When Mac OS X Leopard was released a few months ago, one of the major features being promoted was Time Machine. This was Apple’s revolutionary approach to backing up, which creates incremental versions of files and documents that can be accessed by going “back in time.” So if you create a file on a Monday and amend it on Wednesday, and then on Thursday decide you actually wanted Monday’s version to work on, you can restore your current version of the file to the state it was in on Monday. When I upgraded, I set Time Machine up to back up to an external hard drive, even though I was already using SuperDuper! as a backup solution (and Mozy too. And Flickr for my photos. As you can see, I’m paranoid about data loss.)

I never had occasion to actually restore anything from any of my back-up sets till last week. I was writing a piece on this site about the death of Esbjörn Svensson, and was trying to embed an MP3 of one of his tunes into the post. Whatever happened, the page file got corrupted and threw up an error message when I tried to publish. I deleted the post, rewrote it without the MP3 and tried again. Same story. It was late and I was heading for France the following day, so I decided to leave it till I came back to sort out.

The whole site is contained as a single Rapidweaver file (called a sandwich), which is stored on the hard drive of my iMac, and backed up to my three back-up systems daily. So by the time I came back home, the corrupt file was now the backed up one. Normally, this would cause a problem, but because I have Time Machine, I was able to fix it quite easily. I just went back through Time Machine to the day before I started writing the post that caused all the problems, and brought that copy forward to the present, replacing the corrupt one. I then rewrote the post and voilà, it worked.

If it’s early June, then it must be Apple World Wide Developer Conference time. That means a keynote from Steve Jobs, which usually means new goodies. Not always mind, as the WWDC, as its name suggests, is aimed at third-party software developers, so the shiny new kit doesn’t always materialise at this time of year.

But this year it did. The 3G iPhone is on the way, and just looking at it now, it really is a magnificent piece of work. It looks like they overcame the initial problems of getting 3G the iPhone, such as battery performance, and then some. The only price we know of so far is the US$ one, and it starts at €199 for an 8GB model. This is half the current price for an original iPhone, and a third of the initial price of the 4GB model released just under a year ago.



Hopefully, O2 will launch it in Ireland with a decent price and contract, but based on their past form, I won’t be holding my breath.

The other announcement of note is MobileMe, or .Mac 2.0. This is a long overdue upgrade to Apple’s online suite of apps and utilities, and as a subscriber, I am delighted to see this one coming down the tracks.

via MacUser

The Apple Store is finally coming to Ireland. Apple have announced that they are now recruiting for a new store in Victoria Square in Belfast, "North Ireland."



No dates yet as to when it's going to open. Or indeed any indication if there is to be any move to open a shop in "South Ireland."

In other Mac news, Apple have released an update to OS X Leopard, bringing up to version 10.5.2. Is it just me, or are these updates getting bigger and bigger? This baby weighs in at 343MB. Those DSL speed enhancements can't come a minute too soon!

MacBook Paper:

Fake Steve has been hacked - by his good friend Fake Bono

How To Dismantle An Atomic Blog

Today's the day. Mac OS X, version 10.5, codenamed Leopard makes its debut. It's a little late, as we were all expecting it in the spring, but hey, at least we weren't waiting five years.

According to Apple, there are 300+ new feature in the OS. I'm not going to go into them here, as gigs of bandwidth are being plundered right now all over the internets, as hardcore Mac geeks go all a-quiver over such new features as Time Machine, the spiffy new Finder with Quick View, Spaces, the new iChat, Mail, Core Animation, etc.

Some links to give you an idea of what it's all about:

A guided tour, from the horse's mouth.

David Pogue in the New York Times points out some lesser-heralded features.

Crazy Apple Rumors goes down that route too, but gets sidetracked.

If you were to time travel and take a Mac with Leopard loaded on it back to 1973 and were to show some people then what computers will be like in the future, you could totally get some hot 1973 chick into bed with you! But make sure it’s not your mom, dude.

TUAW have cleared the decks for the next 24 hours in order to bring us a comprehensive guide to Leopard. This could result in the fewest references to the iPhone in a 24-hour period since before 29 June.

Also posted at CmdNotCtrl

Fake Steve gets his Ireland mixed up with his Scotland.

Link

Things have been quiet on the blog front for the last while, for one reason or another. Work has been quite busy, with a lot of toing and froing. I have found that I have had a dearth of ideas for posts, and those that do crop up seem like too much effort to write up.

But anyways, I'm on hols at the moment. I'm at home minding the little 'un. My sister, who looks after her during the week is away with her gang on their jolliers. My wife started a new job last month, so she can only get one week off, hence my status as a househusband this week. We will be on hols en famille next week.

The burtda went grand. I was working all day, but we managed to avoid the rain in the evening and get the barbie going. A nice piece of lamb was the order of the day, and we accompanied it with a nice bottle that we had originally planned to open last year on the 40th, but circumstances dictated otherwise. (Pontet-Canet 1966, in case you're curious.)

We were in Mayo last weekend, and took ourselves off to the beach on Sunday. Folly, you might think, but it was a lovely day on Cross Strand near Louisburgh. Not warm, as such, but very pleasant. I love the beaches around there, as the sea can be quite wild and dramatic, and also the fact that they are nearly always practically deserted. This weekend was no different, and with the exception of a few surfer d00dz, we pretty much had the beach to ourselves. It was Babba's first trip to the seaside, and she even got to dip her piggies in the Atlantic. Back home on Monday, and since then thankfully the weather has been holding up. Walks at Emo Court are a regular feature of our days this week, and in this weather, it's a very pleasant way to pass an hour.

So what's been going on? I had planned to write at length about the Darren Graham affair, and may yet live up to that ambition. That sort of nonsense should have no place in any sport. Hopefully the GAA will use the opportunity to do something positive.

The recent Irish Times series about "Rip-Off Ireland" almost inspired me to put fingers to keyboard, but so far I have manfully resisted. Maybe next week. Or then again, maybe not.

On the tech side of things, Fake Steve Jobs has been unmasked. Apple have released new iMacs, so my machine is no longer cutting-edge. Still, I got ten months or so on the frontline, so it wasn't too bad a stint. Also, the new iLife and iWork suites have been released. I have ordered my copy of iLife '08 already. And to top it all, my .Mac account goes up from a measly 1GB to a much more respectable 10GB of storage. Once I install Leopard, I will use some of that space to back up all my photos (to go with my current backup regime of external HDD, Flickr and monthly DVD burn.)

Next week is Aoife's first birthday, so there will be lots of excitement to be had. She has a new little cousin as well, who was born just three weeks ago.

Then there's the preparations for the World Cup coming up as well. Loads to write about, just have to find the time.

So that's it. The babba is having a snooze at the moment, but is due to wake up any minute, so I'd better sign off.

Just fucking sick, I tell you!

The (London) Times reports today that O2 have secured the rights to the iPhone for the UK. Neither O2 nor Apple have confirmed the report.

Whatever happens, the deal done in Europe can't be done in the same way as the AT&T deal was done in the US. No carrier is present in all markets, so it's likely that all three of the big guys (O2/Telefonica, Vodafone and T-Mobile) will get some slice of the action. What will be interesting to see is who gets what in markets where two or all three of them operate.

The other issue is the technology. iPhone works on EDGE on AT&T, a technology that is inferior to the widely available 3G here in Europe. By the time iPhone arrives here, it could well be version 1.1 with 3G support. As long as it's not GPRS!

Tomorrow is iDay - the day that the American public finally get the chance to get their hands on the new wonder-gadget from Apple - the iPhone.



Here are a few predictions for what will happen over the course of the next couple of days or so.

Highly Likely

• AT&T's network grinds to a halt as thousands of new iPhone owners try to access their Web 2.0 resources on AT&T's decidedly un-Web 2.0 EDGE network.
• The first loss of an iPhone to a mugger will happen within an hour of the first one being sold.
• Some socially-retarded geek will record in his blog: "Jeez, man. I got this iPhone, like, three hours ago, and I still haven't gotten laid."
• Paris Hilton's name will be ignored by the main networks for at least an hour.
• Authors of "What's Hot/What's Not" lists in newspapers and magazines will trip over themselves to declare the iPhone "soooo last Tuesday."
• All stock will sell out within the first hour, meaning that several people who were camped outside their local Apple Store for days will be turned away empty-handed.
• Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will lock himself in his study with his Zune, and pretend to ignore everything to do with the iPhone.
• On Saturday morning, Bono will walk in to his local newsagent in Dalkey, yakking into an iPhone, the only one in Ireland.
• After gaining massively, based on several months of iPhone hype and supposition, Apple's share price will fall once the mythical gadget becomes a reality.
• Several complaints will be made about the device, regarding missing features that Apple never claimed the phone would have in the first place.
• Pacific Catch, the San Francisco restaurant featured in the first iPhone ad, will be booked out for the next year.

Highly Improbable

• During the three-hour closure of the US Apple Stores tomorrow afternoon in preparation for the launch, huge Post-its will appear on the doors of all of them, bearing the legend "We'll be back soon"

• At 6 pm, Steve Jobs will appear on giant screens in all US Apple Stores, and declare "Fooled you all!! There is no iPhone. We just wanted to see how much you would believe. Instead, we are going to offer 30% off selected educational software!"
• George Ou, Rob Enderle and David Maynor will all slaver over the device and extol its virtues on their respective blogs.

In the meantime, from the essential "Secret Diary of Steve Jobs":

"Woman trades her child for spot at front of iPhone line"

and from iPhone Matters

"Dinner in Cupertino, June 28th, 2007"

And last but not least, David Pogue's review of the iPhone for the New York Times:

New iPhone demo video on the US Apple site. About 20 minutes long it's available in three different file sizes and also for download. Damn, it's one nice piece of kit.

"Folksomony" is the most hated web-related neologism, according to a report in The Register.

WordPress is fast becoming the favoured blogging platform of many Irish bloggers. [I use it for my Mac and Rugby blogs.] This guy is not impressed with WordPress's approach to security [via DF]

I have just upgraded to the new version (3.6) of RapidWeaver, the site creation tool I use for UnLaoised. Things haven't gone entirely smoothly, as I can't use the old theme in the new version.

So what you see now is just a temporary look. I'm looking for new themes and hope to have a more interesting one in place before long.

Tags: RapidWeaver, Blog, Themes

I'm a big fan of RealMacSoftware's RapidWeaver web creation tool, so much so that I use it to create this site. Normally it costs $40, but you can snag a free licenced copy by purchasing this month's MacUser magazine.

Alternatively, you can go to my Mac blog and I'll show you how to get it easier than that.

The geekiest of Mac geeks are the ones to post up their "unpacking pr0n" photos the minute they get their new Apple goodies out of the box.



But this has to be the best pisstake of the process ever.

Wait! There's More…

In a comment over on Machead, Jimbo asks how we should articulate the name of the new device called tv. Apple tv? Symbol tv?

Wait! There's More…

It seems that Cisco aren't happy about Apple using the name 'iPhone' for their new all-singing-all-dancing handheld-multimedia-internet-communication-phone-thingie after all, and have engaged the services of Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Runne.

(via Mac Rumors)

One of the announced features of Mac OS X Leopard will be Dashcode, an app that allows you to create your own Dashboard Widgets. This is something I have been keen to do for ages, so I was delighted to see that Apple have released a beta of Dashcode that works in Tiger.

Wait! There's More…

Macworld today was pretty much all about one product - iPhone. For months the speculation was rife that Apple were working on a phone, but no-one had an inkling just how advanced this thing appears to be. (Incidentally, I queried the iPhone name yesterday, and would be interested to find out how Apple got around the fact that Cisco already have a product called iPhone on the market.)

Wait! There's More…

Apple's year started as always with Macworld in San Francisco. This is the show where the company sets out its stall for the coming twelve months, and is often the showcase for new product lines.

While there weren't any completely new goodies on offer last January, the big news story was the launch of the first two Intel-equipped Macs - the iMac and the MacBook Pro. Both sported the Core Duo chip, and the MBP came equipped with a built-in iSight. iLife '06 was released as well, and it included a new app - iWeb, a basic, template-driven web-publishing platform.
Wait! There's More…

There was some welcome news for Mac fans of in Galway recently, with the opening of a new shop specialising in Apple products.

3G, one of the big players in the retail mobile phone market, is also an Authorised Apple Reseller, and it is they who have opened the new store in the Eyre Square Centre in the city centre.
Wait! There's More…

Jim, a long-time Mac user and has just sent back his new Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro to Apple and asked for a refund.
Wait! There's More…

Doug Morris, Group Chief Executive of Universal Music, having agreed with Microsoft that Universal will get $1 for every Zune sold, is looking longingly at the iPod and wants a piece of it. Wait! There's More…

Under €50:

A six-month subscription to ScreenCastsOnline.
Don McAllister's weekly video tutorial on Mac apps, tips and tricks is absolutely invaluable. (Not just Mac either, by the way. Don has just started a series of screencasts on what Google has to offer.) For $25, you get 26 weekly shows, mostly about 20-30 minutes in duration, with superb production value. If this was twice the price, it would still be a steal.
Wait! There's More…

I've been meaning to try out Apple's iPhoto Books feature for a while now, so we put together a book of photos of Aoife to see how it looks.

We got it back today, and it's impressive. We chose the hardback linen-bound one, and the finish is of a very high standard. There are 20 pages of photos in the book. You choose how many photos you want per page - it can be a single photo taking up the whole page or several photos together.
Wait! There's More…

I was tempted to set up a new category for this story - Bears And Their Toilet Habits - as on the face of it, it looks like it's stating the bleedin' obvious.

But this report by Nielsen Media Research should be looked at in another way. After more than a year on the market, the video-capable iPod is not being used all that much for its video capabilities. Wait! There's More…

John Gruber writes about attitudes to that most beloved of Web 2.0 conceits - beta.

Using “beta” as a badge of honor for released commercial software makes no more sense than using “buggy” in the same context, and it makes no more sense as an excuse, either.