Yesterday my brand new MacBook Pro 15″ arrived.

I got my original white MacBook over two years ago and it quickly became my primary machine. The seamlessness of the Apple hardware-software connection, its increased performance over my existing Linux PC and the desire to learn about OS X motivated this. Since then it has been, for the most part, my primary computer.

The MacBook still is an excellent machine for what it does, but being a full-time desktop as well as a portable computer, I began to desire a larger screen for when I’m using it at the desk and to get away from the limitation of the rather pathetic Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics.

So to address these issues and erm… continue my investment into computing (nothing to do with the fact that the new Pros are just, really, nice) I went out and bought the new 15″ MacBook Pro.

I got the middle model, with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM and the dual GPU Nvidia GeForce 9400M (for battery life) and Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT 512 MB (for performance).

I’ve had it just hours, but I love this machine!

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Another one of my completely random, and probably uninteresting observations about the MobileMe preference pane in Mac OS X System Preferences. It’s also an excuse to try out a very short screencast with Jing and its Screencast.com hosting.

If you can’t, or don’t want to watch the video, if you search for iTools (.Mac/MobileMe’s original name) in the search box of System Preferences, it highlights MobileMe as a search result. Just as you’d expect from an intelligent search tool, it realises what you really mean.

However, that functionality hasn’t been replicated for if you search for .Mac, now MobileMe’s former name. It does highlight Back to my Mac as one of the results, but just as with iTools, MobileMe should be highlighted straight away.

It’s actually quite difficult to believe that my MacBook is 18 months old now. About a month ago, I noticed that mounting DVDs became unreliable. CDs worked fine, you put them in the slot, it span up fine and everything was good. DVDs, though, would take a long time to decide whether to read, involving a lot of spins up and spins down.

Eventually, reading DVDs became unreliable to the point of not working most of the time, and on Tuesday, since I could now do without the MacBook for a few days if necessary, I decided to ring AppleCare (I have the three-year Protection Plan) and get booked in to get it looked at.

I called the number and got through pretty much instantly. The guy on the other end didn’t sound like a native English speaker and occasionally was difficult to understand, but I got my message across quickly as to what the problem was. I got booked in at the Genius Bar at the Southampton Apple Store. It’s about 30 miles away, and I had to take two trains to get there, with a total journey time (including walking to the station and to WestQuay at the other end) of about 2 hours.

So on Wednesday I arrive at the Apple Store. Despite the fact that it was still being intermittent, in the sense of working, but being slow about it and making some funky noises, I was surprised that the Genius didn’t need much convincing that there was an issue.

It was checked in there and then for a new DVD drive (they call them SuperDrives, but for some reason I don’t like calling them that).

The one thing I didn’t like at that point is that the agreement you sign to give it away for service states that if you don’t let them take it, they apparently charge you £100 plus VAT. It’s labelled as a diagnostic fee, but really it’s a lock in to get service done with them if they think you need it. Well, fair enough, but that should have been disclosed up front, before the ‘diagnostic’ is done. This is especially important if you don’t have AppleCare, or you’ll be at the mercy of Apple’s repair prices, whatever they make them, or £100 odd and nothing done.

Anyway, it went off and they reckoned 2-3 days to get fixed, as they didn’t have the drives in stock.

The next day, in fact little over 24 hours after I checked it in, I get a call saying it’s ready for pickup. I headed back down and picked it up.

They even managed to handle the potential confusion due to the fact that it was bought in my dad’s name, but I alone did this whole process. I made this clear at the initial Genius Bar appointment, and it was subsequently well communicated between the staff for when I picked it up.

The result? I have a new … er, SuperDrive and DVDs work fine again.

Overall, a pretty positive experience. Just watch out for diagnostic fees, and don’t go to the Genius Bar unless you’re sure you can hand the machine over there and then for service.

An interesting footnote – they quoted that without AppleCare, the repair would have cost just under £200. Which incidentally, is what AppleCare costs. So, it’s already paid for itself, perhaps?

The photo is hideously blurry… but for some reason I like it.

Summing my thoughts up and dumping them as quickly as possible:

• Snow Leopard. Why do I always hate Apple’s product names, then warm to them eventually? It’ll have to grow on me. Looks relatively boring. Apple ran out of ideas – lack of innovation.
• iPhone 3G – nice.
• iPhone 2.0 software – looks solid. Nothing earth-shattering that wasn’t really expected. $9.99 + UK VAT + mild extortion will be leaving my bank account soon.
• Mobile Me – reserve judgement. I’d like to give it a try. Not sure I need yet another email address. Probably too expensive.

Any other thoughts? Accepted in brain-dump format or more eloquent versions. 🙂

Today and yesterday I was tasked with representing IT and the IT courses that were available at my college; perhaps marketing them a bit too.

To do that, I did a couple of presentations on two topics that tie in nicely to some of the things that the courses offered do, one on operating systems (specifically, the differences between Windows and Mac OS X) and one which focused on mobile communications, with a Bluetooth demonstration. Turnout for the IT presentations was a little disappointing, but still, I think it went very well.

When you think presentation, you think PowerPoint.

Recently, I tried out the trial of Apple’s iWork 08, specifically because I wanted to play with Keynote and use it in a real setting, for these presentations I did.

I ended up buying iWork, mostly for Keynote. I absolutely love it – I think the results it makes can look more professional than the average PPT and the process of putting the presentation together involves significantly less screaming and hair-pulling (and once you’re used to it, almost none at all).

In my opinion, Keynote is the best program for making visual aids to presentations that you give that I’ve tried. Of course, using a great tool doesn’t mean you’ll have a great result, but it might help you along the way. 😉

… is the little Time Machine icon in the menu bar. It saves a Dock space as I can access everything I need to do with Time Machine in a much more compact way.

The new Stacks stuff is nice, but while I use Stacks, I don’t use it for collections of enough items to warrant using the new list view.

One thing I might like back, though, is the ability to put an icon for my home folder on the right side of the Dock that with one click opens ~ in Finder. Yes, I know, I could click the Finder icon at the left, but that works ever so slightly differently; it might focus an existing Finder window.

Did anyone else notice the TM backup done straight after 10.5.2 took ages to ‘prepare’? I understand why, because there were a lot of individual files that changed in the update, and it had to query the FSEvents database to list all those changes, but I wonder if anyone else experienced that step taking 20 minutes or more.

Yeah, they cost too much, but they are awesome. So here are my completely unrefined first impressions.

Mail is by far the best mobile email client I’ve ever used. To be fair, I haven’t really used that many, but it beats going to the Gmail web interface hands down. On a full-sized computer, Gmail webmail is pretty workable, but is sluggish on a device like the iPod.

Here, the richness of a local app improves the experience significantly, especially on slower and unreliable dodgy wi-fi connections. And I can have as many POP/IMAP accounts as I want loaded in and synced up. The best part of Mail for me is that it caches email you’ve downloaded (even on IMAP), so you can look at email again even when you don’t have a connection to remind yourself of a detail or something. I actually love Mail on the iPod Touch. 😀

Maps is pretty cool – haven’t had much real use for it yet, considering I only got the apps this afternoon. It’s less useful than on the iPhone as you’ll have to find an open connection to use it, rather than using the cell network. Still, it’s an impressive maps experience considering the portability of the device you’re running it on.

Weather’s useful, and as far as I can tell, also caches data so you can still see something when you’re not connected.

Notes is a genuinely useful app and should in my opinion have shipped with the iPod in the first place. Shame about the lack of syncing, but it’s useful for quickly jotting something down without finding a pen and paper.

I don’t really care much for Stocks, not at the moment anyway. 😛

The customisable home screen and web clips are a nice touch too, although I’m not sure about the wobbling icons. It sort of distracts you from what you’re doing – I think something a little more subtle might have been better to let you know that you’re in editing mode.

Overall – they’re worth getting, but I am still quite annoyed at the fact that it isn’t a free update. Roll on the SDK. 🙂

I’m not going to make predictions per se, because they’ll be wrong.

I am going to list what I’d like to see announced by good old Mr Jobs in tomorrow’s keynote. Well, OK, they are sort of predictions, but they are more than likely very inaccurate and I take no responsibility if I end up looking stupid this time tomorrow.

• A new MacBook of some sort, but please don’t call it the MacBook Air. Not just a minor bump, something big and new.
• iTunes Movie Rentals – this one’s been on the cards for a while, and I think it’s happening tomorrow. Maybe just Disney to start with? 😉
• News about the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK and/or 1.1.3.
• Something that no-one’s expecting and no-one predicted (pretty much can’t go wrong with that one, can I?!).

So, by this time tomorrow, things will be kicking off (if I’ve done my time calculations correctly). We’ll see!

Here are some photos from the unboxing of my iPod Touch. I’ve had it for a few days now, and I am absolutely loving it thus far.

Strangely though, I don’t really feel like jailbreaking it and messing around with it at the moment. Whether I’ll stick with that attitude and wait until February, considering it’s not long now, or whether I’ll change my mind will yet to be seen, I guess.

In the meantime, enjoy the photos below, or view the full set on my Flickr.

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So I’m downloading the WebKit source code which I need for an upcoming FOSSwire tutorial. Downloading it from SVN is painfully slow, but then I can’t remember SVN checkouts ever having been that fast.

There’s another option to download – grabbing a .tar.bz2 of the latest nightly. Downloading that over HTTP is, guess what, also painfully slow.

The top speed this connection can do on download is around 250 Kbytes per second. It’s downloading at less than 10% of that capacity, with no other activity on the connection. Downloads from other sites run much faster. Now it might just be me, but I can’t help thinking Apple are either not putting enough resources into WebKit.org, or they’re deliberately degrading the download experience.

I hope for their sake it’s the former, and if so, come on Apple, put some resources into it! You wouldn’t have a base for Safari if it wasn’t for the open source community, so let’s be nice back shall we?