Jeff Carlson chats with Chris Breen on this week's Macworld Podcast to talk about what he likes and dislikes about iMovie '09, and whether it's worth upgrading or if people should jump to Final Cut Express instead.
John Siracusa at Ars Technica turns his attention to ebooks in this lengthy piece, bemoaning the slow state of adoption at the mainstream level and making the oft-missed distinction between ebooks and ebook readers.
Google has released Google Sync for the iPhone and other mobile phone platforms. If you rely entirely on Google Calendar and Gmail, it might be worth checking out, but beware, since it deletes your existing contacts and calendar information during setup (this is because it's setting up an Exchange account on the iPhone, not due to anything wrong with Google Sync). We'll stick with other syncing solutions for now.
The xkcd Web comic has an excellent two-panel strip that lays out just how bad guys would go about getting through strong encryption if they really wanted to. Hint: it's cheap, easy, and doesn't involve distributed computing.
Gmail Labs's Task List feature, released this past December,
has come to the iPhone. The new mobile version available at gmail.com/tasks is very similar to the
original, enabling users to add and delete tasks, and manage several
lists. Unfortunately, also like the original, there's still no syncing
with Google Calendar (and thus with iCal).
Fraser Speirs, who develops the FlickrExport plug-in for iPhoto and doesn't pretend to be unbiased, offers a detailed look at just what iPhoto '09's Flickr support provides in this blog post. Our take: iPhoto's built-in support will be sufficient for basic uses, but serious Flickr users will stick with Fraser's FlickrExport or one of the competing plug-ins.
Joe Kissell wrote the book on MobileMe, but also knows it's not the best solution for everyone. In this Macworld article, Joe explores other ways of getting a similar range of features.
Apple has changed its iTunes Plus upgrade policy, allowing you to pick individual tracks and albums to upgrade and remove digital rights management protection for songs you bought with DRM enabled. Upgrades are still $0.30 per song and $3.00 per album in the U.S. market.
The App Store really does contain more than just games and novelty programs. Jeff Carlson spotlights eight applications that designers will find helpful in his article at CreativePro.com.
Although Seagate has yet to respond to our inquiries about how Mac users can update buggy firmware in a wide selection of buggy Seagate drives, Steve Maller reports that Seagate tech support walked him through building a CD that booted his Mac Pro into FreeDOS, after which he could run the firmware updater. PowerPC-based Macs and drives in external cases are still out in the cold.
Apple has announced it will begin shipping iLife '09 on 27-Jan-09. The latest version features major upgrades to iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand; comes free with new Macs; and costs $79 for all other users.
As part of Macworld's 25th anniversary issue, Adam wrote an article about what he feels are Apple's six worst Mac-related products of all time. It's pure opinion, so check out the reader comments about what was - and should have been - included.
In MacVoicesTV episode 917, recorded at Macworld Expo, Tonya plays along as Andy Ihnatko plans to take over NASA and then they both talk about Macworld Expos past, present, and future. Bob LeVitus and Bryan Chaffin join them midway.
Macworld reports that the specifications of the $999 polycarbonate MacBook, the last of the white-shelled models to be sold, has had its graphics card upgraded to the Nvidia GeForce 9400M. The preinstalled system memory was raised to 2 GB as well.
Forgot to post this earlier, during the bustle of Macworld Expo, but here are my Apple-related predictions for 2009, as solicited by our friends at Macworld before the show. Note that part of my second prediction has already come true. Score!