The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Dave Burstein’s remembrance sums up the dynamic life of Jef Raskin: Jef Raskin died of cancer on Saturday February 26th after being sick for several months. A wonderful spirit and renaissance man, who inspired me and many others. He created the Macintosh project at Apple in 1979, naming it after his favorite fruit. He left Apple to form Information Appliances, where he designed the Canon Cat with an innovative interface. [more]

Dave and Jennie Bource are making a documentary film about Jef, some clips are available at the site.

Recent updates to Raskin’s blog include Apple documents from 1979, RC airplane photos, and his restored organ from 1858.

DigiBarn Friends: Jef Raskin, A Life of Design

Blogdex Links (9), Daypop (11), Technorati ( 20)

Wikipedia: Jef Raskin
Blogdex Links (6), Daypop (7), Technorati ( 19)

TUAW has partnered with sister site Engadget for a ton of MacWorld coverage. Look for coverage all day long the next couple of days on both TUAW and Engadget (go, go Weblogs, Inc. network effect!).

Right now Engadget.com is running live, minute-by-minute, coverage of the MacWorld keynote:
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000477026962/



9:11am PST - Steve Jobs arrives on stage, starts talking up HD projection, he’s showing off their new Apple store in London, it’s their largest store to date, and the second grossing store they have worldwide.
9:14am - Recapping the year, the iMac G5 launch “The most beautiful desktop computer”. The best selling Mac they have.
9:15am - Mac OS X update, “The world’s most advanced operating system, 12,000 native apps, 14 million users. Tiger on schedule to ship first half of this year with 200 new features. Any process will be able to address 64 bits of memory.
9:16am - New Tiger features. Automator, collects and accomplishes routine tasks. Most important new feature is Spotlight, desktop search allows you to find anything. Photos, PDFs, docs, integrated into OS and applications.
9:17am - Microsoft will be building support for Spotlight into their Mac apps.
9:21am - Spotlight just instantly searched 250,000 files, can sort by people.
9:22am - Spotlight offers searching within Corbis images.
9:23am - Steve just crashed Spotlight photo viewer! “Well, that’s why we have backup systems here.” Force quit and recovered.

Many more updates at Engadget here:
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000477026962/

From the “Music is a Platform”

” Panel at the Web 2.0 conference.

The panelists:
Hank Barry, Partner, Hummer Winblad
Mike Caren, Senior Vice President of A&R, Atlantic Records
Eddy Cue, Vice President, Applications and Internet Services, Apple
Danger Mouse
Michael Weiss, CEO, Streamcast

DJ Danger Mouse (right) talked about using sony’s Acid software to make the grey album. I’ll have the Mp3 of this discussion up in a little bit. DJDM talked about using a cracked version of the software and making the Grey Album because he had nothing to loose if he got sued.

Micheal Weiss is pitching a new website called Neonet (can’t find the domain) that he says is a next generation P2P search technology.

Here is part one of the discussion in MP3. Part two is coming up.

... more to come… the panel is still going on….

Apple said they had 70% of the legal market. Apple thinks the marketplace wants an a la cart downloads. Hank pointed out that artists get 10-14% of retail (i.e. a la cart) sales, all you can eat licenses mean the labels have to pay the artists half. So, the labels don’t want to do it.

If true I think this is the biggest story of the year, right up there with the Google IPO! Engadget has a lot more pictures and details.

Go check out the P.Diddy diamond iPod over at Engadget—cheer up Sean!

Our peeps over at Engadget.com are showing off some of the results of their design the new G5 iMac contest… dang, some of these people need to go work for Apple!

I like the ice-pop version below. :-)

Yes… it’s true we’re losing Sean and Greg. :-(

They’ve done an amazing job and Brian and I wanted to take a moment to thank them for making the Apple weblog the most trafficked blog in WIN (the Weblogs, Inc. Network)!

[Note: this doesn’t count our B2C blogs like www.Engadget.com, just the blogs under the weblogsinc.com domain name].

If you’re interested in filling their shoes, and you can post at least 50 times a month email me at jason <at> calacanis dot com or via the form tips form.

PT’s How To Tuesday’s over at Engadget.com takes on Apple’s DRM (digital rights management) technology and explains how people are freeing up the music they have paid for.

The purpose of hymn is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. It allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases from their DRM restrictions with no sound quality loss. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes. It works on Mac OS X, many unix(-ish) variants and on Windows.

More info on iTunes DRM from hell posted at LawGeek.

WSJ on Apple’s recent quarter:

Apple Computer Inc. reported a sharply higher fiscal second-quarter profit on strong revenue growth, helped by sales of its iPod music player.

The Cupertino, Calif., personal-computer maker posted net income of $46 million, or 12 cents a share, up from $14 million, or four cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. The recent quarter, which ended March 27, included a restructuring charge of $7 million; excluding the charge, the company had a profit of 14 cents a share.

Revenue climbed 29% to $1.91 billion from $1.48 billion a year ago.

In January, Apple said it expected earnings of eight to 10 cents a share and revenue of about $1.8 billion.

Apple said it shipped 749,000 Macintosh computer units and 807,000 iPod music players during the quarter. Gross margin was 27.8%, down from 28.3% a year ago. International sales accounted for 43% of revenue.

”We experienced growth in most areas of our business — most dramatically in selling a record 807,000 iPods, up more than 900% over the prior year,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in prepared remarks.

From the theinquirer.net:

WE’VE JUST got word that the Software Development Kit (SDK) for Microsoft’s forthcoming Xbox 2 has now been released to Developers. As we reported earlier, IBM processors are indeed the Xbox 2 development platform of choice. The big news to us is that the XBOX 2 SDK has been seeded to developers on dual Apple Power Mac G5 systems running a custom Windows NT Kernel.