Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Every year day the Apple rumor mill chugs along offering more and more bogus stories. This propaganda tends to especially heat up before each Apple conference, including MacWorld. This year, there’s been so much hype about Apple and its plans (iTV, Leopard, iPhone, iLife, MacPro, a tablet...) that we are probably setting ourselves up for a major disappointment. Nonetheless, Thomas Fitzgerald had decided to jump the gun early and list out his predictions in three areas: certainties, probable, and possible but unlikely—sounds like a crap-shoot to me.

Keep in mind that he claims, “These are not secret files I have received or inside information, just careful analysis of the current thoughts and public rumors.”

Certainties

• OS X Leopard - Apple will show and possibly announce a ship date (March/April) for Leopard at MacWorld. Which “top secret” features are shared is another thing.


• 2.iLife 07 - There is no new speculation as to what might be included in the new iLife suite, however I suspect iWeb will probably get the most work, it being the youngest of the Applications.


• 3.iTV - We’ll finally get an official name, maybe a release date, and more spec/feature info.

Probable

• MacPro revisions - Quad core Intel Xeon processors


• Revised Cinema Displays - Refresh needed


• MacMini Revision - Core 2 Duo refresh


• iPhone - Ah, the Apple branded cell phone. The one thing however that does suggest an iPhone’s imminent release is that Apple hasn’t denied it. If they don’t release one at this stage, their share price is going to tank.


• Full Screen iPod - Based on numerous patents and a rumor started on think secret well over a year ago, the full-screen iPod is the Apple rumor that just won’t die.

Possible but Unlikely

• Apple Tablet - They could have their own interesting take, possibly something similar to the UMPC’s


• MacBook Sub Notebook - AKA a Sony’s Viaos TX, cool but unlikely

There is a little taste to get you into the MacWorld cheer. For more, head over to Thomas’ site.

Read [Thomas
Fitzgerald]

Back in late August, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was elected to Apple’s board of directors.  And until now, we haven’t seen much of the two companies collaborating.  Enter geotagging for iPhoto.  If you’re not familiar with geotagging, sites like Flickr and a whole slew of Google Maps API-based sites use it to mark on a map where something happened.  In the case of iPhoto, it would mark on a map where each picture or album was taken.  Now this has yet to be announced by Apple or Google, but Mactelchat forum user javester has been poking around in the code and noticed something fishy.  Javester stated one of his/her findings as follows: :"In the Localizable.strings file inside the iPhoto app bundle, we find several intriguing keys, including one called GPSMapURL which is preset to “http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%f+%f"!" In real people terms, this means iPhoto has code that links to Google Maps.

Javester also found a hidden “Show” button that would link to a Google Map of the location.  At the time of writing their first post, they couldn’t get the “Show” button to work.  But after some more hacking away, they came up with the video after the break.

Read [Mactelchat] Via [CrunchGear]

Steve Jobs just finished Apple’s keynote presentation at the WWDC. The second major announcement (first one is here) was the previously announced preview of Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard, the sixth major version of Mac OS X. Leopard is scheduled to ship in spring 2007.

The newest features are Time Machine, a program that will automatically back up and restore everything on your Mac, and Spaces, an new way to instantly switch between groups of applications required for various tasks. Leopard also includes advancements for Mail and iChat, including Stationery, Notes and To Dos in Mail; and Photo Booth-style effects, the ability to “place” yourself in any photo or video as the backdrop for your chat, and live presentations of iPhoto slideshows, Keynote presentations and videos in iChat.

“Breakthrough features like Time Machine and Spaces are good examples of how Mac OS X leads the industry in operating system innovation,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “While Microsoft tries to copy the version of OS X we shipped a few years ago, we’re leaping ahead again with Leopard.”

Time Machine automatically backs up everything on the Mac to an external hard drive or Mac OS X Server. In the event a file is lost, users can search back through time using an intuitive time-based visual display to find and then instantly restore the file. With one click, Time Machine can restore anything from a single file or photo to everything on a Mac.

Spaces is an new way to group applications required for a given task into a “space,” then instantly switch between different spaces to bring up the specific applications required for that given task. Users can get a bird’s eye view of all their Spaces and choose where they want to go next with just one keystroke or click of a mouse (as seen here).

Additional features in Leopard include:

• full native 64-bit support that allows applications to take complete advantage of 64-bit processing while maintaining full performance and compatibility for existing 32-bit Mac OS X applications and drivers


• enhancements to Boot Camp, making it possible to run Windows natively on Intel-based Macs


• Front Row now available with all new Macs to play back digital content, including video Podcasts using the Apple remote


• Photo Booth, Apple’s application that lets users take quick snapshots with an iSight video camera, add visual effects with the touch of a button, and share them via email


• iCal 3 with group calendaring capabilities, event drop box, and standards-based CalDAV support


• improved Spotlight searching that’s even faster, provides richer previews, and lets users search across network mounted folders on other machines


• a new Movies Dashboard widget for movie times and Web Clip for clipping any part of a web page as a live widget


• new parental controls including curfews, time limits and remote administration


• Core Animation, a new graphics technology that makes it easy to create stunning visual effects and animations


• major enhancements in Universal Access, including improvements in VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in screen reader


• security enhancements including anti-phishing protection in Mail and Safari, and an automatic firewall that limits network resources available to an application


• new development tools, including Xcode 3 with full 64-bit support, DashCode, an easy way to create new Dashboard widgets without writing a line of code, and Xray, for optimizing application performance.