With this afternoon’s arrival of Mac OS X 10.6.6 comes the addition of the Mac’s very own app store icon in the Dock…
…which leads you to the app store’s store front…
Apparently there is some other stuff going on.
Macs
When you move house….
…you realise just how many mice you have – even a boxed [wikipop search=”Apple Desktop Bus”]ADB [/wikipop] one…
…although you use the Magic Trackpad for everything these days. There are probably a couple more somewhere ;-).
GameSalad and the iGoD
Note: This will require the GameSalad plugin to be installed to work – and then it is probably only good with Safari on a Mac!
Experimenting with the GameSalad game creation software. It is still a beta version and has crashed my Mac several times – although this is probably largely due to me trying run before I can walk. But it only took a few minutes to cobble together an experimental piece that will become the Intergalactic Goats of Doom (or iGoD 😉 but may evolve into the Intergalactic Vomiting Vampire Goats of Doom.
Update: This has now moved to here as the plug in continues to cause problems/crashes.
You just click to move the Smiley (or touch when I get it on an iPad) to or from the goat. Why not? The M key kills the backing beat and the S key starts it again.
Me (not) Mobile?
Have just enjoyed the 60 day trial of Mobile Me. Having a house full of Macs which will be joined, I do not doubt, at some time by an iPad all that syncing and sharing stuff is just the job. Mostly I was using the picture gallery which, combined with a dinky WordPress plugin, provided a quick link from here to there.
The trial expired but no payment was charged. Instead an email complaining that something was wrong with my card details…
…which was strange. I checked the details and all seemed, as far as I could see, to be correct but still it was rejected…
…which was strange because the details of the same card are stored at the Apple Store where it is used (far too) frequently…
One of their suggestions was to purchase a box from the Apple Store, have that delivered by snail mail, discard the disc and packaging into the recycle bin, and type in the included activation key. [W:Cloud computing] eh! It’s the future!
In the past I have purchased QuickTime Pro and Aperture activation keys from the Apple Store but alas a Mobile Me activation key is not availabe.
So, for now, I have given up and rolled my own using the Gallery software.. Perhaps not as pretty as Apple’s but it does the job. A bit of PHP in the widgets over there (->) adds an image and a link. A bit of FTP adds a straight through connection.
The email said they would keep the account active until the 12th June which is just after WWDC and some rumours say… that Mobile Me will be free anyway. Hmmm!
iPods iPads ePads (that’s about the size of it)
While Apple makes us wait until the end of April for the iPad it is interesting to compare my original (2005) 1 GB iPod Shuffle and Martine’s new (2009) 8GB iPod Nano.
Mine plays music. Her not very much larger but considerably thinner one plays music… and videos and has a radio and a video camera built in and records audio memos etc. etc..
It was back in 2005 when [W:Saturday Night Live] were predicting that things would become even smaller…
But then we may not bother waiting for the iPad and just go with the ePad instead…