There has been much hype over the coming of Apple’s new iPhone, which is precisely why it will disappoint. Before its presentation the iPhone was shrouded in much secrecy and speculation. Fans, even with a handful of spec’s, continue to speculate more and anticipate further surprises. Distilling down everything reveals the fact that this is the first time Apple has developed a cellular phone. I am confident that this will result in unseen problems and mass disappointment; how much depends on how quickly Apple adapts. We shall see. 2¢.

I’ve been using OS X pretty steadily now for over two years. I’ve had very few complaints in that time and many, many moments of awesomeness-induced joy.

One of the things that makes Mac so usable is the number of really useful keyboard shortcuts that are available throughout the system. It’s not necessary to know these shortcuts to use a Mac, but as a user develops their Mac skills these shortcuts provide tremendous room for growth. Maybe Windows XP has similar conveniences as Mac but Mac just seems to do it better. Take application switching as an example. Windows has Alt-Tab. Alt-Tab cycles through every window. Hurray. Mac gives you Command-Tab to cycle through applications and Command-` to cycle through open windows of an application. Note the difference – Mac gives you a more fine-grained control over the switching. These shortcuts work in Expose as well. Pressing F9 gives a user a view of all open windows – pressing and holding Command while pressing Tab will switch the view from the F9/All-Windows view to the F10/All-Windows-for-a-Given-Application view. That’s cool but more than that, it’s useful.

If you’re a Mac user you owe it to yourself to check out the list of shortcuts on Apple.com – learn just one shortcut a day and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your experience on Mac will transform from merely great to insanely great.

Apples critics have been wrong before, but they’re not wrong this time.

Steve Jobs can’t hope to compete head to head with the biggest in the wireless business – he’s inferred as much in quoting targeted sales figures of 12 million units.

So what will Apple have achieved for itself in getting involved in this market? On the positive end, they may have the opportunity to extend their “iPod halo” into the board room which would be tremendous.

On the negative end of things, Apple may have just provided a host of very competitive electronics manufactures the means to simultaneously dilute Apple’s brand while enhancing their own through competition.

I’m puzzled by Apple’s choice of venue for competition here. Apple clearly has the basis for a video iPod, but they have chosen to hold off delivering it to avoid drawing attention away form the iPhone. Apple has crippled the growth of its most explosive product line to serve some purpose that’s not entirely clear. I think the purpose of the iPhone is unclear because it’s not a terribly compelling product and that’s a huge problem for Apple.

Anybody care to disagree?

Sorry - Apple’s my fixation. Some interesting things have popped up recently and they bear on the iPhone, my current pet peeve. First, the Chinese company Meizu is showing a device that looks remarkably like something we’ve seen before. I’m certainly not surprised. How long will Apple be able to retain its brand coolness when everybody has something that looks the same? Are the white earbuds going to be enough? Though FIC wasn’t able to get the look down, they’ve got a full-screen device on the way in March. Linux based, it’s not going to rule the world but it’s another leak in the dike. This list shows that the full screen mobile device market isn’t quite an empty field that Apple wants people to believe it is - remember what I said about the vicious nature of cell phone market? (Look specifically at the section entitled “Awakening the Sleeping Giant”) For my money, this device by Samsung looks really nice - I wonder what the candid response by Jobs would be to it? Is it worthless because it actually includes a keyboard? Somehow I don’t see that as a liability.

Enough doom and gloom - it appears that Apple is still doing well, despite the critics. Their recent earnings set a new record. What is really interesting here is that for the first time in a while the most popular item on their web store was not the iPod, but rather was the Apple TV box. This is profound. Apple is now going to see a surge in sales of media through the iTunes store as people are able to share their movies and TV shows with the family. These media sales have got to have a pretty good margin for Apple. After all, selling more episodes of the office from their web store isn’t going to require Apple to open up new research offices in Berkley or outsource anything to China or India. They’ll pretty much just make more money.

So, Apple as the media giant - is anybody nervous or do we all welcome our new overlords?

Robert X Cringely has an interesting take on Apple TV. He thinks that Apple TV is expensive if all it is is a media hub, in the vein of a slingbox. Cringely’s thought is that a 40GB hard drive is overkill and that means that Apple is trying to “trojan horse” some sort of other functions or features into customers houses. He thinks that this means that Apple TV is really just a fancy Bittorrent machine which will give Apple control of the most powerful distribution channel in the whole of the media industry.

Interesting thoughts, but I’m not buying it. Apple would have to make customer participation in such a network “opt in” if they wanted to maintain good relations with their customers. Given that, how many people would agree to let their Internet connections be used in such a manner, with space on the 40GB hard drive that they (the customer) bought and own fair and square be used by Apple to increase Apple’s profit margin? I’d guess not many.

Rather, I think that the hard disk is there so that I don’t have to have a powered computer running in order to watch TV. Seems logical to me. Occam’s razor.

Look familiar?

Thanks to Engadget for pointing out the obvious.

The iPhone probably isn’t a ripoff of the LG phone. Rather, the iPhone is essentially a licensed product - could this be a first for Apple? And if so, what sort of rights does LG retain in all this? Do they get to shop their phone around along side the Apple phone? The plot thickens!

I like to check to see who is linking to Wi from time to time and this gem turned up recently: I hate losers with nothing to say.

Apparently somebody decided that their New Years resolution was going to be to start a blog on the Mac their parents got them for Christmas. Hurray.

If “mind filter” had done the slightest bit of delving it would be clear that I’m no Microsoft fanboy, though that seems to be the assertion. The posts I’ve written about various features of OS X that I like which should be some indication of where my loyalties lie.

Given a few years “mind filter” will grow up, move out, experience life a bit, and realize that Apple isn’t perfect (though for somebody whose perspective is limited to Steve Jobs “second coming” it might be hard).

There’s a deeper point here, though. Ever heard of “garbage in, garbage out?” Or “iron sharpens iron?” The Internet represents the garbage here, not the iron. People like “mind filter” do nothing to sharpen anybody else and I worry for the consequences that our society will face when the next generation comes of age.

But am I?

I wrote earlier about some misgivings I had regarding Apple’s (at that time rumored) move into the cell phone market. The post was melodramatically titled, “iPhone - The Beginning of the End for Apple.” Apple ignored me and introduced the iPhone on Tuesday at Macworld San Francisco - it certainly is an impressive device. Steve Jobs did some of his best work Tuesday in selling the iPhone but there are a few things I have reservations about still.

Such as, who is the iPhone for? Not for kids. Or rather, not for kids who aren’t spoiled rotten by parents desperate for love from their ungrateful hellspawn. Starting at $499, the iPhone has the features and the price to compete directly against the premier “smart” phone companies and products. We’re talking Blackberry, Treo, Blackjack, etc. These guys have years in the market and have very competitive products - we can expect that they will compete very vigorously with Apple, not just roll over and take their beating.

NBEHTM addresses some of my concerns by asserting that the introduction of the iPhone is not a ploy by Jobs to take on the cell phone market but rather a ploy to increase the penetration of Apple computer hardware into the enterprise. This makes some sense given that business is where most of the Blackberries are going, and given that Apple’s presence in the business community is pretty weak. An iPhone could extend the so-called “iPod aura/halo” into the boardroom. My one complaint with this idea is that Apple hasn’t shown a 6G iPod as yet, so either they’ve got another product up their sleeves or they’re going to be trying to direct customers toward an expensive phone/media player hybrid. Jobs wants a 1% piece of the phone market, and he’ll likely get it, but how will that affect the sales of devices that can be truly called iPods if a upper-middle class iPod option isn’t on the market? And will the iPhone fit with corporate purchasing plans? And do executives really want to learn something new, or would they rather stick with what they know?

Whatever the corporate response to the iPhone, Apple isn’t dense about its media players and has a version of the full-screen iPod, which will look remarkably like the iPhone, ready to go.

Anecdotally, I showed the iPhone to Mrs. Interested (http://www.apple.com/iphone/phone). She went from “$499 is a lot of money for a phone” to “$499 isn’t that much money for a phone” really quickly. Time will tell what happens to Apple and the iPhone - I’m looking forward to seeing the situation unfold.

Automator is a built in feature of Apple OS X, starting with version 10.4. I’ve used it in a variety of situations and the more I use it, the more I find I really enjoy it.

In a nutshell, Automator is a graphical way to script/automate many of the features of your Apple computer. Want to resize and rename a large number of pictures? Easily done with Automator, but it’s also possible to apply color correction and other effects en mass as well. Want to copy all your email to your iPod in the morning so that you can read it on the subway to work in the morning? Again, easy. Here’s what an Automator workflow looks like:

This is cool and, incidentally, a feature that Microsoft hasn’t even tried to emulate in Vista.

Automator workflows can be run through the graphical interface but I just realized that they can also be run from the command line. The workflow icon that is saved to your Desktop (or wherever) looks like a file but is in reality a directory. Hidden under the path example.workflow/Content/ is a file called document.wflow. The document.wflow file can be invoked by Automator from the command line as shown below:

What this means is that the general Automator coolness can further extended by scheduling Automator to run workflows without any user intervention. The scheduling service we use to do this is called “cron”, a UNIX utility that comes pre-installed on Mac by virtue of the BSD core of OS X. There are a variety of circumstances where scheduling workflows could be useful. Using the email-to-ipod-copying example from above, you can schedule your Automator workflow to copy emails to your iPod 10 minutes before you usually walk out the door in the morning so that all you need to do is grab and go. In order to set up a scheduled Automator workflow, do the following:

1. Set up a workflow and save it. For this example we’ll assume that the workflow is named “example” and it is being saved to the Desktop. Your Automator workflow will look like this:

   

   but remember that it’s in fact a directory and not a file.

2. Create a text file that will be hold the schedule information we will feed to “cron”. We’re going to be using the terminal in just a few minutes to start the cron job, so might as well get warmed up. Change directories to Desktop (’cd Desktop/’) and run the “nano” editor by using the following command:

   

   Assuming we want our workflow to run once a day at 7:30 in the morning, the file would look like this:

   

3. Next we load the job into our “crontab”. This is illustrated below, along with how to check to make sure everything made it in alright:

   

So that’s it. There’s a lot more that can be done here - for example you could set up the cron job to run only on weekdays by modifying the cron job slightly, but that’s probably out of the scope of this post.

What do you all think? Have you got interesting or inventive uses of Automator that you’d like to share?