Blog's from the Bush

You know how it is, you deliberatly put off buying a laptop because MacWorld SFO is only a month or so away and then the big day arrives and all you get is hot air, admitttedly sweet sexy MacBook Air but still not a road warriors laptop...

So imagine me earlier this week when Tuesday rolled around and new Mac Book Pro model numbers started appearing in retailers systems in the US. Remember it's still yesterday in the good old US of A.

New faster processors, better keyboard layout & LED backlight for the 17" screen as BTO option - I'm in heaven again. So, after checking with the finance director I jump on the Apple.com.au/store website to cost one out. All looks good, 17, hi-res screen option, avoid the Apple memory and hard disks and hang-on where's the LED option?

Go back, check, definitely not there.

Check the spec's page again - yes LED option mentioned, hmmm...

Check the US Apple store, OK, do are Aussies being sligthed by Apple? Don't they know Australia was the first country to end the sale of filament bulbs? (Lets just ignore the mercury issue for the sake of this post... OK...)

As MacBook Pro's aren't cheap and I really want that LED backlight display I got on the phone to Apple and found a helpful representative that sounded as confused as I was - after a few minutes on hold I've been assured that all 17" MacBook Pro's with the "Hi-Resolution" display have the LED backlight display. Nice to know if you're pedantic like me...

Posted by craig at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every now and again you need something to laugh at... hope this one helps

[Via Parisblog]

I think this one is relatively safe for work...

Posted by craig at 9:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I knew there was reason to keep reading the APC website (even though its a dark side publication these days).

[From Finally! Apple's iPhoto Photobooks come to Australia, New Zealand | APC Magazine]

Yes you read that right, Australia and New Zealand can now buy Photobooks through iPhoto's built-in system. In fact the whole country list looks to be a bit longer than it was the last time I looked, check out the menu below for your country!

Apple's local website has been updated to show the Australian pricing but it appears that the printing is still being done overseas.

I had a quick walk through of the ordering process and a few things (like where the printing is not being done) have become apparent. The first is that it looks like you can get free shipping if you spend enough money... the next is that large orders get a gigantic 10% discount. Mind you if you're going to buy 25 or more books their might be cheaper ways to get them. Finally like the Apple Store you can can ship to any address in your account.

Now just a short wait to see what the results are like! I'll post some pictures when the book arrives so check back regularly.

Posted by craig at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

I ask you what is wrong with this post to the APC RSS feed...

Twitter, a new micro-messaging platform, might just be the tool you needs to stay in touch with friends, family and business colleagues.

read more

[From All you need to know about Twitter]

If you can be bothered reading the article about the "new micro-messaging service" - where has this article been for the last 2 years? That's not what's bugging me though - the blue bird is probably familiar to all of you reading this, it's the Twitteriffic icon, the great little desktop Twitter client for Mac users. In fact apart from a one line mention about Twitterrific the rest of the article is the fluff I've come to expect of APC.

How about using the Twitter icon ? or maybe pointing out that the blue bird that you have a the top of your feed is actually Twitterriffic's icon - something please folks using images or photo's without proper attribution is just wrong on so many levels.

Luckily APC's feed redeemed itself in a recent posting about iPhoto printing coming to Australia and New Zealand.

Posted by craig at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

[From Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime® components ]

To quote the website Perian aims to provide a single package for all your playback needs. It is a large collection of QuickTime components incorporating several libraries and therefore lots of video file formats. So all you movie buffs out there that like to rip your DVDs to your hard disk in obscure file formats this is the stuff your looking for.

Version 1.1 brings some very nice and heft features for something tagged as a .1 upgrade. The skinny according to the update notice is:

• Major performance improvements
• TrueAudio, MP1, and DTS audio support
• Slice-based multithreaded decoding for MPEG-1/2/H.264
• Apple H.264 now handles AVCHD/interlaced video
• Compatibility fixes for QuickTime 7.4 and Leopard
• Objective-C GC compatibility
• Fixed a crash in Toast
• Better subtitle rendering
• Subtitles play during MKV loading
• Snow support
• Miscellaneous bug fixes

For me personally the best thing about Perian (apart from the huge range of video formats) is the simple implementation for users. You download Perian, open the DMG and then double click on the Perian preference pane. This causes your Mac to open your System Preferences window and ask you if you want to install the Perian software - click yes and you're done.

Un-install you say? What about Un-installing? To which "Why?" would be my answer!

However, nothing simpler, no digging through obscure Library Folders in strange parts of the Mac that you'll never get dear old Gran to look at. Just open your System Preferences window, click on the Perian icon and click the "Remove Perian" button under the General tab.

Oh and if you find it to be as good as it is, how about giving the folks at perian.org a hand.

Posted by craig at 8:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

[From Official Google Mac Blog: New Google Toolbox for Mac]

Google Toolbox for Mac is a set of useful Objective-C utilities for building Mac applications, its young and in the early stages but like all Google Code projects is ready and waiting for your input!

This 1.0 version comes with its own nice little XCode project and for a first release that's described as "a little eclectic" its certainly enough to start getting my head around...

Some of the interesting sections so far:

GTMCalculatedRange.hGTMDelegatingTableColumn.hGTMGeometryUtils.hGTMLinearRGBShading.hGTMLoginItems.hGTMNSBezierPath+CGPath.hGTMNSBezierPath+RoundRect.hGTMNSBezierPath+Shading.hGTMNSColor+Theme.hGTMNSData+zlib.hGTMNSEnumerator+Filter.hGTMNSString+HTML.hGTMNSString+XML.hGTMNSWorkspace+Theme.hGTMRegex.hGTMShading.hGTMSystemVersion.h

Posted by craig at 12:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I realise a lot of you have held off on the Office 2008 upgrade/purchase (like me - lets just let them shake some bugs out first and maybe put back some of those features...) - you may be interested in the latest from the Mac developer team's "blog" over at the new Office for Mac website.

[From Mac Mojo: The Office for Mac Team Blog]

In the post referenced above they list all of the recent MacWorld SF sessions on Office 2008 and link to the Quicktime movie of the session! There's 9 videos in all so you may want to throw them on the download and catch up with them on your iPhone/Touch on the way to work - unless your significant other also wants to watch then you may as well pipe them out to your AppleTV for family viewing.

So far my favourite has been "Working with Office in Corporate Environments" but thats probably just a reflection on my return to the corporate working world.

Posted by craig at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a quick note worth passing along - the ever useful video conversion software HandBrake has move to a new domain.

http://handbrake.fr

So folks update those bookmarks to the amazing, free video transcoding software that is Handbrake. For those not in the know, HandBrake, to paraphrase Wikipedia, is free, open source, GPL licensed, multithreaded, cross-platform software that can convert a DVD into a MPEG-4 video files into a bunch of formats. For my long suffering Windows friends note the key word - FREE - originally developed for BeOS, this clever software is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. There's even a CLI for the those hard core "we don't want no stinkin' UI" geeks out there.

The really nice thing is that for the technophobes amongst us it comes with a bunch of presets for iPods, AppleTV's, PSP's and yes even your iPhone/iPod Touch, so what are you waiting for - go get it.

Posted by craig at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)