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O2's flakey Web site

Monday, 07 July 2008

Well I've currently had nine separate upgrade codes from O2 and still no joy with managing to order an iPhone 3G from its Web site.

Every time I go to the site it first asks me for my iPhone number, then crashes at some point between texting me an upgrade code and placing my order. I've managed to get as far as selecting the phone and option and even clicking on the 'Place Order' button before it hanged.

Mark Hattersley | Mark Hattersley | Read more...


A tale of two cities WiFi

Friday, 04 July 2008

Different approaches to wireless Internet access in San Francisco and neighboring Silicon Valley are producing very different results, with one project springing up around the city and the other inching through regulatory procedures.

The high-tech meccas are still pursuing municipal wireless after the first bubble in that industry burst last year. The free-for-cities business model that was to have covered all major U.S. cities in Wi-Fi failed because of high costs and low subscription rates, with some thorny political battles thrown in. San Francisco was one of the most high-profile casualties.

Macworld Team | Stephen Lawson | Read more...


Acrobat's new home on the Web

Wednesday, 02 July 2008

Remember when hardly a week went by in the early months of 2008 without some sort of Apple product announcement? The past few weeks, Adobe has been doing its best Apple imitation, with a slew of product news aimed at creative professionals.

Following the debut of a trio of public betas for the CS4 versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth, Adobe kicked off this week by introducing Acrobat 9 Pro. The new version of the PDF creation and editing tool should arrive in July, and Adobe has said that it will integrate Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro into Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium and Standard editions, Creative Suite 3.3 Web Premium and Creative Suite 3.3 Master Collection editions. CS3 owners can upgrade for $159. Pricing for full versions, as well as a host of optional upgrade paths can be found at the Creative Suite page on Adobe’s Web site.

Macworld Team | James Dempsey, Macworld.com | Read more...


Jaikoz 1.12.1 - Macworld WWDC 2008

Friday, 27 June 2008

Download free full version of Jaikoz Audio Tagger 1.12.1.

Unfortunately due to a mistake on our part, an incorrect version of Jaikoz Tagger 1.12.1 was included on the Macworld WWDC 2008 cover disc.

Macworld Team | Read more...


Fun with Spore Creature Creator

Monday, 23 June 2008

Spore Creature Creator – available for both Mac OS X and Windows – enables users to create creatures using design tools taken from Spore, a virtual life game created by Will Wright, designer of Sim City and The Sims. Spore takes the Sim City and The Sims concepts to an extreme, where you create a life form from its first stirrings in primordial ooze all the way up to an intelligent, spacefaring civilization.

Spore Creature Creator lets you assemble hundreds of parts into a creature of your own imagining.

Macworld Team | Peter Cohen | Read more...


Microsoft's Golden Age: Going, going ... gone?

Monday, 23 June 2008

Oracle Corp. and SAP AG may still be bigger in enterprise applications, and Oracle in databases. Both IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. may reap more IT dollars overall. But in the ways that really count, Microsoft Corp. remains the king of the IT industry.

Now, though, Microsoft is at a major crossroads, as co-founder Bill Gates prepares to step away from his day-to-day job at the company next Monday (see more coverage on our "Bill Gates Moves On" page). Although Gates has long been disengaging from Microsoft — he turned over the CEO position to Steve Ballmer in January 2000, and his retirement plans were announced two years ago — his departure raises questions about whether the software vendor's best days are behind it.

Macworld Team | Eric Lai, Computerworld | Read more...


iPhone 3G-killers

Wednesday, 18 June 2008

The iPhone 3G isn’t even out yet and already rival phone companies are lining up to release iPhone 3G-killers.

In the last two days I’ve had my hands on two such devices. The first is a Sony Erricson C905, which Sony was kind enough to show to me at a launch party yesterday.

Mark Hattersley | Mark Hattersley | Read more...


Spam winner

Monday, 16 June 2008

Congratulations, Mary Xee, you have just sent me my 1,000 unread piece of spam email.

Frankly, this is unsurprising. Under a variety of different names you have been sending me an email roughly once every 10 minutes (day and night) for the last month. Comically, the other day you offered me a service for sending bulk emails.

Mark Hattersley | Mark Hattersley | Read more...


Adding some magic to GarageBand songwriting

Wednesday, 11 June 2008

In the previous installment of my ongoing recording project, I wrote about about how I like to use GarageBand to write songs. Songwriting involves some talent, luck and in the case of a new song I’ve been working on, some magic.

Recently, while talking to my writing partner, Allan Doy, I expressed interest in doing a traditional type blues song—nothing too complicated, just a good slow blues number in A. Unfortunately, when it came time to lay down a quick track to show Allan exactly what I wanted, I couldn't find the right drum loops at the right tempo. I cited Led Zeppelin’s I Can’t Quit You Baby as a rough take on what I was shooting for, but even that didn’t fit exactly what I wanted.

Macworld Team | Jim Dalrymple | Read more...


Fearless WWDC keynote predictions

Monday, 09 June 2008

It’s time for another edition of Wrong in Public, the Steve Jobs Keynote Prediction game in which yours truly tries (and usually fails) to determine what the Apple CEO will announce during one of his periodic addresses to the masses. Today’s game is brought to you by AT&T, the number “3” and the letter “G,” and the service formally known as .Mac.

Of course, for Monday’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote—which you can follow live at our sister site Macworld.com—some of the mystery has gone out of the guessing game. We’re all pretty much agreed that Apple is going to talk about its iPhone software development kit and maybe even give us a few details about the iPhone 2.0 software coming later this month. And if the iPhone shortages don’t have you convinced that a 3G iPhone is likely to be unboxed Monday, then maybe if we sit around long enough, AT&T can announce it prematurely.

Macworld Team | Philip Michaels | Read more...


Apple's Monopoly

Thursday, 05 June 2008

Apple has just made its sneakiest step yet to boost iPod replacement sales - using the power of bitter gamers to encourage wanton destruction of people's media players.

What has it done?

Jonny Evans | Jonny Evans | Read more...


Revisiting the 10.5.3 update

Friday, 30 May 2008

As you’re all aware, Apple released OS X 10.5.3 Wednesday, and I wrote an analysis piece on the update. However, after looking at my blog post late Wednesday, I realized that I had made a fundamental mistake in writing about what’s changed in 10.5.3: I wrote about the wrong update file. How did this happen, you might wonder?

I have a few machines here in the house, and whenever Apple releases an update, I update most machines using the built-in Software Update. However, I also like to download the Combo Update, and use that on at least one machine—in the past, people have experienced different results when using the Combo Update instead of Software Update, so I like to try both and compare the results.

Macworld Team | Rob Griffiths | Read more...


.Mac's new name

Friday, 30 May 2008

A while ago I blogged about a rumoured upgrade to Apple's .Mac service. Well the rumour is back with a vengeance after some coders sniffed through Apple's OS X 1.5.3 update.

Russian website Deep Apple is reporting on changes to the source code for OS X 10.5.3 and found this gem:

Mark Hattersley | Mark Hattersley | Read more...


In-car audio

Friday, 30 May 2008

We've just put a series of reviews for in-car adaptors online, but before you all rush out and buy one I thought I'd quickly let you know about a new system that's been delivered to the Macworld office.

Called the iO PLAY, it's an innovative bluetooth streaming kit for your car. The box contains a bluetooth transmitter dongle that plugs into an iPod (or iPhone), a bluetooth receiver, control panel and microphone.

Mark Hattersley | Mark Hattersley | Read more...


Sorting through the Mac OS X 10.5.3 update

Thursday, 29 May 2008

Eight months into the Leopard era, Apple unleashed the third update to Leopard, with Wednesday's release of OS X 10.5.3. By way of comparison, the 10.3.3 and 10.4.3 updates both came within five months of the release dates for Panther and Tiger, respectively.

As with most of Apple's recent OS X updates, the 10.5.3 version just screams for a broadband connection, weighing in at more than 400MB, depending on which Mac you have and which version your machine deems you to require. So what do you get in exchange for your download time investment? Apple details many--but not all--of the changes in this Knowledge Base document. I won't bother repeating everything listed there, but here are a few of the more important highlights:

Macworld Team | Rob Griffiths | Read more...


Whose Tube is it, anyway?

Thursday, 29 May 2008

Frankly, I thought Viacom's US$1 billion law suit against YouTube was dead. YouTube has been kicking people off its site left and right for posting copyrighted material, even if they didn't always deserve it. And Viacom had started allowing its best material -- like South Park and The Daily Show -- to be shown on the Web for free. It sure sounded like Peace in Our Time.

Apparently not. Earlier this week, Google filed its response to Viacom in court, raising the specter that a loss could put the very nature of the Net at risk -- "threatening the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information."

Macworld Team | Robert X. Cringely | Read more...


Multi-Touch comes to Windows

Wednesday, 28 May 2008

Microsoft's had another idea all by itself… It's called Multi-Touch and will be coming to PCs in the next version of Windows. You can watch a video of it in action on the Windows Vista Team Blog.

I must admit, it looks a bit familiar. I get the feeling I've seen it somewhere before.

Mark Hattersley | Mark Hattersley | Read more...


The Apple of the future

Tuesday, 27 May 2008

During the last several weeks, I've been rewatching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from start to finish. While the TV show has held up well for the most part in the 15 years since it premiered, I was struck by a peculiar thought when I recently watched a time travel episode that saw several characters transported to Earth in the year 2024. Technology that was--from the perspective of TV show writers in 1995--futuristic ended up looking, well, primitive compared to what we take for granted today. That's how much things have changed in just over a decade.

It's not that surprising, either. Our vision of the future is constantly in flux, informed by our perception of the present. In the 1950s, the future was full of jet packs and flying cars. In the 1990s, we thought everything in 2024 would be LEDs and CRT monitors.

Macworld Team | Dan Moren | Read more...


WiMAX option for MacBook and MacBook Pros

Friday, 23 May 2008

Oh, glorious FCC! Bringer of news on upcoming products. Thank you for the gift we've just received....Even though Intel tried to keep it quiet from us (PDF).

Over the weekend, the FCC leaked out a bit of exciting news. Intel is soon releasing the 5350 WiFi/WiMAX combo card that fits into Mini PCI Express card slots (pictured below).

Macworld Team | Seth Weintraub | Read more...


With partners like these...

Tuesday, 20 May 2008

About this time last year, just about every conversation I had with someone started to sound like this once they found out where I worked for a living and what I did there. Them: So you write about Apple products? Me: That’s right. Them: That’s cool… so what do you think about this iPhone that’s coming out? How’s that going to do?

And that would be the point in the conversation where I’d stroke my chin wisely and furrow my brown and say in even, measured tones that the iPhone looked like a fine product, but I wasn’t sure how it would measure up to the successes Apple enjoyed with the iMac or the iPod.

Macworld Team | Philip Michales | Read more...