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OK, there’s bitching and then there’s primo grade-A bitching.

Macworld Already a Bummer, With or Without Apple.

“Worst. Macworld. Ever.” said one attendee after the Tuesday keynote. “This sucks.”

This displays little more than a lack of proper historical perspective. Gil Amelio ring any bells? Please, let’s not review the tape, people. It could get ugly.

It also displays a lack of proper verbiage. More correctly, the attendee should have said “Worst. Macworld. Expo. Keynote. Ever.” as he or she could not have been to the showroom floor yet.

Also, there’s all the drinking. We’re not nearly done with that.

This year’s keynote was an epic yawner.

Personally, while the keynote obviously lacked the big announcements of recent years, the Macalope found the iLife demonstration to be awesome, and the crowd seemed to agree.

No new iPhone.

Please. No serious analyst thought there would be a new iPhone.

No new iPod.

iPod? Nobody at all thought there would be new iPods.

No new iMac, and — despite lots of pre-show hype, rumor and buzz — no new Mac Mini.

Yes. A bunch of people thought there might be a new Mini and maybe a new iMac. But did Apple in any way shape or form lead anyone to believe there would be? No. This kind of sentence construction is designed to make you think that it’s somehow a failure on Apple’s part that they didn’t deliver an iMac or a Mini. It’s not.

You can be disappointed that Apple didn’t announce more (and, don’t be mistaken, the Macalope is) but you’re just being a tool if you’re claiming to be disappointed because Apple didn’t announce specific items “everyone said they were going to announce”.

The keynote also ended with a thinly veiled insult: Tony Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” — surely a goodbye middle finger to International Data Group, which owns Macworld Expo.

Of course it seems to be a middle finger if you’re the kind of person who sees everything through the prism of motives that appeal to your high-school Heathers mentality. The horny one actually thought it was a nice send-off.

Was it a great keynote? Well, no. Phil Schiller actually did a great job delivering it. Has anyone watched CEOs from other companies? They’d be lucky to have their keynotes delivered by Schiller, let alone Jobs. Apple followers are spoiled.

The problem is he just didn’t have that much to announce. But expecting pie-in-sky items like new iPhones and iPods is just jackassery in the third degree.

The Macalope will have some more thoughts on the keynote in his piece for Macworld on Thursday.

ADDENDUM: The Macalope, while not shy about profanity, doesn’t usually point it directly at a silly pundit, but in this case he’s going to make an exception for this:

Topping it off was Tony Bennett, who came onstage and belted out a couple of songs nobody under 60 knows.

Fuck you, Mathew. The Macalope is well below 60 and was utterly thrilled to see a fucking legend like Tony Bennett singing classic songs. Unless you go to Vegas frequently, this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see someone whose name will go down in history as one of the greatest performers. And so far everyone the Macalope’s talked to has raved about it.

Don’t be a dick.

Ryan Singer on iPhoto ’09:

Apple realized that people don’t just want to find photos. Go back to iPhoto’s domain: it’s that situation where you have a bunch of photos and you want to look at them and share them. When you’re in that situation, you don’t just want to see random photos. You want to see and share photos of certain things.

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Looks great.

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Bizarre piece from Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider yesterday, claiming that Gizmodo “got the story right” about Steve Jobs’s health. The report with the headline that read “Steve Jobs’s Health Declining Rapidly”, and included this quote from their “trusted source”:

Steves [sic] health is rapidly declining. Apple is choosing to remove the hype factor strategically vs letting the hype destroy apple [sic] when the inevitable news comes later this spring.

So Apple issues statements from Jobs and from the board of directors which indicates that the cause of his weight loss has been identified and is being treated and that he expects to be in better shape within a few months — and somehow this proves that Gizmodo was right about a report which stated that his health is “rapidly declining” leading to some dreadful “inevitable news later this spring”? What the fuck.

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A MacInTouch reader poked around in the app bundle and found Windows .exe’s. No wonder it looks so weird. Update: Doesn’t seem like the app is a WINE translation, as the MacInTouch reader speculates.

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Snell and Moren’s live coverage had a good mix of play-by-play and commentary.

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Another good overview of new features, with a separate page describing iWork.com. You know it’s a Web 2.0 because it’s clearly labeled “Beta” right in the logo.

I wonder how iWork.com displays fonts that aren’t present on the client side?

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Includes extensive guided tours showing the new features in iPhoto and iMovie.

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I predicted iLife, iWork, and the 17-inch MacBook Pro, but, as usual, I predicted a slew of other fanciful things that didn’t pan out. (It occurs to me that if everything I predicted had been included, it would have been a six-hour keynote.)

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Kids just aren’t as cool as they used to be.

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My thanks to MacHeist for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. There’s something going on at the web site this week where you get a “mission”, solve puzzles, and then you get free software as a reward. You get the outliner Process (regularly $39) for free just for signing up.

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As of two minutes ago, it appears you can now buy music from iTunes from your iPhone over EDGE and 3G, not just Wi-Fi.

Even better: all the music in the store appears to be DRM-free now. I’m guessing Phil Schiller will announce it later on in the keynote. Maybe this is the “one more thing”?

Update: It’s official.

Update 2: During the keynote, Schiller specifically said music was now downloadable over “3G networks”, but I was right — it works over EDGE too.

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Doesn’t seem like Twitter is holding up well, but I’m jotting notes from the keynote there.

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For the next five seconds while this open wifi network works! More later, if the person running it doesn’t hack my MacBook! I’m here with Chris Breen, Craig Hockenberry and 10,000 others. I didn’t get their names. 9:03 - LIGHTS DIMMING! Ladies and gentlemen…. PHIL SCHILLER! Thunderous applause and ladies panties! 9:05 - Holy crap, I’m not [...] 25

I just read the article, Switcher's lament: The case against Mac, by Rafe Needleman.  Certainly the author's name fits the way the article came across to me.

Actually I could have saved him a lot of trouble.  Over the years, Outlook on the Mac has always seemed to lag what Microsoft delivered for the PC.  I was once at a meeting at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab where enterprise users of the Mac read the riot act to Microsoft.  I think that was almost seven years ago, and my guess is that things are only slightly improved.  I am not sure Microsoft would see much advantage to making it easier for its users to switch to a Mac.

If you are an Outlook addict or power user, do us all a favor, stay on Windows.  I could offer a whole laundry list of things which I like better about Apple Mail than the Outlook client which I use daily on my Vista laptop, but many of the things are just what I have grown to like on the Mac over the years.

However, there are some key differences. Number one on my list would be that Apple's Mail is rarely unresponsive.  Outlook rarely goes more than a day or two without some problem.  Then there is the wait while Outlook is retrieving mail or updating its caches.   The reality is that if you grew up on Outlook and cannot live without it, forget about being happy with mail programs on the Mac.

While I am certainly no Outlook fan, I understand that some people cannot live without it. Why this is the case I cannot figure out. Outlook has to be one the clunkiest pieces of software that I have ever seen. It needs a complete rewrite.  Sometime in the last six months Outloook decided to not like the SMTP server for one of my mail accounts which has a digital certificate.  The account works fine on Apple Mail and on Thunderbird on Linux, but I cannot send mail on Outlook using that account.  It receives fine, it just will not send. I have given up trying to fix it.

While I might fault Apple for saying how easy it is to import everything to a Mac, life is a whole lot easier if you have been using standard IMAP servers for your mail.  You just set the accounts up, and things seem to work perfectly.

One of the author's next complaints is iPhoto in relation to Picasa.  The biggest gripe seems to be that iPhoto requires that photos be imported.  I have a hard time getting very excited over this.  It is actually just something you do once, and it is done.  I use both products each day.  I get irritated that Picasa will not import pictures without me giving the folder a name or selecting a previous folder, but I do not lose sleep over it.

I like iPhoto importing my photos with no hassle.  Since it is not unusual for me to do a couple of hundred photos a day, I might be a little more photo-centric, but I do give both programs a good workout.  I am convinced iPhoto's tools are better than Picasa's. On XP my Picasa used to launch automatically when I inserted a memory card.  I have not been able to figure out how to get Vista to do that.

Picasa does have some nice things like geo-tagging and watermarks, but iPhoto is a solid tool.  The integration between iPhoto and Picasa Web albums is very good.  The option that iPhoto offers in generating a web page is also very useful and saves me a fair amount of time.

As to irritating user interface issues, Picasa requires me to tell it to return to the library when I have finished working with a photo. On the Mac I just click on the photo.  However, it certainly is not something that is much more than a nit.

Then there is the VPN issue.  What can I say other than VPNs are in general a pain in the rear that most people do not have to endure.  There are VPNs that work well with Macs.  We were on a VPN almost all the time when I worked for Apple.  We signed in with a SecurdID keyfob.  Apple will never be able to stay on top of all VPNs so if a VPN is very important to you, you might check to see how other Mac users are doing before you make the decision to switch.

As to printing photos on a HP printer.  I have two HP printers at my desk currently.  They both work fine.  I seem to manage to print to the photo tray when I need to and switch to regular paper without much trouble. Not only that but I use the scanner on my HP C6180 AIO. I even use it with a third party product, VueScan, so I do not have to touch the scary HP software.  I have a post, HP AIO Photosmart C6180 and Mac OSX, about my success with the printer which I use without problems on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Right now on a variety of Macs, I am using Canon, HP, Epson, and Brother printers.  That is actually three Epson printers, three HP printers, one Canon printer, and two Brother printers.  I also used the Minolta copy center printer at our office until our company started requiring authorization codes which the Konica/Minolta Mac driver does not support.

Since I use Google's Gmail calendar, I do not spend a lot of time with iCal.  I do find it very useful for integration of a wide variety of information beyond appointments.  I use it to subscribe to a tide table, local weather, and my Gmail calendar.  I am sure if you are used to an Outlook calendar there are holes. Even the author and his wife do not agree on the calendar issue so it is pretty hard to fault the Mac on that one.

This quote just makes me chuckle.

If I was starting from scratch and buying my first computer, or if neither I nor my wife worked for companies with entrenched non-Mac-friendly e-mail systems, I might be singing a different song. But we're not high school students, we're grownups with serious amounts of technological baggage. The Mac has not been treating us well as we've tried to switch.

I have helped plenty of people switch to the Mac.  These folks do not have "technological baggage," they have a moving van full of stuff that most people will never face.

I am sure there are lots of people out there with HP's Media Smart Server. Actually, that is probably not the case.  I also have a hard time with the complaint about relearning Microsoft Excel for the Mac.  He even admits that he has just gotten used to the new Windows version of the suite.  I found the transition from the previous version of Office on Windows to the latest version like learning a whole new program.

I am still happy with the older PowerPC version of Office on my Macs, but somehow I manage to use both Windows versions when necessary.  I even use NeoOffice without any problems.

As to the problems with the Blackberry, that might well be the case since for years I have heard Blackberry users complaining about support for the Mac.  I still do not carry an iPhone or a Blackberry.  They might cut into my fishing time.

I think the lesson from this switcher is to do your homework before you jump to another platform.  It you are married to Outlook or perhaps the Blackberry, just stay where you are.

Also it is a good idea to never take Apple's marketing very seriously.  Users on the Mac platform are a much better source of what will work than Apple's marketing message.

The Mac is a great platform. Every time I watch to see if my Windows Vista laptop is actually going to wake up, I am reminded of how reliable a Mac is.  Each PDF I automatically create brings a smile to my face.  I move from a Mac environment to a PC environment almost every day, and I remain convinced that most people, not married to Windows for life, would have a better computing experience if they took the time to switch to a Mac.

I do not know of any people whom I have helped switch who would disagree with that comment.

Life here on the coast continues to be very pleasant  The holiday season has treated us well. 

I am happy to be on the coast and not in a city.

Our new electronic village for the Crystal Coast continues to get some good traffic.

I have had a lot fun working with the new iMovie and creating clips of the Emerald Isle Christmas Parade for YouTube.

I am looking forward to what Apple has to announce tomorrow.  Maybe we will finally get a signal that Apple is still interested in computers beyond the iPhone.

My predictions from last year, plus those from 2007 and 2006.

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Quite an odd visual theme. Doesn’t really look like a Mac app at all.

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Chuq Von Rospach on the non-removable 17-inch MBP battery rumor.

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Translation: If Jobs were terminally ill, or otherwise unable to do his job, Apple’s board would make it known.

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