The above video clip is from Apple CEO’s Steve Jobs’ Worldwide Developer Conference keynote address. Basically every year Apple organises a developers’ conference where the Apple developers congregate and clap the latest announcements from Cupertino. Often, it’s been used to announce new consumer products. Case in point - this year’s unveiling of the new iPhone 3G. Not only (as mentioned in a previous post) has Apple listed Malta as one of the 70 countries it will be available in, but at the end of the presentation announcing the countries, Steve Jobs remarks that the next time someone is Malta they can get themselves an iPhone! His tone was jovial but it might be construed as condescending to our proud nation rock. Oh well we’re on apple’s site And steve Jobs mentioned us any publicity is good publicity isn’t it? I’m just glad I waited out the first gen iPhone. Now we wait with baited breath for the pricing announcements.

Thanks to my PHB for pointing this out.

I’ve finally managed to install Leopard. Took me over a week because I wanted to go out and get myself an external hdd. I did this not so much for Time Machine which I don’t have much use for at home but I wanted to do 2 clean installs so I needed something to back up to. I proceeded to install Leopard on my 3 month MacBook and on my 4 year old G5. The G5 has 2 hdd’s, one of which I cleaned after moving its data to the external HDD.The HDD (a 500gb LaCie basic model from scanmalta.com for Lm52) will also house all my software installers and backed up installer CDs in one neat place. It will also be used to back up my Mac Pro at work. This will free up some space on my other LaCie external drive which sits on the network as my media server. I’m pretty happy with LaCie’s products and chose them originally for their long standing support for the Mac platform knowing set up would be very straightforward. (more…)

We all knew that prices in Malta are ridiculously high for most things in Malta (I pay USD $65/month for a 4mb connection for example) it is now official. Thanks to Australia’s Commonwealth Bank which has started using the 4gb iPod nano to build an international price comparison index which is similar to the Big Mac index. We can now see that Malta is the 7th most expensive place in the world to buy an iPod and the absolute most expensive in the EU. Things could be worse as Brazilians have to pay about $100 more than us Maltese.

SG Solutions (part of the Gasan Group) have touted with pride that their iPod prices were comparable to those abroad, obviously they were looking at Brazil rather than the UK (which is quite expensive in itself) or the U.S. (one of the cheapest places). Besides the iPod, which is a desirable piece of tech and a commodity item rather than a necessity, it is still indicative of the woes Malta faces. Our wage increases at a rate that’s lower than any other member state whilst the prices here sky rocket.

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Checking out the blogoshpere and it appears many peeps are a bit disappointed regarding the latest Steve Jobs keynote speech at their WWDC (worldwide developers conference). My expectations were low. One last minute surprise was the availability of safari for windows. this was done as a tactic to allow web devs on PCs to develop for the iPhone which uses Safari. As a Mac user I don’t really enjoy seeing bits of what make using a Mac great being grafted onto PCs but as a webdev myself any increase in Safari’s market share can only be a good thing™.

Anyways I like what I’m seeing from the updated finder though the sidebar’s getting a bit cluttered, the fact that shares appear to have been revamped and new previews and sorting options are included, bodes well. What I’m waiting for are new print and open/save dialogues as they’re a bit sucky in Tiger.

Was replying to a post on TUAW and got a bit carried away - thought I might reproduce it here : D

Dear Santa Steve i know it’s a few months left till crimbo but there are a feww things i’d like but prolly won’t see in leopard -

1. well a new finder is a given - i’d really like to see some features windoze has that would be nice such as cut n paste of files even tho it breaks the paradigm…, file management features in open / save dialogues - oh improve keyboard navigation of same dialogue requesters

2. I’d like for the finder not to stall (and at times crash) each time a machine that was being accessed via a mounted share is switched off

3. I’d like the printer options to use tabs or icons a la prefs rather than a drop down menu with at times hard to understand names - a clearly labelled static menu makes for a better ui menu than any drop down menu.

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Apple fans the net over have had to eat some humble pie as the big fruit in Cupertino contradicted their earlier statements about shipping OS X.5 “Leopard” on time by now stating that it’ll arrive 3 months late, ie in October. They’re blaming being overstretched cos they had to get the iPhone out of the boxes by June.

Jeremy Horwitz over at iLounge had my same thoughts about Apple using coupons that will allow new Mac purchasers between now and the release to receive a free copy of Leopard on release.

Pro users are still waiting for the upgrades from Adobe to upgrade to Intel Macs, now they’ll wait for upgrades to leopard. It would make sense for them to do so cos it will save $1000s on multiple licenses in spite of the money extra speed will generate / save.

Personally, I’ve been waiting for the next release of macs and leopard but will push back my purchase. It’s funny how everything backfired for Apple - taking pot shots at MS for vista delays, then having to state leopard isn’t delayed then contradicting themselves a few days later… Screw the iphone i want a new Finder and new Macs, portables and a midrange pro (ie an iMac specced machine w/o monitor and with hdd and gfx card upgrade options that isn’t bottlenecked by using laptop components)!

Search facilities have long been one of the Mac OS’ strengths, I recall being impressed by my first Mac’s almost instantaneous find facility. And apple continued to improve it on OS X when things started getting messier on people’s hard drives as from 100’s of megabytes we’re now dealing with 100’s of Gigabytes of stored data to sift through. Up until 10.3 (panther) we had the good ol’ find utility. Come 10.4 Tiger and now we have spotlight. A feature so good, Microsoft got out their photocopiers for (according to Steve Jobs at least) and made system wide search a priority for Vista.

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