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I only got up super early to listen to a keynote live once – that was the announcement of the iPhone 3G. Brilliant. The rest, I’ve just read about in the morning.

The WWDC keynote a few days ago turned out to be quite awesome – new iPhone, iPhone 3.0 software update, new MacBook Pros, Safari 4 out of beta, and Snow Leopard announced. I may be totally wrong, but I reckon that’s one of the biggest keynote presentations ever. I wouldn’t call myself an Apple blogger… but being a lover of all things Apple, I thought I might share some thoughts on the exciting things…

iPhone 3G S
I’m not overly excited about it. Yeah, it’s got a better camera, and yeah it’s got 7.2Mbps download speed. But it still has 384kbps upload speed (will HSUPA [1.9Mbps upload] arrive next release?). The processor is supposedly better, but I’m not all that fussed by the current one. I might just hang out another 12 months – the odds are in my favour that there’ll be another new iPhone around June/July 2010, and my contract would be up then!

iPhone 3.0 software
This one is awesome. Been looking forward to it since details were leaked a few months ago. Tethering is cool; but for me, it’s only cool because it’s so very easy on a Mac. Copy Paste is the greatest! Landscape keyboard is awesome – but I think we’ve all gotten used to living without it. And the MobileMe “Find My iPhone” and remote wipe are very cool as well (there’s a good demo of it here). And free too. Huzzah!

New MacBook Pros
Always happens – you buy a new Mac, and a better one is just around the corner. That doesn’t bother me so much (although the better battery does a little), because it is always bound to happen with Apple. What’s annoying is that in the US they’re cheaper. So by the time they get here, they may be cheaper as well! Oh well.

Safari 4 non-beta
Pretty happy about this – the cosmetic changes are cool. And it just is so, so fast. And hopefully all the little bugs (like the one where you can’t pin all the windows of the “Top Sites” section) are now gone.

Snow Leopard announced
This one definitely rivals the 3.0 iPhone software as my favourite bit! And only $US29 to upgrade makes it even sweeter. Apple published a cool list of features on their site. Some of my most looked forward to: faster wake up and shutdown times, Quicktime X, Mail.app improvements (and Exchange support built in is brilliant to kick Microsoft a bit harder), and the fact that it takes up 6GB less of space is cool too.

I am liking that Apple is taking bigger steps to becoming better. It’s sad that they have to be so hugely far ahead of all their competitors as far as technology goes to even be noticed… and even then, people don’t think they’re any good.

And they just seem to do these things so easily, and churn out even better products every year. Love it.

I am definitely a happy camper with my 13″ Macbook.

The story: I was round at the in-laws’ place for dinner on Thursday evening, and amongst getting an awesome hat from Howie, and having many, many laughs, Howie and I chatted about Macbook Pros and how exciting it was that I was close to getting one. When I told him that I was just going to go with the 2.4Ghz one, he pointed out that the 13″ Macbook is exactly the same spec, and design (cos the unibody is very, very nice), except 2″ smaller and cheaper.

Turned out to be basically $600 cheaper. Sweet deal. I had a look at one in JB Hifi near work on Friday morning; had a muck around with it for a good 15 mins trying to decide if I could move from 15″ to 13″. I headed back to the office and actually did that work thing that I’m supposed to be doing there, and thought about it. In the end, I decided to go with it. And JB Hifi man was good to me and I walked away with a 3 year warranty, leather case, and the Macbook for $2600. Quite pleased with myself!

The migration was easy – as you’d expect. But I was cranky that I seemingly had no other way to migrate things except via network. So after setting it up to migrate about 60GB of stuff from my Powerbook at about 6pm Friday evening, I let it be. The next morning at about 11:30am, it finally finished. Frustrating, but I was excited that all my info was across and in the right place with barely any effort on my part. I didn’t migrate any apps – going to a newer OS just made me scared of permissions issues, etc.

I had to move a few things around – my 15″ desktop and dock settings were still there, so stuff was stretching off the screen, but I’ve found myself very comfortable with the smaller screen now.

As I twittered, there was only a couple of issues – a Mail.app [seemingly] permissions issue, and a timezone issue, again fixed by some permissions fixing. But other than that, the migration has been flawless and easy :) Wouldn’t have expected anything else.

Oh, and I love Spaces. And just OS 10.5 in general. It’s awesome.

And my Powerbook… well this afternoon it got a fresh install of OS 10.4, got a clean, and is heading off to Canada land with Sam to keep him company. I’m sure it will do him well now that it has had a fresh install. Hope the battery holds on for him too.

Boot Camp has helped me set up a Windows partition, and on Tuesday I will hopefully get the image for work onto this, and register it with the Active Directory Server at work and then I’ll have the fastest computer in the office :)

Hooray for just buying a new Mac! 13″ Macbook, 2.4GHz, 250GB HDD, 2GB RAM, leather case, 3 year warranty… $2600. Deal of the year!
17 minutes ago

JB Hifi do the best deals. Far out, I can’t wait to get home.

It needs a name.

I am definitely loving the new Genius feature of iTunes. It works pretty well – I just pick a song that I wanna listen to, and then it’ll pick songs that it thinks are similar to it.

I guess it’s like normal shuffle, but it sticks to similar genres and styles. So if I pick a “Christian” song, iTunes tends to pick 24 mostly other Christian songs. And if I pick a Playjerise song, I end up with some Missy and some Brooke too. Quite cool.

The only qualm so far is that iTunes decided that when I chose This Is Home by Switchfoot, it thought Better The Devil You Know by Kylie was an appropriate companion.

Spent this morning updating to iPhone 2.1. Mainly because it was there, and cos the jailbreaking people were quick off the mark to get this update hacked.

I had to laugh at one of the listed updates being “improved signal strength”.

“Surely they can’t update signal capability from the software,” thinks James.

But here I am down at church, where last Sunday night, and every Sunday night before that, I’ve barely had 1 bar of 3G coverage. And now, 3 bars and higher, consistently.

Awesome! Thanks, Apple :)

Having a bit of a nerdy night sitting on Debbie’s couch. Just as an aside, she’s cooking dinner, so it’s almost heaven. :)

I recently moved my email address across to be hosted by Google Apps. Basically, I can take advantage of Gmail’s pretty good spam filtering, but also their free hosting and IMAP compatibility. IMAP is quite cool – kinda like exchange, but without the “push” side of things. It two-way synchronises email on my iPhone and my computer. So now I am moving my email back to Mail.app (after realising that it’s better then Entourage – no one is allowed to say “I told you so.”), and setting it up for IMAP.

Then on the iPhone front, I updated it to the new software now that the jailbreak software has updated as well. But since doing that, it wouldn’t sync with iTunes – everytime it was plugged in, it just pops up the “restore from a backup” or “set up as a new iPhone”. I looked around on forums and it seems to be a pretty sporadic error that a few people get when they’ve updated – even if not jailbroken.

Turns out the fix is quite easy. Seeing as I’ve already restored it from a backup, and the data is already on my iPhone… I can just now “set up as a new iPhone”, and it doesn’t really affect anything at all… except that it obviously makes the iPhone and iTunes happier to talk! So that’s what I’d be doing right now, except that the iPhone’s battery is dead.

I can smell a very yummy dinner… and can only hope that good smell means that it’s very close to being ready.

Had a bit of an interesting day. As is usual for Wednesdays, I didn’t even get my work computer out until after lunch – rock into work, have a coffee with a couple of people, endure the 2 hour mobile sales meeting, and by that time, it’s usually 11:30. So there’s some time to say hi to a few city people that I haven’t seen for a while.

The arvo then consisted of some serious planning for Friday. We have finally received an engagement document that we need to present to our team of account executives about our new job direction and stuff for this fin year. And because these guys are all pretty new, I have started to work on a schedule of wireless data training that I’d like to roll out over the next few weeks. It will be a whole new thing for me I think… but I am looking forward to it all.

I’m round at Debbie’s tonight… had some very nice beef with hokkien noodles for dinner, and now Debbie is having lots of fun playing games on my iPhone. I’m looking forward to having a go at jailbreaking my iPhone when I get home actually. There’s already some apps out there that assist the phone in becoming a tethered modem – quite cool.

The app I wrote about a few posts ago has finally become available. I was quite excited as I checked the app store on leaving the office.

As I sat down on Mum and Dad’s couch this evening, I opened it, punched in my details, and was getting quite excited about how amazingly simple, elegant and quick it was.

I typed in my blog address, and the admin username and password. And voila, that was all that needed to be done for a self-hosting WordPress blog. Amazing. Once open, there was a list of my latest 30 posts, and I could just click on one to read it, and then simply tapping on the text brought up the keyboard for me to edit.

All was going brilliantly… it was very impressive indeed! However, as soon as I tried to save any edits, the app just crashed. Sad. It does auto-save all your progress though, which adds to the impressiveness… but that is fairly useless when I can’t actually save anything that I type.

I’m sure an update will arrive very soon.

Monday morning; and I’m back in the city. Just for a very short visit though.

On Friday evening, I bought myself a gorgeous iPhone on Optus. My goodness is it elegant. Better than I ever could have imagined I think. I only had to wait until about 11:30am on Saturday morning for my number to port across – which is pretty impressive considering the huge amount of mobile network activity across all carriers on Friday. Boy, did the iPhone launch cause some awesome systems failures in Telstra – worse than I’ve ever seen before in my 4 years of working there.

Anyway, all was good. The battery seemed to diminish qute quickly, but I was connected to wifi for several hours, so I shouldn’t complain.

But Saturday night, something started to go a little bad. It looked like my iPhone was taking ages to charge. After leaving it for a while, it seemed as though it just wasn’t charging over 10% before stopping charging. It’d then start charging again when it was almost empty. That was sad. And then last night, it just seems to not be charging at all… even though it has the little lightning bolt icon.

So here I am at the Apple Store, hoping that I will find my hero, and they will fix, or give me a new iPhone :)

Oh yeah… that camp that I’m running.

It’s awesome really. Things started off tough for me. It seemed to just take me quite a while to “be there” as far as mindset goes. It was a very though Saturday night and Sunday morning. But Sunday over lunch, I began thinking program, and started to feel like things were ok, and started to find my place and feel content.

What was cool was that as Sunday went on, I began to realise that the team of leaders this year is nothing short of awesome. I think I’d unknowingly “outsourced” more activities to them to run than ever before, and in the lead up to this week, I realised that and I think that might’ve made me a bit more anxious than previous years. But like I said, as Sunday went on, I realised these guys are fantastic, and they’ve taken the activities and really run with them. So much so that I was not at all worried about not being there this morning… it’s well and truly under control.

…just because I can.

It’s so lovely up here. Everything you expected from all the hype. A billion staff around asking if you’d like help. More iPods, Macbooks and iMacs than you can poke a stick at.

So gorgeous.

Time to stop lusting and go back to work.

Hooray for the new Apple Store!

I arrived at work this morning to find the big blue covers taken off the front of the store. But all was still black except for that bright white Apple logo.

But then as I left work this evening, the lights were all on! You could see inside all three levels and it looked might pretty. Strangely, there was no one queued up outside yet – I thought there would be by now. But I am very sure that sometime tomorrow I will start to see people queued up all ready to camp out in the cold overnight for the Thursday evening opening.

I will be looking forward to Friday though – my next desk neighbour and I will be taking some time to wander across the road and distract ourselves :)

Mmm… not bad… much what I expected. Would’ve liked unlimited data though.

• There will be two plans available: a $79 cap with 1GB data and $300 worth of calls; and a $99 cap with 3GB of data and $400 worth of calls
• Both plans include Visual Voicemail
• 30c flagfall; 35c per 30 seconds talk, 25c SMS messages
• The iPhone is only available on a 24 month contract – you can’t purchase it outright
• The 8GB model will cost $220, the 16GB $330
• Only the 16GB is available in white
• Optus won’t be selling accessories – they will be sold through the Apple store

[Gizmodo]

Wonder what Voda will come out with…

It was well worth me getting up at 3am this morning.

Yay for the iPhone 3G!

My first few thoughts were that if you’re a Windows Mobile handset manufacturer, then you should be seriously scared (especially considering the Blackberry Bold is just around the corner too). This iPhone is everything a PDA should be, and has seriously pushed the envelope of mobile data technology. It’s more than I ever expected I think.

Second thought was that Apple seem to have gone out hard against RIM and Blackberry! (Which may very well be why there’s no Telstra link on Apple Australia’s iPhone site.) Not just through their “Enterprise” features… but through MobileMe. MobileMe goes way over and above what Blackberry have ever been able to provide to a non-email-server user.

I was sitting at my computer quite in awe at MobileMe. I’ve never been a huge fan of .Mac, never needed it really. But all of a sudden, this has broken through to be something extremely amazing; something that’s always been limted to corporates. It hasn’t been available to consumers at this extent. All of a sudden, everyone has dual sync emails, calendar, contacts… not just Blackberry corporates who have a $6000 server next to their Exchange server.

So yes, damn straight I want an iPhone 3G.

It doesn’t look like Telstra’s on board; which for mine, is sad. They have the best 3G coverage – no matter how you feel about them, that’s pretty undisputed. But, my guess is that they feel it would entrench far too much on Blackberry (who seem to be getting very close to Telstra with this new HSDPA Blackberry only just around the corner), and very possibly, the lack of Bigpond/Telstra branding on the handset may be against Sol’s directive for mobile handsets. That’s just a huge guess on my part though.

So Voda or Optus? My choice will be down to price – if one of them brings out an unlimited data plan, I’ll be there queuing up at the store with the rest of ‘em.