Tape Findings, and Found Magazine Website

Two fun finds today...the first is Found, a website devoted to found objects. According to their About section:

We collect found stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, doodles-- anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life. Anything goes.

We certainly didn't invent the idea of found stuff being cool. Every time we visit our friends in other towns, someone's always got some kind of unbelievable discovered note or photo on their fridge. We decided to make a bunch of projects so that everyone can check out all the strange, hilarious and heartbreaking things people have picked up and passed our way.

As an off-shoot of this site, there is another one, called Tape Findings. Now this one really appealed to me. I can still remember being a kid, and my little sister and I playing around recording our voices on a Radio Shack Realistic Cassette Recorder. We'd record anything, really -- me reading the paper, or the latest Guinness Book of World Records. Anyhow, this web site brings together these lost-and-forgotten tapes, and like Found, they can be banal or funny, serious or strange, but wow, what a great site for the voyeur in us all.

Found Magazine
Tape Findings

Apple Updates: Macs, iWork, iLife

Hello again, Apple fans. Apple, Inc. announced some updates to hardware and software yesterday, and for a more complete overview than what I could provide, I thought I'd list here the opinions of the gang over at Small Dog Electronics, who put together some great Mac newsletters. I've used some of their content before, and I really like their writing style, so take it away, Small Dog!

[Copyright 2007 Small Dog Electronics, Inc., Waitsfield,
Vermont USA - All Rights Reserved]

New iMacs!
By Ed@Smalldog.com

Today Apple announced greatly updated iMacs. They featuring brand-new
Extreme 2 Duo Intel processors (more on those below), a boldly
refreshed pro design featuring 20" or 24" glass displays encased in
aluminum, an all-new keyboard and iLife 08 (more on that below, too!)

Standard configurations are:

20" iMac with a 2.0 GHz processor, 250 GB hard drive and ATI Radeon
HD 2400XT video card - $1199

20" iMac with a 2.4Ghz processor, 320 GB hard drive and ATI Radeon HD
2600 Pro - $1499

24" iMac with a 2.4Ghz display and 320GB hard drive and ATI Radeon HD
2600 Pro video card - $1799

All models come standard with 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.0 wireless
capability, an 8x Superdrive, 1 GB of RAM, and the new Apple
Keyboard. They can be customized with up to 4 GB of RAM, and up to a
1 TB hard drive.

The new iMacs feature three USB 2.0 ports, a firewire 400 port, a
firewire 800 port, a gigabit ethernet port, mini-DVI port, an audio
in and audio out port. All models also continue to feature a built-in
iSight camera and microphone. You can run a second display up to 23"
from the mini-DVI port.

The new glass displays are glossy, and the resolution appears to be
the same as current 20" and 24" iMacs - 1680x1050 and 1920x1200
respectively.

Mac Minis:

Updated Mac minis!
By Jimmy, Jimmy@Smalldog.com

Previous to this announcement today there was a lot of speculation
around the death of the Mac mini. Many though Apple was going to
phase it out of their product line but today instead of doing that
Apple refreshed it.

The new Mac minis include Core 2 Duo chips which are up to 33% faster
then previous chips, allows 4GBs of RAM, has 4 USB ports, has digital
in/out audio and has a Gigabit ethernet port. The new minis also come
with iLife ‘08.

According to the Apple tech specs page (http://www.apple.com/macmini/
specs.html) on the Mac mini it does not come with 802.11n wireless
networking which seems a bit odd to me. Overall it’s a nice upgrade
and I would love to replace my Xserve with one of these.

iLife '08

iLife '08!
By Ed, Ed@Smalldog.com

Apple also announced a new version of iLife, now called iLife 08. As
an iLife 06 fan, I have to say this new version looks incredible.
Here is a brief rundown of the new features in each iLife application.

iMovie 08 - iMovie is being released as an all-new application, and
has a new interface and icon to show it. The app is now centered
around an iPhoto-like library, where you can catalog all your video.
This is something I've always wanted - it should be very convenient
to keep all the video on your Mac in one central location, ready to
be watched, scanned, and even edited.

iMovie now claims to accept video from "any source," and the video
can be mixed & matched in single projects. It also features a newly
expanded "Share" menu, with updated options for outputting video to
iPod, iPhone, Apple TV - and direct exporting to YouTube. The YouTube
feature is going to be huge. Steve Jobs is telling people to skip the
DVD, and exchange high-res video files computer to computer, or
computer to TV. iMovie also integrates with the new .Mac iWeb Gallery
- which I'll discuss below.

There are actually dozens of added features, upgrades, and
enhancements throughout iMovie 08. It really is a whole new
application. We'll explore iMovie in depth in the future; you can
read about some of the new features here:

http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/

iPhoto 08 also received some updating love. A new feature called
Events allows you to easily group and organize huge iPhoto libraries.
New photo editing features include noise reduction, white balance
adjustment, selective improvement, guided cropping and more. You can
choose to automatically show or hide photos based on your star rating
(you do rate all of your photos with stars, right?) There are new
books and calendars available (including much larger calendars than
the previous options.) Photos can now be exported to a new .Mac Web
Gallery, which promises a better way to post and organize photos
online. You can contribute to the gallery "from anywhere" you have
internet access. Read more here about the new version of iPhoto here:

http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto

Garageband is updated with a slew of new features. The biggest all-
new feature is the Magic Garageband. This is a "virtual onstage band"
that you can jam and record with. There are new interactive
instruments that can be edited in real time. There is a new multitake
feature. Garageband can now record high-fidelity 24-bit/44.1kHz
audio. There is a built-in Mastering Engineer to make your songs
sound like a commercial CD. There is a new visual EQ to allow you to
graphically adjust frequencies for each track by clicking and
dragging EQ bands. Parameter Automation sets the parameters of
instruments and effects to change at multiple points within a song.
You can now organize the structure of a song by using predefined
sections (intro, verse, chorus, and bridge), print software
instrument tracks as music notation with automatically formatted
staffs and complete measures, and display the name of chords in real
time as you play on a USB keyboard. Also - you can now export tracks
as MP3s. Read more here:

http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/

I'm glad to see that iWeb has been updated. First, you can finally
easily switch iWeb themes. This was not possible in the previous
version of iWeb. There are eight new themes to go along with this
feature.

There are new animated web album pages. You can put 500 photos online
per album. iWeb makes it easy to integrate Google Maps and Google
Adsense on your web pages. A new feature called Web Widgets makes it
easy to embed a snippet of live content from another website on your
iWeb page. Web Widgets would include YouTube videos, stock tickers,
weather reports, and more.

Finally, Apple has made it easier to use a personal domain name with
your iWeb pages. Read more about iWeb here:

http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/

iDVD received the least love in this upgrade. The main feature is
new, pro-quality DVD encoding. Apple says "the new professional-
quality option in iDVD uses advanced encoding technology to maintain
the highest possible quality for DVDs that are near or at the disc’s
capacity."

There are 10 brand-new themes, and the all of the older themes are
also compatible. The interactive "drop" editor has been updated. Menu
navigation, real-time preview, and theme switching are all faster.
Indeed, iDVD touts better performance throughout rather than a glut
of new features. Read more about iDVD here:

http://www.apple.com/ilife/idvd/

iLife '08 requires a PowerPC G4 (733MHz or faster for iDVD), PowerPC
G5, or Intel Core processor, 12MB (1GB recommended) of RAM, and Mac
OS X v10.4.9 or later.

iWork

Numbers and Pages and (Key)notes, galore!
by Kali, Kali@smalldog.com

I have been waiting for an update to iWork for what seems like
forever. So, I was happy to see Apple finally announce an update
today that includes revamped versions of Pages and Keynote, and a new
application called Numbers.

Pages is a word processor that has style; more specifically, it has
nicely designed templates that make it sort of a word processor-slash-
desktop publishing program. (I like to think of it as an InDesign
“lite” or something like that.) In Pages ‘08, more templates have
been added, and Apple has declared you will be able to “switch easily
between word processing and page layout modes.” Sounds great to
someone who loves to multitask.

Keynote is designed for presentations, and is fantastic for the same
reason—it’s really easy to use, and the templates actually look nice!
There are several new features to Keynote ‘08, such as new effects
and transitions between slides. It also looks as though slide
manipulation has gotten a little slicker, too: you’ll be able to
remove a background with one click. And, if you need a little help,
new video and animation support will add punch to an otherwise
lackluster presentation!

Now on to the newbie: Numbers ‘08 adds spreadsheet functionality to
the iWork suite, which it had previously lacked. Those of you who use
(or have used) Appleworks know that it was a feature not brought over
into Pages. In reality, I don’t use spreadsheets too often in my
every day life, but it seems to me that Apple needed to remedy this.
Numbers is touted as “spreadsheets the Mac way,” which has to mean
both its ease-of-use, and an impressive, clean interface! (I don’t
think Apple will disappoint.) Some of the features include:
customizable templates, tables, charts, an interactive print view,
and “effortless” compatibility with Microsoft Excel.

iWork ‘08 will be available for $79.99… we’ll add more info as soon
as we can get our hands on it!

Thanks to Small Dog!