Macbook Air: a genius before his time

On a comment on my post about the new Macbook Air, my former colleague Ana has pointed me to ZDNet's second look on the new Apple's notebook. While I do see how some of those points may be valid, I still have the sensation that the thinnest laptop can be a sort of genius that was born before its time.

I think this is a new concept of computer, that will probably only be understood in a few years: the ultra-portable and wireless computer.

Sure, you don't have an optical drive. But nowadays you don't use a drive that much, do you? Almost all software is "downloadable" from the web. Backups can be done to external drives.

Sure, you only have one USB port. But if even the backup drives are becoming wireless, why do you need so many ports anyway?

Sure, it doesn't have an ethernet port. But if the point of the notebook is to be ultra-portable, then why invest on a "fixed" technology.

Sure, it doesn't have a removable battery. Every innovative small laptop has to make some compromises. And a removable battery is overrated. On my lifetime of "gadgetery" I only had to buy a new battery for a cellphone once.

In conclusion, I won't buy a Macbook Air. That's right, "won't"... but only because it doesn't meet my needs: I don't need a portable computer, I need a powerful computer to work on a desk.

But if I ever turn into a technological travel salesman, I'll sure buy the Macbook Air :-)

And it's here

UPDATE: you can see the full Steve Jobs keynote here.

The rumors were close and Steve Jobs finally presented the news on the Apple world (while the keynote movie is not available at Apple's site, you can read it at Engadget):

• There's in fact a new notebook, MacBook Air, the thinnest notebook ever (watch guided tour here)
  
• 1,6 or 1,8 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 2 GB memory, 13,3'' LED-backlit screen
  
• Multi-touch trackpad that allows performing iPhone-like operations
• No optical drive, but a nice wireless feature (Remote Disc) that allows connecting to nearby computers' optical drives
  

And a lot of other new products were announced:

• Movie rentals service on iTunes
• New price for Apple TV and software updates
• A wireless Time Machine-enabled hard drive: Time Capsule

Apple has done it again :-)

What are the news?

With a bit more than an hour to go until Steve Jobs gets up on stage to perform his well-known Macworld 2008 Keynote, it was expected that the Apple Store was going to be down:

The question is: what will be the new products? There are some rumors, but all we can do is wait...

Burn: the simplest CD/DVD application for the Mac

The built-in CD/DVD burning functionalities in Mac OS X are quite useful, but sometimes you just need a few more options to better control the burning task. But then, you may end up installing a complicated third-party application that requires you to execute 10 steps in a not-so-easy wizard just to burn a few files onto a CD.


Burn is an application that stands more or less in the middle. It doesn't have that many options for you to change as some CD/DVD burning applications, but it's not as simplistic as Mac OS X's Finder's burning functionalities.

It's open source, so feel free to download it if you want a simple, yet powerful CD/DVD burning software.

Change the format of the screenshot pictures

I've posted here before about the things I love in Mac OS X, one of them being the built-in screenshot grabbing shortcuts. If you don't know them, here's a quick tutorial:

• Command + Shift + 3 = image of the whole screen
• Command + Shift + 4 and then Spacebar = image of the chosen window
• Command + Shift + 4 and then mouse = image of specific region

All these create a PNG image file on the desktop with the captured image. You can use CTRL to transfer the captured image to the clipboard instead.

However, PNG format may not actually be the best format to output the screenshot since it is not so widely accepted as, for example, JPEG. So, if you want to change the output format of the screenshots, just execute the following command on a Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

Et voilá! From now on, every time you "grab" an image from your screen, the output format will be JPEG. You can also try other formats such as GIF. Just change the last part of the command to use gif instead of jpg.

And naturally, if you decide to get back to PNG, just add the png extension to the end of the command.

Source: MacTips

Macworld 2008: the rumors

The Macworld 2008 Conference & Expo is almost here (January, 14-18) and the rumors have been rising on the web.

Most of them point out to a new (possibly ultra-slim) notebook with excellent new features, such as multi-touch trackpads (or maybe even screens) similar to the iPhone multi-touch capabilities and a Blu-ray drive or external optical drive.

Other rumors point out to the presentation of a 3G version of iPhone.

But the most surprising rumor is the possibility of Steve Jobs presenting a dual-screen ultra-portable notebook such as this picture on the left shows.

Whether it is a dual-screen or just single-screen, some believe that the most probable innovation to be presented at the Macworld, is a kind of MacBook Touch, where the multi-touch capability and iPhone/iPod Touch-like behavior will be the most interesting feature of the new device.

You can even check out some of the (potential) scripts for Steve Jobs' keynote.

Well, I guess that all we can do is just wait for the keynote on January 15th and see if Apple can surprise us....again. I'm sure they will, but how?