Last week’s review is here.

The Applications reviewed this week

1. Pixelmator
2. OmniGraffle
3. Money
4. Racer
5. Battle for Wesnoth

Pixelmator:
This is an interesting program I picked up.  It has an interface very similar to Photoshop, but it’s not quite like Photoshop.  It’s covered in hundreds of features and advance editing tools.  One big bonus for this application compared to Adobe’s Photoshop, is the fact that this program is a native Cocoa app, while Photoshop is Carbon.  For those who don’t know about Cocoa or Carbon, it means that Pixelmator is much faster, more efficient, and less bug prone. Saying this I do have to point out a few problems I’ve encountered.  The first one is the image browser,  I have yet to ever get this working.  Every time I open it it freezes not just the application, but the whole system, making me have to do a hard shutdown.  It is also very limiting when trying to create an image from scratch, rather than tweaking one.   Overall it’s a fairly nice alternative to Photoshop.

Latest Version: 1.1.3; 4 March, 2008
Price: $59, shareware
Developer:  Pixelmator Team Ltd.

• Type: Image Editor
• Efficiency: 4/5
• Features: 3/5
• Graphics: 3/5
• Stability: 4/5
• Ease of Use: 4/5
• Modern Mac Look: 5/5
• Price: 4/5

Total: 27/35;  77%

OmniGraffle:
If you need a graphical representation or diagramming software, this is about the best program I’ve used whether on the Mac or PC.  It has many different categories for the job you need done.  It even contains pre-made graphics to design a user interface sketch (if your making an application).  In fact there are so many features and assets within this program that at times it can be a little hard to navigate through to find what you were looking for.  After a while though it becomes second-nature and a great full-featured application.

• Latest Version: 5.0; 5 March, 2008
• Price: $99(Standard) and $199(Pro)
• Developer:  OmniGroup

1. Type: Diagraming Software
2. Efficiency: 4/5
3. Features: 5/5
4. Graphics: 3/5
5. Stability: 5/5
6. Ease of Use: 3/5
7. Modern Mac Look: 5/5
8. Price: 5/5

Total: 30/35;  86%

Money:
This is a little nifty program for people that like to organize their personal finances.  This application is like a database that keeps track of spending and even your bank accounts.  It has a very intuitive feature that actually will connect to your bank account and update automatically with it.  I have found this program to be extremely simplistic, so it’s not for advance usage, but it is fairly nice.  In truth I think the price is a little high, I believe it should be donate ware or maybe $14.99.

• Latest Version: 5.0; 5 March, 2008
• Price: $99(Standard) and $39.99(Pro)
• Developer:  jumsoft

• Type: Diagraming Software
• Efficiency: 4/5
• Features: 2/5
• Stability: 5/5
• Ease of Use: 5/5
• Modern Mac Look: 5/5
• Price: 2/5

Total: 23/30;  76%

Racer:
This is a pretty nice racing game.  It’s a multi-platform online game which uses the mouse to accelerate and turn the cars.    For a free game it has really nice graphics, and great game play,  Saying this, it is very very easy to drive and doesn’t completely follow real physics.   Along with this, just a tab from another car will send you spinning like crazy.

• Latest Version: 0.5.4.3; 6 March, 2008
• Price: Free
• Developer:  Ruud van Gaal

• Type: Racing Game
• Efficiency: 2/5
• Features: 3/5
• Graphics: 3/5
• Stability: 4/5
• Ease of Use: 5/5
• Modern Mac Look: N/A(Opengl Based)

Total: 18/25;  72%

Battle For Wesnoth:
A very addictive game.  It’s similar to Civilization or Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, with a turn based RPG style simulation.  The theme in this game is fantasy as you build up your army of warriors.  There are many different sagas with in it and a lot of replay value.  The graphics aren’t the best, but I love the music.

• Latest Version: 1.4; 8 March, 2008
• Price: Free
• Developer:  The Battle for Wesnoth development team

• Type: Turn Based Strategy Game(fantasy themed)
• Efficiency: 3/5
• Features: 4/5
• Graphics: 2/5
• Audio: 3/5
• Stability: 5/5
• Ease of Use: 4/5
• Modern Mac Look: N/A(Opengl Based)

Total: 21/30;  70%

Yesturday, it seems that Apple’s servers were bogging down. Now I don’t just mean they were running slow, I mean many people couldn’t even access the developers site. Why is this? Because there were over one million developers trying to download the 2GB, finally released, iPhone SDK. Yes, it appears, after what Apple demoed at yesterday’s conference, that Apple wasn’t joking around when it bluntly said the iPhone is years ahead of its competition.

Personally, I’ll be one to say, I’ve never seen a full desktop game running on a smart phone. Most have low resolution graphics and very horrible sound. Apple, EA, and even Sega show-case the power of the iPhone with three very good looking games like Spore and Super Monkey Ball.

Just in five minutes on the Internet, I spotted about six articles about the iPhone and its SDK. All of these takes upon it were positive and very similar. They all saw the iPhone as a next generation phone, that could in fact make a decade long monopoly for Apple as the dominate mobile device. Here’re a few quotes and snippets:

“It’s clear we’re not the only ones interested in the software development kit (SDK) — after a few hours of trying, we still haven’t had any luck downloading it” - alleyinsider

“There should be significant concern in the RIM camp… By summer there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of applications ready for the iPhone” - Computer World

“The iPhone/iPod touch games will make the iPhone analogous to the Wii, in that it opens up new concepts in game UI design”

“[Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch developer] tools look awesome — far better and more advanced than what most Mac developers were expecting”

“Then Apple kicked things up a notch with the SDK details… But the real surprise was Apple’s efforts to market and develop an ecosystem for third-party iPhone development [including] Kleiner Perkins’ [launch of the] $100 million iFund to fund iPhone developer companies” - Notes From Anywhere

“By the time Apple officially releases the OS X 2.0 update in June, there will be no doubt that the iPhone will have turned both the personal computing and mobile communications industries on their head in just one year” - CNET

Here’s a Video of Steve Ballmer, giving his views on the iPhone:

Today the iPhone is starting to pop up in businesses and corporations.  Through a survey it also appears to have the highest satisfaction score as a business phone.  Apple has show cased it’s SDK road map and to start off, it explained what it’s doing for enterprises.  Here’s a list of new corporate features:

1. Push Email
2. Push Calender
3. Push Contacts
4. Global Address list
5. Cisco IPsec VPN
6. WPA2/802.1x
7. Remote Wipe

Even better, Apple has now integrated Microsoft Exchange server into the iPhone with something called Activesync.  The room exploded with Applause and cheer when this was announced.

Today the iPhone claims 28% of the smartphone Market, with RIM’s Blackberry at about 40%.

Now me personally, I don’t have either an HD DVD or Blu-ray player, and I don’t plan on ever getting one. Now that HD DVD is dead, all that’s left is Blu-ray — but wait, could there be another competitor on the horizon? Many people have been talking after the death of HD DVD, some saying Blu-ray is not in the clear yet and in fact might not have much of a victory at all. It appears that all these people are pointing at Apple. Apple, the one already covered in blood from the death of many digital download stores and/or media players.

Companies below either closed shop entirely, or discontinued a product:

Yahoo!, Virgin, MTV’s Urge, AOL, MSN, BenQ, Rio, Dell, iRiver, Thomson, Olympus, BuyMusic.com, TowerRecords, Sony’s Connect, Google Video, and Wal-mart.

Now Apple is a company that has created many industry standards; it’s considered by many as the “trend setter.” It’s made the mouse a standard (1981), USB a standard (1998), developed FireWire as a standard (1995, 2000), optical mice a standard (2000), super drives a standard (1988, 2001), the modern laptop design a standard (1991), 16+ million colors (24 bit) on screen a standard (1987), Wi-Fi a standard (1999), etc., etc., etc.

So what I’m getting at is Apple is trying to set a new standard. Steve Jobs has pointed this out many times directly and indirectly. He has pointed out the decline of optical disks and the increase of digital downloads. He shared his vision in which everything could be downloaded digitally. You see Apple wants to get rid of the concept of physical storage devices like the optical disk (not SSD or HDD, of course). Knowing Apple, I could seriously see the fading of optical disks in just a few years, and I could also see Blu-ray not lasting very long.

When Apple makes a change, it takes six months to as much as 10 years, but soon the industry follows its lead.

As BYTE Magazine said back in December, 1994 (link):

“Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry as a massive effort to keep up with Apple.”

“It’s no coincidence that every new version of Windows looks more and more like the Mac.”

“In 1984, critics derided the Mac for its appliance-like simplicity, but it went on to pioneer or popularize almost every innovation in personal computing: the GUI, desktop publishing, built-in networking, plug and play, integrated multimedia, API-based software development, visual programming, hypertext, 24-bit color, the global clipboard, undo, voice control, built-in color calibration, dynamic memory allocation, SCSI, and even 3 1/2-inch floppy drives.”

“Apple’s R&D lab, located in Cupertino, California, is the inspirational R&D center for the entire industry.”

“Apple is pushing ahead with some exciting new technology, and the industry would be much poorer without Apple’s technical leadership.”- this one has to do with the fact that Apple was dying at the time.

I could get more quotes, but I think this one source says it all. Apple is one of the biggest innovators in the industry and when it does something, whether it gets noticed or not, the industry shifts in its direction. So I really can’t see Blu-ray as a standard for very long. Congrats Blu-ray, on the victory, but your life will be short. Apple’s behind you, ready to strike.

Back on July 31 of 2007, Apple said it had sold three billion songs, making it number 1 on the Web as a music download retailer. This also made Apple the third largest music retailer as a whole, surpassing Amazon and Target. Today Apple has sold more than four billion songs and is now the number 2 music retailer in the world, only behind Wal-mart. It is, of course, still number 1 on the Web.

What this shows is that iTunes is not just gaining ground, but is gaining ground faster over time, slowing down to a nice pace. Originally it took iTunes three years to reach one billion songs (from 2003-2006). Then it took only 11 months to gain another billion songs. Again, the third billion took a mere five months. Finally the last billion, getting up to four billion, took roughly six months. So iTunes shows that iTunes should be gaining around two billion songs sold per year.

This data does not count the movies, TV shows, podcasts, or games that are downloaded through iTunes.

Now before I begin, just to clarify, because I see this mistake many times. Astrology and Astronomy are completely different subjects, Astrology is a false science that uses patterns in the sky to tell your future.

For a long time now, I’ve been telling people that the market share graphs and surveys are false; it seems very few believed me. The reason I said that had to do with the fact of how market share information was gathered. You see, a company like Net Applications has a snippet of code that is put into hundreds of Web sites. The code can tell what computer the visitors are on, and then send that information back to Net Applications.

The bad thing about these types of invisible surveys has to do with the Web sites themselves. From what I’ve learned most of Net Application’s Web sites are on e-commerce sites. At this time there are still many e-commerce sites devoted to Internet Explorer and/or Microsoft. One of which was Wal-mart’s online music store (which is gone now). You see Net Applications doesn’t list the Web sites its code is on, so you don’t know if any Web site is biased toward an OS or works better on a specific browser, or tends to get more of a specific OS because of what they sell.

Well now today I’ve found proof of how unreliable this method is. I found another Web site, which I trust a lot more than New Applications, called w3schools.com (W3 is the consortium that creates the open Internet standards).

Here’s a comparison:

So as you can see, there are some big differences, and actually W3 and Net Applications can’t seem to agree on any of the browsers. Firefox for instance seems to have more than twice the market share on W3’s side compared to Net Application’s.

This statement above can reflect on another similar market share Net Application does — the one that everyone seems to base their facts upon: The Operating System Marketshare. This has the same results as above. W3 actually says that Linux has a market share that is over five times the amount Net Applications says (3.6 > 0.67). So what does this say about Vista? Well, let’s look at Apple’s share. Net Applications says there are roughly 8% of computer users on Macs. Steve Jobs commented a while back that there are 23 million Mac OS X users. Estimating, I believe it is close to 26 million today. So what does that say? In total it appears that there are only about 320 computer users in the entire world. 320! that’s impossible — that’s less than 100 million over the population of the United States, so what about the rest of the world? I remember Microsoft claiming that there are close to a billion computer users out there, but then where did they go? I then did the same thing with W3’s information and got double the users at around 650 million. So who’s right? Are they both wrong? Who knows?

So once again, do listen about who has a larger market share, it’s all just a pseudoscience.

• W3 Browser Statistics

• Net Applications Browser Statistics

Ever since the fall of last year it has seemed inevitable that Blu-ray would win. Warner Bros. said it all when it planned to only sell Blu-rays and to stop production of HD DVDs in May. Then Target stopped selling HD DVDs, and just recently, Wal-mart has stopped selling them.

Today it has been said that HD DVDs are officially dead and Toshiba is planning to stop production; the cost to scrap all the HD DVD players and materials will end up costing hundreds of million of dollars.

So, everyone that bought a HD DVD player, or who own an Xbox 360 with an HD DVD player, welcome to the wonderful world of obsolete, unsuccessful products. Sony’s Betamax has been here for a while waiting for you.

When the Apple TV first came out, I thought it was an okay set-top box. Over the first few months I saw nothing but good reviews, yet at the same time very few people were buying them. I do have to comment though, Apple TV so far has had the best results, selling about 800,000 units in 10 months, and that’s with very little advertising.

I personally have not been one that has bought one yet. I can’t find anything appealing enough about it to shell out $229 (was $299) for it. The new features in Apple TV take 2 have added some appeal. I can now watch or listen to podcasts on it, and I can rent movies.

The only problem with renting movies on it, is the fact that I’m one of the few people Steve Jobs didn’t count at Macworld when he said that most people only watch a film once. I normally watch a movie many times over again. So I really could careless about the renting part of the Apple TV.

Then there’s the new flickr feature. I’ll just come out clean and say, I don’t have an account there and I only go to Flickr when one of my friends gives me a link to it. I don’t know why, but I’m just not interested in it, just like how I don’t care about MySpace. The closest thing to Flickr I go to is YouTube, and that’s about videos not photos.

Now I recently posted an article about a new patent for the Apple TV that lets you watch broadcasted TV as well as live iChat with friends. This I would like very much. Now what I really want from Apple TV is the ability to use a wireless keyboard and/ or mouse, to have Safari built-in, and some form of IRC system to go along with iChat. I would also like a news feature that allows me to view current news, preferably video cast, but text is fine, and weather.

Finally there is one great Web site that should have been added to Apple TV, that being Blip.tv. What a great source of independent shows and clips, that would fit perfectly next to the YouTube channel.

Until Apple TV gets an iChat, Safari, and something like Blip.tv channels, I doubt I’ll get one. Maybe someday it’ll add something I like, but so far there isn’t much appeal at this point for me.

Today, around 47 Apple patents were posted today by the United States Patent Office. Through all of these, there was spotted an interesting discovery. Two new feature that soon might hit Apple TVs are broadcast TV and iChat video conferencing. Now I believe this will be a software upgrade for the Apple TV, at the same time I believe Apple will introduce a new Apple TV.

The reason I believe Apple will intro a new Apple TV has to do with the fact of a new remote, similar to the one now, but with 5 widget buttons on the bottom. Also with the new iChat feature, it might seem that Apple is actually making not just a new box, but an actual TV. Starting with the iMac G5, Apple now ships all, but the Mac Pro, with a built-in Camera. So they could make a screen with a built-in camera for this. Knowing Apple, they wont make you use some third party camera with the Apple TV (although they would probably allow it). With this information, and facts it seems like a 50/50 between Apple coming out with a television or they might bring back the external iSight camera. Personally, to me, I really doubt Apple will come out with a TV, I think the iSight external camera has a very high possibility.

Now the two features, live iChat and broadcast TV, aren’t just two separate features, they work together as well. You can for instance be watching a sports game, while chatting with one or more friends. The friends would pop-up on top of the broadcasted game, in a small window just like iChat on the Mac.

Here’s one illustration from the Patent:

you can learn more here.

I like Palm, it’s one of my favorite personal mobile computer maker, but it’s slowly fading away.  I don’t believe Palm will close it’s doors however, I do believe it’ll come back.

The story of Palm started in 1992, the year it was founded to create small portable devices.  In the same year Apple had started work on something they called a personal digital assistant, aka PDA.  Apple’s name for the PDA was Newton, and it would become the standard maker for all PDAs to come.

Palm, started work on a PDA called the Zoomer.  It was, however, a commercial flop.  Palm managed to stay in business by selling software for HP, as well as Apple’s Newton.  Eventually Palm learned from it’s mistakes and created the Palm Pilot line.  The Palm Pilot is also considered the first generation Palm PDAs.

Although Palm never had to much success they had better success than Apple.  Apple’s Newton although very powerful, had a $1000+ price, and it’s size made it eventually lose in the market.  In 1997, Steve Jobs announced the end of the Newton.

Three years later in 2000, Palm and Apple were in talk about something, but nothing seemed to happen.  In 2001, Apple started a small unnoticeable fight to claim the name iPhone.  In 2002, Apple added some of Newton’s API’s like its writing recognition system into OS X(it has yet to be used).

Around 2004 the rumors of the iPhone started and by 2006 the rumors started to become factual evidence. The president of Palm responded to Apple bringing out a phone by saying:

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone.  PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

In January of 2007, Apple announced the iPhone.  About 9 months later, 3 months after the iPhone was released,  Palm sadly said they are pulling their new generation device/OS.  Palm had spent much time on the new operating system, but the iPhone killed it before it was even released.

“Palm is canceling its Foleo product right before the company was due to ship the new notebook-like device to retailers.  Palm founder Jeff Hawkins unveiled the Foleo at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital Conference in May, calling it ‘the most exciting product I have ever worked on.’ Shaped like a notebook computer, the Foleo was designed to work in tandem with smartphones such as Palm’s Treos. The idea behind it was to provide a larger screen and keyboard that would allow smartphone users to more easily check their email and edit documents stored on their mobile devices. The company originally planned to sell the device starting this summer for about $500 each.” Troy Wolverton reports for The Mercury News.

The above post was made right after iSuppli reported that the iPhone had out sold all smart phones in July.

I do believe Palm can bounce back very easily, it has had rough times before so this is nothing new.  At this time however, Palm has commented that they are closing all their retail stores.  Palm seems to be doing what Apple did in 1997, closing down projects and other resources to focus on one path and then build up from there.
At this point people are say it’s going to be war between RIM and Apple for 2008, but maybe in 2009 Palm will join it again.