Apple Briefs

… but only if you stay up late. The .Mac homepage has the following service announcement from Apple:

MobileMe Launch 7/9/2008, 6pm-12am PT

As part of the MobileMe launch, www.mac.com will be taken offline at 6pm PT on Wednesday, July 9th.

Members will be unable to access www.mac.com or any .Mac services during this time with the exception of .Mac Mail accessed via a desktop application, iPhone, or iPod touch.

MobileMe will be available as soon as possible during this maintenance window.

So, if you’re prone to staying up until the wee hours of the morning (Pacific Time, which pretty much rules it out here at Apple Briefs), you might get to see it on July 9th ¹. The rest of us can expect to see it the morning of the 10th. The MobileMe iPhone features should be activated the following day (July 11th) with the release of the iPhone 2.0 software update. I’ll try to find some time in between games of Super Monkey Ball to test out the MobileMe push email features.

¹ Yes, technically after midnight it becomes the 10th. But I have always maintained that the day doesn’t change until you’ve decided to pull an all-nighter (n/a on holidays).

The WWDC keynote speech started pretty slowly. Most of the first hour was devoted to things that:

1. Only a developer would care about (which makes sense consider the venue, but still); and
2. We already knew

To be more precise, the first hour of the keynote was spent on iPhone 2.0, the upgrade to the software of the iPhone and iPod Touch. Some interesting third-party applications were previewed, but nothing show-stopping. We did learn that the iPhone will support the viewing of Microsoft Office documents. That’s about all I took away from the first hour as a business user.

The new product announcements arrived about an hour into the keynote. They went pretty much according to the script too. Let’s take a look:

3G iPhone

There were plenty of (often contradictory) rumors swirling about the 3G iPhone. So what does the new iPhone have?

• 3G for faster downloads
• GPS
• More battery life
• A thinner body
• A lower price (16GB for $299, 8 GB for $199)

Apple has posted the full specifications for the new iPhone on its website. If you took all of the rumored improvements and new features (with one exception), you would basically have the 3G iPhone. The one thing missing was a video camera for video iChat, but that rumor didn’t have a lot of credibility behind it. The new iPhones are nice, but I am not overcome with jealousy and feelings of obsoleteness yet.

MobileMe

MobileMe replaces the venerable and much-maligned .Mac service. MobileMe brings with it new web applications called Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Gallery, and iDisk. Each does pretty much what you would expect based on the name. MobileMe also brings with it push email, contacts, and calendar to the iPhone. Apart from MobileMe, the only way to get the push experience on your iPhone is to use Microsoft Exchange. MobileMe brings push down into the realm of home users. I am hopeful that a future release of Mac OS X Server will allow for push service to iPhones without using either Microsoft Exchange or a me.com email address.

A handful of resourceful people were able to figure out most of this last week. But it’s still nice to get the official word from Apple and see the demo. The announcement wasn’t all happiness though. With the transition to MobileMe, Apple will be removing its iCard service and web access to Safari bookmarks. I did not use the bookmark feature, but I often used the .Mac iCards because I found them much nicer (read: less tacky) than many of the other services out there. At least I get to keep my mac.com email address.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Rumors of a new version of Mac OS X surfaced in the last few days before the keynote. Snow Leopard would mark a departure from Apple’s stated intention to move to a longer release cycle (early versions of Mac OS X were released on almost a yearly basis). Leopard was released last, suggesting that 10.6 would not arrive until late-2009 or early-2010. To my dismay, the keynote came and went without any mention of Snow Leopard. But my disappointment was short-lived. Soon after the keynote Apple confirmed Snow Leopard and released some basic information about this new version of Mac OS X. The press release was followed up with a full-blown preview page with, well, just about the same information (but prettier!).

The press release mentions two new features worth talking about. First, Snow Leopard will include Microsoft Exchange 2007 support in Mail, Address Book, and iCal. This probably shouldn’t be a surprise considering the forthcoming Exchange support in iPhone. But I was still surprised. Second, Safari will include the “fastest implementation of Javascript ever.” Apple may be referring to the recently-announced Squirrelfish Javascript engine for Safari. Javascript speed seems to be one of the new benchmarks by which browsers are judged (with good reason in the age of Web 2.0 applications). But the real reason to check is Squirrelfish is its really cool logo (which longtime readers should know is of major concern here at Apple Briefs).

Apple plans to release Snow Leopard in about a year (suggesting a later release date than the rumors had predicted).

Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference is next week, and the rumors are flying! Rumored upgrades to three products have Mac and iPhone users on the edge of their seats.

iPhone

The next version of the iPhone should be arriving soon. Everyone agrees that the new iPhone will be 3G (meaning faster internet access), but that’s about all they can agree on. If you pay attention to all the rumors, the new iPhone is supposed to have a larger screen and a smaller screen, be thicker and thinner, have better battery life and worse battery life, have GPS (or not), and have a video camera (or not). Is Apple coming out with more than one model or are most of the rumors wildly off base? The latter is almost always true with Apple rumors, but we expect to find out for sure very soon.

We’re also anxiously waiting for the software upgrade that will allow third-party applications to run on iPhones. This is no rumor, but we don’t know yet when the new software will be available. The latest word is that we should expect it sometime late June or early July.

.Mac

An upgrade to .Mac has been talked about for quite some time. It’s easy to see why. The main thing that .Mac has going for it is iLife integration. But that appeals to only a small portion of Mac users, and it’s certainly of little use to business users. With the release of the 10.5.3 update, the prospect of a .Mac upgrade became more likely. Current rumors suggest that .Mac will be renamed to Me (with at least some parts of the service called Mobile Me) and sport many new features, including better online mail, calendar, and address book management. The new service may also have “push” email to iPhones much like the previously-announced Microsoft Exchange functionality that should arrive in the iPhone software upgrade. If the rumors are true, it would make .Mac a much more attractive service for small business owners.

OS X version 10.6

Catching many by surprise are the rumors that a preview version of Mac OS X 10.6 being distributed to developers at WWDC. If the rumors are true, the new version will be called Snow Leopard and will focus on performance and stability rather than features. It sounds more like a Service Pack in Windows-land, but there are technical reasons why Apple would need a major release (10.x) to pull off all the changes the new version is rumored to include. It’s all speculation at this point, but you can read more about it over at Ars.

In what might be the earliest back-to-school promotion ever, Apple is now offering students a free iPod Touch and (as usual) a free printer with the purchase of a computer between now and September 15. Technically you could choose to get a free iPod Nano instead of the iPod Touch. But with the iTunes Application Store just around the corner, the size advantage of the Nano is becoming overwhelmed by the feature list of the Touch. For anyone still in school, this is a great opportunity to load up on Macs before you graduate and have to pay “grown-up prices.” (Ok, you’re limited to one desktop and one laptop at the student price per academic year, but that still means two iPod Touches and two printers!) It’s too bad that I no longer get the student discount. Maybe we could petition Apple to allow attorney CLE classes to qualify?

A couple of weeks ago MacWorld made a comparison between Microsoft Office and Apple iWorks, aptly titled The Office Suite Smackdown. Ben Stevens at The Mac Lawyer made a post last week highlighting the conclusion of the MacWorld review of Word and Pages. I thought this was a good time to weigh in with my software choices. I use Word, Pages, and one other application depending on the situation.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word will be the king for quite some time because people just can’t let go of the Word document format. I have tried using other programs to open Word documents, and they get 95% of it right. But that’s just not good enough. So I use Microsoft Word whenever I think I might have to share original documents with someone else (mostly for work). Word also does a handful of things really well – like labels, envelopes, and mail-merges – where it doesn’t matter too much which program is used. If I could avoid owning Microsoft Word entirely, I would gladly do so. But, as long as I have to pay for Word, I might as well use it for the few things it is really good at.

Apple Pages

One thing Microsoft Word is not very good at is page layout. Microsoft Publisher seems to be the low-end tool of choice on Windows. Mac users aren’t missing anything, though, because Apple Pages (part of iWork) is a truly great program. I have Adobe InDesign CS3, and I rarely need to use it. A good designer can create really professional-looking brochures, newsletters, and other layouts using Pages. There are two modes in Pages: Word Processing and Page Layout. I never use Word Processing mode. For simple drafting, all I need is an efficient interface and good style functionality. Word and Nisus are just better than Pages for that. But neither of them can stand up to Pages in page layout.

Nisus Writer Pro

Nisus Writer Express got me through law school. I used Word v.X for the first semester, but two freak occurrences made me give it up. First, not long before my exams I noticed that the outline for a significant portion of my class notes had merged to a single level. Hierarchy in an outline carries a lot of meaning, and mine had disappeared. I am sure I accidentally pressed some disastrous key combination that caused a cascade effect. But that kind of thing shouldn’t really be possible in any sensible program. Second, I was in the middle of my Contracts exam (my first law school exam) and I got an Out of Memory error when I went to save. I had plenty of RAM. The hard disk drive wasn’t close to being full. But there this error was staring me in the face. Luckily I was able to save the situation by copying, closing Word, re-opening Word, and pasting. Still, it had me scared enough to look for alternatives.

That alternative was Nisus Writer Express. It doesn’t do everything Word does. But the features it has are intuitive and easy to use. Nisus Writer Pro adds a few missing features (like table of contents), but it still doesn’t have everything I want in a word processor. Word 2004 is much better than Word v.X, but by the time of its release I was squarely hooked on Nisus Writer Express. So I still use Word for the few things that I described above, but I try to use Nisus for most of my other document drafting.