Happy Snow Leopard Day!

Well, on Monday Apple announced the release date of Snow Leopard as Friday 28th August 2009 - ScreenCastsOnline publication date! Despite several people suggesting that Apple scheduled it on a friday to coincide with ScreenCastsOnline, that wasn’t the case, really! However, the issue was... do I do an install show using the developers build in my possession and hope that the final retail build had no surprises? Or do I wait until I get the final version of the build and leave it a week before doing a Snow Leopard install show? I figured that they Apple wouldn’t change that much, at least not in the install so I opted for the first. So the results of my labours are published in this week’s show - SCO0213 -Snow Leopard Prep & Install. This is a full free show and the links to download the show or stram it are on the webpage. As I write this on the release day, it transpires that the build I used to record the show, is actually the final build released on DVD to developers, so I had no last minute changes to cope with. Just as well really as the show took twice as long to put together as normal as I had to resort to using some live video footage to capture parts of the install process - I hate doing that! Anyhow, I hope you find the show informative and helps when you do your own Snow Leopard installation. As an aside, after seeing all the buzz surrounding the release, plus Snow Leopard updates being available for Mail-Act On, DropBox, 1Password3 and SuperDuper, I threw caution to the wind and installed Snow Leopard on my main production Mac Pro (having several backups and a spare machine of course). The install seemed to go fine except for a rather worrying kernel panic at the end. All seems well following a reboot and I have to say that everything does feel a lot snappier. I'll probably take some time off over the Bank Holiday (yeah, Don, sure...) so may not be able to give it a full workout until next week but I'll keep you posted. I hope your upgrade goes swimmingly!

Click to read more ...

Did I mention...

I don't think I did!

I'm delighted to have been invited to speak at this years Blogworld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas (Oct 15 - 17 2009) I'll be presenting a session on Saturday 17th at 3:30pm covering "Creating ScreenCasts". You can find a full list of sessions here.

As you may be aware, BlogWorld and New Media Expo were previously two separate conferences which merged earlier in the year. This will be the first combined conference making it a much bigger and significant event.

I've been fortunate enough to attend the New Media Expo (or whatever it was called for that year!) for the past three years and it's always been an amazing event, with lots of opportunities for networking and learning all about the industry. It will be interesting to see how it has evolved and see just how much buzz is generated in its new form.

Should be an exciting time.

Goes without saying that if you're headed that way too, I look forward to getting the chance to say hello.

Click to read more ...

Yes, I know you're excited but...

Now as you know, I'm as big a fan of Apple and OSX as most of the readers of my blog, but I just want to try and set expectations a bit with the upcoming launch of Snow Leopard on Friday.

Leopard is a stellar operating system and Snow Leopard will make it even more stellar, but it's a bit like an iceberg, in that most of the changes are below the waterline. We'll all benefit significantly from these new changes over time as more and more developers re-engineer their applications to take advantage of the new core features.

But it's going to take time.

The cosmetic changes you'll see on Friday will be relatively low key but the intention always was evolutionary not revolutionary.

So what I'm saying is don't expect to be initially blown away on Friday when you boot into Snow Leopard, it will all seem very familiar. However, As you explore, you'll discover lots of really neat but very subtle changes throughout the OS, some not very obvious, some you'd probably not realise unless you had them pointed out to you.

Over the next few weeks, I'll do a couple of ScreenCastsOnline shows covering Snow Leopard, starting this week with a run through of the installation options and possibly some of the more obvious features. I'll follow up next week with a look at some of the subtle changes in Snow Leopard and how to get the most of it.

Just don't expect to have your socks blown off on Friday, Snow Leopard will remove them gently and carefully over the next few weeks!

Click to read more ...

Tom Tom for iPhone...

Well the highly anticipated Tom Tom "turn by turn" GPS iPhone application has been released on the world. Unfortunately, they didn't release the matching cradle at the same time but more about that later.

I was intending to hold off on buying the application until the "official" cradle was available, but following a Twitter conversation with Rob Hanson (@switchmac) it dawned on me that I had a Ped3-Auto stand for the iPhone, sent to me a while ago for review.

So with that in mind, I plonked down £59.99 ukp of my children's inheritance and bought the UK version of the app from the App Store.

A 241MB download later and my iPhone 3G S was now a fully functioning Sat Nav!

Now there are already turn by turn applications available from the App store (and much cheaper than £60 -
Co-pilot has been mentioned favourably - £25.9) but I was already familiar with the Tom Tom UI with my wife having a standalone unit, and I really wanted a proven solution (plus the cradle)

So is it worth more than double than Co-Pilot?

I can't really say as I've never used Co-Pilot!

Tom Tom for iPhone is however, a very good implementation of the traditional Tom Tom application. At last I can now pinch the screen to zoom in and out, I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to do that on the standalone Tom Tom.

Boot time is very quick and route calculation extremely speedy. It supports horizontal and vertical orientation, flipping the map round as you might imagine. I found that the short charger lead I had caused some tension on the Ped3-Auto causing me to keep the unit in vertical mode, a longer lead would allow me to use the horizontal mode.

GPS Signal acquisition seems to be much faster than the standalone unit.

As far as using the device, all seems OK. There was sometimes a slight lag in positioning as I turned a corner but the Tom Tom soon caught up, there was no problem approaching turns with instructions being given in good time.

The Route Type (Fastest, Shortest, Walking, Bicycle, etc) seem to be hidden away under advanced planning for some reason.

As usual the Tom Tom comes with a database of POI (Points of Interest) but this does not appear to be editable, and neither does the application appear to be able to be sync'd with the Tom Tom HOME desktop application. You can of course add favourite destinations and I presume this information gets backed up during your iPhone backup whilst synching.

The iPhone application also integrates with the Contacts list on your iPhone allowing you to select an address within your list to route to, and it also allows you to call a POI via the phone.

In operation, you can use your iPhone iPod app to play music and the Tom Tom will work in conjunction, pausing the music each time it gives verbal instructions. I understand that the phone will interrupt the Tom Tom if an incoming call comes in, which does give rise to the potential of you missing a turn if on the phone, but then again, you shouldn't really be on the phone if driving, should you :-)

Overall, I've been pretty impressed with the application, even if the price does seem a bit steep. It will be interesting to see if this price point stimulates other applications to charge more.

The fact that I carry the iPhone with me at all times means I now have a still camera, a video camera, an audio recorder, an iPod, an atlas, a clock, a timer, a phone, a games console, a computer and now a sat nav with me at all times (plus many more functions) all in a single device.

Truly astounding!

The area I'd like to see improved is the integration with the Car. The new Tom Tom cradle will go some way towards this with a built in charger, enhanced GPS performance, an amplified speaker for louder instructions and hands free calling. It's possible that the cradle will also interface with your car audio system via bluetooth? It's even been suggested that the cradle will also support iPod touches and 1st gen iPhones with no GPS due to the enhanced GPS built into the cradle.

No idea on the pricing for this yet, but I don't think it will be cheap.

What we really want is connectivity built into the car itself.

A little iPhone slot that you plug your iPhone into and allows you to interface with all of your cars systems. Not too much to ask is it?

The chances are that if the Tom Tom cradle does integrate in someway with the latest car audio systems, I'll probably have a look at upgrading the audio system in my car.

I may just wait until iPhone connectivity comes as standard with all cars before looking to upgrade that.

Click to read more ...

See, I told ya.....

Rumours abound of an Apple event in September.

Actually, Apple always hold an event in September, usually to launch a revamped iPod range for the Christmas period.

But as I mentioned in my previous blog post, immediately, everyone starts speculating about the "tablet".

Within a few hours, Jim Dalrymple of The Loop publishes a blog post:

Very reliable sources familiar with the product have said speculation of the tablet being introduced during the September event are flat out wrong. The Apple tablet, they said, would not see the light of day until the first part of 2010.

Now although Jim doesn't say so, this is a clear intervention from Apple to say "Hang on guys, it's not going to happen this year! Let's just calm down a bit"

I have to say though, I'm surprised that 2010 was mentioned.

Click to read more ...