macolyte.net

My brief first impressions of some of Apple’s new offerings:

• iLife ‘06 - I’ll definitely be making a trip to the Menlo Park Apple Store to pick this up. The new iPhoto features look pretty snazzy, especially if I want to get Steph that “Sexy Poses of A.J.” calendar. iWeb is intriguing; I’m curious to see how well it does things and how customisable it is. The Podcast Studio feature of GarageBand looks impressive and would be useful if I ever get that podcast started. And watching Steve demo iMovie made me want to go out and buy a digital camcorder so I could actually have some reason to use it. But that could have just been the Reality Distortion Field.
• iWork ‘06 - BFD.
• Intel iMac - The first of the anticipated Intel Macs. I’ve been pushing Steph to get an iMac for a while, now I have a reason to push her harder. But apparently “You’ll have a better/faster machine than me” isn’t sufficient motivation for her.
• MacBook Pro - Worst Name EVER. The benchmarks were a little misleading since they’re comparing a single processor machine to what is, in effect, a dual processor machine. It only comes in the 15″ at this point, which is too big for me; I like something smaller and more portable. They also changed the ports that it comes with, but I only use USB and FireWire 400 anyway, so it wouldn’t really affect me all that much. I do like the new magnetic power adapter.

In other news, I ran all the updates available in Software Update, including the much put off Bluetooth firmware upgrade. I don’t think I did anything wrong, but it seems to have broken my Bluetooth. I haven’t checked Apple’s site yet to see if anyone else had the problem, but I will. I also had a bit of an issue with the local copy of WordPress I keep on my PowerBook for testing purposes. After blindly flailing at MySQL for about three hours, including a re-install, I did what I should have done first and checked the WordPress support forums. There in all it’s digital glory was the solution.