Crazy Apple News Site

(Since iPhone 4 fever is still going–albeit waning– we are pleased to bring you a newly unearthed journal written by Liliburn H. Jobs shortly after he settled in what was to become Cupertino. Only a few entries are still legible; the journal was found in a box tangled in the roots of a tree.)

March 21st, 1864: I was right! The tree in our north pasture is indeed an apple tree. Lisa and I have a new wager: I say it’s a Macintosh, she says Golden Delicious. We shall see. Our house construction comes along well, although we continue to await our shipment from the glazier.

August 4th, 1864: Lisa owes me again! That tree is indeed a Macintosh. When I took my first bite of it’s fruit, it was like a great, solemn chime rang out, sonorous and simple. I have named this tree “Apple 2″ because Lisa lost two bets to me on this tree. We still await our shipment from Washington. Our house is nearly finished, but still a bit drafty.

October 12th, 1864: at long last our windows arrived from Redmond. We installed them into their frames, but are not pleased with the results. EAch of the four panes has a different tint, one blue, one green, one yellow, one red. In addition, there have been a number of holes that we have had to patch, and a number of bugs seem to sneak through the frame. It is a wonder to me that these windows are so popular. I’ve half a mind to go into business competing with these know-nothings from the north, but I fear it may be too late to make significant headway in that market. I’ve got to think different.

Martyn Williams, who surely had better things to do, chose instead to write about the downfall of tr.im, a nearly unknown url shortener, who sought to compete with the equally stupid sounding bit.ly, tinyurl.com, and the almost-longer-than-the-original readthisurl.com. And we here at CANS are glad he did, as we were all set to launch into the beta testing phase of our own url shortening website.  We had already run into a few snags with our program, not the least of which was the fact that our “shortened” urls were promising to look something like “http://crazyapplenews.com/shortening/index.php/sle4231xfSEslkeyggiotr78Cvdew” ¹

We will now observe a minute of silence for the fallen tr.im, shortened to three seconds, as they would have wanted it. 

Thank you.

1. I was going to actually make that link live, but decided at the last moment not to do three hours of coding and testing for a one-line throw away gag [↩]

With the release of the newest versions of the iMac, Mac Pro, and Mac mini lines, the Mac mini has been changed from an underpowered, “me too” system into a much more powerful “me too” system. Sporting a brand new NVIDIA chipset and up to 4 GB of RAM, the mini is now actually useful. We went to our local Apple Store to interview the mini and see how it likes its new styles.
“Oh yeah. Check this out, iPhone. They came to talk to me, pal. No new story about you this week, huh? Gee, that’s too bad. Looks like mini’s getting all the attention these days! Anyway, what was your question?” We asked again how the mini was enjoying its new chipset, but it was distracted by someone looking at the Mac Pro on display next to it.

“Why are you looking at Behemoth over there? Are you suddenly Pixar employees? Do you really need 40 pounds of aluminum to send your little forwarded emails? Or maybe you think you’re gonna write the next great rock opera. Guess what? I can run Garage Band just as well as The Obelisk over there, and you can carry me home on your lap, instead of using a forklift to get Gigantor over there through the front door. Come on, step away from the monster machine.”

“It’s hard for Apple products to not be the ‘top of the line’,” said iPod Touch. “Mini’s been a weak link in the desktop lineup for a long time, and Pro has definitely let mini know where he stands. iMac? Oh no, she’s always been nice to mini, and he really looks up to her. I mean, we all do. But now that mini has a lot more power and has gotten center stage for the first time since his introduction, well, it’s kinda gone to his processor, if you know what I mean.

“But like I was saying, we Apple products are designed to be the best of the best, and when you’re constantly the runner up, it can be hard on your self esteem,” Touch continued. “I’m not proud of this, but when I went Second Generation and got my 32GB option, I kinda let iPhone know about it, you know? I tried to be nice to the Nanos, but it felt good to put iPhone in his place.” Here Touch broke off, seeing an iPod Classic walk by. “Hey, Classic! How’s your dinosaur hard drive holding up? Don’t scratch your disk! Okay, pal, you just keep running in circles, I’ll be over here surfing the web. Yeah, who’s the ‘funnest iPod ever’ now? Yeah, you just keep walking.”

“We’re all very proud of how far mini has come,” said iMac. “but he has kind of gotten above himself with this new upgrade. I mean, he keeps digging at Pro, asking him ‘how many watts he’s wasted today’ and ‘if he’s made any motion pictures yet’, and basically just attacking him in all his most sensitive areas. We all hope it’s just a phase, and that he’ll grow out of it and start acting like an Apple product again.”

Since we were getting strange looks talking to computers, we decided to talk to a real human being. Unfortunately all we could find was an Apple Store employee.¹

“We think that mini has had a pretty bad case of “Napoleon Syndrome” for a while. He’s small, but quite powerful, and threatened by the bigger and more powerful macs around him. But this new speed upgrade has made it much worse. I don’t know why he picks on Pro so much. I mean, it’s 8 cores to 2, man. Game over. But he just can’t let it rest. Still, it’s better than when he was next to iMac.”

“Hey, blogger guy!” mini yelled. “Why are you talking to crew-cut there? Listen, come here.” Dropping to a whisper as we approached, he continued, “Listen, see if you can convince iMac to come over to my subnet. She is one fine piece of industrial design, let me tell you.”

And so, creeped out and a little disappointed, we left the Apple store, without spending money.² Will the mini grow up and take his place in society? Only time will tell.

1. Rim Shot [↩]
2. which creeped out and disappointed the Apple store staff. [↩]

Today we here at CANS are happy to welcome Frasier Crane, fictional doctor and food snob onto the blog!

Many is the time that I have been preparing for a discrete little soiree in my apartment and have discovered to my horror that I have neglected to adequately explore the full range of cheeses before leaving the apartment, and must choose a cheese based only on my memory of the qualities thereof. This is quite a quandary. Do I purchase the rather nice Lingot Saint Bousquet d Orb that has only recently been made available and hope that it goes well with Bourgogne Chardonnay, or do I purchase the Pitchounet in the belief that it is a more suitable match? Naturally, this usually leads to unlikely goings-on, and more than once has resulted in my randy producer becoming amorously involved with a purveyor of wines and spirits. I’m beginning to think that she could use some therapy herself.

Thus you can imagine my delight when I discovered fromage, a small, inexpensive program for the iPhone that allows me to peruse the world’s finest in curdled milk while out shopping, and ensures that my purchase of Cendré du Beauzac will not fight with the Côtes d’Auvergne that I’ve had laid up for a few years now to truly impress he head of the Arts Council at the beginning of the 2009 season. For only three dollars I can be assured that my choices are the height of taste and sophistication. Unless my improbably-skinny brother “accidentally” erases the program and replaces it with a highly inaccurate parody thereof…

Since it worked so well for my most formidable predecessor, all I’m putting in this post is a link to a post I wrote about Delicious Library on my other site. It’s not as big as Macworld, but hey, I’ve got about 10 dedicated readers on that site! And some T-shirts for sale!

That article started out as a post for this site, but isn’t very funny. Please, no comments about this site not being very funny either.

Leap, the new finder replacement by Ironic software, advertises itself as “better than the finder” at locating both the documents you were looking for and the documents that you didn’t know you were looking for.  However, further testing has proven that Leap is better at locating documents than the actual human brain, and has therefore made the user as useless as an embarrassing vestigial tail.

“With Leap, I no longer need to use my computer,” said tehCatz66 in an online review.  ”All my documents are so easily found, I just think about them and I’m done! Thanks, Ironic Software!”  This is thanks to Ironic’s use of Bluetooth, Bonjour, and Voodoo. 

With Leap you find things based on your natural memory of that file.

says the Leap website.  Macs with wireless connections can automatically connect to your brain, then pull your memories directly from your brain, thus allowing Leap to both index your brain and know what you are looking for, both consciously, as well as subconsciously in the new beta version of Leap 2.0.  ”I won’t say there haven’t been embarrassing situations with the whole ‘subconscious search’ feature,” said Ted Leckie, one of the members of the Ironic team. ”There have.  Like that time that we were demoing the product and this girl with an iPhone walked by.  Leap was searching all the customer’s minds at the time, and suddenly the screen was full of really, really shocking images. Pure lust, in it’s most graphic form.  I mean, it’s just an iPhone!  I’ve got, like, three that I purchased with the proceeds off of Yep.  Don’t tell Tom, by the way. I told him Yep tanked.”

Perhaps the most powerful feature of Leap is the way it can 

…allow you to stumble upon not only the file you were looking for but sometimes an even better one that you weren’t looking for. 

“It’s totally true,” said another user, whose name I haven’t made up yet.  ”I was looking for my will, which I keep as a Pages document, and I found a letter my wife had written to my best friend.  I thought they hated each other, but  now I know that they’re, like, really good friends! Now I can have him over for poker on Wednesdays again! Thanks, Leap!”

Leap is available for only $59 from Ironic software, or if you have overclocked your Time Machine you can go back a couple of weeks and get it as part of the MUPromo Bundle.