Apple Briefs

Last week Adobe announced Acrobat 9 and made it available for preorder. There will be three versions of Acrobat 9: Standard, Pro, and Pro Extended. Of these, only Pro appears to be available for Mac OS X. Many of the new features of Acrobat 9 focus on interactivity and multimedia. For example, Acrobat 9 will support embedded Flash content. Acrobat 9 Pro Extended allows you to add video, audio, demos, and more to Microsoft Powerpoint presentations. The big hook for lawyers using Acrobat is the idea of the paperless office. Acrobat 9 does add a few features that should help small businesses work without paper:

• Create a PDF from the contents of the clipboard
• Create a PDF from a portion of a webpage, keeping links and interactive content intact (unfortunately, this feature is for Windows and IE only)
• Compare PDFs and highlight the differences
• Combine multiple documents into a single PDF Portfolio
• Create forms and track responses online at Acrobat.com
• Collaborate on a document using Acrobat.com
• Encrypt documents with 256-bit encryption

None of these are “must have” features in my mind. Everything except PDF comparisons can be done adequately in other ways. Still, having a single integrated tool is nice (instead of, for example, having to run PGP for encryption or send multiple documents in a zip file instead of a PDF portfolio).

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).

Delicious Library, item number 2 on my list of the 10 Most Beautiful Mac Applications (for Non-Geeks), has received a major update. I haven’t gotten a chance to sort through all of the release notes yet, but a few things did catch my eye. What can you expect?

• Better graphics
• Support for larger libraries
• One-click web publishing
• Integration with your iTunes library
• Smart shelves (think smart folders, but for shelves!)

This week Nisus Software unveiled version 1.1 of its Nisus Writer Pro word processing software. The release brought with it some much-anticipated new features. The headline features of the release are mail merge and comments. There are dozens of other fixes and additions, but these two in particular will help Nisus Writer Pro compete with the likes of Microsoft Word and OpenOffice. As I wrote about previously, mail merge is one of the reasons I still use Microsoft Word. The combination of Nisus Writer Pro version 1.1 and OpenOffice version 3.0 might finally change that.

Cultured Code dropped a new version of Things on us yesterday. The 0.9.2 release includes support for iCal and Leopard’s system-wide to-dos. This new feature allows Things to interact with other applications built for Leopard, such as MailTags and MenuCalenderClock for iCal.