Apple in Zoom

Confirmed rumor by AppleInsider, the new iMac should be silver. Forget about the black color of new iMac, new iMac will be the similar to MacBook Pro.

The new design is not enough. New iMac will have a new hardware inside, which should result in much more improved performance of the whole gadget. Wow, looking forward to see a new 24´´ iMac on my table.

The new silver iMac should be also thinner than the current one. The new silver iMac will be probably delivered with a new keyboard. I would be very happy to see the keyboard, which is shining in the night the same way as my MacBook Pro. As I love to play with my computer in the night. But there are no rumors about the backlight inside the new keyboard.

I decided to buy one as I need a bigger screen to make adjustments in photos. And larger the screen is, the better result and better productivity I will get. Sure, that is a bit of a mantra for me to apologize the huge cost I will have to pay.

Definitely, a new silver iMac will be my final good bye to the old /but still very good/ PowerPC architecture. It was a really nice time to spent with PowerPC processor.

BitRocket looks like a very agile competitor for Transmission and Azureus BitTorrent clients - at least on Mac OS X. BitRocket is an open source BitTorrent client for Mac OS X and it is developed natively just for Mac OS X.

As authors express, BitRocket is aimed to be a good alternative to other Mac OS BitTorrent clients. And it definitely is. As any other open source application BitRocket has a long journey to get to the version 1.0, but the current beta is pretty able to compete with Transmission and it is much more capable than Azureus.

BitRocket BitTorrent client supports RSS and you can see all the new addictions to the favorite BitTorrent sites. You can define as many RSS syndications as you want. Also BitRocket is able to search for torrent files with its internal search engine. It searches for the torrent file on most favorite BitTorrent sites.

When you look for the alternative BitTorrent client for Mac OS X you have to consider BitRocket as well.

Steve Jobs has to have a nice dreams these days. After a big nervous preparations of a “revolutionary mobile phone” he must know. At least development costs for the new mobile phone – iPhone will be covered by the number of customers, who paid for the device really high price.

iPhone was a real big risk. iPod was pretty new device, when it was introduced and its spread among customers. Do you know, how long time does it take to iPod to sell 1 million pieces to customers? More than several months, it took about a year. And Apple TV? It is a device, which is almost unseen right now. Everything at Apple is focused on iPhone.

When you see the madness around iPhone everyone has to understand about the delay in the development of Mac OS X Leopard. The cashflow generated by iPhone must be much more stronger than the potential cashflow generated by the new version of the Mac OS X operating system – Mac OS X.

The Americans have a nice example to see what the communism was about. They stand in queues for several hours to get their first iPhone. Not complaining, just waiting.

We, the Europeans, can just read reviews and stories about the brand new iPhone and the preparations for iPhone introduction to Europe. The Europeans operate on a bit different GSM system, heavily used to send MMS and to use the 3rd generation GSM networks and iPhone will need a huge update to be competitive on the market. But looking at the iPod story and its innovations, it is pretty sure, within several months, the new innovated iPhone will be introduced to the market.

Nokia, Motorola and Samsung must be very sad about the results of iPhone. When a completely new competitor comes to the market, with a completely different marketing strategy and not competing by price of the gadget. It has to change the rules on the mobile phone market. The new “high end” mobile phone will have to come with a new strategy and new features and it will take some time to these companies to develop a successful competitor.

Making iPhone a success needs a strong focus on iMacs and iPods (do not forget about Microsoft and its Zune story) to keep their competition advantage at the moment. Just iPhone is not a basis for the successful future. Even Apple needs more legs to stand on. And it is nice to see that iPhone has a big chance to become another leg for Apple.

Crazy future starts today. Apple starts to sell iPhone. Nothing is more expected than iPhone this year. Forget iPod, forget iMac, iPhone is the king of the scene. Maybe with the small princess of Apple TV. Review will follow review, one reason will beat another reason. iPhone is a success before its introduction to the market. Why? No one saw it /just few exceptions so far/. But it has a community of people, who love iPhone and a community of people who hate iPhone.Apple released update of iTunes, which is compatible with iPhone so you can start to work very comfortably with. Apple cares about its community. And iPhone will reign the newspapers and specialized magazines for several weeks. And life style magazine will quickly follow with its positive reviews of the products.I hope Apple made no major mistake in development of the device as it will be a real success on the market and it will be able to compete with Nokia, Motorola and Samsung very nicely.As a true European, I can stay calm for several months. It will take a long time to iPhone to come to European markets. And to the Czech Republic, it can be about a year from now.So, I will be completely out of the iPhone madness. But I wish all the best to Apple to make a successful introduction to the market.

Transmission and Azureus are the best applications for bitTorrent sharing on Mac OS X. Both applications are competing for its users.

Azureus is a very complex application, which knows almost everything is very well connected with other services, offering directly for download a lot of movie trailers and free songs directly to your computer with just one single click.

Transmission is a complete opposite of Azureus. With a very simple user interface, which consists just from one window showing all your torrents and their progress in downloading and uploading. All you can do is just to make a set up of the download and upload speed limits, which I fully recommends to you. The authors of Transmission say, that Transmission have very simple and intuitive user interface, which is something you have to agree with. It is almost mission impossible to make the user interface simpler from their solution.

Transmission fully co-operate with Growl notification system and you are informed about the status of the files downloaded and uploaded with notifications, which helps you to monitor the overall status of the transfers. To make things even better, the speed of download and upload are shown on the icon in the Dock.

Transmission is a true Mac OS X application. When you define one folder, where you put your torrent files, Transmission can be set to watch this folder automatically and adding them for download without any interference from your side. This is really great feature of the application.

Comparing Transmission and Azureus bitTorrent clients is not that easy. Transmission is a light weight application, which does not consume a lot of resources of your computer and it is amazingly fast. Compared to Azureus, which is written in Java, it is a lot more quicker and for many users - the work with the application can be much more comfortable. Today, I would definitely choose Transmission over Azureus. In case, you need just to download bitTorrent files from the Internet - you have no option - just take Transmission.

Transmission is provided to the community as open source application and you can modify the application as you want to. I had several issues configuring Transmission correctly as Airport Express was a bit blocking my communication, but with external help from friends I made finally Transmission communicating with external world around me.

When you need the application for sharing bitTorrent files I can fully recommend Transmission. Transmission bitTorrent client is available for Mac OS X, Linux and BeOS.

Mac OS X Leopard raised expectations like Windows Vista. About a year later, but it will be time for another “Wow”.

The surprise is prepared a bit different way. Microsoft Windows Vista were available as a beta to almost every single user, who wanted to try the feeling of a completely new experience. In the world of Windows.

With Mac OS X Leopard, just few people were so lucky to have a beta version and all the web site are pressed not to publish a single picture of new Mac OS X Leopard.

Mac OS X Leopard was presented publicly just two times and everything is a secret. So far, there is no big surprise for the Apple community. It looks nice, it sound great, but there is really no feature to make me looking forward to upgrading to Mac OS X Leopard.

Apple’s lawyers are very active and they ask every single website to delete the screenshots of the new operating system. I do not understand why. There is nothing new to see. Most windows look the same, just their surrounding is a bit different.

In case, you are interested to see the pictures, you can look here.

And you can add Apple in Zoom to your RSS Reader.

Buy any book about digital cameras and digital photographing and the first thing you will notice is a long speech about RAW file format and the need to use it.

Generally, when you are a photographer to take photos of your family, friends and some other occasions, you really do not need to benefit from RAW file format.

The benefits of RAW file format are:

• possibility of white color balance;
• adjustment of exposure;
• details in the photo.

White color balancing is very important for digital cameras and post processing of digital photos. When the photographer used a classic film for taking photos, it was easy – the right film has to be used according light conditions. With digital cameras, the right temperature of colors must be set. With a compact digital camera you have no worries as it is set automatically for you, but when you want to make some additional adjustments and corrections in the photo, you need to make a picture in RAW format. Balancing white or setting the temperature of the photo is an easy task, when the photo is in RAW format.

RAW format includes information about exposure of the photo and it allows additional corrections and changes in exposure of the photo. It allows you to get more details from the photo and to make the photo look more sexy. It is not a general cure, it is an option to make photos look better.

RAW file format is a lossless file format. Everything, what digital camera sees is stored in the file. No details are lost for the future. In JPEG the details are lost from the photo and it limits potential corrections and adjustments. The details can be sometimes very important for the play with the photo.

But as RAW file format has several advantages, it also has one big advantage. With RAW file format, you have to make some kind of post-processing the computer. It is not a file format for direct presentation and also, when you ask for the print outs of photos, you cannot send it in RAW format. You have to convert it.

Using RAW file format is great, when you plan to make additional post-processing with the photo, but when you plan just photos for memories, go for JPEG. It is quicker, a lot more comfortable and no one will recognize any major difference.

Generally, you have several options for importing and adjustments of RAW images before passing them to another application:

• Adobe Photoshop (expensive)
• iPhoto (not so comfortable)
• Aperture (great, but expensive)
• Open source application like Rawker (simple)
• … or you can benefit from Sandisk offer

Sandisk offers the buyers of their memory cards to download Capture One LE for free when you buy a new compact flash card. It is nicely included in the package and the application is really great and the offer saves to you 95 USD for the application. The only condition is to buy a Extreme III type card, but it is the only condition.

The application does just one thing – it takes all the RAW photos from one folder and process them to another. You can do almost everything with the photos, from balancing the white color to adjusting the lenses. And all the tasks are done intuitively. You can choose the version of the Capture One for Windows or Mac OS X and both versions include the same features.

The application has a very simple user interface, with the selected photo in the window and you can immediately see the changes as you change the values. When you are done with the setting you can make a batch processing of the photos or you can adjust all the photos manually one-by-one.Within the offer, you receive also one free update of the application. When you do not see the application as sufficient for your needs, you can upgrade the application to the PRO version with a 15% discount. But –it is really very expensive.

More conditions you can find here.

There is one interesting rumor on this site. It is in Czech, but the statement is very simple. Confirmed from the sources at the manufacturing company, the production of the new line of iMacs will start within several weeks (2 – 3 weeks).

iMacs will not be just updated – it will be a complete redesign and also – much more powerful hardware will be present. The article express, new Santa Rosa chipset will be used and also – just NVIDIA graphics will be included in all the models – and it should be one of the best models they offer now.

And – the article says, new iMac is very cute and sexy.

So guys, we have just to wait for a short time to see a new iMacs in stores.

Raising expectations and not meeting them is the most typical fundamental mistake, which can happen in the business. It is usually possible to find it in the area of project management, where unmanaged expectations of internal and external customers quickly finished many careers.

The expectations from the speech of Steve Jobs at WWDC were really high. Not supported just by the Apple community, but also heavily supported by the financial markets analysts and their predictions. Many of them predicted new products and “revolutionary” services and predicting the shares of Apple to buy.

The issue with the speech is a bit different. Apple did make no comment to any of the rumors on the market and inside the Apple community. What usually happens with rumors? They start as a tiny story and after several hours, it is completely expected news, which just needs an official confirmation. The confirmation did not come and the rumor was growing bigger and bigger and no one knew the roots and the real truth. It was known just to Apple, but the company kept silence.

Basically, there were two major mistakes on the speech of Steve Jobs´speech:

• In the light of raised expectations of final audience, the speech of Steve Jobs was a real disappointment. When I read the 10 biggest changes in Mac OS X Leopard, nothing looked really attractive to me. 2 new Dashboard widgets visible on the screen? Wow, but I expected the Dashboard widget to be able to sit on the Desktop. Spaces? Cool, but Linux has it for years. New iChat features? Cool, what about some serious work? Smart Preview? Cool, but I know it from other operating systems.
• Also, the introduction of Safari 3 for Windows was not a lucky moment. I know it is beta. But Steve forgot to mention it is very early beta. The application runs just under English version of Windows correctly, trying to run under different language brings sudden results. Trying a different language version under Mac OS X can bring the same. It was too early to release that as many people make humor about really “innovative web browser” as it shows internet pages very “innovative way”.

The real issue is not bringing some innovative ideas. The issue is not bringing the confirmation of rumors at the market. The market expected Apple will make a huge step in the development of Mac OS X Leopard and the expectations were not met. Right now, me personally, I do not see any benefit of upgrading my current Mac OS X to Mac OS X Leopard for 129 USD, when I see no value added and productivity increase.

Steve, the next keynote needs a lot of preparation and generally… you need to drive the expectations of the target audience.