these shownotes disappeared somehow – maybe when i posted the enhanced version of this episode I destroyed them? Oh well, a mystery.
Listen to the Podcast – Time: 33 minutes 10 seconds
New Microphone
Listener Ron inspired me to get a good mic, so everyone needs to thank him in the comments at podfeet.com. Also inspired by Father Roderick of the Catholic Insider podcast – he put it perfectly – he said “it’s so FATIGUING to listen to a bad recording.”
Got the Samson CO1U USB Condenser Mic – “The worlds first USB Studio Condenser Microphone”. it even has a sticker on it that says Ideal for Podcasting!
My buddy Ron and I had fun buying it, especially the part where I got out for under $100 including the mic stand. We spent hours playing with Audacity and Wiretap Pro and system preferences and the Samson software to see if we could find as many places as possible to adjust the gain and mess things up. think we got it down right now! how’s it sound? send me feedback at [email protected] or put a comment on the website.
samsontech.com
Happy electronic day continued with getting digital cable – 6 remotes now! tv, tivo, digital cable box, stereo, DVD, and of course the Roku Soundbridge.
country update
Welcome to our new listeners from Greece and Iceland!
I see our IE usage creeping up 14% again – if you’re not using Firefox or an alternative browser and you’re on a PC, you should really consider changing for security reasons. I did a podcast on that topic a few weeks back and we got the usage of IE down to 11%, I want everyone practicing safe computing!
update on google earth
available now for OSX – specifically 10.4 and up. earth.google.com
logo looks nicer than the beta one
Apple MacWorld Expo
4th quarter: Apple revenue 5.7B, never above 4 in three years and a billion more than analysts expectations, and up 63% from a year ago. sold 14million iPods. that was an average of 100 ipods a minute for 3 months! WSJ article about tech boom coming shows an apple logo mutating into a bull.
it always was good when apple would announce to its users that they made money because we were all afraid they’d go out of business, wonder when they should stop telling us that because we’ll know they’re healthy and should just stop having such high margins.
FM receiver/remote for iPod – shows the radio station on the iPod display – works only with Nano and 5th gen iPod – unfortunately – wonder why. $49. nice accessory.
iPhoto Photocasting – like podcasting, allows you to publish photos on .mac and then others (without macs even) can subscribe to them and get updates whenever you post. uses industry standard RSS.
iMovie can open more than one project and helps to make video podcasts. bunch of new themes.
iDVD can do widescreen (gotta buy that new camcorder) and makes magic DVD’s – no editing just make me a darn DVD
Garageband – includes Podcast Studio for making podcasts, add sound and changing artwork.
Includes ducking – which is an effect when you start talking it automatically lowers the volume of the soundtrack you’ve laid in. including royalty free sound effects and music (bunches of it). that’s what you heard on the beginning of the show.
also speech enhancements so you can supposedly record your voice using the internal microphone and it sounds “great”.
Can now use iChat to do remote interviews.
iLife and iWork are Universal, which is short for universal binaries, meaning they run under PowerPC and Intel. that means there’s no penalty to buying now and getting the advantage even if there’s an intel-based mac in your future. Not sure about iLife ’06 – they have a link to an explanation of Universal but they don’t say whether iLife is or not.
Microsoft head of the Mac Business unit announced that they commited to provide Microsoft Office for FIVE YEARS. I know we all hate it, but just in case the open source alternatives don’t replace it, it’s nice to know we’ll be able to be compatible.
Photoshop under Rosetta – he said point blank that the performance would not meet the requirements of the professional. I thought that was pretty cool of him – the guy who’s always “thrilled” about everything, it makes other things he says more believable. he said it was good enough for casual Photoshop users though. I counted and it seemed to be around 20–25 seconds to open up. His demo of Word under rosetta looked pretty good though – had photos in a word file and scrolled pretty smoothly up and down (way better than on my PB 1.25GHz.
on the MacBook Pro (that’s going to take FOREVER to get used to not using the Power from Power PC), interesting things were:
display is 67% brighter – as bright as a cinema display
IR sensor by the latch for remote
4-5X faster measured in spec benchmarks – specint and specfp
built in isight
thinner – back to 1 inch
Magsafe – a power cord attachment technology that uses magnets – so when your power cord gets yanked it doesn’t pull the MacBook off the table – and everyone knows about that! patent pending…
the DVI output can actually drive the 30″ cinema display! it actually has the dual data link required to drive it.
what about the ExpressCard/34 slot – replaces PCMCIA slot, scary, but I found an article on extremetech.com from 2003 talking about this crazy new slot coming in 2004:
For many users, ExpressCard will be the first introduction into PCI Express, which in turn used to be called Next Generation I/O, NGIO, or 3GIO. However, ExpressCards will combine USB and PCI Express functionality, and will be used to replace front-loading USB cards, such as flash card readers, external hard drives, and even some wireless networking equipment. In notebooks, proponents say, ExpressCards will eventually supercede the popular PCMCIA or PC Card format.
Expresscard.org has a list of compatible devices (there’s not a lot) but there are a few memory card adapters, a memory module, a network adapter, two television tuners, and 6 interface modules. the only thing I ever used my PCMCIA card slot for was a handy memory card reader for my SD cards – no need to drag a separate device around, it was always with me.
Apple likes to be first on everything, and get rid of the old overnight, right? guess they’re doing it here too.
and finally the new Apple Intel ad is hilarious, so in your face!
Personal experience with new apps
GarageBand –
crashing because of old movie files that must have problems
cool how you can bring in artwork
explain ducking
iPhoto –
not a big user of iPhoto (I use iViewMedia Pro), but
nice to have the integration of iPhoto into GB for enhanced podcasts
very very fast – thought fast because of Intel box on stage
editing in full screen mode is fun
calendars are cool, but it crashed after I’d worked for 30 minutes on one, and it wasn’t saved, and there’s no save function either. bummersville. nice themes tho. Kinda made decisions on it’s own – like photo layout – would start with 1 vertical and 2 horiz, then changed to 4 horiz wehn I pulled in a photo.
Did go back in, got ‘er done. sent to 3 people, but had to upload 3 times instead of 3 addresses with one upload.
iWeb
only got as far as testing out the AJAXness of it – easy to drag podcasts, photos, text all over the place.
Stay tuned – more work with GB, iPhoto, and iWeb for sure. i don’t use iMovie of iDVD but when my husband starts using I’ll drop a few comments.
Apps ready for Intel
VersionTracker has added a page to show what apps are already native to Intel:
http://www.versiontracker.com/macintel/
Apple passes Dell in Market Value
Market value is stock price x number of shares, right?
Nine years after Michael Dell said he’d shut down Apple and give the money to the shareholders, Apple has passed Dell in market value, at $72,132,428,843 compared to Dell’s $71,970,702,760. Analysts expect Apple to continue to outperform competitors, citing 2006 as ‘poised to be the year of both iPod growth and, more importantly, Mac market share gains,’ with earnings growing more than 35%.
get a human on the phone:
ever want to just talk to a darn human when you call AT&T or Citibank or MasterCard, or Honda? my friend Linda sent me a website with a list of hundreds of companies and the sequence to call them!
paulenglish.com/ivr
Accessibility petition from Google
Darrell Shandrow of the Blind Access Journal asking Google to use accessible verification methods to stay in alignment with their mission statement which includes the words “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. I don’t get why Google wouldn’t WANT to make it more accessible. please check out this petition – it’s only 3 lines long so there’s no heavy lifting involved and your email information can be kept private. For some reason it doesn’t render properly in Safari (inaccessible?) but it works fine in Firefox. Check it out at petitiononline.com/captcha or if you can’t spell that just click on the link in the shownotes.
comments welcome at podfeet.com on the blog, or in email at [email protected]. thanks for listening and stay subscribed!