Bites from the Apple: The Shape of Things to Come

While Apple has served up an hors d'oeurves of this year's iPods, we're still hankering for a big Mac attack--in particular the long-awaited refresh of the MacBook/MacBook Pro line. A photo's been running 'round the gadgetosphere this week that purports to show the new casing, which combines some of the curved look of the MacBook Air with the black LCD bezel and the glass multi-touch trackpad that have also been grinding through the rumor mill. Jason O'Grady, among others, calls it a fake (just take a look at the mirrored Mac OS X dock on the trackpad... which doesn't even appear on the screen), and adds that he's heard that the new MacBooks will stick with their traditional boxier design, will have a black "flat top" keyboard like the Air's (seen at right), and will get full multi-touch capabilities. AppleInsider reports that all MacBooks (JV 13-inchers and Pro 15/17-inch models) will sport aluminum enclosures and will shed some connectors--going with a backward-compatible FireWire 800 port and replacing the bulkier DVI video port with the mini-DVI port now found on the standard MacBooks. We should be seeing new models get the royal Jobs-ian announcement come the middle of October. Now for more Apple-y goodness from the week that was:

• Well, maybe not all goodness. There's been quite the storm arising from the Apple wing of the gadgetosphere about Apple's iPhone App Store, and in particular how Apple's non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is preventing developers from collaborating (as well as causing a publisher to shelve a title on iPhone development) and how some apps are rejected without a full understanding why they got the boot. And this week it was revealed that developers who have apps rejected can't even talk about the rejection due to NDA enforcement. If you think this is all just a bunch of wonky inside baseball, Jason Snell of Macworld lays it out in real-world terms:

  If developers are afraid to write programs for the iPhone that aren’t games, to-do lists, and tip calculators, for fear that all their hard work will be wasted by a malicious or capricious Apple rejection notice, they will stop writing programs for the platform. And the well of innovative, interesting iPhone software will dry up.

  Glenn Fleishman echoes those sentiments at TidBITS and then sums up:

  Apple needs to get its act together, and be specific about what is and isn't acceptable to avoid uncertainly. Remember FUD? Fear, uncertainty, doubt. It was what once made Microsoft great and terrible: they sowed FUD to keep their competitors from gaining a toehold.

  But Apple's FUD is against themselves. They need to unFUD themselves, and fast.

• Charlie Sorrel over at Wired's Gadget Lab has a screen grab of the iPhone's Safari browser from the upcoming iPhone OS 2.2 update, and there's been a subtle tweak replacing the search magnifying glass (seen in the screen grab on the left) with a search bar (on the grab on the right) that emulates the search bar found on the desktop version of Safari.

  

  He also ponders the MIA copy-and-paste functionality and wonders if Apple is reinventing it:

  Imagine a system-wide menu added to all applications which, instead of shuffling items off to a clipboard, lists all the places you can send that file (or text string). This would be like the existing "Open with" option available in the Mac's right-click menu -- each application effectively reports to the OS exactly what kind of files it can handle and the OS remembers this. Thus a picture could be sent to not only the Photo app, but to any other photo program. Text could be sent directly to any open dialog box in, say, Safari.

  Technically, this still uses a "clipboard" stack to store items temporarily, but the user experience changes to fit the iPhone's one-open-app-at-a-time paradigm.

• RIM may be bringing native software to the Mac that enables syncing with Blackberries (via Ars Technica).

• If you're an iPhone owner who's also a Delicious social bookmarking user, you might be interested in the Red Delicious iPhone app, which lets you see your recently-added bookmarks as well as browse your bundles and tags (via Macworld).

• Tweet of the week from Macworld editor Dan Frakes: "Apple's current MobileMe status: "Some MobileMe members may be temporarily unable to see" Great, now it induces blindness."

• Still no Apple TV update that allows direct purchase of HD TV shows, but Apple TV Junkie is hopeful that one is coming soon.

• And finally, via TUAW, a bit of electronica as composed from the Mac's alert sounds (and displayed in GarageBand):

--Agen G.N. Schmitz