unklerupert’s knee

Apple today approved and released the Wordpress iPhone app. Hopefully this will persuade me to post a bit more than of late, have been a bit busy drinking wine see.

First impressions are very good. Setting up blog access took minutes, as did creating a new post and adding tags and categories. Now can I add a pic?

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It is 00:21 on the 26th of October 2007 as I write this. All Apple whores rejoice, today is Leopard day, the long awaited release of OS X 10.5 will be over @ 18:00 tonight.

Apple have had a great year with the introduction of the iPhone, the iPod touch, and increased Mac hardware sales above projection, now with the release of Leopard, it’s ease of use, simple but powerful built in backup with Time Machine, things can’t get much better.

But wait, how about a celebrity endorsement, from a lovely young lady with a new tech podcast to help us all out, yep, that will provide the final push to help Apple take over the UK home computer market, probably.

So, without further ado, get yourself over to Byte Me TV and check out episode 1, where Keeley Hazell wrestles with the choice between a PC or a Mac with the help of Byte Me TV resident puter guru Gary Schwartz .

It’s a tough choice, with well constructed arguments on either side of the question, but Apple just about swings it, welcome aboard the Mac bus Keeley :O)

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Apple today announced the release date of their latest OS X iteration 10.5 Leopard on 26th October 2007. Apple have updated the Mac OS X page to include a countdown and more details on the highly anticipated upgrade to their operating system.

So now to decide whether to watch the early adopters struggle with application incompatability and wait for the first updates to fix, or whether to throw caution to the wind and go for it on release day. Probably the latter as I am such an Apple whore!

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Apple announce a special event on Wed 5th September.
iPod supply being run down all over the place.
Seems like the whole iPod range will be updated on Wednesday 5th September, will the much rumoured video iPod make an appearance at last? After all the announcements, could the one “one more thing” be the addition of The Beatles back catalogue to Apple iTunes? Some are saying NO, but I find it rather coincidental that Paul McCartney has just been announced as a special guest on BBC Radio 1 with a rather big announcement on …. Wednesday 5th September (announced by Edith Bowman on Friday afternoons show)

All will be revealed next Wednesday, locking the credit card away now, and throwing away the key.

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I am watching MacRumors Apple WWDC (world wide dev conf) updates to see what new Apple gear I can spend my hard earned money on, this is indeed a new low. I will of course later be mooching about for a webcast of Steve Jobs keynote to see what the “secret” features of the new OS X Leopard are.

I will then go shave my head and paint myself green. I am an Apple whore.

UPDATE: OS X Leopard looking very nice indeed, have a look October can’t come soon enough, hopefully they’ll get the iPhone out in Europe by then as well.

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Apple today released some nice new teaser ads for the upcoming iPhone. Looks like June 29th release in the states, no news on Europe yet, so I’ll keep saving the sheckles.

Ad1 – Never been an iPod that can do this.

Ad2 – How To.

Ad3 – Calamari?

Personally, I am hoping vodafone get the european contract and that the iPhone comes in at around £200 > £250. Bet your ass that they will be going for a lot more than that on e-bay though, maybe worth a punt for a quick profit, ala the Nintendo Wii, and very unlike the Sony PS3.

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Boo Hiss! News just coming out that due to the shift of QA and engineer resources from Apples’ new OS X iteration Leopard over to the much anticipated iPhone, Leopard release has now been delayed until October 2007.

Found out whilst mooching round macrumors.com for news of any new developer seeds. Plenty people getting pissed off and whining that they want the OS and not the shiny phone, me, I’m not fussed, the longer they take to get it right the better.

More details over @ macrumors.

Update: Official Apple Statement

Apple Statement

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones. [Apr 12, 2007]

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From NME.com

The Beatles’ music finally set for download release?
Apple and EMI set for major announcement tomorrow
2 hours ago

Speculation is mounting that The Beatles’ back catalogue will finally become available to download.

Apple have called a press conference at the EMI label headquarters in London tomorrow (April 2), where boss Steve Jobs will make a major announcement about iTunes.

The Beatles and Apple recently settled a long-running legal dispute over use of the Apple brand name, clearing the way for a deal to be struck over the digital release of their music. Since EMI control the band’s catalogue, insiders are predicting that a deal between the two will be announced tomorrow.

The Beatles music has never been available to legally download before.

Recent changes in chart rules allowing downloads to count towards the singles chart have prompted speculation that when it is available, the band’s music could dominate the UK Top 40.

Depending on the details of tomorrow’s news, this could now happen as early as next Sunday (April 8). There is also speculation that the announcement could include information about the European launch of Apple’s latest MP3 playing gadget, the iPhone, which is set to make its US debut this summer.

Check NME.COM tomorrow for full details of Jobs’ speech.

Rumours over at macrumors.comsuggest that the press conference could be about EMI becoming the first record company to remove Digital Rights Management from music downloads, something Steve Jobs has recently proposed in his “Thoughts On Music” article from Feb 2007.

Or maybe we get both? Certainly been a bit dry on the Apple news front recently, all will revealed tomorrow.

UPDATE: DRM removal it was, more details over on aunty BEEB

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Have recently been converting a lot of video to .m4v format to manage video playback through Apple iTunes (7.1.1), now when I export stuff “for iPod” from my elgato eyeTV software, the resulting video files, when imported into iTunes have a description field. I have not been able to edit this field with iTunes (get info) or add descriptions to videos I have added from other sources.

Well I found a solution (although it would be nice if Apple managed to add this to a future release) over @ dougscripts, hopefully that helps someone else out there :O)

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As you can see there is a link to the “Social” page at the top there. Pop through and you will see a nice big kinda cloud of all my publicly visible bookmarks (I have got some secrets you know) that are managed through my del.icio.us account.

del.icio.us allows you to export and manage all of your internet bookmarks online, share them with other people, and integrate them with plugins like this nice firefox one. Doing this means you can always have your bookmarks to hand wherever you are, at home, at work, on holiday etc.

So I thought I’d share that, being nice and all that, feel free to send paypal donations of thanks to neill@pro-creator.co.uk :O)

If your using Apple OSX you can also use a nice app like cocoalicious to manage all your bookmarks (although development seems a bit slow on this one, it does the trick), you may need to tickle it a bit as well (see this)

Of course you might be using Windows, in which case, you have my sympathies.

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