There has been a lot of news in the last few days and during the collection, it became increasingly clear that there was going to be enough for one of my rare interim podcasts. We start, of course with Apple.

There was some fallout from the Apple announcements concerning the iPhone 3.0 software update to come, but most commentators and developers seem to have been satisfied with the announcements. You can't please everyone of course, so some commented that there was no "One more thing" while others were disappointed that Steve Jobs did not pop out of a box for a surprise appearance. It is March, not June. Joe Wilcox of eweek was enthusiastic in his analysis of what this update will mean for Apple and the users.

Some of that positive thinking that came out of the event translated into an improved share price. It was moving up from the low 90s to the Mid-90s just beforehand, but the announcements pushed it back over $100, reaching $103 before settling back to $101 by Wednesday evening in the US.

One thing that was not announced, probably because of time limits was that tethering is to be allowed: using the phone as a modem for the computer. I used to do this with my Ericsson phone which connected the the Mac using Bluetooth and even wrote about it when we went up to the wilds of Tak for a weekend to stay at the Bhumipol Dam there.

As well as outlining that feature, the MacNN article tells us of a feature for tracking stolen iPhones called "Find my iPhone" which uses the Back to My Mac part of Mobile Me. That will please some people.

PC Magazine was full of praise for the presentation itself; and on the free upgrade for iPhone users, asked the rhetorical question, "Why can't any other smart-phone vendors do this?" The answer may lie in part in the reason why iPod touch users, like me, will be charged some $9.95, which is about 350 baht, and is due to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. That applies when new features are added changing the original device. The iPhone is subscription in the US.

Sascha Segan at PC Magazine has a good analysis of the iPhone and its related services, comparing this with competitors' products like the Blackberry RIM, Nokia Symbian phones and Google's Android.

What a lot missed because they were looking in the wrong direction, as often happens with Apple, was the announcement concerning connectivity: iPhone and iPod touch linking with other devices. This can be effected either using the Bluetooth in iPhones and the second generation touch, or via the connector underneath. Daniel Eran Dilger has a lengthy analytical look at this.

As I say, not everyone was positive, and the Macalope Weekly on Macworld had a review, with some excellent rebuttals and useful links, of some of those who seem determined not to be happy come what may. Unfortunately, that review appeared before comments from the Register, who are determined never to look on the bright side and oten seem to have an anti-Mac approach.

Actually, not all at Glasshouse Street: Andrew Orlowski had a considerably more enthusiastic approach and he, as he often does, gets to the nub of what Apple is up to. It is a two-page article and page 2 is certainly worth taking time over as well.

Not unsurprisingly, an analysis of the beta when it was released to developers found that there is code in there that refers to new models of the iPhone. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, Apple has never stopped developing and the surprise would be if there were not a new iPhone in the works. There is also a rumour that some of the references suggest that a video camera might be in the next iPhone.

I wonder if Apple could develop a new system voice, like this [demo] they could call it Register, that reads text out slowly in a sad monotone, and every couple of sentences, instead of the breath that "Alex" produces, gives a groan or a sigh instead.

The new iTunes is going well and I love the DJ playlist, especially the way I can control this from the iPod touch with the Remote app.

This week the rental videos arrived in the iTMS, but not for Thailand of course. I clicked on the link I found in one story but I got another view of Apple's red card: not in this country. There are still plenty of other online services I can buy music from, although the downloading and installing is less convenient. You only have to download apps (which we can do legally here) to see how it is supposed to work.

One online service that packed up midweek was something that was announced to a great fanfare with all the usual chickens running round in circles screaming, Apple Killer, Apple Killer. Well, SpiralFrog, an ad-supported music service that tried to offer free music to users, is dead, succumbing to the cruelties of real economics and a lack of users. If the music was free and they had no users, what does that tell you?

There were reports the day after the Apple announcements that AT & T, who were still suffering fall-out from its poor service at SxSW in Texas, were about to offer the iPhone free from its service: like Asia markets already have.

The Post Business section did have something, although I feel the agency they used had things mixed up focussing on the long expected cut and paste features and putting the other, more dynamic parts of the announcement down the page. What we saw in the Post was a re-organised version of the original Brad Stone article, with some extra bits added and some other stuff taken out. For once I will leave the link on the podcast page in the hope that users are not directed to the registration page of thd NYTimes.

MacNN like a lot of sites have more information: enough to suggest that the NYTimes wire article was more than a bit thin on detail.

Maybe we should be kind to Microsoft this week, but I can't guarantee that.

There was a fanfare for Redmond late in the week when they rolled out IE8, which has been around for a while in beta form I am told. A real shock here as Redmond apparently made a decision to "make the browser better adhere to Web standards." Why am I troubled by that information. I found that in an article on the browser release by Ina Fried on CNET.

Fantastic really. Microsoft is still uncomfortable with the idea that it does not own the web and lots of Mac users are still suffering from the insistence of many organisations that their customers must use IE as their pages are programmed with ActiveX. And despite the clear evidence that there are security concerns -- and Safari has weaknesses too, for sure -- many of those insisting on this are banks. I picked up a thread on this on the Apple forums during the week when a couple of users were still having trouble in the UK with the Lloyds online service that demands IE.

I swear that the letter that was posted online this week was the same that one of the banks here sent me a couple of years ago when I tried to use their service. I changed my bank.

By Sunday morning, in an article titled Microsoft Snubs Standards with IE8 we heard that the new browser failed the standard Acid3 test: "Out of a possible score of 100, IE 8 rang up 20. It failed the test and failed it badly," writes Ed Moltzen in Channel Web, who also pointed out that Safari scores 100.

Safari does have weaknesses, but at a conference in Vancouver, Canada, called CaanSecWest, Dan Goodin reports that experts managed to hack Safari, IE8 and Firefox. Good that such competitions exist as the weaknesses exposed can be reported and fixed. Not so good is what Dan Goodin reports in the Register, that some unreported exploits can be bought for as much as $100,000: and these purchases are not for vanity.

MSN Messenger featured in some news items during the week as the next version is on the horizon. The beta version of version 8 did escape but was found to be really unreliable, but that is OK, that is what you need to find out with a beta, and this was not even a public version, so no complaints there. What I did find interesting was that, at last, there may actually be video capability in this, an area in which Mac versions, including Adium, really lag.

There was a web-based plugin for Adium but that was not too exciting, and there is also aMSN, the Open Source version which is a bit flaky, sorts lists in a horrible way, but does allow video from time to time. One note about the upcoming MSN Messenger is that it does not have support for the PowerPC Macs; and that may be the trade-off for that video feature.

On the other hand, Silverlight, which we tried on the Mac a while back and found rather interesting, in a positive way may now have a version for mobile phones. Not the iPhone of course, which still does not have a Flash capability; but the recent version 3 update has some features that will work well on the smaller devices. With no irony, I wish them well. There is a full report on the Register from Gavin Clarke.

Well, that's two not so bad examples of what Microsoft can do; and for a third, they have apparently brought years of experience of malware and crashes, which it has been trying to tidy up, to the development of a tool that examines a crash and produces a report for those who are developing software for the Windows platform. First looks at this by some experts produced some positive responses.

I knew it couldn't last. The moment Ballmer puts his head above the parapet, he has to say something and interprets news the way Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity over at Fox News do. He was asked about the way Macs are gaining momentum. No they're not. Sales are falling. In one month, along with the rest of the computer industry, including Microsoft and its customers, there was a drop in sales, but several analysts rebutted that assertion with a look at sales over a period of several months, but Ballmer has his figures and claims that people are not going to pay an extra $500 for the privilege of the Mac.

He should look at the faltering heap of parts that shares space in my office with an iMac that doesn't stop running. The PC cost something like 24,000 baht and has been to the shop numerous times since it arrived less than 6 months ago. The current 20" iMac which is faster than mine, is cheaper too and is now shown as 45,900 with shipping. Actually the difference is $620, but once you have factored in taxi fares to the repair shop and time away while the various parts were being replaced, and a DVD drive that still does not work that puts a dent in that figure.

Over at The Mac Observer, Nancy Gravley has a column on Cool Stuff Hiding Inside Mac OS X. It sounds like she has a similar approach to me. I instantly learned something new and used one of her tips for the next paragraph, she writes:

"Say you are conducting research on the Internet and you find a snippet of information that you want to keep. You can highlight it, place the cursor inside the highlighted area and drag it to your desktop for later use. That saved information is called a Clipping. But you can take it a step further than that. You can drag that Clipping into a document and use it as is. This is a great help if you are gathering information, or want to use a quote. And, if the information you save as a clipping contains hyperlinks, they remain intact and will transfer into your document."

That even works with my podcast pages that have white text. Nancy's page has an RSS feed so that goes onto my list as well. She also has a book, Tips, Hints, and Solutions For Seasoned Beginners Using Apple Macintosh Computers With Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 which can be bought online. The links are on her page.

With all the noise surrounding SxSW and other input, I finally succumbed to Twitter and I can be twitted? twittered? ah, "tweeted" using extensions_th

Within a couple of hours of joining a few people had added me -- following they call it -- although some may be advertising gimmicks: not sure on that yet. These included President Obama, although I don't think that was a personal thing. I added him in return. Among the people I am following are CC Chapman of Accident Hash, Stephen Fry, a bike rider, a Mac user, and the iTunes movie trailers site.

As a day or so passed, I added some more, including the Huffington Post, so the nature of the incoming information gradually becomes tuned to the user's preferences.

And of course, in a typical example of the type of synchronicity that happens to me, three days after I started, John Martellaro in the Mac Observer produced a useful article on How to get started with Twitter, which I recommend.

I am trying out two or three different ways to get these messages: a free app on the iPod touch, which I do not use too much; the Twitter page which I am finding I have to refresh; an RSS feed which seems to miss some of the tweets; and a plugin for the Hi5 page I have which updates often and displays enough for me to work with. With the information from John Martellaro, I also installed Twitterific.

For some more information on SxSW which started this section, Jerry Weinstein has an article about the phenomenon on Huffington Post. While Steve Rosenbaum also has an extended piece on just what SxSW is. Perhaps, also we need to consider its impact and look to future years, particularly when traditional conferences -- and other trade shows -- are becoming less well attended.

I try to keep a track of what goes on especially with interesting events and accessories. A couple of sites had the heads-up on a new microphone from a company called SwitchEasy. The microphone has the name ThumbTacks and is quite tiny in comparison with others I have seen commercially. It is of course shaped like a thumb tack, or for UK listeners, a drawing pin. It works only with the new iPod nano (the 4th Generation) and the 2nd generation iPod touch. When I checked it is only available in the US and Europe, so I dropped a note to remind them that Asia is here too.

The Australian government is turning a bit oppressive lately. There is what has been called the Great Australian Firewall that has been causing some problems for those in the Antipodes including some anomalies which may end up as coincidence, but no one is happy. An example was the weather forecast widget. As far as those were concerned, cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Christchurch and others had ceased to exist.

There have been some other problems, but late in the week, the Register had something which gave me a wry smile as almost the same had happened here: the secret blacklist of sites was found online at Wikileaks. As the Register suggested, Wikileaks itself may be blocked down under, but it was not blocked here. At least not then. The list could indeed save a curious person hours of seeking out, umm, esoteric sites -- special interest stuff.

I managed to find a couple of links. Just about every country has something to hide.

There are certain companies that work so well that, despite the occasional downturn, they keep giving. Apple did go through a lousy patch in the 90s but managed to get going again by returning to what it does so well; and let everyone offering advice about what Apple should or should not do, remember that.

IBM has such a solid core business that occasional mis-steps like its fandango with Microsoft, again in the 90s, is now well behind it to such an extent that there is talk this week of a take-over of Sun, which has such a narrow market, but some great products and innovators.

Cisco this week are also spending and they have bought the consumer electronics company, Pure Digital Electronics who make Flip Video camcorders. Marguerite Reardon tells us on CNET that Cisco have been trying to move into the consumer market for a while as they want to expand into the home with networking, perhaps similar to the way Apple have done this with the Macs, iPods and AppleTV.

Oracle, headed by Larry Ellison, is another long term stalwart and last week the company reported another good quarter: so good that it paid out its first dividend to investors, although in the current economy that may have been a smart move to get rid of some of its cash in hand. One wonders why Apple does not do this. Oracle seem to be taking a leaf out of Apple's book by predicting the next quarter will be a little light. Just to be on the safe side, perhaps.

On the other hand, Sony which has strayed far from its original and brilliant origins, does not know where it wants to go and is bleeding money these days. It is currently trying to find cash for the Ericsson mobile phone business that it sucked in a couple of years back. It is not trying to dump the unit, but rather to dump Ericsson. If that happens then I will not have another mobile phone from that source. With Ericsson name attached I could sort of justify it in my mind after Sony did that despicable trick with the root kits on music CDs. I never bought another Sony TV or stereo, and while I had had a gorgeous Walkman for years, the iPod is clearly my choice these days. Actually, if I could afford it, the iPhone would be too.

Is this a time when a lot of companies are going to expand by merger or take over? We saw this in the late 90s when so many joined to the detriment of some I feel. But along with the others I just mentioned, I hear that LaCie, who make the external hard disks I favour, is to merge with a Swiss online storage company called Wuala, a small operation with only 11 personnel but a large user base. LaCie may be looking at the way cloud computing is expanding rapidly.

Talking of which, time to brush off the rumours again: some folks cannot let go the idea that Apple is to produce a Netbook. LG, the Korean firm, who make telephones that do not work with Macs, are apparently producing flat panels for Cupertino that use organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) rather than the usual LEDs. The computer is to be made in Taiwan according to David Richards of Smarthouse.

What this is -- when it is available -- is to be like the best presents: a surprise.

The OLED, by the way is a type of LED that is made of thin films of organic molecules, according to the website, How stuff works."

My technician at the Electrical Engineering Department who was well aware of the technology seemed gob-smacked when I told him of this idea. His one word, was Phaeng: expensive.

Fortunately one of my colleagues has a small example of a monochrome OLED and I was able to borrow it to take a couple of pictures -- see original technology on eXtensions. He told me the cost of this small device was in the region of 4,000 baht and he is still trying to find datasheets and the like so that he can design an interface: his office, by the way, looks just like one would think an engineers office should be with chips and wires and boxes everywhere.

I mentioned last time the BBC program Cluck, which I find rather dissatisfying, particularly their attitude to Apple and Macs, which might as well not exist. I accidentally watched an episode on Friday not long after I had taken the pictures of the OLED screen at work. The first item on the BBC program was on OLED TV screens and one from Sony was described as an iPod touch killer. I had to turn it off it was so boring and certainly short of real information.

I was watching the BBC because earlier the news program had an excellent item on credit card fraud based on call centres in India. There was film of a dealer selling numbers and other consumer details, and although many were false or out of date, some were current. They tracked down a couple of UK users and they had all bought Symantec software a few hours before their details were sold to the reporters. It was interesting to see the victim being interviewed by Alan Little who was using a Mac to show him the data he had from India. This is online as a text with some of the video and it is well worth looking at and taking note of the risks we all face when ordering online or by phone.

Also in the UK, I have mentioned before the lack of privacy these days with the CCTV cameras all over the place. The internet too is under attack from the government there, and not just in the UK. The government is selective about which parts of the EU it joins -- it should have started using the Euro years ago: ask UK people with pensions here. It is hypocritical therefore when it seeks to control internet access for ALL in Europe with its suggested amendment to the Telecomms package doing the rounds. What the UK wants to change is the idea of "users' rights" with the "principle" that conditions apply.

Needless to say some of the Europeans themselves are not so happy about this stupidity and the comment I read was from an online law blog by Brandon Lovested, ironically from the US, whose own record on freedoms has taken a hit in the last few years.

A lot of people are somewhat upset by the bonuses paid out to AIG managers who caused the financial problems in the first place. Heavens, what I could do with a couple of million dollars. . . .

Morally suspect, of course, they are legally sound, whether we like it or not. The attempt by the US Congress seems to me therefore another of its kneejerk reactions and in the last 10 years or more, Congress could have done the world several favours if they had considered properly -- the job of Congress and the Senate -- rather than rushing into so many things. As a note both Senator Obama and Congressman Barney Frank did try to bring in legislation to curb some of the excesses, but others shouted them down.

On Saturday, David Carnoy at CNET passed on some news from the Italian site, The Apple Lounge, who have had a good record on rumours in the past. They are suggesting that a 17" iMac (yes, Seventeen) is available at Apple's own education pages for $899.

Other sites picked this up by the time Sunday arrived here and I was reminded of the recent phone call I had from the local Apple office asking me about the education supplement in the Bangkok Post: they were thinking out loud about articles and advertising.

Also on Sunday morning, I had email from Doctor Smoke, who has an extensive website for those who need OS X help and whose earlier PDF published book on fault finding and fixing, called Troubleshooting Mac OS X, I reviewed briefly at the end of 2005. I also did an online interview with him, parts of which appeared in the Bangkok Post at that time.

He has a new version of Troubleshooting to cover Leopard, the current version of OS X and he is going to let me have a look and review this. It is available online now for $19.95 for the download with other options, such as CD and multiple-User licences. The download is slightly smaller than the previous version at 10.4MB.

That smaller download will be of great help to me in my current situation with True about whom we have not moaned for a while. The last few days have seen a drop off in service with slow connection speeds out of the country and frequent interruptions. The intermittent nature has meant that even a 1MB download of some software took several restarts to nudge it along. I also find that online with the MSN service, I use Adium for this, has dropped time and time again, while online games playing has become frustrating: if it stops for 20 seconds your character may be dead.

I asked a friend to phone on Sunday morning and the male voice at the other end ran some tests and in the end said something to the effect that True cannot guarantee the link. I guess if True cannot guarantee the link, I cannot guarantee that I will remain their customer for much longer, especially when an offshoot of Loxinfo is advertising a 3MB link for about 600 baht a month, when my 2MB link -- which never is -- costs me almost 1,000 baht each month.

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