I went on an easy six-mile run in Central Park this morning.

I run in Central Park a couple nights a week. This morning I ran the usual loop, but in reverse.

It’s the first time I’ve run the loop in this direction, and I noticed some things I’d never seen running the opposite direction in the dark. Among them was a beautiful pond at about 110th Street. There’s a waterfall near the pond, too.

I’ve run by these things countless times and never noticed them. It’s amazing how more lighting and a new perspective can expand your world.

I’ve been getting mail messages from WordPress telling me it can’t
access my mail blog posts.

If this message shows up, the problem is resolved.

I made another visit to the Apple Store SOHO tonight. The purpose of this trip was to pick up a copy of the new iLife, a completely unnecessary purchase I nonetheless made for the third year in a row.

Why did I buy the software? Because I use iPhoto quite a bit and I’d hate to think there could be some really cool feature I don’t have, regardless of whether or not it’s useful. Is it worth $79.99 plus tax? Ask someone else. I can live with myself.

So I bought the software and I’m sitting at Starbucks waiting for it to install. It takes over 5 GB of drive space (that’s after I unchecked some of the extraneous GarageBand content) and about 30 minutes to install, so I’m passing the time with this blog post.

Like I said, the only iApp I use with any amount of regularity is iPhoto. Walt Mossberg isn’t kidding when he says there’s no comparable photo manager on Windows, though I recently set up my Mom with the (free) Photoshop Album and thought it was at least a step forward for Windows. The searching functionality is already sweet (both within iPhoto and via Spotlight), and the new “photo podcasting” functionality that uses RSS sounds intriguing. I’m going to experiment with it on this blog as I begin posting more photos. I’ll be evaluating it against the FAlbum/Flickr combination, which is set up but is in the process of getting some tweaking.

iMovie is an impressive app, but once I’d spent more than about 20 hours on digital video projects I decided my time would be better spent on a pseudo-pro tool, so I moved to Final Cut Express about 18 months back.

Final Cut Express is great. Strangely, I’ve been disciplined enough not to upgrade to the HD version, because there doesn’t seem to be any compelling (or usable—I don’t have an HD camcorder) new features.

Digital video is something else I’d like to experiment with on this blog, but for me it’s really a solution in search of a problem at this point. I’ll probably put out some test video posts in the reasonably near future, though, some done via the iMovie video podcasting functionality (which I assume means the posts will be in QuickTime format) and some using Flash video. Flash video makes more sense to me than QuickTime—I hate video player browser plug-ins.

I’d be really happy if iWeb is a nice, simple, GUI-based Web page editor that will allow me to do simple CSS-based pages from scratch. My own intuition and the brief write-ups I’ve read lead me to believe iWeb will be a template-based app I’ll launch about twice. I don’t think I’m the target market.

The new GarageBand sounds great for anyone who wants to mix their own tunes and/or do podcasts. Good luck to anyone who plans to do this.

(About 30 minutes later…)

iLife ’06 is installed.

Full screen editing and side-by-side photo comparisons (for up to eight pictures) is the nonessential iPhoto feature I’d hate not to have. I’ll post on the photocasting once I have a chance to play with it.

iMovie is much more feature-rich than I remember. Of course, the last version I used was at least two revs back. I can see myself using it for simple video projects, because for basic tasks the UI seems more efficient than FCE’s. I’ll probably post some test video podcasts in the near future.

(Side note: Does iMovie support non-destructive nonlinear editing? If I recall correctly Apple implemented that a version or two back.)

iWeb is pretty much as I expected—pretty, easy to use, and completely useless to me. I can see it being useful for non-techies, though.

No comment on iDVD until I need to build a DVD.

I respect Apple’s strategy. Their tools make Web publishing, photo sharing, podcasting, movie making and other digital lifestyle essentials a piece of cake. The slick tools tie people to the Mac OS and reward people for bringing friends and family to the platform, and .Mac subscriptions provide for a nice recurring revenue stream.

I wish the slick tools were more useful to me personally, but if I were in Apple’s shoes I probably wouldn’t cater to my picky technical preferences, either.

I haven’t launched GarageBand. Happy audio podcasting, other people.

Is this why Apple’s announcements this week were somehow underwhelming?

It’s an Apple rumor, so take it with a grain of salt.

An interesting video from Tony Blair’s crew on Google Video.

A little dry, but neat to watch.

I don’t think anyone was particularly shocked to see Apple announce Intel-based Macs today. Still, it’s pretty exciting. I’ve now experienced two Mac processor transitions.

Apple released the MacBook Pro, which is essentially a slightly thinner, substantially faster, and significantly more feature-rich 15″ PowerBook. Building an iSight into a thinner case is a very cool thing, and the 4x (claimed) performance improvement sounds enticing, though it’s less impressive when you consider how much Apple needs to make up for lost time.

I was kind of hoping for a new case design, but then again I really like the current one, and Apple has made some solid updates to it over time. Also, keeping the basic case design intact means my 18-month old 17″ G4 PowerBook still seems fresh, which reduces the likelihood I’ll start looking to upgrade before the need really arises.

The Intel-based iMac looks cool too, of course, though the relative performance increase isn’t as great. Feature-wise it appears identical to the recent G5 refresh.

It will be interesting to see the benchmarks for both the universal binaries and the emulated apps.

Apple had a good day, and the year’s off to a good start, but I’m a bit underwhelmed given the inflated expectations set by the overactive rumor mill. I should know better. Still, it will undoubtely be an interesting couple years for the Mac platform. Once we’re past the basic transition the innovation should start to get really compelling.

Of course, there’s also finally a Windows upgrade coming later in the year. Yeah, this year will be fun.

The first couple days of this week have been busy. I hit Fashion 40 for the first time last night. Cool atmosphere, listenable dance music, a particularly strong Bombay Sapphire and Tonic (or maybe I just didn’t eat enough yesterday).

I saw a Daily Show taping tonight. Jon Stewart answers audience questions before the taping, which is really cool. The guest was Albert Brooks, who was promoting his new movie Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. The clip they’ll show tonight was pretty funny, though the opinions on IMDB were mixed.

Afterwards Dave and I hit John’s Pizzeria (pizza with sausage, mushrooms, and olives–good as always).

I went to Isola (MenuPages, New York Times) Friday night. It was my second visit. Both times I’ve had Quattro Stagioni, which in layman’s terms is pizza with sausage, mushrooms, and artichokes (I held the artichokes).

Amy had some sort of garden salad, which she said was good. Dave had Penne alla Norma, which he enjoyed.

(If it’s not already obvious, I’m a simple eater. I don’t apologize for it.)

Today I went to City Diner. We went shortly after noon. It was pretty crowded, but the host was super-efficient (and pretty friendly) about getting everyone seated. The food turnaround was the fastest I’ve experienced in a New York restaurant.

Once again living up to my simple nature I had chicken rice soup and a Caesar salad, both of which were excellent. One of the best Caesar salads I’ve had. Laura had some sort of omelet; I don’t recall the details. I didn’t ask her how it was, but it looked good.

I’ve now spent over two hours at the SOHO Apple Store. I came to attend their “Digital Photography with Adobe Photoshop CS Pro” workshop (the seminar actually covers CS2).

The seminar was somewhat useful if you haven’t used Photoshop much, but it didn’t cover anything I wasn’t at least moderately familiar with having read the first few chapters of Deke McClelland’s Adobe Photoshop CS2 One-on-One. Still, if you’re new to Photoshop or are trying to figure out if you want to drop $500-plus on it the seminar is free and is worth an hour of your time.

My attention went in and out due to the Apple Store’s free Wi-Fi. I browsed the Web through the next seminar, which was about Aperture. As cool as Aperture looks (Apple’s stuff always looks cool), I thought this week’s Yahoo! Go and Google Video announcements were much more interesting.

The above is not an apples-to-apples comparison, obviously, but I’m much more interested in “network-level” innovation than I am in yet another desktop app. I’m much more interested in Flickr than I am in Aperture, Photoshop Album, iPhoto, or any of the like. The cool thing is that via the Flickr API you can integrate Flickr with any of these apps. I hope Apple does some of this type of integration proactively to keep the desktop apps relevant. As much as I like iPhoto, my Mac isn’t the only computer I use, and Apple online services aren’t the only ones I use, either.

This isn’t to say Apple doesn’t innovate outside of consumer electronics or the desktop, though they don’t do any services that personally interest me. (I use the iTunes music store, but I don’t even have an iPod. That’s a story for another day.) Apple obviously deserves points for iTunes’ impact, but I’d like to seem them do something that has a larger scale impact.

It will be interesting to see what Apple produces at Macworld SF this week. I hope to see at least 1) some sort of Intel Mac Media Center and 2) a compelling new network service, something as interesting the VOD service that’s been rumored.

Okay, I just looked up and I’m apparently halfway through “iPod and iTunes Workshop.” I’m outta here.

I updated the UI to “Version 2.0.”

The major changes:

1) The right sidebar is now in a solid box. There was formerly a dotted line separating the main content from the sidebar. I think this look is a little cleaner.

2) The dotted lines in the header and footer are now solid.

3) The post metadata (the text below the posts) is now a consistent size, regardless of where it’s being shown, and there is now a dotted line above and below the text.

4) The blue link color has been changed subtly. It’s not exactly the same as the lines and the header logo, but it blends better.

One nice side effect of the change is the site looks much better in IE. The look is now consistent in Firefox (Mac 1.5), Safari (2.0.2), and IE (Windows 6.0). I’ve been doing my development on the Mac lately and was surprised to see Safari and Firefox handle things almost identically, while IE tends to go its own way on some things. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised; now that I think about it IE always did seem to go its own way on standards compliance.

I’m going to try and stop focusing on the UI for a while. (I know the UI is really plain, but it took a while.) My next area of focus will be Flickr integration. First I’ll fix the general display to make it more consistent with this new UI. After that I’d like to explore integrating the posts and Flickr photo albums using common tags. More on this later.