Crazy Apple News Site

10:00- Steve is on stage! But not made of metal, which is disappointing.

10:05- iPads are selling like really expensive hotcakes. Everyone loves them.

10:15- Doctors can show you your x-rays without you getting out of bed with their iPad. “This is where we think I left my watch,” says Dr. Johnson.

10:16- Kids love iPads too! Who knew?

10:17- The iPad…loves you. It loves children. It’s basically an angel of love and light and love.

10:18- iPad 2 gets announced today. Say goodbye to the copycats.

10:19- New Processor! Faster! Dual core! Did we mention faster? It’s faster. That’s why it’s called “A5”.

10:20- Cameras! Gyroscopes! Miracles!

10:21- It’s thinner too. Faster! Thinner! Cameras!

10:22- White iPad. ugly.

10:23- Verision and AT&T. I have nothing to say about that.

10:24- The white one is still really ugly.

10:25- The prices, they no move. No come down, but no go up. So there you go.

10:25- They ship on March 11th. Take that, all you other tablets that haven’t shipped yet.

10:27- For $40 you can have a weird port splitter thing. Charge and use all at once! You know you want it.

10:30- Weird new magno-roll-up cover thingy. Looks…cool? if you like the color light blue.

10:31- A RAINBOW of colors! A rainbow that includes three shades of what amounts to “black or gray” And executive leather covers. For the discerning user.

10:32- Scott Forestall is out, and is feeling intense about iOS 4.3

10:35- iPad switch does what YOU want, baby. It’s your switch. As long as you want it to mute or lock rotation.

10:36- iPhone 4 is now a hotspot.

10:37- Photobooth demos. I’m still not over the original OSX photobooth demos. Please stop.

10:39- FaceTime. Yep. Yep.

10:41- Big stuff coming out on March 11th.

10:42- iMovie for iPad. All the Pixar engineers who have been working with iMovie for iPhone breathe a sigh of relief. Finally! a slightly larger screen!

10:44- iMovie for iPad is…a lot like the OSX version. But it’s got a cool marquee thing on the home screen, so that’s cool, right?

10:48- My limited patience for iMovie demos is coming to an end. Seriously, guys. Move on.

10:49- Steve just revealed how old he is “It blows my mind, this stuff.” He may have well added “What with the tapping and the rotating and the looking and the making movies? I don’t know.”

10:50- GarageBand for iPad. This one make sense. But still, the demo better be short.

10:52- Moving on. Okay, thanks for the GarageBand demo. Moving on now. Please?

10:53- “This is a window into a much larger piano”. I’m pretty sure that’s not how that works.

10:55- Apparently the rest of the demo is all GarageBand, all the time.

10:56- Drums. DO NOT USE DRUMSTICKS! Use your fingers. Or our new iSticks.

10:57- Smart guitar: the guitar is smart, so you don’t have to be.

11:00- Okay, I’m going to just be over there somewhere until they’re done talking about GarageBand. Talk amongst yourselves.

11:03- Garage band is finally done. That was painful.

11:05- “Now we made a video that I’d love to show you.” Did they make it in iMovie on an iPad 2?

11:06- Jony Ive likes the iPad 2 A. LOT.

11:09- Kinda bummed they didn’t make iWeb for the iPad.

11:11- Steve is on stage, wrapping things up…hopefully. Unless he’s got some cool news about something else.

11:12- Steve is giving a speech about DNA and technology and stuff. It sounds kinda mystical.

11:13- And that’s all folks! Thanks for joining us in joining others…or something. And remember, if you enjoyed this post, why not buy your editor an iPad 2? It’s the classy thing to do.

MechaSteve.

Jony Ive has spent the past few months perfecting an entirely Liquidmetal body for our beloved CEO and visionary. From his new skin he can rule benevolently over all for many years to come.

 

Oh and new iPads.

Well, no, nobody’s dead. I’m just tired of calling it meta-live blogging or pseudo-live blogging or some such thing. So I came up with this really emo title instead. Now you’d think I’d come up with a  better title. But you’d be wrong. This is what we’re going with.

 

The point is, Time-stamped hilarity is coming your way later today. I’m not dead. I think I’ll go for a walk.

Every Friday we publish a list of inFrequently Answered Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.

this week we talk about the newest thing in physical IO: LightPeak Thunderbolt!

 

Q: So, What makes Thunderbolt better than other stuff?

A: Speed. Pure, unbridled fastness. Faster than fast, and daisy-chainable, Thunderbolt is–

Q: a lot like Firewire. You know, Apple’s last failed attempt at pushing a new IO specification on all of us. All they do is force LaCie to make a few hard drives that are outlandishly expensive because they use non-standard ports.

A: Firewire isn’t a failed technology! It’s just not…fully embraced.

Q: What about ExpressCard?

A: ExpressCard…could have done better, sure, but–

Q: And Firewire

A: you already said that one.

Q: Ah, but I was talking about Firewire 800 this time.

A: Okay,well, yeah, Firewire 800 hasn’t really taken off, athough there are people that use it.

Q: We’ll call them “People who use macs to make movies” and move on.

A: It’s not Just…okay, fair enough. But Thunderbolt is–

Q: A lot like the ADC?

A: We don’t talk about the ADC around here.

Q: Face it, Apple makes a lot of amazing technology, but they just don’t drive hardware standards. Pretty much every connector they champion ends up in second place. Look at DisplayPort.

A: Hey, now, you can’t call DisplayPort a failed connector yet! It’s still in the works! Dell is using it! Lots of people are using it!

Q: To connect to Apple Cinema Displays.

A: Right. No! To connect to all kinds of high end monitors. And besides, what about all the changes that Apple has made? What about the death of the Floppy drive? or the death of the stylus?

Q: Granted, they’re good at showing the world what our hardware should do, or rather, what it should stop doing. I mean, using a stylus, remember that?

A: Always losing it, trying to get your finger to be precise enough on those terrible resistive displays…

Q: Or using a ballpoint pen lid, because if you used the actual pen you’d get your screen all covered in ink.

A: Yeah, those were the terrible old days. Learning some new way to write so it would more-or-less understand your handwriting–

Q: But of course, half the time you just gave up and used the on-screen keyboard.

A: Well sure, it was faster to hunt and peck than scratch and swear.

Q: Yep, yep. Well, I guess Apple has made a difference after all.

A: That’s right.

Q: Be that as it may, Thunderbolt still isn’t going to ever be popular.

A: …I know.

This just in:

Expect people all over the world to start ditching their iPads in preparation for new iPads, and expect Android tablets to start wondering why they’re not competitive anymore¹ .
Expect Tim Cook to try to be somewhere near as cool as The Steve. Expect a large number of superlatives from Jony Ive about the new device. Expect me to start subtly begging for money so I can buy one of the blasted things.
And, as always, expect a not-exactly-live post from me covering the event in hard-to-follow detail.

We’ll be interviewing a current Gen iPad as soon as we find someone who is willing to let us talk to their iPad and not think it’s weird.

1. not that they have ever really been competitive… [↩]

Every Friday we publish a list of inFrequently Answered Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.

Today we throw some fuel on the eternal flamewar and review Cinch, the program that Apple should have thought of first.

Q: So, I have a problem. It’s, well, it’s all my windows.

A: Go on.

Q: They’re not bad, you understand. That is, they mean well, you see.

A: I understand.

Q: But, well, they’re a bit unruly from time to time.

A: They start sitting on top of each other, that sort of thing?

Q: Exactly. Like, XCode will lean just enough to cover a column of text in my browser window, or Chrome will be just big enough to Obscure iTunes’ controls, that sort of thing.

A: So, it’s not enough for you to actually get mad, at them, because they’re not actually doing anything wrong, but they’re definitely acting up a bit.

Q: Yeah. I’ve tried putting them in different Spaces, you know, so that Chrome is in 1 and XCode is in 2, and that keeps them from touching each other, but it gets to be a real pain running back and forth all the time, know what I mean?

A: Some days it feels like that’s all you do, running back and forth from one program to the next, each one bouncing their icon at you, trying to get your attention.

Q: You’ve seen this sort of behavior before, I see.

A: I’ve got programs too, my friend. I understand what you’re going through.

Q: Well, what’s worked for you? How do you keep your programs in line? I mean, it seems like this is a pretty common problem.

A: There’s a great new app in the Mac App Store that takes care of just this problem. It’s called Cinch, and it’s exactly what you need.

Q: How does it work?

A: With Cinch installed, you just drag a window’s title bar to the edge of the screen to make that window take up exactly one half of your display. Drag a window to the other side and you’ve got two nicely lined-up windows, not touching each other, just sharing an edge.

Q: So I can look at things in Chrome while I work in XCode!

A: Exactly my friend.

Q: That’s a seriously great idea! Why hasn’t anyone made this part of their operating system yet?

A: It’s a mystery. One more thing, by the way. Let’s say you want one app to take full screen. All you do is drag it’s title bar up to the top of the screen and BAM! Full screen mode.

Q: That’s great. But what if I want to put everything back where it was?

A: Just drag the windows back to the middle of the screen and they’ll resize back to what they looked like before you Cinched them up.

Q: That is some seriously intuitive and useful user interface work. What kind of genius came up with that, I wonder?

A: We may never know.

Look, I’ve been publicly hating on John Mayer for a long time, now, and I didn’t get into the “Hate John Mayer” game just to get shown up by some upstart who’s been doing this a lot longer than I have. But what the heck, I like violent mood swings, so I’m happy to welcome John Moltz into the Mayer-hating club . We authors of CA*S sites that don’t update all that often have to stick together!

Someday, we can all be free of people who want to “run through the halls of [their] high school” and “break down the double doors.”

Every Friday we publish a list of inFrequently Answered Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.

This week we once again look into the best way to nurture your musical side with the newest GarageBand.

Q: What need have I, the Swan of Avon, for a band of garages?

A: Oh, hey cool, we haven’t done a character piece for a while. Okay, here goes. Forsooth! Yon mouldy poesy hath need of most vivacious melody, hathen’t it?

Q: Your words are to me as the barking of scabrous dogs. I have no need to lay down tracks and master my mix. I’truth, I have gained no small reputation as a mixmaster in yon pub “the Queen’s Boar”.

A: Full well cognizant of the impossibility of e’en the smallest part of this dialog, yet I press on, wondering aloud how one mixes in renaissance England.

Q: Verily, through skillful direction of not one, but two groups of musicians, I am able to concoct melodic mashups between such diurse sources as “A Gest of Robyn Hode” and “My Lady Hath an Ample Posterior“.

A: Verily, I can but hope that I am never subject to sickness such that I enjoy such diversions. But should such be your wont, then you would do well to inspect this latest product from the great Apple, that which more fully facilitate your entwinings and manipulations.

Q: Faugh! What could Apple provide me that I cannot provide myself?

A: A more firmly-grounded version of historical English?

Q: I dothe notte see thine pointte. My English isn’t wandering at all! What’cho talkin’ ’bout, Willis?

A: Be that as it may, GarageBand has many features in which you should be interested. It will attempt to coerce all your tracks to fit a single rhythm.

Q: Indeed, that may be of some passing value during the middle-8 bridge¹ .

A: So, buy it.

Q: Indeed? Thus you end our repartee?

A: Yeah. Sleepy now.

1. I’ll level with you: I have no idea what that phrase means. I just hear musicians say it a lot. [↩]