The Silver Tongue Show

Following a blog post earlier today, the answer is yes, Apple did update its dotMac service.
The answer to the other question is no, I’m not disappointed at not having renewed my membership. As I was saying, Apple would have had to go a long way to make the offer worthwhile, but I don’t think I could be happy even though they did upgrade the service quite a bit.
But let’s go back to this later on and see what exactly has been announced today.

A new iMac.

Not much of a surprise concerning which machine was going to be updated today, though the new design had been kept well secret (except for the keyboard of which we’ve seen a few pictures a few days ago).
I rather like the new design of the iMac, and it’s very, very slim. Tech specs are rather unremarkable, it’s basically what you would expect to find in this kind of machine. No really, what stands out is how slick and slim this machine is, it doesn’t look bigger than the average display, but this is a complete computer…
With the kind of lifestyle I’ve got at the moment, it really doesn’t make sense to buy a desktop computer so I don’t really care for iMacs just now.
An updated Mac Mini.
It’s just a speed bump, nothing really exciting here.
iLife ‘08 and dotMac.
I’m putting those two together because Apple is trying quite hard to tie the two together. So this is the new and much anticipated version of the iLife suite, they didn’t dare calling it iLife ‘07
iPhoto and iMovie seem to be getting the more significant updates. And as I understand it, the updates are pretty much all geared towards publishing content on dotMac, using what they call a Web Gallery. This is a new service of dotMac that aims at making it extra simple to share pictures and movies on one’s website. I have to say I was quite impressed at the demo movie, it really does look nice but here’s why I’m not disappointed at not being a member anymore: I only have an old camera that I seldom use these days (and I’m not planning on buying a new one), I don’t have a movie camera, let alone an HD one, so I don’t have any movies to share, and I’m using my website mostly as a blog. So there you go, this service is not for me. dotMac now offers 10GB of storage, big deal, I don’t really care about that since as I said I’ve got a camera that takes pictures that are 500KB max and I don’t have movies. What I really need is a good blogging platform, and even though iWeb has been updated to be more customizable, I doubt it could satisfy me. All I see just now is that dotMac is the only hosting platform I know that charges 100 euros a year without supporting PHP (or any other web language) nor mySQL (or any other database). This is quite lame and that can’t make a good blogging platform, so it’s not for me.
iDVD and GarageBand have been updated as well but I don’t think there is anything revolutionary in there.
iWork ‘08.
Now, I personally think that this new version of iWork was the best announcement of the day. It looks like they’ve significantly updated both Pages and Keynote, and they’ve even added the missing link: Numbers, a spreadsheet application. Excel spreadsheets but with a Mac look, I can’t wait to see/use that. From what I’ve seen so far, it really looks promising. I’m sure it won’t be as full featured as Excel, but I’m sure 99% of Excel users don’t use any of the advanced features. So a spreadsheet application that has good basic features with great looks should be a hit. Because come on, Excel is damn ugly, I hate it.
Pages has been updated to have better word processing functionalities. To be honest, Pages 2 has already replaced Word on my machine, and I already thought it fared not bad at word processing, and since I thought it was easier to use for formatting, this was already my preferred word processor. I’m quite excited at the new functionalities.
Finally, Keynote has been updated too. I’ve been a Keynote user since version 1, this is a great presentation software and I’m sure I’ll like the new version. There’s a new functionality called Action Build, one can move objects along a path, setting a starting point and a final point and Keynote will animate the move for you. It sounds like Core Animation will be doing the job on the Leopard version, I’m wondering how they’re doing it on Tiger…

So that’s it for the day, I’m quite sure I’ll be trying iWork ‘08 pretty soon!