Crazy Apple News Site

Much has been made of Apple’s new tablet released this morning [Note to self: put name of tablet here after tablet is released, unless you forget], but only a select few reporters were invited back for Apple’s other product unveiling later in the day.  Announcements simply read “Meet us at the Palace Hotel at 5:00″ with the Apple logo underneath.

Members of the press were ushered in to a large ballroom near the bar area. There were chairs, a microphone and a table on one of those portable stage thingies, and that was it. Nervous looks were exchanged. iPhones were consulted, and people re-read the invite, just to be sure.

At 5:15 the lights went down and a guy in ripped jeans and a “Journey” T-shirt came into the room and turned a spot light on the stage, then left. Nothing more happened for five minutes.

At 5:20 Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller , arm in arm, came up onto the stage. Each was holding an aluminum bottle in one hand, and they were swaying slightly. Jony Ive walked in behind them, towing a cart full of crates. As Jobs and Schiller stepped into the spotlight the audience could see a distinctive Apple logo on the bottles.

“Ladish and gentlemenssss… hey, wha happend to all the ladish? Shteve, whurrrr, whurrr the ladies? Coul’ve at least invited Trapani. What’s with all the….awwww, fuggedabodit.” Shiller began, then turned back to his bottle and sat down heavily on a chair on the stage, mumbling to himself. Steve Jobs looked up and took over.

“Gennelmen… I would like to introush you to Applesh newesht product. This is shomething that Phil an’ I have been workin’ on for… for…. foralonglongtime.  Thish!” he said, holding up the bottle to the light, “Thish is… APPLE BEER!”

Only he was able to pronounce the Apple symbol. Very strange.

“Now don’t get ush wrong!” Phil said from his chair, standing up again. “Thish isn’t just som’, som’ beer made from applesh. This ish a completeere….completlish, thish is a whole new thing!” He took a long pull on his bottle again.

“It’sh true! Apple Beer is non-alcoholic! Sho you don’ hafta worry ’bout your liver. Inshtead, it’sh got a shpechisal blend of aneshthetisksks… anishtehetis…. of thngsh that make yer lips numb… AND other thingsh that make your BRAIIIIN numb!” Shteve…sorry, Steve said. He continued, “It’sh made to our most demanding speshifications!  Jony here, he made the bottlesh outta OLD CANS.  They’re recycled! Sho Greenpeashe can jus’ shuddap abouddit already. And the ingrediensh! We got shome of the besht ingreditensh your money will be able to buy! But Jony’sh gunna havta tell ya ’bout ‘em, ‘caush I godda sit down.”

Ive then stepped up to the microphone. “We crafted Apple Beer from the finest Jonagold and Fuji apples to give it it’s unique flavor, and added a carefully selected mix of natural and synthetic ingredients to provide you with all the “good” aspects of normal beer, but without all the downsides… the vomiting, the headaches, and the addiction.  Apple Beer is completely non-addicting, non-alcoholic, and won’t leave you feeling like a cat went to the loo in your head the next morning,” Jony said, holding up a bottle. “Oi! Too right! Ya barmy blokes!”

Actually that last part was Phil Schiller.

“As you can see, however,” Ive continued, “Apple Beer does still lower your inhibitions and allow you a certain degree of freedom of expression that you might otherwise deny yourself.”

“Yesh yesh, thanksh, Jony,” Steve Jobs said, standing back up. “We’re done with you. Go pash out the free shamples. Apple Beer will be available as shoon as we can get groshery stores to shell it. An’ now, Phil an’ I are gonna go get pished.”

Jony then told the crowd that Apple Beer would be priced at $11 for a six-pack, thus putting it just out of John Moltz’s reach.

Moments after Steve Jobs left the stage; iPad launch presentation completed, the Apple Pundit community began pining for the “Mythical” Apple Tablet.

“Yeah, the iPad is nice,” admitted David Pogue, “But before, when we were all waiting for the ‘Apple Tablet’ it had way more features, and they were cooler, too. Now we have a real thing, and we can’t make up new features all willy-nilly. Screen that makes little bumps where the keys on the keyboard are? Gone! Face recognition so your whole family can use it? Gone! It’s just a big ol’ iPod touch.

“I mean, yes, of course I’m going to buy one and write a missing manual for it, but I’m not gonna be happy about it.”

“I could afford the mythical apple tablet,” John Gruber said, holding his torn cardboard sign reading “will be grumpy for food” with one hand so that he could gesture wildly with the other. “It was going to be free, or at least really really cheap. But the iPad, well, it’s all ’sensibly priced’ and stuff. I can’t afford real cash monies! Who am I, that Nate guy who writes CANS? I heard he’s rolling in the dough.”

Not everyone was despondent, however. Walt Mossberg calls the iPad “The best thing ever ever ever,” stating that he “loves it more than my own left ear! It’s perfect and beautiful and everything that was ever good is in that iPad!!!1!!!!”

Slightly more rational correspondents are waiting to “see one in real life” and are withholding judgement until they experience… who am I kidding? There are no rational correspondents in the world of Apple punditry.

It’s CANS first birthday! And what better way to celebrate this momentous occasion than with a flashback episode?  Walk down memory lane with me as we review some of the previous year’s best moments.

Who can forget the introduction of Grug, the Freeverse Technical Support Orc?

A: …Grug not from third-world country, Grug orc.

Q: What?

A: Grug orc from Hordes of Orcs. Freeverse too cheap to pay employees, so make game characters do work.

Q; I thought that redhead they’ve always got all over the site does all the tech support.

A: Grug not think so! She just model, never do any real work around office.

Q: Wow, that’s rough.

A: Nah, Grug pretty happy. At least have desk job.

Q: As opposed to…

A: You ever play Hordes of Orcs? Imagine from our perspective: “Okay Grug, walk out there. Don’t worry about arrows, fire, radiation, walls, or fact that player take all your money when your head explode.”

Q: Yesh. That sounds….Kinda fun, actually. Why do you orcs throw your money when you die?

A: Can’t help it! Last thought usually “Can’t take it with me!”

Or the in-depth reporting we did on the pre-launch parties for Mobile Me:

But not everyone shares Bob’s trepidation. Bob hoards his trepidation, keeping it locked away, safe within a strongbox deep in his soul.

“With the coming of Me we shall all finally be able to transcend the myth of physical forms, not to mention have our contacts available to us from any Mac or PC. Yes, as we embrace the Me in the Cloud, the purely physical me, the one that doesn’t take stylish vacations to Cancun or Whistler, the one that doesn’t match Apple’s vision of humanity, will be left, a shell sitting in a chair in front of a late-model G5 iMac, while our spirits dance among the servers in Cupertino.”

Of course, it wasn’t all rocky product releases and accented tech support this year. We also saw the passing of one of the great ones of Open Source, Mr. Richard Stallman:

“We brought him into a nice living room with Charles in Charge on the TV. He loved Charles in Charge…” Raymond paused for a moment, his eyes moist. “Sorry… Anyway, while he was distracted by the antics of the lovable Scott Baio and Nicole Eggert, a technician came in behind him and injected 40,000 lines of pure Windows ME source code into his beard. Richard was gone before the second commercial break.”

But even death couldn’t keep RMS down, and he came back for a guest editorial, giving us all a little peek into the afterlife:

So does that mean that I, the reanimated corpus of RMS, have started using an iMac to do all my otherworldly programming and checking my email? No. I use the real æthernet, a network the likes of which you mortals cannot comprehend, to transmit my thoughts as data structures directly to those that need them. It’s like wireless, but far, far spookier and cooler. Also we get, like, 9800GBps transfer rates, so my BitTorrent ratio has gone up quite a bit.

Add in a some Fairy Magic:

And the King thought, and brought forth Music that the people could carry, and all was good. And he thought again, and the beautiful company built computers in the Air, and all was good. And at last he thought his greatest thought, and brought forth a new device, one that combined the Music, and the Air, and let people talk to other people across great distances. And the people rejoiced, for the new device was amazing and powerful. At length the beautiful company let others create programs to run on the device, and the rejoicing increased. True, it was hard to develop software for the beautiful device because the beautiful company only wanted beautiful software. And true, the beautiful device was a little expensive, but people were happy to buy it because it was so great.

and some executive cookies:

Since the launch of the new Mobile Me platform Apple has extended all users’ accounts by at least 90 days, as an apology for the flawed and awkward rollout process. But that just isn’t enough for Steve Jobs, who in a recent meeting decided that the executive board of Apple need to take this “to the next level” and personally apologize to each and every Mobile Me subscriber by bringing them a plate of cookies.

And it adds up to a pretty good year.

Well friends, I would like to thank you for your continued support and readership. Here’s to a happy second year of CANS!

Here at CANS we’re always thinking. Right now we’re thinking, “Hey, Salmon really is pretty tasty!” But we’re also thinking about what we should write on the site. This site.  And now we would like to hear from you¹ on some of the topics we’re cooking up.

So, with your comments, let us know which of the following topics you would like to see turned into a full-fledged post this week.  And we’ll see if we can’t pull off more humor and less not-writing than we had last week.

Without further ado, then, I present the list:

• OSX 10.7 To Be Code-Named “Hobbes”, Bill Watterson Hired to Design Interface
• Bill Gates Starts New Career as Fireman
• Zombie Richard Stallman Joins Microsoft Board of Directors
• John Gruber Makes a Valid Point; Brags About It for Months
• Zombie Richard Stallman Eats Ballmer; Named CEO of Microsoft in Unanimous Vote
• That Twitter Bird Icon Named California State Mascot
• Bill Gates Starts New Career As Astronaut
• OSX 10.7 To Be Code Named “John Gruber”, He brags about it for years
• Crazy new stories about upcoming iPhone 3G2.0

What do you think? See something you like? Good stories, these. And I can let you have one for a fraction of normal prices. Act now! Operators are standing on their heads.

1. both of you. All three, if you count j0n [↩]

And so, having helped Steve Jobs and the Internet save our Macs from infection, I find myself flat on my back, having lost to a regular ol’ analog people-virus. Thanks to my team of Androids I can still post, however. If I get delusional later I’ll try to write something. Those posts are usually pretty funny. At least, I think they are…

So, the basic plot for this novel is one that has been bouncing around in my skull for, oh, about ten years now.  I’ve always had a pretty good idea who the main cast would be, what they would be like, and how the plot would go.  On November 1st I sat down to finally write this novel that I’d been ruminating over, and figured that it was all going to go just like I’d planned it for the last decade.

In the second chapter I introduced a few extra characters to fill out a dinner party scene.  One of them said his bit, bowed, walked off stage and we’ve never heard from him again, as is good and proper.  One of the other ones,  however, attached himself to my protagonist and rapidly became his best friend.

At first I smiled at this little slice of life, but as it became clearer and clearer that this interloper wasn’t planning on going anywhere I started to look for ways to gently get him out of the story.  The problem was that he and my protagonist were now fast friends, and what’s worse, this new guy was actually pretty well developed and fit into the story like a gear in a Swiss clock.  Trying to pull him out would bring the whole thing down on my head.

A few chapters later the new guy gave us his life story and to my astonishment it was better than some of the life stories I had been working on for years.  My attitude to this little me-tooer switched from a slight desire to chase him off to a more appeasing stance, making sure he was comfortable, got enough face time, because he’s made the whole story work better and has just quietly suggested ways in which he can be helpful in wrapping up all the loose ends.

So, the  moral of the story is: Don’t belive you are in control of fiction during a first draft. You can be in control during the later drafts.

The good news is that I’ve written over 32,000 words out of 50,000, which means I should be done with the NaNoWriMo challenge a bit earlier than the end of November and can probably get a few words about this whole Papermaster thing up before it blows over.  Is it just me, or does Papermaster sound like a terrible hybrid Print Shop/Filemaker program?  Everytime I see his name on news sites I wonder how he got it.  I can only think it was a joke at Ellis Island some years ago.

Anyway, be good, have fun, I’ll be back with some Not-Entirely-Sane Apple News soon.

So, The Crazy Apple News Crew (CANC?) leaves early tomorrow morning to go to Colorado for a day.  We’re going by plane (but by biplane. This is the 21st century, not the 19th.), so the title doesn’t really make any sense at all. But my question to you all is: What does one do when one is in Fort Collins?  We will immediately post any and all Crazy Apple News Items((CANI? Sounds like an Italian dish.)) we come across in our travels.  And by “immedately” I mean, “Whenever we can get a network connection. Some of us don’t have iPhones, ya know.”

So, to sum up: What does one do in Fort Collins and expect some microblogging from the road. Hopefully.

Okay, over and out.

You may have noticed a brief outage earlier today. Hopefully, looking at the site now, you’ll see why that happened.  This should be the last theme change for a while.  Until they come out with a Snow Leopard theme, anyway.

We thought this new theme was a bit more Appley.  You know, more Leopardy, less Linuxy. More iTunesish, less Amarokesque.  Also, you may notice a newish buttony thing down on the right hand side…

Apple took iDisk in a new direction with the release of Mobile Me.
For years, the iDisk icon has been the now-all-too-familiar “some kinda network-magic-ball” on a hard disk, suggesting that an iDisk is, well, a hard drive on the network (or possibly the other way around. I’m not sure.) Now, however, the iDisk icon invites you to explore something entirely new. Specifically, it invites you to explore worlds where you can ride with your improbably-proportioned friends on a magical wingéd horse named Feathers into a fluffy cloudy mauve external disk in the sky.
This is a movement sure to be met well with the under-12 crowd, a group that makes up a significant number of Apple computer purchasers.
“I like it a lot!!!!!!” said a person who was not allowed to tell me their name because “Mommy said I shouldn’t talk to bloggers”. “It’s a cool new picture, and I can store all my paintings of princesses on it! It’s so pretty! I named it “pretty fairy”! And I like the prple [sic] color too!”
While we at CANS would never admit it, using the new iDisk makes us feel like royalty. Pretty royalty. Not, like, Prince Charles or anything.