in fact be more than that, however.

MacRumors reports that a new iTunes version may be released sometime soon. They guess it is 5.0.2, but I would put more money on 5.1. iTunes 5 was a typically underwhelming x.0 release (remember v4.0?) and now Apple probably plans to add all sorts of more interesting functionality in point releases over the next year or so.

It might even turn out to be more significant than that. Think Secret is now speculating that Apple will indeed release video iPods tomorrow and that the iTunes video store will debut. My take is that Apple will announce such devices without the vital functionality (vital according to Apple executives) of ripping DVD’s to one’s HD, but with big collaborations (e.g. BBC) and with a big push towards music videos and vlogging. The company will then attempt to use its iPod cache to exert pressure on the government and the industry to make ripping one’s own DVD’s for use on one’s video iPod a legal and feasible reality.

Well, here’s hoping…

James Rocchi, critic for Netflix, posted this from the recent Toronto Film Festival:

Oh, and the Press Office computers are Macs; wow, that’s awesome, because I want to deal with learning a whole new OS that doesn’t support Movable Type fully when I’m busy.

So I thought about installing Movable Type before posting this (since I’m a Wordpress user), but the install is way too work intensive for such a simple investigation. So, having not ever used MT before, I will venture a guess as to what Rocchi is talking about here.

Like Wordpress, MT probably has a WYSIWYG element in the post composition tool, which makes use of either MIDAS (Mozilla) or MSHTML (Internet Explorer). Safari (and Webkit) did not support either of those methods of in-page editing until version 1.3/2.0 (for 10.3 and 10.4 respectively). However, according to many of those involved in tools using those technologies, like the Writely guys and the TinyMCE guys, even the latest release of Safari cannot really support full use of those engines.

So James, it’s not that the Mac is incompatible with Movable Type. It’s that the WYSIWYG interface in MT is not supported at this point by Apple’s built-in browser. While this is a problem that Apple should be looking to address ASAP, it is certainly not a game ender, since most blog posts are just paragraphs of text anyhow.

Update: As Drew points out in the comments, James Rocchi has left Netflix. Shout out to Drew and his crazy awesome site from this NYC film student!

So I tried Opera, and yes, it is super fast! On my mac there really is a noticeable difference between it and Firefox, which is even faster than Safari.

From Boing Boing...

FEMA to Mac, Linux users: drop dead: A stupid usability flaw in the FEMA website is causing frustration for some of the Hurricane Katrina survivors fortunate enough to have computer and internet access. Bottom line: if you’re not using Windows + IE, it appears that you won’t be able to file a disaster assistance claim on Fema.gov.

Absolutely unbelievable.

Cringely, on Apple as the largest threat to Microsoft:

I think Microsoft’s clearest threat still comes from Apple, though not the way most people expect. Yes, Apple is about to take Microsoft to the woodshed when it comes to Internet movie distribution. Yes, Apple already super-dominates the music player market where Microsoft doesn’t even really exist. But the real jewel is one Microsoft has to lose, not gain—the PC platform, itself. What could Apple do to take down Windows, with or without the help of Intel? What seems to me to be the answer came to me this week from a reader who had a disruptive idea that I gleefully embellished. Here are the clues. Microsoft is woefully late with its next Windows upgrade, while Apple is far ahead with even the current version of OS X. Apple is moving to Intel processors and hackers have already shown that OS X can run fine on non-Apple hardware. But Apple doesn’t want to give up its profitable hardware business to compete head-to-head with Microsoft. And remember, Apple totally dominates the portable music player market and will probably sell 25 million iPods or more this year. Every one of those iPods is a bootable drive. What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version—OS 10.4—on every new iPod in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store? It wouldn’t kill Microsoft, but it would hurt the company, both emotionally and materially. And it wouldn’t hurt Apple at all. Apple hardware sales would be driven by OS 10.5 and all giving away 10.4 would do is help sell more iPods and attract more customers to Apple’s store. Like that kid in line at the bank, it would drive Bill Gates crazy.