Apple Event Predictions

David Weiss from http://unweary.com/ has posted a “Prediction Score Card” for tomorrow’s Apple event.  Attached in PDF format you’ll find my thoughts.  Feel free to post what you think in the comments.  I’ll have a full post up tomorrow evening covering the event in full detail.

Download Mike’s Predictions

Some Apple News

Hey guys, I apologize for the lax updates.  I’ve been incredibly busy starting my new semester and beginning the preparation for the Apple Certified Technical Coordinator exams.  Regardless, speaking of Apple, here’s some Apple news from this week:

- Apple has invited select members of the media to the now confirmed media event on January 27th at 10:00 AM PST.  The title of the event is “Come see our latest creation.”  Will it be the much-rumored tablet, iLife/iWork 2010, iPhone OS 4.0 with true multi-tasking?  We’ll have to wait and see.  I will be writing a long wrap-up at the end of the day on the 27th.

- Apple released BootCamp 3.1 today for Intel Macs and finally includes support for Windows 7.  Apple promised that by the end of the year 2009, but they missed the mark.  It was finally released today.

- A rumor was published today claiming a new version of iTunes, combined with Apple’s recent LaLa acquisition, could allow iTunes users to move their entire library to the cloud so they can play their music on any device on the web.  Neat!

Google Officially Unveils ‘Nexus One’

Happy new year, everyone!  Today, Google held a press event at its headquarters to unveil the ‘Nexus One’ – aka, the Google Phone.  Google vice president Mario Queiroz said that the new Nexus One is a “superphone” and an “exemplar of what’s possible” on mobile phones running Android.  Several other people spoke at the event as well, including Google VP of engineering Andy Rubin, HTC CEO Peter Chou, and even Motorola’s Co-CEO Sanjay Jha. Shots and videos have been leaking for months showing off this device.  And even though we all knew the Nexus One was coming, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a stellar looking phone that carries a serious set of technical specifications that blows even the iPhone 3GS out of the water.   (more…)

MagicPrefs Adds a Little More Magic to Apple’s Magic Mouse

In October, Apple released it’s newest mouse offering, the Magic Mouse.  I wrote a review of it in November, here.  At first, I was worried that it was a little too low profile, but after about a week or so, my hand got used to it and I’ve loved it ever since.  The momentum scrolling is phenomenal, and the multi-touch gestures are fantastic.  They make navigating the web extremely easy while the momentum scrolling makes scrolling through large documents a breeze.  The only problem with it, however, is that Apple sort of crippled it when they shipped it.  It only supports a single two-finger gesture out of the box, and very basic, regular one-finger gestures.  The tracking is also incredibly slow. (more…)

iPhone Icon Christmas Ornaments

After seeing this post online about plexiglass iPhone app icon ornaments, I knew I wanted a set.  But, I didn’t want to buy them online from Belgium.  Not to mention, those ones were incredibly small; they were less than 1″ by 1″.  Working at Fox Chapel Area School District gives me access to a lot of incredible technology, including a laser saw.  So I figured, why not try and make a set myself?  I figured it couldn’t really be that hard… I just needed to find a high-res photo of an iPhone (thanks, Apple press images), and cut out each icon. (more…)

Firefox World’s Most Popular Browser

GigaOM is reporting today that Firefox 3.5 has finally surpassed Microsoft Internet Explorer to become the world’s most popular browser.  All I have to say is: FINALLY!  And congratulations to Mozilla!  Although I’m a Safari user on my Mac, Firefox is my primary browser on all of my PCs.  It’s simply phenomenal, and this is well deserved.  Kudos, Mozilla – my hat’s off to you.

Original GigaOM Story

‘Readability’ by arc90

Here’s yet another amazing product I’ve found at the mercy of reading David Pogue’s blog (the first being the Zeo, of course).  Readability is a super cool piece of javascript that turns any webpage with text and/or an article, like CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, etc. into a nicely formatted page that looks like a Kindle screen or newspaper.  It eliminates all of the clutter around the article and lets you focus your attention on solely that – the content; the article. (more…)

Google Wave Invite Giveaway!

I have 10 Google Wave beta invites to give away. Thats right; 10 lucky people will get Google Wave beta invites, courtesy of myself and Noah Purdy.  Noah is a fellow CIS student at RMU.  He’s a super nice guy, and I thank him for helping to make this possible.

Google Wave is a communication tool aimed at making it easy and simple to collaborate with multiple people. There’s really no other way to describe it besides to direct you to this video, and to the site, which has a nice introductory video on Google Wave and what it’s about.

To be entered in this contest, you’ll need to do one of two things: tweet the post, or comment on it.

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