Techmeme is completely jammed! Take a look at this snapshot of the page. The discussion on the iPhone is all over it.

And over on Technorati where the top tags and searches are:

And if you glance at Digg you can’t help but notice the most digged story ever with nearly 15,000 diggs and more than 1000 comments:

And also that the iPhone occupies 6 of the top 10 stories on Digg:

And on Reddit it is number 1 with more than 600 votes:

And finally from Newsvine we see this:

Wow.

The site that was set to offer live audio streaming of the upcoming Macworld Keynote already seems to have fallen offline. World Of Apple seems to be showing a “Server Not Found” message right now. And it is just 51 minutes until the keynote…

Update: Can now get the Favicon. Not the site though. Better use Mac Rumors Live instead.

The common consensus seems to now be that there will be an iPhone at least announced at Macworld tomorrow (Tuesday 9th January). I am still not convinced myself. Yes I think that it would be cool - but I am not sure that Apple have got what it takes to do it right now.

But I say this in the pure hope to be proved wrong. So lets see how it goes…

Update: Yes they released it!

Omnidrive is a very web 2.0 file storage company based in Australia. The idea is that storing files on a remote server should be just as easy as storing files on a local drive. Of course in reality it isn’t, so Omnidrive’s desktop clients bridge this gap in an effort to make online storage as seamless as possible.

On Windows it appears in an explorer window. Very similar to how any other explorer window looks. And it is great. You can fiddle with your files just how you want to as if they were on the hard drive of your computer. And on the Mac it is mounted in the Finder so it appears almost exactly like an external drive.

That is, if you can get it to work.

When I tried to install the Mac client I got this window:

I reported this to Omnidrive staff on numerous occassions. But they never got back to me. Anyway the other day I got a new external hard drive and I ran the installation again except this time selecting the external drive as the installation destination. It worked fine and then I was able to drag the program into my Applications folder. A bit of a work around but it now works fine.

I know what you are thinking. What is the point of having your stuff stored or backed up with Omnidrive if you need this bastard-to-install client to get at it? That cyber cafe is hardly going to have it installed is it. No, it is not. And this is where the beauty comes in. There is also a web client. It is basic, but it is useable. This is another perfect example of the ideas I suggested in my web 2.0 post. A desktop client for the best user experience on the computers you use most and a web client for all those other places where you might be caught on a computer without the client. This gives storage perfection.

The conversion of prices from dollars to the British pound has always been a bit of a mystrey. But nothing is more baffling than the new prices given to the iPods. The top of the range iPod Nano (Black) costs $249 or £169. The bottom of the range traditional iPod also costs $249. But wait for it… it costs £189.

There is clearly something funny going on here. An extra £20 has come from somewhere. Either Britain is being ripped off for the traditional iPod or Britain is getting a bargin on the iPod Nano. I know that the price conversions to pounds are quite complicated. First they have to be converted to pounds, then VAT is added and then they have to made into a sexy price… probably by some rounding up. I decided to investigate this process.Lets first take an example outside of this conflict. Say the iPod Nano 4GB. There it is $199 or £129. A direct conversion of dollars to pounds says that $199 should be £105.75. Now take VAT at 17.5% it comes to £124.25 which they round to the £129 price tag. So this method of conversion seems to work well.

Lets now try it on the iPod Nano 8GB (Black). So we take the $249 and we get £132.57. Plus the 17.5% VAT gives £155.77 which is quite a bit less than the £169 that the British are made to pay. But if you think that is bad then look at the £189 that is charged for the full iPod (30GB) that is a full £33 above the price worked out through considering tax.

So lets take a little closer look at this price conversion process. Below I list the price differences between what the British prices should be (including tax) and what they are.

iPod Shuffle: £5.53 - $10.38
iPod Nano 2 GB: £5.69 - $10.68
iPod Nano 4 GB: £4.75 - $8.92
iPod Nano 8 GB: £13.23 - $24.83
iPod 30 GB: £33.23 - $62.35
iPod 60 GB: £40.47 - $75.93

Quite a premium on the highest range iPod too. It is just it was much more noticable for the 30 GB iPod given the same price was used for it and the iPod Nano 8 GB.

I can’t do such an indepth analysis for other country stores as I am not aware of taxes that may be applicable. One thing I can see without any knowledge of customs and taxes is see if the price of the 8 GB Nano is the same as the 30 GB iPod in each store.

And it is in:

Australia, Canada, Japan, Singapore, and the USA.

But it isn’t in:

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Suomi, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Republic of Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.

The pattern is pretty clear. Europe and Hong Kong (where the price increment for the iPod 30 GB is very slight) have the different prices. That is the majority of the courtries that are offered by the store so the question should perhaps not be why the prices are different in all of these places but why they are the same in Australia, Canaga, Japan, Singapore and the USA. It seems completely crazy. Perhaps some EU wide tariff only on things with more than 8 GB of storage? It just doesn’t make sense.

Today at the much hyped Apple Event “It’s Showtime”, Apple announced significant changes to the iTunes logo. Here are the images:

	Months of design work. Thousands of ideas.
V6. Before		V7. After

The Musical Note

The thing that immediately hits you is the colour change. They have taken the plunge and gone straight from green to blue for the musical note. But that isn’t the only change. Not by a long shot. Just look at the shape of the note. The bar between the notes has got thicker (or “taller”) and has a new style of sheen which makes it look less 3D. The angle of the top of the note has slightly changed too and it has been lowered with respect to the disc behind it. Whilst the left corner of the note used to coincide with the edge of the CD behind it the CD is now higher at that intersection. The effect of this is seen throughout the image. No longer can the white background be seen between the two sticks of the note at the right hand side. This triangle of white is completely lost. The balls at the bottom of the note seem more rounded. Their angling has changed too and they are less elongated and more spherical. The shadow effect of these on the bottom disc beneath has totally changed. The old logo shows a clear shadow to the lower right of both balls whereas the new design has much lighter shading for the shadow and whilst it is to the lower right for the leftmost ball it is not seen at all for the righthand one.

The CD

The disc itself has also been changed. Again the most dramatic change comes with the colouring. The spectrum has been completely reversed in a rather bold move with the red in the lefthand spectrum now starting at the bottom. It’s center has changed to now be a lighter shade than the rest of the disc and due to shape changes in the disc (as well as repositioning decisions) you can no longer see through the disc’s central hole to the left of the left stick. The only viewpoint via which the hole in the disc can be seen is actually between the sticks themselves. Back with the spectrum, we see the colours have been really focused or “deblurred” for this new release. The spectrum is much more split up compared to the very smudged approach seen in the original design. The disc seems to have been raised vertically too. By this I mean that it is standing more upright than previously. The main indication of this is seen in the shadowing behind the disc of which more can be seen.

This is clearly a hugely significant change. And to unveil it on the same day as new iPods, iPod Games, iPod Movies, iTV to come, and a revamped iTunes program is incredible. Needless to say, the logo is shipping today.

Update: I think we were all kind of wondering if Apple would go full out and update front row to match the blue. And we shouldn’t really have wondered. Of course they did. They aren’t however so pedantic to update the information about front row on say the Mac Book page. Good for them.

The Finder

The core of the Mac OS X system is the finder. It it is largely like explorer is in Windows operating systems. You can not close the finder when you are running the operating system, and it is the “application” that is running when you start up the computer. As you can see on the screenshot to the right it says “Finder” right at the top of the screen just to the left of the apple logo. This bar ends with the clock and spotlight icon and is also home to the things like volume control, and wireless configuration (rather like that area in windows at the bottom right of your screen). This is bar is called the menu bar.

And it is a pretty significant difference from Windows. Notice that in this menu bar you can see File, Edit, View, Go… etc. These are all pop out menus just like you would expect to find at the top of a window in a windows application. Expect obviously for these words to change as the active application changes. For iChat you need a Contacts menu, for Word you need a Format menu, for Firefox Bookmarks etc. I am not really sure what the advantage of having the menu bar always in the same place and unattached from the window to which it corresponds is. But one thing that does spring to mind is that it rather saves on vertical space on this screen. You never need to be able to see more than one menu bar at once, so why display more than one? Having them attached to the windows showing and hiding everytime you switched applications would be messy. If you think about it the windows would appear to bounce as you switched, so having it along the top of the screen is a good solution.

One thing that is not immediately clear is that the word “Finder” itself is a menu too. This is standard. For every application the name of the application gives a drop down menu and in this menu a pretty standard group of items. The about dialog which is typically found in Help on a windows program is found here. As are the preferences which can always be accessed through that clover leaf (also known as CMD, command, Apple Key) + comma as is shown in the image. You also get the option to hide the program and in every case except the Finder you get the option to quit the program too. These are crucially different things with quitting being the more severe choice. There is no equivalent to hiding in windows, it closes the instance of the program running but not the program itself. This means that you can reopen the program very quickly (it is already in fact open) but in say Firefox you will be back to your homepage not on those pages you were viewing when you hide the program. Obviously having a lot of programs in this state of being hidden will start to lag on system resources after a while. And with programs hidden isn’t it rather tricky to keep track of them all?

The Dock

Enter the dock. That is this thing that lines the bottom of your screen:

This is like your taskbar in Windows. But interestingly it is also like your Programs menu that stems from the start button. Here you can see all the programs that you have chosen to place on the dock. And you can see which ones are active. They are denoted with the black arrow. You will always see that the Finder is active as I stated above, it cannot be closed. You will also see that there is a vertical line and to the right of it you will find minimised programs. The images that are used are live previews of the actual program. If you have a video, it will continue to play in the dock. Clicking on anything minimises reopens it onto the main screen and removes it from the dock. This is unlike windows where maximised windows are still seen in the taskbar. The result is that you can easily see what is minimised but there is no real list of everything that is open you just have to count up the black arrows.

You can play with the dock in the settings. It can be down the side of the screen, or on the bottom as is the default. If you are short of space you can have it autohide too. As you move your mouse along the dock the items can be set to enlarge as you hover over them which is a nice way to see what you are focused on especially if you dock is so full that the items in it are quite small. The enlargement will show you something quite important in OS X. The icons are very high resolution, they look much more glossy than the ones in Windows which is something that we will see throughout the operating system. As you hover the name of the application is also shown.

The trash can on the far right of the dock is like the recycle bin in Windows. But really it plays a much bigger role in OS X. So big in fact, that it is the entire subject of part 3 of this Switchers Guide.

Previously in Mac OS X Switching… Part 1 Basic Differences. View the whole series.

This is the first is a series of articles that I am publishing on this blog to detail in considerable detail what is involved in switching from the Windows platform to using Mac OS X. I will discuss what is different, what is hard to get used to, what I miss, what is better and what I could now never do without. If you have been a regular mac user for some time then this is probably not of interest. I am really targeting people who may be considering a switch and would like to know first hand what the need to be aware of to use Mac OS X. I must admit that I am a new user of the operating system and I do in no way intend to present myself as an expert on the matter. I know very little, but it just happens that I think I know the little bit that is important to Windows switchers, since that is what I am.

Nothing Too Drastic

The first key point that I think needs to be made is that there is nothing drastically different between the two operating systems. What you exclaim? Why is any of this necessary then? Well yes there are differences, millions of them but all in all the basic structure of the way things work is pretty much as you would expect. You have a desktop for instance, and you have a window to browse through your files too like Windows Explorer. Applications appear in windows which are draggable around the screen, just like in Windows. You have a mouse that appears as an arrow on the screen. Right clicking gives more options to the user to preform regular tasks or change settings. There is a control panel like area where user options can be enforced. There is a clock in the corner. Lots of things work just like you’d expect them too. These few things may be consistent in all operating systems, but as a Windows user for life how am I meant to know that. What I mean to say is that in the same way as a Ford and a BMW are both cars and both have tonnes of familiar bits to them, Windows and OS X have lots of similarities. You will not have to rethink the way you use computers.

Lots Different Though

Although there is so much that is near identical in both systems, you are much more likely to notice the many striking differences between the interfaces and the ways of doing things when you run OS X. The interface works differently. There is no start menu to get your programs from. There is this bar across the bottom of the screen instead. There is no place that lists all the open applications like the task bar in Windows, although this bar on the bottom (the Dock) will take up windows when you minimise them. Another huge difference is that when you first start up you will have a blank desktop except for one icon, your hard disk, in the corner. On Windows you are much more used to loading up the computer for the first time to see a smattering of free AOL trials, and other bundled programs or offers. That isn’t to say that you don’t have bundled programs on a Mac. There are plenty. But they don’t appear on the desktop, they are in this dock thing which is always visible so there is no need for them to be on the desktop itself too. There is no recycle bin or equivalent on the desktop either. Instead the trash can is again tied to the dock. And another big difference is that all the menus for your programs don’t appear at the top of their associated windows. Instead they all appear right at the top of the screen. This is a pretty big change and it takes time to get used to. There is also no maximise, a slightly different (and confusing) way to close programs and to top it all off these buttons all appear at the top left hand side of the windows. The opposite to what you’d expect. In dialog boxes the Ok and Cancel appear the other way round with Ok on the right. And there is a prominent search box enlodged in this bar along the top.

They are just a few flavours of the little differences between the systems which hit you first. There is much more to be said about each of them, and I will discuss them in turn as I proceed through this series. Continued soon!