Commentary: An Apple Renaissance…

Just a few quick comments, not exactly genealogy related (well it could be – the number of genealogists using Macs may start to rise)….all concerning the Mac mini.

There has been a lot of talk over the past day or so about Best Buy once again selling Macs (Mac minis specifically) in their brick-and-mortar stores, and not just online (as they had been in the recent past) . Although their website mentions only that they are coming to their retail stores and not an exact date, various rumor sites are reporting within a month or two. Same with Target (which had them online, but halted sales because of supply concerns, which should be addressed within a month or two as well).

It’s been quite a long time since Macs have enjoyed this much visibility. With a $500-$600 pricetag, with problems/concerns people (particularly parents) had with security, popups, spyware, etc. with other platforms, could this be a revival of sorts? Sure, Apple has sold a lot of Power Macs, iMacs, PowerBooks, and iBooks over the past few years, but how much of that was too previous Mac owners? We know a lot of college students picked up PBs and iBooks, but their numbers were spread out over several years.

All I know is, I’ve been reading a lot of forums, and I’ve seen a lot of Windows users ordering these and being very excited (to they point they are counting down in the threads to when it shows up on the doorstep). I’ve also been in two different Apple Stores over the past week, and both have been a lot busier than normal. I happened to be in one last saturday when the Mac minis, iLife ’05, and iWork went on sale, and it was almost as busy as a grand opening of an Apple Store. Some of that can be attributed to interest in the iPod shuffle, and the updates to iLife and the release of iWork, but it appeared that every third person out the door had a Mac mini. More than a few were either Windows users, or had used Macs years ago and came back, going by comments I overheard, and conversations I had.

What to make of all of this? The Mac mini is shaping up to be bigger than I think many of us could have imagined. Once again we heard critics say “it won’t sell, why would somebody buy a computer with a mouse, keyboard, and display, etc.”, and once again the critics were wrong.

Expect to see a lot of new activity very soon, from new users. Many people have their Mac minis already. Many of those who switch to Macs from PCs, aren’t going to be in a hurry to switch back anytime soon. I think at this point, with OS X as stable and mature as it is, that anybody would be hardpressed to move back. It’s fast becoming a cliche, but I’ll go ahead and say it – the Mac mini was twenty years late, but better late than never.

Utility: iuTime v1.20

iuTime is a free utility from UNI Technologies Corporation, that allows you to perform time and date calculations (subtractions, additions, etc. between multiple dates).

Official Site Requires: MacOS X 10.2.7

Changes:

* [new] Preference to open a particular tab at application startup.
* [new] Preference to set a particular date and time format for certain fields.
* [new] Window location is remembered for next application launch.
* [new] Ability to play a tick sound for each second, and a chime on the minute.

Online: Retrospect-GDS 1.6.4

The Retrospect-GDS Project has updated Retrospect-GDS to 1.6.4.
Retrospect-GDS is A web app designed to display genealogy information. Data can be stored in one of several databases including MySQL. Supports multiple languages. The look and feel can be changed easily using the built in templating system.

SourceForge.Net Project Page and Official Page

Changes: (1.6.4)

* This release fixes a problem with displaying individual notes in Firefox 1.0.
* It also includes a new french language translation by Robert Weinland.

Changes: (1.6.3)

* This release addresses a couple of problems with the dutch translation. A misspelling was fixed and the month names were changed to abreviations.
* A problem where the footer text sometimes appears in the middle of the pages in Firefox was also fixed.

Information: Genealogical.com CD-ROM products and Macs

I spoke with the folks over at Genealogical.com about using Macs to view the genealogy data on the CD-ROMs they publish/sell, and they informed me they are working on a Mac solution (right now the viewers are Windows only). They don’t have a timeframe as of yet, but will e-mail/contact us when they have more information.

They have a lot of good genealogy publications to begin with (2000+ books and CDs and counting), and it’s great to see they aren’t going to leave Mac genealogists out.

If your interested, you might want to take a look around their site, and maybe even send them an e-mail stating that your a Mac user and would like to be informed when their Mac solution is released. They obviously know there is an interest from Mac users, since they are working on a Mac solution, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to let them know that you are interested and to thank them for working on a Mac solution. We’ll post more information when we have it.

followup

Macworld: Apple’s New Products

By now, you may have heard about Apple’s new offerings :

Mac mini. They did it. A new, entry-level Mac at $499. Six and a half inches square and two inches tall. Think about that for a few minutes. Much of it is Build-To-Order as well (faster CPU, more memory, bigger harddrive, DVD burner, etc.). If you know anybody sitting on the fence about converting to Macs, or have an older machine and want to upgrade, or just don’t like clutter, this might be the Mac for you. Ships: 22 Jan 2005

Apple iPod shuffle. $99 or $149 iPod (512MB or 1GB storage), about the size of a couple of sticks of gum, twelve – twenty hours battery life. Doubles as a flash/USB drive. If you want a cheap backup, maybe your taking some photos or files over to a friends or a family member, this might be the device for you, because it’s not much more than normal flash/USB drives in this range. Ships: Now

Apple iWork ’05 – Productivity Suite made up of Keynote 2 and Pages, Apple’s new word processor, with plenty of features including some spiffy styles/templates, Word compatability, PDF publishing. Noticed that ‘Family Newsletter’ was one of the templates… $79. Ships: 22 Jan 2005.

Apple iLife ’05. Substantial updates to iMovie (HD/Letterbox content), iDVD (many more formats, themes/menus), GarageBand, and iPhoto, which has almost become a replacement for Adobe Photoshop Elements (and some would argue the asset management was better). iPhoto will handle RAW photos, as well as some advanced editing features. $79 Ships: 22 Jan 2005.

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