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Introducing the Digital Music & Video Superguide

I was there when Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod. And when the event was over, the assembled members of the press were divided into two camps: one group didn’t know quite what to make of Apple entering the esoteric world of digital music players, a field with questionable prospects and no dominant products. The other group of us had already grasped what digital music was all about. In fact, we had already begun converting our CD collections into MP3 files.

In the intervening years, Apple has brought digital audio and video into the mainstream, not just through the massive success of the iPod, but via the iTunes Store, the iPhone, and the Apple TV. These are all cutting-edge technologies, and that means that they can be complicated. While Apple’s products are more intuitive than most, many features can’t be mastered simply by reading the flimsy getting-started guides that Apple includes with its products.

That’s why we’ve created this newest addition to our Superguide series, The Macworld Digital Music & Video Superguide. This update to our previous iPod and iTunes Superguide is a straightforward and up-to-date guide to working with music and video, and comes packed with practical advice for handling digital media on your Mac, iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV. In it, we’ve compiled the best tips, tricks, and advice from Macworld’s experts to help you get the most out of your device, your software, and your collection of digital media. We’ll lead you through every aspect of building, managing, and enjoying your digital media library.

When Apple's reach exceeds its grasp

The huge success of the iPod and the incredible media hoopla surrounding the iPhone have transformed the way the world looks at Apple. In five years, it has gone from being the company that makes weird non-Windows computers to the company that makes all kinds of cool products—including great, non-Windows computers. The public perception of Apple is that it's a technology juggernaut with immense power at its disposal as it steamrolls over everyone else in the technology industry while creating one industry-busting product after another.

There’s just one problem with that image: It’s not true. In the past year, we’ve seen numerous examples of how Apple’s reach can dramatically exceed its grasp.

Size is relative

Obviously, Apple is no longer the little two-guys-in-a-garage operation that started out in 1976. These days it regularly generates more than $7 billion in revenue every quarter; in its last quarter, it reported a $1.1 billion profit. Clearly, Apple’s board of directors isn’t rifling through the company’s couch cushions searching for spare change.

iPhone apps: When 2.0 means 1.0

In the last week, Apple has released a major update to the iPhone, including a second generation of the iPhone hardware and a new version of the operating system that runs both the iPhone and the iPod touch.

Yet for all this talk of second-generation hardware and updated software, one of the most important components of the new iPhone is definitely still at version 1.0.

With the release of the updated iPhone software, Apple flung open the doors of its new App Store. On its first day, the App store was populated with more than 500 programs, and that number is growing rapidly.

AppleScript and chat privacy

Recently I was fuming on Twitter about the inability to set “private times” in chat applications. I’ve spread my instant-messaging address far and wide, and that’s fine—but there are certain times (like when I’m home looking up a hey-it’s-that-guy on IMDB) when I don’t really want to begin a random chat with someone who I’ve met once and who just wants to aimlessly chat about what’s going on in the world of Macs.

The good news is, instant-message services such as AIM allow you to adjust your privacy settings, so that only people on your buddy list can see you. The bad news is, I’ve yet to find an IM program that lets you adjust those settings on a schedule. I’d love to be able to say, “accept any chat on Monday through Friday, 10 to 6, but all other times limit the chats to those people on my Buddy List.”

But it can’t be done, so far as I can tell. My next step was to dig through the AppleScript dictionary and preferences file of my current IM client, Adium. No dice.

AppleScript versus Alameda County

You think your county has problems? Try California’s Alameda County, where court rulings are available in an unruly Java applet or as a long series of TIFF images.

I know this because I was interested in reading the ruling in the case of the University of California’s stadium project, which is being challenged by various Berkeley groups. (I’m a Cal football fan, so the subject of Memorial Stadium is near and dear to my heart. And I’ve been known to blog on the subject in my spare time, so I wanted to be up to speed on the ruling.)

Apparently the Alameda County courts are using technology so ancient that, rather than generate a PDF out of whatever computerized document system they used to generate the verdict, they printed out a copy, scanned it in, and posted the images straight from the scanner. (And then relied on a Java applet I couldn’t get working on my Mac to display it.)

Snow Leopard: Back to Basics

All the media attention this week has been on the announcement of the new iPhone 3G during Steve Jobs’s keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. But for Mac users there was another huge story that day, one that took up only a few seconds of the keynote: Snow Leopard, a brand-new version of Mac OS X.

Apple has been working on Mac OS X for more than a decade, and the public has been able to use it for eight years. In that time, the replacement for the classic Mac OS has grown through several stages: it began in an awkward, half-functional state, progressed into a fully functional replacement for OS 9 with increasing levels of speed and stability, and finally became an entrenched system that advanced by acquiring whizzy new features such as Spotlight and Time Machine.

Early in Mac OS X’s history, the operating system sped up with each new version, as Apple engineers tuned the code and got it working better. But those improvements have faded, and the last two releases have certainly been no faster than their predecessors. Instability, too, has returned to Mac OS X. (The title of my predecessor Rick LePage’s opinion piece, “What I Hate About Leopard,” says it all.)

Hands on with iPhone 3G

Yes, I’ve touched it.

Okay, so maybe touching the iPhone 3G is not as impressive a feat as it was to touch the first iPhone when it was announced back in January 2007. But still, for the next month I’ve got one up on most members of the general public.

With that in mind, let me tell you what I found.

New: Mac Basics Superguide for Leopard

We’re very lucky here at Macworld. Both in print and on the Web, we’ve got an amazingly diverse readership. Among our readers are some incredibly geeky, tech-savvy people who could code a perl script in their head or disassemble a MacBook Pro with the power of their mind. And also, some people who are relatively novice Mac users, who avidly read what we write in order to flex and improve their Mac skills.

The latest book in our Superguide series, The Macworld Mac Basics Superguide - Leopard Edition, is for both kinds of readers. If you’re someone who’s struggling with the basics of operating a Mac, or someone who’s a new user of Mac OS X—perhaps you’ve made the switch from Windows to Mac—this new 88-page guide will get you up to speed.

Written in an easy-to-follow style, the Macworld Mac Basics Superguide - Leopard Edition will give you detailed tips and information about using the Finder and the Dock, switching between programs, using Apple’s Spotlight search tool, opening and saving your files, and setting up system preferences and user accounts. We’ve tossed in some basic security and troubleshooting advice to keep your Mac up and running smoothly. And our own Dan Frakes, who pens our Mac Gems blog and magazine column, has assembled a list of 23 great low-cost programs that will enhance your Mac experience.

Why Apple will sell 10 million iPhones

Every now and then, I read something that makes me fall off my chair in shock. In this case, the text in question is in a New York Times article, “The Guessing Game Has Begun on the Next iPhone” (hat tip to John Gruber for the link).

The Times story is largely what you’d expect: an attempt to discuss the anticipation about the next-generation iPhone we’re all sure is coming next month, but about which there’s precious little actual information. But a brief detour to discuss Apple’s repeatedly stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones during calendar-year 2008 is desperately off course and veering into crazyland:

After almost a year of strong sales… the iPhone has settled down to a less-than-spectacular pace: roughly 600,000 units a month, according to the company. Apple… sold just 1.7 million phones in the first three months of this year, meaning it must sell more than 8 million phones to reach Mr. Jobs’s publicly stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008.

“They’re going to have a difficult time” hitting that number, said Edward Snyder, an analyst at Charter Equity Research. He said that Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cellphones, sells more phones every week than Apple has sold since the iPhone’s introduction.

Here’s the thing. I’ve stared at Apple’s iPhone sales figures repeatedly over the last few months, and I can’t see any reasonable way that the company can’t sell 10 million phones this year.

The iMac turns 10

May 6, 1998 was a Wednesday. I used to work at home most Wednesdays. That day I got a call from my boss’s assistant instructing me to hurry in to the office. Which means I was probably not wearing pants when I first heard about the existence of the iMac.

Those were funny days, the days before live coverage of every Apple new-product announcement. Not only was the technology not really far enough along to allow for such a thing, but nobody really cared. In fact, the only person from Macworld to attend Apple’s event at the Flint Center in Cupertino was the editor in chief. He did it largely because someone needed to do it. In a sad case of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, in early 1998 Apple had held a series of secret product briefings for minor Mac updates. We were tired of it. So only one of us went.

Oops.