Michael Dell will return as CEO of Dell Inc., replacing Kevin Rollins, who also resigned as a member of the board. Dell has had disappointing earnings and battery recalls in the last few quarters. The company’s accounting practices also are the subject of federal scrutiny. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York has subpoenaed documents related to Dell’s financial reporting from 2002 to the present.

Continue reading Michael Dell Back in the Hot Seat…

Apple has updated their US Apple Store locater which includes a Google Maps mash-up for locating your nearest Apple Store. The store locater clearly identifies Apple resellers versus the Apple Stores.

The NFL will make the highlights from this Sunday’s Super Bowl available for purchase at the iTunes Store the following day. Downloads will be avaialble in English or Spanish, will cost $1.99. A 90-minute video of the NFL’s coverage of the Super Bowl will also be sold for $1.99.

Video highlights from the NFL’s regular-season and playoff games have been available from the iTunes Store since September.

CNN’s Miles O’Brien interviewed Bill Gates about the debut of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista, yesterday asking him directly if Windows Vista was mimicing Apple’s OS X.

This is a small portion of the Bill Gates interview by CNN’s Miles O’Brien’s:

The full video interview can be see here.

O’Brien: Frankly, a lot of what I see here, um, seems to mimic a little bit [Apple's Mac] OS X. Were you going after a specific look there, the Mac look, or?

Continue reading Bill Gates Squirms on CNN…

I thought it might be a nice time to show the comparison of OS X and Windows Vista that was done at Apple’s WWDC in August 2006 by Steve Jobs & Bertrand Serlet. Also check out Pogue Reviews Windows Vista and this one and this one on YouTube. Vista has copied features that Mac OS X has had for years!

Microsoft launches Vista with the tag-line: The “Wow” starts now. Well so far the “Wow” has been more of a “YAWN.” I feel for Microsoft. How would you feel if you threw this huge expensive party and nobody came? There have been no long lines with consumers lined up as there was for the OS X Tiger launch. In fact, the last time I saw Microsoft get crowds all excited was way back when for the launch of Windows 95.

You would think that after over five years of waiting Windows users would be more upbeat. This is the “year of the pig” or Ding Hai as so still call it on the Chinese calendar. Seems Windows Vista was released in the right year as it most certainly fits in, by the hardware requirements Vista needs to run smoothly. For most people running anything but “top-notch” newer machines, a Vista upgrade is not a good option as the machine can revert to a ‘bare bones’ Vista mode.

Walt Mossberg, Tech writer for the Wall Street journal has spent some time with Vista and has written an article called Vista: Worthy, Largely Unexciting, worth the read.

Continue reading The “Wow” in Vista: No One Came to the Party…

Apple has released an Airport Extreme 802.11n Enabler for Mac, $1.99 (instant download) – that will allow the following Macs to use 802.11n:

• MacBook Pro with Core 2 Duo
• MacBook with Core 2 Duo
• Mac Pro
• iMac with Core 2 Duo (not the 17-inch 1.83GHz model though)

These machines have 802.11n built-in, but they were generally disabled. Make sure that your Mac doesn’t already have 802.11n enabled before paying for this. Some recent Macs have been reported to have shipped with 802.11n already enabled.

Continue reading Airport Extreme 802.11n Enabler for Mac Now Available…

Apple has now made the iPod shuffle available in five colors – blue, pink, green, orange and the original silver. The 1GB iPod shuffle costs $79. The new iPod shuffle is available immediately worldwide through the Apple Store, Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers.

iPod shuffle features up to 12 hours of battery life and lets users shuffle their songs to listen to them in a random order or simply flip a switch to listen to their songs in order, such as when listening to a new album. All of the shuffles now come with Apple’s latest earphones, which are also sold separately for $29 as Apple iPod Earphones.

The iPod shuffle requires a Mac with a USB 2.0 port and Mac OS X version 10.3.9 or later and iTunes 7.0.2 or later; or a Windows PC with a USB 2.0 port and Windows 2000 (Service Pack 4), Windows XP Home or Professional (Service Pack 2) and iTunes 7.0.2 or later. In addition, an internet access is required and a broadband connection is recommended.

Nine of Apple’s newly granted patents were published today by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, including a telephone conferencing application and the famous glass staircase located in Apple’s Fifth Avenue Store in Manhattan. Click image for larger view.

These patents also include Apple’s Mighty Mouse Patent: Mouse having a button-less panning and scrolling switch,” a “method and apparatus for simulating a mechanical keyboard action in an electronic keyboard,” “deferred shading graphics pipeline processor having advanced features,” “centralized queue in network printing systems,” a “method and apparatus for a calibrated variable phase offset timing between synchronous clock subdomains,” and an “Apple iPod Patent: Graphical user interface and methods of use thereof in a multimedia player.”

Apple just updated its Xserve RAID product, up to 10.5TB in capacity while lowering the cost per gigabyte of storage to $1.31. The Xserve RAID works with Macs, Windows, Linux, Solaris, NetWare and mixed-platform environments.

Xserve RAID has an average read throughput of up to 380MB/s and write throughput of up to 301MB/s. The system also supports real-time, uncompressed, high-definition (HD) and multiple-stream (SD) video editing without dropping a frame, according to Apple.
Continue reading Apple Updates XserveRAID to 10.5 TB…

WordPress 2.1 “Ella”, named for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald is immediately availability for download just 8 days since WordPress 2.07 was made available. The 2.07 WordPress update contained mostly security fixes. I look forward to updating ReelSmart to the latest version of my favorite blog engine. I will need to wait to test all my used plugins and custom code will first work in the new version.
Continue reading WordPress 2.1 Released…

The Sundance Film Festival 2007 has joined Disney and Paramount in the Movie section of the iTunes Store. Each movie short from the Sundance Film Festival 2007 is being offered for $1.99 each. This is a nice addition to the iTunes Store and allows these talented filmmakers a place to distribute their shorts online. Free podcasts from Sun dance are also available. When I used to attend the DV Film Festivals in L.A. and New York years back, I always wished I could buy the cool films I had just seen somewhere. Now iTunes is starting to make this possible. Enjoy.

Running a blog like ReelSmart and testing loads of software applications I take a lot of screenshots. In my quest for easier and faster methods for grabbing and posting them I found InstantShot! from Digital Waters. This free OS X utility sits on your menubar waiting to take a screenshot.

InstantShot! is similar to the Grab application built-in to OS X, but with more file formats easily available. The Grab tool captures screenshots in only .TIFF by default. InstantShot! can with a mouse click capture screenshots in JPEG, PNG, and TIFF. InstantShot! can be used to take multiple timed shots and an option to hide your desktop with a solid color (configurable in InstantShot’s Preferences).

Software can get really expensive. Especially from the big giant commercial vendors like Adobe (Macromedia) and Microsoft. Fact is most average users including college students never use or need all the bells and whistles the big vendors price into their software applications. If you need some graphic or office applications and do not want to spent big bucks, check some of my recommendations here. These cheaper applications (in some cases free) may just surprise you how well they work. You may never need the expensive software from the big guys.

Pixel Image Editor, $39 is an inexpensive alternative to Photoshop. As it is not a total Photoshop ($649) replacement, Pixel Image Editor can meet the needs for many users. Similar in layout to Photoshop, so if you’re already familiar with Adobe, you should feel comfortable with this. You can also look at GIMPshop as a free alternative to Photoshop. Pixel Image Editor is available for Windows, Linux, Linspire, MacOSX, BeOS, Zeta, QNX, MorphOS, FreeBSD, eComStation, OS/2, SkyOS and even old plain DOS, for both x86 and PowerPC architectures. Click image on upper right for larger view and see if this looks familiar to you Photoshop users.

Continue reading Save Money on Software…

As reported by HardMac: While waiting for an hypothetical launch of the Zune in Europe, a promotion campaign is on-going, and Microsoft offers about 30 tracks to be downloaded from its dedicated website: Artistdirect. If it is always a pleasure to get free things and gifts, Microsoft might not really appreciate information lying in music track tags:

As illustrated above, those free music tracks have been encoded with iTunes 6.0.4, and not by MS own audio solutions. Of course, one should always use the best tool, but if Microsoft starts using Apple’s solutions to promote the Zune, we are not sure about the real success/future of the Zune in USA, as in Europe.

iLounge has a nice Apple TV tour including lots of pictures and information. If you are interested in Apple TV take a peek. Apple TV is shipping next mouth in February with Apple taking orders now. If you have a newer flat screen TV, this just may be a “must have.”

Windows chief Jim Allchin’s emails that have become even more famous since the MacWorld keynote, has a new edition to his Apple beats Microsoft tirade. Is Jim Allchin the biggest Apple fan? The Microsoft Iowa antitrust trial (Comes v. Microsoft Corp., CL 82311, Iowa District Court, Polk County) has exposed yet another internal Microsoft email that was never meant for consumers eyes. In a November 2003 e-mail by Windows chief Jim Allchin, shows the frustration that Microsoft felt with its digital music device partners. This probably helped them decide to try the Zune music player and service to challenge Apple’s iPod. As I have always said it is the iPod/iTunes platform that uses QuickTime that they most feared, as Apple has gained big time against Windows Media.

Jim is becoming the “poster-child” for why there are so many Windows switchers coming to the Mac! As you might expect, what Microsoft says in public is a world of difference to what seems to be said in private emails. Remember Gates and Ballmer saying how much they liked the Creative MP3 players? I do. Seems Jim Allchin and several others at Microsoft did not love the iPod competitors claiming to “feel pain” from these devices and their own Windows Media Player software.

Continue reading Another Microsoft Allchin Email Released…

Thumbscrew is a free simple application for OS X that does one thing well. Drop an image onto the program, and Thumbscrew makes a very cool thumbnail image instantly.

The images that are created can be tilted, in a frame, and have a drop shadow added.

Continue reading Thumbscrew Your Images…

Continue reading iTunes Tip #44: Move Your Library to an External Hard Drive…

Apple has seeded a new release of Leopard (Seed 9A343) to developers Thursday January 18. This version is the latest sent to developers since Leopard (3A321) was seeded December 13th, 2006.

Apple has itemized a few of changes to Leopard from the last seed, including:

• HIToolbox provides new HIRect/Point/Shape-based Window Manager API for resolution independence compatibility
• Tab support in Terminal
• Terminal now lets you save a multi-window configurations through workspaces which are available through the “Terminal” menu.
• QuickLook APIs have been updated

I also noticed a new SMS feature in iChat. This should make iChat able to communicate directly with Apple’s forthcoming iPhone! There are some improvements to Safari in this build including better “snap-shots” when you hover over the tabs showing the website.

Continue reading Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 (9A343) Seeded to Developers…