The NVA Blog

Watching Steve Job’s keynote speech from the Apple 2006 WWDC really got my attention. Apple has surely kicked ass in 2006. In historical fashion even.

Even if you are a die-hard Windows user, or shrug off Apple because Windows rules the corporate desktops and server rooms, I urge you to watch this keynote as you will learn (at least) two important things:

1. Apple has accomplished things within one calendar year that take other companies 5 years to do poorly

2. Windows Vista appears in several ways to be a sad rip-off of functionality Apple began delivering in the first version of OS X close to 5 years ago. (Bonus for PC users: you should still be psyched about Vista when you get your hands on it, because you will then be pretending to be using OS X).

Apple has executed impressively on both hardware and software fronts this year (and we are not talking about iPods). The company has completed the transition of the entire hardware product line from PowerPC to Intel in less than 12 months. On the software side, they have not only delivered the port of OS X to the new Intel architecture, they introduced the Universal platform for cross-compatibility between PPC and Intel, and are on track to deliver the next version of OS X, Leopard, before the end of the year.

Here are some of the interesting stats mentioned during the keynote:

• Apple doubled its laptop market share in 2006 - from 6% to 12%. Most of the growth came after the Intel based MacBooks were launched.
• Q2 2006 was Apple’s best quarter ever - they sold 1.33M Macs
• Apple’s new MacPro is a 64-bit Quad - 2 duo-core processor Xeon 64-bit CPUs @ 2.66Ghz - $2500 - that’s $1000 less than a similar setup from Dell! (check out Apple’s fastest Mac EVER)
• Apple has released 5 OS updates in 5 years
• There are now 19M OS X users
• Apple includes BootCamp - the dual-boot utility in Leopard. You can run Windows on your Mac.
• Leopard brings 64-bit application layer support. This means you have 64-bit support from Kernel to Application. You can run 32bit and 64bit apps side by side without emulation.

Time Machine - If you have ever had backup problems, lost files, or overwrote a template by clicking “Save” instead of “Save As”, you have to check out Time Machine - the built-in backup and recovery application built into Leopard. What is innovative here is how Apple turned the not-used-as-much-as-it-should-be backup and restore world on its head by leveraging some new and existing features in the OS. Time Machine appears to use the new Core animation platform and some combination of rsync/shadow copy to create an eye-candy UI that literally flies thru time and allows you to jump to restore points when the file changed. If you have ever tried to restore a file or filesystem that does daily backups, you know it can take hours or days of restore/hunt/delete in order to find thru trial and error the version of the file you want. What is equally impressive is that this works at the meta-data level as well, so you can restore individual objects such as contacts, emails, photos, etc. Check out the demo - restoring files is easy for the first time in computing history! Time Machine requires a second HFS+ drive, it sounds like this can be a USB/Firewire external, network, or internal drive. I’m looking for more details as to whether this can be a partition on the same physical drive (you lose the hardware-failure protection if you are not running RAID volumes), or what the options are for network drive support and how it works if you are disconnected from the backup target.

iChat - Apple has taken the built-in chat client (which is based on AOL’s AIM) to a whole new level. This ain’t your grandma’s chat…You can now share pictures, video, and documents with your buddies in a presentation format (not just sending the file thru the messaging window). You can also do green-screen and video-over-video backgrounds in your video chats. With all new laptops and iMacs coming with built-in iSight cameras, suddenly every Mac user can get studio-fancy with their chatting. The big feature here is iChat Screen Sharing, according to the Apple website, Screen Sharing enables “shared observation and control of a single desktop”. This is going to be great for collaboration efforts (an audio chat automatically starts along with the desktop sharing), but even more so for remote-help/remote-control efforts. I’m now twice as convinced switching my parents over to a Mac from a Dell/XP box was the right choice. (Note: Some people are upset that Apple ripped off Script Software’s ChatFX features in Leopard. They have an interesting blog post on this topic)
There are more details about the new Leopard features complete with a few digs at MSFT Vista in the keynote. This post isn’t meant to be a full report on the WWDC or the keynote, hence the hilghlighting of only two new features. Some have said that the Leopard announcement lacked a big “wow” feature. I think Time Machine is pretty damn impressive. The new iChat features have lots of potential, and there are more features coming Apple is not yet announcing.

I have read criticism of Apple that they may miss the 2006 holiday season (which we know Vista will), and that Apple remains a “non-starter” in the business world because MSFT has such dominating market share. Personally, I think Apple has moved mountains this year and should be applauded and respected for their ability to execute on life-threatening platform change without stumbling or eroding their iPod/iTunes business. At the end of the day, I don’t care about market share. When I need to sit down in front of my computer to complete an important task or do something fun, what matters is ease of use, intuitiveness, and style. Not market share.
Regardless of how well Visa hits or misses the mark, or whether critics will pan Apple for this or that, I urge you to take a step back and look at what this company (who is NOT the market leader in the desktop or server markets) has accomplished in the last few years, and what they pulled off in 2006. Like me, you may find yourself impressed.

P.S. - this post was written on an Apple G4 PowerBook

I recently installed Mint on my server to track the traffic to the website and blog. Dave @ Stormlab turned me on to Mint, and I have to say I’m very impressed so far. It’s not for everyone, as it’s php based and needs a database to store it’s info. That said, it’s an open architecture with plugins called Peppers (cute, eh?), has a very clean web based UI, and took about 5 minutes to install and configure. Adding plugins is as easy as copying php files to the right directory. One of the coolest things is the Geo Mint that uses the Google Maps API to actually display where your site visitors are coming from.

Mint also has plugins for WordPress (what drives this blog) and many of the other major blog patforms, so you can track activity both inside and outside the blog. Very nice.

The developer, Shaun Inman, has produced a high quality product at a very reasonable price. ($30 per site) The ability to track traffic both inside a blog and on static or dynamic web pages is the key. There are lots of plugins available and did I mention it’s easy to use?

Before reading this post, if you are not already familiar with Sonos, go check out their products.

True, the market is littered with personal media servers and home network music broadcasting solutions. I’m sure some of them actually work too. I’m quite into music and I’m into how it souds, so I waited and waited until the right product emerged. I tend to be into techie-gear and be an early adopter, but in this case nothing I saw on market had impressed me. Until I met Sonos…

Sonos is an example of a company that “got it right” in my opinion. They brought to market a product designed to do one thing exceptionally well, and thoughtfully included the must-have features but left out the fringe stuff that appeals to only power users and geeks (of which I am one, ironically). They got it right because they built a hybrid that appeals to both the computer-user market and the audiophile market. The controller has an iPod like interface and feels solid in your hands. It’s a many-to-many setup (you can control multiple players from multiple controllers and manage multiple audio zones) that enables total control over the music in the house w/o running speaker cable everywhere. Another reason they got it right…their support team recognized that some of us are a bit more capable when it comes to the technical stuff, and they enable you to bypass the initial line of support designed for non-techies. Smart.
I’ve got over 100GB of MP3s, and I can play them at any time throughout the house with the very intuitive controller .

The system works very well, has good audio quality, and is pretty damn fast given it’s dealing with a network of 4 players and a library of over 38,000 tracks.

What’s cool is that when friends come over and pick up the player, they can easily browse my entire library on the controller and make playlists. Everyone’s a DJ. I also use myTunes from SonicSwap to fill in the album art for all of my music, which Sonos displays as well.

The hardware is well made, solid, and intuitive. The company is easy to work with and has done a great job making a cutting edge digital music system that just works, doesn’t crash, and doesn’t require an engineering degree to configure.

Highly recommended…