tech ronin

Rumor: Media iMac and Apple iPod Speakers

I'm hoping this $500 iMac that is incredibly small according to Think Secret is really happening. As I see it, we've got a dedicated media computer for some - especially the Windows user who feels he needs to keep his PC. The media iMac being so small, will fit on the desk somewhere next to the iPod. The software running will be iLife - the perfect media computer software. The parallel universe to Microsoft's business-oriented Office suite. Steve has said he is targeting the consumer market (quite some time ago now) and a cheap iMac certainly helps with this.

Its size benefits will include the ability to stand the Mac on its side or put it below a display or monitor. - Think Secret

Or, the *media* iMac is the third entry into the Macintosh home entertainment center with the iPod being first and the Airport Express being second. We need a computer in our home entertainment centers these days because we want to control our music and digital video recording and playback and who knows what all. A tiny iMac that can use the TV as its display device seems perfect for this task (there's no mention of an RGB out but perhaps an adapter would do this).

And, don't forget AppleInsider's rumor that Apple is coming out with its own brand of powered iPod speakers. This is no accident. Apple is moving into the consumer space and with iPods selling like hot-cakes, now is the time to extend its brand. Up till now, Apple has been satisfied selling third-party consumer items like cameras and iPod speakers. Apple used to sell a camera and I think they should go back to that with all sorts of iPhoto and iPod synching features perhaps or I guess they could add the camera to a real photo iPod.

OK. Back to the real world now.

Hot Rumor: Headless $499 iMac

You know I'm the quite the rumor-maven. And my rumors don't always pan out - the nature of a rumor perhaps. But this would so rock that I must pass it on. Yesterday Think Secret posted that "highly reliable sources" have confirmed that a "bare-bones" G4-based iMac is set to be announced on the 11th - the morning Steve Jobs does his keynote at MacWorld.

Today, AppleInsider has posted that they have "multiple independent sources" telling them of a sub-$600 headless iMac. Price matters, of course and $499 rings my bell but perhaps $599 would be more easy to believe. Hoping for that lower figure.

According to Think Secret, the speed will be around 1.25 ghz and the box itself is "incredibly small". It will be in a flat enclosure with the height similar to the 1.73 inches of Apple's Xserve. The configuration is to be 40 to 80 gb hard drive with a combo drive (DVD + CD burner), USB 2, and Firewire 400. Not expected to be available immediately, but later in the first quarter.

I hope this dream comes true. It totally synchs up with my Dec 6 post about this being the perfect time for Apple to make a play for Mac marketshare. This seems to be that play. A nice bold Steve kind of play! I'm guessing there will be a visual tie-in with the iPod again.

Red Herring chimes in with their analysis of this Volkswagen entry for Apple.

[via Engadget]

Podzilla - Linux on your iPod

Looks like this is just getting started but I like it. Why? It gets away from that narrow-focus handheld model which I mostly dislike. If I buy a computer, even if it's an iPod, I want to use that computer and take advantage of what I've got.

Very early on, it was noted that the operating system on the iPod could support lots of different kinds of things. But, we've been given dribs and drabs of functionality - slowly from my point of view.

So, I like this linux on your iPod thing. The screenshot shows Podzilla's version of Linux running on an iPod. Lots of games run. It supports several graphic formats. Can't play AAC-encoded music very well. Oh, and it's dual boot so you can keep running the iPod OS as before. Cool!

[via accelerate your mac, Jordan Carter, 12/27/04]

May I Introduce: Scout Tomyris

One of my closest friends started blogging today. Scout Tomyris has been following my blog and decided to take the plunge. I gave her a gift of a year of TypePad Plus for Christmas and coached from the side while she got two blogs up and running today. Her new personal blog is called Becoming Sage and her other new blog is called WGC Netkeeper (WGC is short for Wilderness Guides Council).

Scout is a Vision Quest guide and starts as Netkeeper for WGC January 1st. They've never had a blog, but she wants to bring blogging to their party and to the vision quest community at large.

Scout is a gifted writer and her first post, Welcome to Becoming Sage, is a taste of lovely things to come. Please give a warm welcome to Scout Tomyris!

Pre-Christmas Doldrums and Tonics

Hi folks. I've been on a down for about 24 hours - crashing from overwork on my Studio Manager product and a big customization of same these last three months. Kind of a hitting the void due to not enough time spent with leisure (of course, the distinction between work and leisure when you run your own business your own way is pretty elusive).

My on-going tonic for overwork has been reading murder mysteries right before bed. The latest is Saving Faith by David Baldacci. I recently read Split Second, Absolute Power and Total Control. I enjoy reading a bunch of books by the same author. These aren't spectacular but do the job. I was pretty hooked on Ludlum's Bourne series with Identity, Supremacy and Ultimatum a while back.

The point is to get out of work mode and do something that's just fun and satisfying. Something that doesn't let you make it into something productive. You don't need to underline the book either. Definitely in the tonic category. Reading impractical books like The Cult of Mac and Coast of Dreams California on the Edge has been a good diversion too.

But, like I said, yesterday the holiday blues hit and I didn't know what all went into it and have found that trying to sort it out is usually a futile effort. So... I did a little shopping (as in shopping therapy) at my local Mall - the lines weren't bad by then - and actually found a nice black Nike sinchilla top for my trouble at 30% off. Next stop, the movies. Watched Ocean's Twelve. It's kind of slow and meandering and full of actors you love to watch. Still feeling at a loss after, I stopped at the local 7-11 and bought a Three Muskateers bar. Then I went home and read Saving Faith. Didn't really give that funk much room I guess.

Today was a better day. Still a little iffy but getting there. I'm planning to go out on this bright blue sunny day and take some photos with my fun little Konica-Minolta X50 camera. My first outing devoted to photography. From here till year-end, I'll be doing something really fun and impractical every day. Count on it!

To top the day off, I found a couple wonderful inspirational quotes on Tom Peters' site today:

"Nobody can prevent you from choosing to be exceptional." - Mark Sanborn, The Fred Factor.

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." - Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde's Wit and Wisdom

Mac App Snippets Dec 17

I got back into Quicksilver today and realized how great it is for getting to things FAST! I often forget that it's there, so am mostly reminding those of you who have discovered it but haven't made it a habit to keep at it. Every time I use it, it gets better and easier and more powerful. Today my Powerbook cursor went wonky for no apparent reason. I couldn't make it over to the Apple menu with my cursor to restart but was able to type cmd-space-rest-return and was restarted. That didn't solve my cursor problem, so it was time to shutdown. Of course, fresh from my success with Quicksilver to restart, I tried cmd-space-shut and was able to shutdown even though my cursor didn't work. I'll continue my experiments because every time I do I discover more cool stuff.

Writing in Marsedit again today. I love the smooth easy feel of this thing. But I won't be surprised if I have to use ecto on it too for the polishing stage... Wouldn't it be great if you could append things from one program to another. Just dreaming probably - a twist on Opendoc seemed to promise something like that many moons ago. By the way, Adriaan has enlisted Neil Dixon to overhaul ecto's icons. Competition is working already...

StickyBrain 3.1 just came out and has Palm synching. That should be a great boon to my Zire 72. According to Chronos, this is the only note manager that synchs to Palm. Wonder how much space it will take up. I'll get back to you on that one. Meanwhile, I'm using StickyBrain more and more. I like it better than NoteTaker and Circus Ponies Notebook. It's quicker. But I'm still learning...

OmniOutliner 3 and 3 Pro are out in Beta. These things are total eye-candy. I'm a sucker for that so will most likely be upgrading. Can't decide if I should get Pro or regular. Will create a special subscription in NetNewsWire to see what people are saying about it to help me decide. These special subscriptions typically with Blogdigger and Pubsub subscriptions reflect my love of non-commercial information sources. Kind of a Wisdom of Crowds sort of thing. I have the book by the way and it's quite excellent.

Upgraded to OS X 10.3.7 without a hitch. Seems to be limited to bug fixes when you get right down to it so not very exciting - at all. Hoping Tiger will come out sooner rather than later.

Marsedit vs. Ecto: Torn Between Two Lovers

OK. I'm learning. Both Brent Simmons and Adriaan Tijsseling commented on my first post and provided additional information. Yeah!!! This works. So now, with further education, I have more thoughts.

Here are some quick corrections:

ecto is not inherently Metallic. You can choose between Metal and Aqua skins. One point for ecto.

ecto is vastly more powerful in its image handling options than Marsedit right now (point for ecto) but Brent is planning to add more options (1/4 point vaporware credit).

Both products will be using Apple's wysiwyg editor when released in Webkit - expected early next year. Meanwhile, Adriaan released his own unique version of wysiwyg so that those who can't deal with raw html can still blog. Now. He was willing and able to do the hard work to make it real now. While rough around the edges, for newbie bloggers who don't speak html, something is better than nothing. I was used to the old ecto and my guess is that new ecto users will adapt more readily to the new wysiwyg way.

ecto does indeed have lots of cool extras not available in the brand new Marsedit 1.0. Adriaan mentioned ecto's way cool new Amazon tool, for example. More points for ecto.

Now, I'm more optimistic that we'll see two complimentary tools in this market. Ecto is well-ahead in the delivery of cool options at the moment. These leading edge options will appeal to the more programming-oriented blogging old-timers - the most influential, google-juiced part of the blogging community.

And then there's Marsedit bringing up the rear with a more mainstream offering that will appeal to the rapidly growing new-blogger crowd who wouldn't know a tag if it hit them in the face. They're the normies who use 10 - 20% of the features of the programs they use.

MarsEdit's main point is to be a literate weblog editor: an editor for people who love writing - Brent Simmons

And since Brent has lots of cred with those same old-timers because of his fantastic NetNewsWire product, Marsedit won't be pigeon-holed as just a newbie tool. As it gains features, it might keep getting a chance to overtake ecto.

Now that Adriaan got me to check out the new Amazon tool, I'm back to using ecto again because I frequently talk about products and like to provide Amazon links with them. The Amazon tool will save me a lot of time and might even make me a buck or two in affiliate royalties. And I often need to do thumbnails, enjoy ecto's drag and drop and extra image settings so Marsedit currently comes up short there. But that doesn't mean I won't use Marsedit for less demanding situations.

For the future, I'm hoping that ecto will steal a bit of Marsedit's polish and that Marsedit will keep adding capability. And equally, I'm hoping that Marsedit will continue its stated intention of appealing to writers first and foremost maxing out the look and feel and ease of use while ecto keeps pushing that bleeding edge with all sorts of rich options for creative expression, personalization and time savings. The blogging, web services and RSS space is exploding with new technology and opportunity and there's lots more to do to keep these guys busy.

This post is brought to you compliments of Marsedit, but I just fired up ecto 2.1.2 to edit my last post so I could easily add in Amazon links to two specific camera references I made. See what I mean?

Blogging Era Requires More Explaining by Sellers

In the last 24 hours, there have been two times when I've wanted to know why companies are doing what they are doing:

Now that I know that Apple has deliberately broken iPod support for Real Networks-purchased music, I want a good explanation from Apple on why I should put up with limited choice for where I buy music to play on my iPod. And it better be a good reason. Help me feel better about what looks like a customer-be-damned move."

As those of you have been following along know, I've been on a digital camera kick lately. My limited research into the current state of the art in affordable pocket cameras has left me with a lot of questions. Wouldn't it be nice if the major camera players would give us a clue as to what they are up to? They could tell us about the trade-offs they are making between picture quality and portability. They could tell us why Canon's SD300 camera is better than Minolta's X50. They could go into detail for those of us who want more than the number of megapixels and size of the LCD.

If companies would bother to explain what they are doing, they would give bloggers the information they need to further explain this stuff to everyone else who cares. Bloggers are a curious lot as a general rule. We want to understand not just sort and list. The era of corporate silence is over. Come on people, at least tell us your side of the story in enough detail so we don't have to speculate blindly.

Marsedit vs. ecto

Marsedit 1.0, Brent Simmons' new blogging software hit the streets this week. I checked out the first public beta when it came out in September and quickly reverted to ecto. Now that the final is out, I'm back using it again. Right this minute, I'm preferring it to ecto.

Marsedit is so clean, so simple and effortless. That's a huge accomplishment - especially in a 1.0 release. This is my third post with Marsedit. Looks to be a formidable competitor for ecto 2.1. This is not a full review by any means, though. A feature by feature comparison may show that ecto is more feature-rich and has other advantages.

However, I have a lot of respect for Brent Simmons and would not be too surprised if he succeeds in blowing ecto out of the water. Here are some quick comparisons

ecto is metallic, marsedit is not

ecto has wysiwyg, marsedit does not

Even though I was very excited about the wysiwyg editing in ecto when it appeared not long ago, it hasn't been trouble-free. I frequently had unexpected results that would take some time to sort out. I would need to skip back and forth between wysiwyg and html editing to get what I wanted. It's been a little frustrating, frankly. But then, all my problems occurred with the beta version. I just got the 2.1 update and haven't had a problem with it so far.

After a fairly rocky experience using ecto 2 beta, I was more open to trying something else - like Marsedit. There are two things I like about it: (1) It feels rock solid and (2) it feels like a polished end-user-oriented product, not a programming tool.

Ecto is struggling a bit sorting out its wysiwyg and html environments. If that's resolved well with a really strong wysiwyg environment, all else being equal, I will probably abandon Marsedit for the greener pastures of wysiwyg on ecto.

But, this week, it's Marsedit. Since I'm a proud and happy owner of both products, I'll keep you posted as I put more miles on Marsedit and keep an eye on ecto's progress. My hope is that both products will find success and occupy slightly different places in the marketplace. That way, I can use both as complimentary tools depending on my needs in a particular situation.

Checking Out Cult of Mac Book

If you've got a Mac fanatic friend, this is the perfect Christmas gift. Or do what I did and buy one for yourself. The Cult of Mac cover alone makes it a cool gift. Looking at the cover puts a smile on my face. The $40 book is 35% off - $26.37 at Amazon.

Leander Kahney looks at the Macintosh lunatic fringe. The people who do things like spend their weekend driving to Apple store openings and waiting in line the night before. Tatoos, antique Macs, custom hardware mods, Steves worship and more. This 268 page large format coffee table book is densely packed with photos and stories.

Here's the Steve Wozniak quote about the book that hooked me:

The Macintosh is more than a computer. It's a way of life.... This book is about what it is to be a Macintosh person. It gives insight into the greatest love and loyalties of any product of our era.

Sure, it's more marketing when you look at it one way, but the quote made me think about my own experience. When I chose to specialize in Macintosh in 1986, it was a sacrifice financially - I could have gotten clients faster by going PC. It was a risk. I picked what I felt was the far better computer and responded to the unique statement Apple made with the product. The 1984 Superbowl ad was key. I was starting my business at that time and the success of my business was on the line. I went with the promising underdog and have stuck with Mac ever since.

I've only read a fraction of the book and I can't tell you yet whether the concept is fully realized. The look is 100% there. Just reading a few pages, I'm not as impressed with the stories. Hoping to find a few gems in there, though.