Hey, I've finally got this blog running over on CARS under Moveable Type. Check it out! It still needs some work, but the best part is there's an RSS feed! And no banner ad!

So update your bookmarks because I won't be updating this here Blogspot version anymore.

Dan Gillmor has a link up to an online statement advocating the verification of electronic voting systems. Normally, I think online resolutions are a waste of time ("Tell Lucas Arts we want Jedi Knight II on the Mac!"), but this is from a collection of Stanford-types (some of them so-called "college boys") and if you're at all concerned about the validity of elections in this country I'd encourage you to consider adding your name.

I read that the new versions of iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie were available via Software Update and when I went to grab them I found my G4 tower was also missing OS X 10.2.3, the latest update to Airport and the most recent version of iCal. Where the hell have I been? About half an hour after I was through with a whole mess of downloading and optimizing there was a knock at the door.

The guy was here to deliver my iLife CD.

D'oh!

Oh, well. At least I hadn't updated the PowerBook yet.

I've only dinkered around with them a bit, but I had one bug already. When I opened iMovie, it said "No project is open, do you want to open one, create one or quit?" (By the way, no annoying splash movie anymore, thank god - I hated that.) I chose to open a project, navigated to one on the hard drive and double clicked it. iMovie just popped me back to the same dialog box. I tried it several times with no success so I quit and then double clicked on the project in the Finder. It opened fine.

Jonathan Crowe confirms my experience with Safari below.

This is a strong second opinion to something I've noticed myself (link via Drew Hamlin's blog). The PC laptops that I've come into contact with in the past few years have been significantly underwhelming. I've previously blogged about my relationship with a particularly loathsome Compaq Armada at work and the machines I see my fellow classmates using at the University of Washington look enormous even compared to my 15" PowerBook and they just sound clunky. The keys sound cheap and people often turn and look when one of them starts typing on their laptop. I can get my PowerBook out and start typing and no one will even notice.

This is very strange. I can't seem to access anything from Safari, but Chimera works fine. At first I thought the dread Internet slowdown had kicked into high gear (low gear?), but I switched browsers and things were coming up fine.

Why would Safari not be able to get into the Apple Store but Chimera would?

Apple's main page has a little icon that says "Welcome Safari User" when it detects Safari as the browser. Cute.

So, does this mean that the recording industry will start pumping CDs out in this format which, if I had to guess, only plays the PC layer in a Windows machine? So I guess we can forget MP3s, huh?

Well, until someone finds a hack around it. I mean, c'mon. This is bullshit.

Does this (link via Mcwetlog) sound like the Steve Jobs you know? Listens to email criticism and online message board postings?

Or does it sound like a rumors site trying to cover its ass for making wild, innacurate speculations before Macworld?

So, Apple determines it needs an additional revenue stream if it's going to be profitable to the extent it'd like. They do the research and they determine that a nominal fee for some of the applications it was formerly giving away would increase the company's bottom line by X amount. They decide to go foward with it.

Then Steve Jobs gets some emails and reads some message board postings and four days before the keynote changes his mind.

I dunno. It's possible, but I doubt it. It's more likely that Apple considered charging for the applications months ago (when Heid submitted his book to his publisher) and then decided against it. Months ago. Not a week and a half ago.

It's articles like this that make me think that the people who write these sites have never worked in a professional corporate environment before. While mercurial CEOs do make snap decisions, they are very rare because, if you're wrong, it's your ass that has to go in front of the board and shareholders and explain why you backed off on the basis of some message board postings.

Apple has a finance department. They (or marketing) run a model to see what the expected return on charging for these apps would be. Jobs, based on input from his vice presidents, makes the final decision on whether or not to go ahead with the fee. It's extremely unlikely (in my opinion) that he made this decision days before the keynote and weeks before iLife was to ship.