Macworld!

This morning, I finished watching Steve Job’s 2 hour keynote address to the 2005 Macworld convention. It’s always fun to see what they have come up with and which new products Apple will release this year.
First off was a preview of some of the cool new features of OS X Tiger due to be out the first half of this year. Spotlight and Dashboard were two of the hundreds of enhancements that will be included. Spotlight is a new way of searching your computer for anything, it has a really cool smart search folder that updates automatically when anything would be added. Dashboard allows you to have a number of widgets (calculator, weather, stocks, and many others) which you can access by clicking an icon in the dock, use the widgets and then go back to what you were doing. Sounds kind of like Konfabulator for some reason. =)
Next, Mr. Jobs announced the release of the updates to iLife and a new product, iWork (a new/replacement for Appleworks). The iLife updates really appear to be just upgrades from what is already in iLife. iWork includes Keynote and Pages, Keynote is roughly like M$ Powerpoint and Pages is similar to M$ Word.
Last, Jobs released two new, really cool hardware products: Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle. The Mac Mini is a BYODKM Mac with OS X and an affordable price - $499. It’s the cheapest Mac ever. I’d be so tempted to get one. =) The iPod Shuffle is based off of the idea that most people use the shuffle mode for the music they are listening to so to simplify the interface, there is only a shuffle->playlist->off switch, Play/Pause, volume up and down, and Next and Previous song buttons. It’s smaller than “most packs of gum” and comes in two sizes. The 512Mb is $99 and the 1Gb model is $149. Very cool. I’m probably going to get one after I actually get a chance to look at it.

Well, that’s the highlights…there were other things, so if you want to see the rest, just watch the streaming video. Keep up the cool stuff Apple!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 12th, 2005 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Cool Stuff, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.