I’m having some pains with my republished website.

That and the fact that I’m now wondering whether to continue using RapidWeaver (probably) or switch over to the really interesting new iWeb program from Apple.

Sorry for all the trouble, and please bear with me…

Today was that watershed day of the year: Steve Jobs’ keynote address at Macworld Expo San Francisco. We finally have our first Intel-based Macs!

Unlike past years, his keynote was not webcast live so I spent the morning ‘watching’ it during a live ‘blogcast’ provided by Macrumors.com. I’m telling you—I spent some of the LONGEST 60-second waits of my life!

It started off with the phenomenal figures around iPods and what they’ve done for Apple and the world. I was most impressed by the statistic that in the 4th Quarter of 2005, Apple actually sold over 100 iPods per minute—amazing! Also, of the 42 million iPods sold since introduced, 32 million of them were sold in 2005 alone. WOW!

They’ve upgraded both iLife and iWork, both including some nifty things including a web authoring suite in iLife—look out RapidWeaver? (And after I’d just bought it too…) I of course have already ordered them both online…

THEN we got to the first of the Intel macs: the existing iMacs with everything essentially the same—including the price—but with the new Dual Core processor; it’s now 2-3 x FASTER too! I’m sorely tempted by the 20″ one to become my secondary TV and media station for the bedroom.

But then the LONGEST 60-second pause after the correspondent wrote those fateful words “One more thing…” Steve then proceeded to announce the all-new MacBook Pro (goodbye ‘PowerBook’ moniker). Based roughly on the 15″ PB form factor, it’s better, stronger and FASTER (4-5x faster in fact)! It has a built-in iSight camera, supports FrontRow and comes with the Apple remote. I’m totally in LUST! It’ll probably be a matter of weeks before I order mine—they’re not due until February, so I’ve got some time.

Go visit the Apple Computer website for all the glorious details!

Welcome to my redesigned website!

I’ve been working on this for the past week or so using the ultimate web creation and maintenance tool for the mac, RapidWeaver from RealMac Software. It is so incredibly easy to use that it was a pleasure doing the redesign. Among other things, it has pre-formatted templates and codes for doing photo albums, movie albums and what you’re reading now—weblogs—so that I don’t have to use separate programs to accomplish each of those tasks.

I suppose people will argue that it’s not flexible enough, but I don’t care: I just want something that’s easy to use and works. I’ll write a little review on the software and what I think of it in another posting here soon.

In the meantime, please visit from time to time to see the progress on my redesign. I have many of the pages up, but others are just placeholders. Use the navigation bar to access each area.

If you exclude the wildly amazing iLife suite from Apple, I think I’ve come across the greatest, most useful, most elegant piece of software I’ve ever purchased for the Mac: Delicious Library.

So a couple months ago, I actually had time to sit down and browse through the then-current issue of Macworld magazine. They happened to be doing a sort of “roundup” of useful software, but my attention was drawn to a review of a utility called Delicious Library.

Well, I downloaded it and it took me all of about 60-seconds of playing with it before I shelled out my $40.00 for a license. This was the program of my dreams that I’ve been waiting years to have: a one-stop, all-media cataloging program that’s so easy to use and so beautiful that I can’t adequately contain my excitement.

Over the years—like most of us—I’d tried cataloging my video/music/book collections in various purpose- or scratch-built databases for FileMaker Pro, AppleWorks or other software. The biggest chore was always having to manually type in all the information about the item: track names for CDs, Actors & Crew for DVDs, publishing info for books, etc. Needless to say, I never really kept this all up.

That’s why Delicious Library is a Godsend! Not only do I not need separate programs for each media type (it stores all types of music, video, game and books), I don’t even need to enter the info. In an absolutely brilliant move, they’ve incorporated an automatic lookup feature that goes directly to the world’s most popular media store—Amazon.com—that automatically loads all the information about the item including the cover art! You can even point it to one of the Amazon international stores like Germany, Japan or the U.K. for loading info on foreign items (very handy in my own case).

Better still, you can do it with your iSight camera through a little on-screen barcode scanner: just hold the barcode up to the scanner, wait for the beep, and the nice lady’s voice speaks back the item’s title to you from the info downloaded from Amazon! It’s just too amazing—I spent the next several evenings scanning everything in my house with a barcode.

Once everything’s in, it displays your collection in a viewer that by now is so familiar in the Mac world, that anyone can figure it out—it works basically like iTunes. Your media is displayed on graphic “Bookshelves” (akin to iTunes’ Playlists or iPhoto’s Albums) that you can create and organize on a whim.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it—download it now and try it out by visiting their website:

Delicious Monster Software

I wish I got something for each referral, but oh well. While the software still has some quirks and some features I’d like to see, it’s still amazing. I give it 6 out of 5 stars…

Hi there–long time no write. I’m only putting this in right now to sing the praises of my new 1 GB iPod shuffle.

Just when I thought there wasn’t anything else I needed from Apple, along came Macworld Expo SFO. Without even seeing Steve Jobs’ keynote address, I immediately placed an order for the stuff he touted. To wit:

• An iPod Shuffle. It’s totally cool! I’m still experimenting with the right way to balance my music shuffling out, but it sure is fun. It is small and sounds great. I anticipate that before the year’s out, it will become the latest “must have” fashion accessory for both Junior and Senior High School students, not to mention everyone else. It’s nice not having to worry about bumping it while the HD is accessing. I currently have about 275 tracks on it AND 128 MB leftover for data.
• iLife ’05. Though I’ve not yet truly delved into the new features of the suite, buying it was a no-brainer. I even got the “Family 5-pack” to share.
• iWork ’05. Now THIS is cool: Keynote was spiffy enough as it was (though, to be honest, I don’t do a lot of presentations from my PowerBook), but the new Pages software is AMAZING! It has prompted me to publish a personal newsletter just to put it to work (BTW, if you’re friends or family, email me and I’ll make sure you get a copy and/or access to the website where I post it). It is a brilliant example of Apple’s design elegance along with the simplicity of use the belies the incredible power it holds. This is the way document creation SHOULD be done.

Anyway, they just announced PowerBook “speed bumps” today, but I don’t know if I’ll trade up or not. I’m actually seriously eyeing a Mac Mini to connect to my plasma TV as an iTunes and later movie “jukebox”.

There hasn’t been anything new on the Mac front for me in a while.

I guess it’s ’cause I’m still incredibly happy with my changeover to the 12″ PowerBook. I’ve only bought a few knickknacks , really: a BookEndz dock to facilitate hooking everything up when I plug in at home; one of the new AirPort Express hubs that I’m eventually going to get around to hooking up to the stereo; one of the 4th generation, 20GB iPods (I gave my old one to Cyndi as an early birthday present—she was thoroughly delighted).

I am sort of anxiously awaiting the September reveal of the 3rd generation iMac. I’ve been thinking that I really would like to have a “server” again, and it will likely be an iMac. There are several things that I’d like to be able to do that necessitate a constant presence. We’ll see. The biggest obstacle is the lack of FUNDS right now (see my “Anime + Manga” entries for the explanation…). There’s also a possibility of a “shift upgrade”: Eusebio might sell his 12″ PowerBook to a friend provided that I buy the latest 12″ iteration, then give my current one to him. That could work out nicely, but again: NO MONEY. Maybe in a couple of months…