Apple

As millions of geeks know already, Apple unveiled its new iPhone 2.0 software and App Store last Friday. By all accounts both efforts were big successes, with ten million copies of third-party software snapped up for iPhones and iPod Touches already.

Like any good geek, I joined the herd and have been spending the last few days trying (and buying) various stuff. And like any good geek, now I get to blog my impressions of said software:

For the last few years, my second-most invaluable gadget (next to my iMac) has been my Palm Tungsten C PDA. I first got it to help me manage a work project, and it quickly became an invaluable tool spare brain, helping me do everything from managing meetings and coordinating tasks to editing documents and reading e-books.

Naturally, then, when my trusty steed abruptly died of digital old age on Friday, my foremost priority was securing a replacement.

Well, after originally getting all a-twitter at Apple's announcement of the iTV (now renamed AppleTV), I'm disappointed to learn that the final product doesn't quite match my original expectations.

[Updated 12:21pm] Like all true Mac fans (and here you thought I'd gone all-Wii, all the time, eh? ), I'll be spending a lot of my meager attention today following Apple CEO Steve Jobs' keynote speech at MacWorld Expo. In fact, as I'm writing this, I'm reading updates from the continually-updated live blogs at Engadget and MacDailyNews, feeding me the latest revelations.

Slipping a site update just before Santa Claus is due to drop down my chimney (not in that sense, you perverts ), we've got new Transformers comics guide entries for Transformers: Spotlight issue #3 and issue #4, as well as issue #1 and #2 of the new Transformers: Escalation limited series.

Funniest read of the day: Mark Morford's column in the San Francisco Chronicle, with the deceptively bland title of "Apple Computer has made the world a better place".

Yesterday: Anti-virus software maker Symantec announces the existence of Macarana, a "proof of concept" Mac virus.

For those who didn't know, the Intel version of Apple's MacOS X uses cryptography on certain key applications to prevent users from running MacOS X on boring generic non-Apple computers.

This article explains how this encryption works; while most of this is too heady for us mere mortals, author Amit Singh ends the article by revealing a hidden limerick that Apple embeds in its protected applications:

For those who hadn't noticed, Apple's ubiquious iPod turned five years old today. Not that I care too much, as I don't own one, but I thought it worth noting the occassion by giving a hat-tip to Playlist's list of notable iPod quotes.

Herein my favorites, most from the ever-reliable "Look how wrong they were!" school of comedy:

[Updated 10/12/2006 8:34am] One of the pieces of news flotsam floating around the online Mac news sites today was this piece -- Apple's "Mecca Project" Provokes Muslim Reaction, originating from MEMRI and reproduced in its (brief) entirely below:

Hot off da intarweb, Apple has announced -- among other iPod-type things -- the new iTV (tentative name), a set-top box that lets you stream all your movies, music, photos, podcasts, etc. from your Macintosh or Windows computer to the television set of your choice.

It's only August 2006, but already I know what I want to see at Macworld Expo 2007:

This one's for all the Mac geeks out there.

Assorted bits of Mac geekery that tickled my fancy from yesterday's opening of the new glass-cubed Apple Store on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue:

Muslems have their Mecca (okay, technically, the Kaaba), and now us Mac-heads do as well:

Fresh off the Mac news wire today, Apple Computer has unveiled their newly-renamed MacBook laptop, thus nearly completing the transition of all their computers to Intel processors.

[Updated 2:48pm, May 2 2005] With relatively little fanfare, Apple Computer has launched their newest advertising push for their computers. The "Get a Mac" is essentially a revised iteration of the previous "Switcher" campaign, but focuses a bit less on personal anecdotes and more on spiffy stuff you can do easier with a Mac.

Either Bill Amend has been sneaking peeks in my living room window, or I have finally fulfilled my lifelong ambition to become a cartoon character.

If there was an election for the Most Attention-Getting Mac News Of The Day, today's sneak-peek release of Boot Camp by Apple would be the hands-down winner.

For those of you who don't pay attention to the geek side of life, there's a lot of trouble out of Redmond this week: