Some of you may be wondering about the numbering. This is podcast 169. I slipped another one out at the weekend as there was already so much news. And I had the time.

This week, we look at the second generation iPod touch: definitely on my Xmas list.

iPod touch Generation 2

Next week I will be looking at the iPod nano which Apple likes to advertise with the word, nano-Chromatic. They are colourful, especially when you see Apple's excellent advertising shots.

I had one of those circulations from Apple Asia this week and they are also pushing the nano this year as a way to show appreciation to employess and clients. Oddly on the corporate gift web page, they have an image of the previous nano.

A reminder from the last podcast, my weekend extra: the Airport Express Update finally arrived and I downloaded that via Software Update. This time we have an iPhoto update. This takes the application to version 7.1.5 and is a 10.9MB download. As it is mainly concerned with printing of books and cards via the online services, it is not of great importance to Thai users.

There was also an update to Disk Warrior this week: to version 4.1.1 which adds support for repairing permissions for OS X 10.5.5.

This is one of those utilities that really every Mac user ought to have. The ordering procedure is a bit cumbersome as it needs to arrive on a CDROM and all purchases are individually numbered: a download for the original purchase is no good. I managed to scratch my disk and, for a fee I was sent a new one and that was easy as they had my full details. I did meet someone who had a copy he bought in Singapore and that did not work properly. It is a good investment, as by the time some people think about buying it, it is too late.

While we are expecting new iMacs and Mac minis perhaps even this week -- I will update you later if these arrive -- Dennis Sellers mentions these in an article in which he suggests that there may be new MacPros at MacWorld come January. I think he is wrong and partly for reasons that he cites, although he does have a good argument for. To me, the MacPro just sn't sexy enough for the pazazz of the conference: if anything these would be a warm-up act. Indeed, last year the new Mac Pros were announced a couple of days before the conference opened.

Dennis is another one to have had his hands on the new Macs and his review is online at the Macsimum News site.

In the last podcast, number 168 I mentioned that Walt Mossberg had got his hands on a MacBook and done a review already, before they have even arrived in this part of the world. While he was really happy with XP on the Mac, he expressed some less than positive noises about Vista.

Wallace Wang at the Electronista web site is another one who has a review of the new notebook Macs: this time the MacBookPro. He has a fairly comprehensive look at the computer and rates it quite highly, but I was interested by sme of his closing comments: "ultimately its biggest competitor is still the less expensive MacBook" and I must admit, when I saw the specs., the thought crossed my mind as well. I am not a games player, so the more powerful graphics are not important in that respect, but will Aperture and things like Final Cut run on the MacBook? It appears that Aperture may well be OK.

In the recent seed of the iPhone 2.2 beta we are told that Google Street View is fully enabled. Not that this is going to affect anyone here. The closest camera icons are in Japan.

We also see that Snow Leopard has had another developer release and that does include the rumoured Finder rewritten in Cocoa. Indeed we hear that much more Cocoa is to be used in this future version of OS X. The developer release is about 7G so far. If it stays that big, there would have to be two disks.

Google released Google Earth for the iPhone [and iPod touch] this week and although it is online now, it is not available in the Thai iTunes store. Nor is it likely to be: 22 countries only I hear are to have the privilege of this.

It looks as if there is a design problem with the new MBP in the way that its hinges appear weak to a lot of new purchasers and apparently will not hold the screen up. The MacBook is not affected, and we hear that Apple are already aware, but for a $2,000 computer, this is not a positive sign although from reading the reports, it may actually be a friction or tension problem: at certain angles the hinges will not hold the screen in the selected position. I would expect a beefed up hinge is already on the way and those sold will have a recall.

I saw a question on the Apple forums this week and I thought, Not that again? It concerns the size of a hard disk: in this case an external disk and nothing to do with Apple. All computer manufacturers do it this way. The disk in question was sold as 500G, but when the user checks, there is only 465G shown. There was a link on the forum to About dot Com who have a definitive answer. Disks sizes are measured in binary, but as consumers don't think that way, manufacturers rate capacities using base 10 numbers.

Maybe it is the disk manufacturers who are cheating us.

Talking of disks, a colleague who has a black MacBook tells me this week that his hard disk crashed over the weekend and he had not backed up for the last two weeks. He is being somewhat philosophical about this and certainly blames himself for not backing up, which I am doing as I type this with Time Machine. I will later also do a physical backup -- copying data directly. I need another hard disk too.

While I was in the Computer Engineering department talking to my colleague, I chatted with another teacher who has responsibility for the network there, including security. They have a system with a Linksys router that demands the MAC address to be entered, so that the IP number is directly related to an identifiable computer: sounds like overkill to me. When they tried to get me online while teaching a few months ago, the technicians clearly had only an outline idea of what they were doing and zero experience of Apple machinery.

There are also different types of WAP password that routers use. I read that some routers give you the choice of either WPA-TKIP or WPA-AES. Macs apparently do not play well with the former, so changing if possible might help. From what I have seen on the forums, certain router brands/models are most affected: some D-link some Linksys some Belkin and Cisco too. I also heard that a Dell router gave an iPod touch ownwer grief.

The Linksys router in question would not accept any input from Safari and I brought this up. It apparently needs IE, which excludes just about every Mac on the earth these days. No problem, I am now told, we can put in the data using a PC, then the Mac can connect: which seems to me to defeat part of the object of unique connectivity. It will get me online though.

I had email from someone in a university in NY last week who had problems with Microsoft Office, specifically when she wanted to use footnotes in Thai. I detest the way the latest Office uses fonts -- it requires its own set, many of which are duplicates -- and will only use a single Thai font: Ayutthaya. To my mind, if local users are required to pay more for the suite than their peers in the US, then they better have fonts that work.

I made three or four suggestions: NeoOffice, Open Office and Mellel, a strong word processor from Israel. The first is an Open Source application that is based on Open Office; Open Office itself has just been updated and now does not need the X11 interface, so works like NeoOffice. While answering the emial, I tried both and they came up fine with all the Thai fonts that I had installed. As it is Open Source, you are paying less (of course) but getting considerably more. A small drawback is that it is a bit slow, particularly when opening a new file. But MS Office does not have a reputation of being lightning fast either.

And for those that have illegal copies of Office on their disks, because they think they cannot work without the Microsoft stuff, this is a way out of this delusion. These two Open Source suites do pretty much all that the MS product does, use all the installed Apple fonts, have more file types and integrate properly with OS X, rather than imposing conditions on which accounts can use the application.

The lady was over the moon with what NeoOffice does.

M.Sharp over at Insanely Great Mac has some figures for the first week of the new Open Office: 3 million downloads, over 200,000 Linux; over 300,000 for Macs and -- amazing this -- almost two and a half million Windows users. Don't they like Microsoft Office over there?

That lady who has taken up with NeoOffice was a fairly new user to Macs, hence the reliance on Office; but a number of times each month I have queries from those who are moving over to the platform. Some of those questions are related to the way that the user may be using a Mac and OS X but is unable to shift the way of working over to the Mac: why doesn't it do it like Windows, I am sometimes asked. On occasions, people take it a bit further and ask me to come and help. My usual reaction is, I would rather stay home and drink tea. But if someone wants to move me away from the tea-pot, then they need to convince me of their seriousness. I have a serious help situation on Friday.

One person asked me for serious help a couple of years ago on the Finder and file organisation, but when i got there, not only had someone else been at the computer, but what he really wanted was me to fix the wifi: not my area really.

After one session he left the country on business, but called me again a month or two later. When I arrived he let me know that three or four others had been there all trying to help and all failing: after I struggled and did get it up and running, he was reluctant to pay for the full time. As I say: I would rather stay home and drink tea.

On this note, I am unsurprised to see others being approached on the Windows to Mac move and Dave Rosenberg writes about this on CNET News. He is kind enough to add a link to a resource for new Mac users put together by Michael Coté of RedMonk.

I would remind you also that I have been putting together a series of intros to the System Preferences and other parts of OS X that are online.

MacNN are reporting that MS is facing, what they describe as "a bleak outlook" for Vista sales. Other terms like, "troubling numbers", "only two percent sales growth year over year" and "lackluster numbers". What surprised me as being most out of character for MS was the sentence in this article that begins, "Microsoft presented a humble outlook through the rest of its fiscal year, however, with expectations of a two percent overall increase for Vista". . . .

Humbling indeed.

Back to the MacBook and MacBook Pro which have NVidia chips for graphics -- the MBP two of them -- which seems to have put Intel's nose out of joint. Indeed, with the addition of ARM to its portfolio, some analysts are wondering if Apple might be planning a wholesale shift away from Intel.

End Note

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