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Items of Note:
A new extension to The Geekcast is coming. Will you be ready?
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Tech news:
Apple’s iWork emerges as rival to Microsoft Office. According to market researcher NPD, Apple grabbed a 2.7 percent unit share, while Corel had a 1.6 percent share in the ‘office’ market. Microsoft maintained its dominance with nearly 95 percent of unit sales. Apple’s share is particularly impressive considering that iWork runs only on Macs, which account for a small fraction of computers, said NPD analyst Chris Swenson. “Apple’s success for iWork has been pretty surprising,” he said. Looking at the Mac platform alone, iWork accounted for 17.4 percent, compared to about 82 percent for Microsoft. “Apple’s iWork didn’t overtake Microsoft Office, but I think taking almost a fifth of the Mac Office Suite market away from an entrenched competitor such as Microsoft is quite an accomplishment,” Swenson said.
Apple’s new Intel ad copied? According to reports, it seems that the band The Postal Service created a music video that is eerily familiar to the Intel / Apple ad currently running. According to Ben Gibbard of the band “It has recently come to our attention that Apple Computers’ new television commercial for the Intel chip features a shot-for-shot recreation of our video for ‘Such Great Heights’ made by the same filmmakers responsible for the original. We did not approve this commercialization and are extremely disappointed with both parties that this was executed without our consultation or consent.” There has currently been no comment from Apple on this.
Disney Buys Pixar for US$7 Billion. Pixar Animation Studios, whose films have garnered critical acclaim with both domestic and overseas audiences, is being bought by Disney for $7 billion. Steve Jobs, as the CEO of Pixar, will become the largest shareholder in Disney. In contrast to Pixar’s remarkable success, Disney have struggled in the last decade to release original and financially successful productions; recently, many of the studio’s films have been sequels of earlier successful works, a good portion of which have been released direct to video. The buyout very much parallels Apple’s purchase of NeXT ten years ago. Because so much of NeXT’s advanced technology essentially displaced Apple’s own struggling and dated codebase for the Mac OS to become Mac OS X, and Steve Jobs’ own idea of a trimmed and stylish product line replaced the beige box Power Mac (insert four-digit number here), many industry analysts joked that ‘NeXT had bought Apple for negative $400 million.’
Tennis coverage making a lasting impression on plasma screens. The logos used by Channel 7 and Channel 9 in Australia during tennis matches are burning themselves into the delicate digital monitors. Wayne Spiers says he bought a $3000 plasma screen on Christmas Eve. It now bears Nine’s logo in the right-hand corner, which was matched by a Channel 7 logo last week, which appeared after one day of watching tennis. Stations can avoid the damage by using a watermarked logo, in a transparent shape that adopts the colours on screen.
Netflix Inc. to offer HD DVD & Blu-ray disks. Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental service, today announced it will carry the first movies available in HD DVD when the new high-definition format launches in late March, according to plans recently outlined by several major movie studios, and said it will similarly offer titles in the Blu-ray format when that product launches, expected to be later this year.
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Test a geek: Thanks to Eric at The Geek Quiz for providing yet another great quiz for us. You can check out his website at http://geekquiz.glitchnyc.com
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How To: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast
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Ask A Geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast
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Hack: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast
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The geek’s view: iWeb
With the new iLife ’06 that just came out, Apple has added a new toy to the mix that allows anyone to publish content to the internet. The new program, called iWeb, makes it easy to get your content online to share it with your family and friends.
Essential to the program is a .Mac membership, which serves as the server back-end for the application. While it’s not publicized, you can export the files to anywhere and get them onto any hosting you like. Once you have this important issue cleared up, it’s time to build.
When you open iWeb you’re immeadiately presented with a window showing you the various templates to choose from. With 12 to choose from, there is something that should appeal to everyone. The templates are very slick and they feel like the layouts that you can use in Pages. They look extremely professional yet show some style. The nice touch on these templates is that you can edit them as you see fit so you don’t need to fit into Apple’s mold for the site you want to build.
Once you have chosen a template, you then choose the type of page to create. There are the same six to choose from for each template. The pages available to you are: Welcome, About Me, Photos, Movie, Blog, and Podcast. Each page has a layout that is optimized for that specific type of content and it’s extremely easy to populate the pages with what you want. When creating a photo page, you just drag pictures from your iPhoto library into the page and it’s automatically copied, sized, and lined up into the page. If you want to rearrange the pictures, simply dragging them around shows the rest of the pictures shuffling around to accommodate the order you want.
The Welcome and About Me pages are basic pages that are pretty self explanatory. When choosing a Podcast or Blog page, you are presented with the template but also a new list-pane at the top that lists your entries and allows you to create new entries. Integration with Garageband works very well here as demonstrated by Steve Jobs at the Macworld Keynote. I will cover this integration in a future edition of The Geekcast.
Overall, iWeb is a nice application that makes publishing websites a snap but also shows the elegance of Apple’s design. While the program is lacking in some areas such as the preferences pane and can stand to get a few upgrades in the usability department, iWeb is another Apple winner.
iWeb is currently at version 1.0.0 and is available as part of the iLife ’06 bundle by Apple for $79.00
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