Blogitech from Chris Maddern

…one CS student’s views on a blog-saturated industry
September 9, 2008

The calm after the storm - Post ‘Jobs-note’

Author: Chris Maddern - Categories: Apple, Events, Hardware, News, Phones, Rants, iPhone - Tags: , , , , , , ,

So, Steve’s taken the stage and done his bit. Now it’s up to us to spend the next 3-5 days marveling at the design brilliance of Apple and how they’ve changed our lives before settling back down in to the (not unimpressive) reality that they’ve just re-engineered an existing solution to be intuitive and look very nice.

This may not be the case this time; all of the updates announced today are relatively subtle. iTunes 8 is a good for-instance. I installed it full of hopes. It looks basically the same in the frame. The new view is nice, but for the first ten minutes made my machine (QX6800, 4GB) hang in a manner briefly reminiscent of installing Crysis on my pre-QuadCore machine.

Read it all..

Free iPhone Application : Air Sharing

Author: Chris Maddern - Categories: Apple, Events, News, iPhone - Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
AppStore

I found out over on TUAW that the iPhone App Air Sharing is available free for the next week (ish). Air Sharing allows your iPhone (or Touch) to become a wireless drive for your PC / Macintosh.

I know that I for one am heading over to download it now.

(about 1 1/2 hours to go!)

Let’s Rock : Apple Event Announcements

Author: Chris Maddern - Categories: Apple, Events, News, iPhone - Tags: , , , , ,

Okay, so it’s only a few hours until Apple’s Let’s Rock event.

Personally, I can’t wait to see what Apple come out with but there’s a lot of rumours and supposition.

iPod Nano 4G Sneak Peak

iPod Nano 4G Sneak Peak


The iPod Nano is expected to be updated in both design and storage capacity.

The iPod Touch is most likely going to retain it’s specs to allow for a price drop to compete with the subsidised iPhone.

A major version release of iTunes (iTunes 8) is expected bringing a few new features; among which is the ‘Genius’ feature to allow for smart playlist generation; perhaps a feature that could be more useful if iTunes ever adopt a subscription model. But most exciting is a rumour that I’ve heard (semi-reliable source) that suggests the newest version of iTunes will be coded to be truly Vista-compliant and not just an XP version that has been hacked together to work; i.e. no more rediculously slow operation!

There’s been lots of talk of Mac Book updates; I doubt we’ll see anything on the pro side, but an Air update is probably round about due now (unless they choose to wait for the new Intel processors next year beginning) and the Mac Book vanilla may see an update now in time for Xmas.

I think the key to remember is ‘Consumer’. This event will most likely be about the consumer ranges in order to drive excitement (read: sales) for Xmas.

More to come…

(photo courtesy of engadget)

June 9, 2008

WWDC…. and I’m on my way out!

Author: Chris Maddern - Categories: Apple, Events, News

wwdc-keynote_045 WWDC’s on. Steve Jobs is on stage, and I forgot and went ahead and made an appointment for 7!!! Argh… so I’m now off out to F5 Engadget on my iPhone in a bar instead! :p.

Here’s hoping that whatever new iPhone they announce will be available in Apple stores to be cracked like old 1.0 because I definitely want! Oh yeah… did I mention… I picked up an Air and it’s amazing! I’ll be sure to post more on that soon!

Finally, new Giggle screenshots of the redesign soon: watch this space!!

 

Chris