International Mac Podcast

[EDIT: Will everyone PLEASE stop calling it the MacPod - Stu]

My prediction for the magical flying unicorn of a product that is the Apple Tablet is as follows; almost everything everybody, including me, has predicted so far will be partially to totally wrong. Obvious paradox aside, the build up to this iUnicorn mirrors that of the iPhone almost perfectly; hundreds of tech blogs speculating wildly different things about a product, agreeing only on a name (well, usually) and a few basic ideas about what it is. So yes, I could spend the next 3-4 paragraphs analyzing the exact position and length of every one of the few hairs remaining on Steve Jobs’s head looking for any clues to what this iFlyingNarwhal is, but that would be stupid, unhelpful, repetitious, and take longer than the 45 minutes I have allotted myself to write this before Chuck starts, so instead I’m just gonna write about what I’d like to see, and what I wouldn’t. (more…)

Alright, it’s time for some honesty on my part. I wasn’t satisfied by the number of comments on my last ‘Keaton On’ post, so I’ve decided to put my life on the line and go on a serious first-to-palm (see what I did there?) Pre-bash-athon. Yes, I do remember the last time I bashed Palm for the Pre on Twitter, ending with my own all-too-public humiliation. Now, after spending 5 months in the fetal position, sucking my thumb and crying for my mommy, I’ve done some actual research (a.k.a. I skimmed the Wikipedia article) on the Pre, and have a whole new set of reasons why it will fail. Muahahahaha!

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It’s no secret that Apple and Microsoft are going at it in an ad battle that would make the Spartans from the movie ‘300′ cower in fear (although they probably wouldn’t cower because of the content of the ads, they would probably freak out about the fact that there are moving pictures in a time when yellow paint was considered the wave of the future and long boring speeches by old philosophers who may or may not have gotten high on bay leaves were considered entertainment). Some love the often humorous, always cunning ad-fest in the same way as they love watching famous Star Wars fight scenes. Others find the ads much more similar to two five-year-olds poking each other with light sabers while screaming loudly for their respective mothers. Of course, you’re not here to learn what others think, you’re here to be told what I think, and then meticulously counter every sentence I write with at least 5 different points on why I’m wrong (I love you guys). Enjoy!

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Cocoa is my girlfriend. That is a phrase coined by the popular cocoa blog of the same name, and it rings sadly true for me, both as a developer of mac apps, and more importantly as an avid user of mac apps.

Somehow things like Adobe Air, X11, and even Apple’s own Carbon give me flashbacks to my time on Windows. Up until a few weeks ago I was using Twitterific as my main twitter client, unfortunately for it, it took its own concept of simplicity too far.

Also, it doesn’t look all that cocoa-ish, especially in Leopard, where HUD windows are supposed to have a glossy looking header. So then I was a rogue twitterer, on a hunt for some good Cocoa twitter clients. I found 5 contenders – here and now they will battle it out for my usership. *ding ding*

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Apparently it’s now a unspoken rule that all of our recurring segments have to use alliteration, unfortunately I drew the short straw and got stuck with the letter ‘K’. Very little apple-related starts with K, but then I realized that I can publish my own posts on this blog now, so I just thought of the most random thing I possibly could that starts with K. Turns out that’s Kumquats. The problem is that I have very little to say about kumquats. So the rest of this post will be very short, only lengthened by the fact that it’s entirely in binary:

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No, no, don’t get too excited, I haven’t suddenly turned on everybody’s favorite fruit-inspired electronics company, this isn’t ANOTHER blog post ragging on the new iPod on the block, quite the opposite really, I mean, look how small it is,  it’s so helpless, that thing can’t possibly stand up for itself. Over-personification aside (That was a really big word!)

Maybe a better title for this would have been “Keaton On: Other people on: the new iPod shuffle” or “Keaton’s response to everybody else’s response to the iPod Shuffle”, but frankly, any headline that implies anything anti-apple is the “Free Beer” of our generation (It makes people read things that they normally wouldn’t). (more…)

It’s that time of year again where every blogger and their grandma’s dog’s cousin blogs about their predictions for Macworld. This year, as always, they all seemed to have reached the exact same conclusions, this year being details on Snow Leopard, a new Mac Mini, and maybe a new iMac or iLife. The problem here is that every one of them is attempting to be correct, guessing only the most predictable, plausible, and likely announcements.

That’s great, Mr. Future-NY-Times-Columnist, unfortunately, it’s boring to read the same boring things over and over again. Here is my list of new products apple could (but most likely won’t) be released in 2009, and why they might be good ideas. (more…)