The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Astute followers of the TUAW Macworld 09 Twitter feed will know that yesterday evening saw us host a small yet fun reader meetup at San Francisco's very excellent Thirsty Bear brewery. In amongst the fine local ales and great food (the roasted apple and cider ribs come recommended), we also gave away yet more swag from the show floor. Thanks to all our readers who showed up!

Hot on the heels of the Macworld Live show Wednesday morning, we caught up with New York Times columnist David Pogue to talk about what's hot (and not) at the show this year, his thoughts on the "Philnote" and the future of Macworld, the iPhone's phenomenal success in 2008 and his undying love (ahem) for the Blackberry Storm.

Click through to check it out.

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One of the highlights of every Macworld is the Macworld Live session with New York Times columnist, musician extraordinaire and Missing Manual author David Pogue. Featuring trivia, parody songs and amusing guests, it's the perfect way to start your Expo day.

This year's show included musical performances such as "Where is Steve?" (parodying "Where is Love" from the musical "Oliver") and a special guest performance from Ge Wang (founder of Smule) on his best-selling Ocarina app. On top of the musical appearances, this years extra guests were Matt Harding from YouTube phenomenon "Where the Hell is Matt" and the folks behind "You Suck at Photoshop".

Way back in December, our Christmas Gift Guide featured our pick of the many OS X-related books out there. One of the recommendations was the (very excellent) Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass - commonly referred to as 'The Bible' in the Mac development community.

At the time the book was a little outdated -- however in the last couple of weeks an updated third edition has been published. New sections feature Objective-C 2.0, Core Data, Garbage Collection, Xcode 3 and Core Animation, meaning this third edition is all ready for many of the new technologies in Mac OS X Leopard.

At just $32 (via Amazon.com), this updated version clearly ought to be on every developer's bookshelf (and aspiring developer's wishlist).

Back in January, the folks from Creaceed released version 1.0 of Hydra -- a Leopard-only, GPU-powered photo application for creating High Dynamic Range photos that competes with the much-renowned Photomatix Pro. Just in time for the Apple Design Awards version 1.5 of Hydra is available. With more tone-mapping options, an image-navigation HUD, RAW importing (should you wish not to convert to 16-bit TIFF before importing), a plethora of Aperture options (more on those in a moment), and many more new features it's certainly a compelling release.

As mentioned before, there's plenty of Aperture integration with this release. As well as being able to import photos from (and export photos to) Aperture, Hydra is now available as an Aperture plugin (beta) - based on the all-new Aperture 2.1 Plugin SDK - that allows you to create HDR photos from within Aperture.

Unlike the cross-platform Photomatix Pro, Hydra's UI is the epitome of OS X slickness -- replicating much of the look and feel of both Aperture and other iLife applications. We'll be taking a look at both Hydra and Photomatix Pro in the near future to see whether Hydra's charms are merely skin deep.

Hydra 1.5 costs $59.95, and is a free update for those we already have a license.

If you think back to June last year, Picturesque - a neat lightweight image editor - was the deserving recipient of an Apple Design Award for 'Best Student Product'. So it's fitting then that, just in time for this year's Apple Design Awards, Acqualia Software has released version 2.0 of Picturesque.

We may not have movies in the U.K. iTunes store, but that hasn't stopped the UK broadcasters from slowly but surely adding their wares to the UK shop. First the BBC pitched in with a selection of shows such as 'Spooks' (it airs in the US as 'MI:5') and then Channel 4 added the likes of Black Books (amongst others). So today adding to the mix is commercial broadcaster ITV, which has added 'Lewis', 'Goodnight Mr Tom', 'Brideshead Revisited', 'Cold Feet', 'The Saint' and 'Captain Scarlet' to the UK store.

That may not sound like a great deal of content, however ITV is clearly looking to milk the archive shows for all they're worth. Apple UK's Hot News quotes Dawn Airey from ITV: "[We have] thousands of hours of classic content in the archive which we are bringing to a whole new audience via iTunes". and then leaves us with the perennial teaser of "Watch out for more great additions coming soon on iTunes".

As usual, iTunes UK TV show pricing of £1.89 (US$3.75) an episode applies to all the ITV content.

Like it or not, unboxing is a ritual for many Apple users, and when there's a new product on the streets, Flickr is home to many Mac users' latest acquisitions. We don't feature unboxing photosets for no-longer-new products all that often here at TUAW, but upon seeing a photoset on Flickr from user ntr23 this morning we couldn't help but share these frankly incredible unboxing shots of an iPhone.

Lego men abound in the set, with precision unboxing being captured (including ladders to help scale those heights) in a truly amazing set of shots. Yes, it's Apple unboxing shots. But of all the unboxing shots we've seen here at TUAW, these have quite possibly captured our hearts as the best we've seen to date.

Be sure to check out ntr23's full set on Flickr and admire these works of art.

[Via]

British readers listen up! If you're a resident west of London, your choices for UK Apple Stores are -- shall we say -- somewhat limited. With just one store in the southwestern part of the UK (Exeter), and one on the south coast in Southampton, Apple's retail clout has yet to extend to the area in between (such as to other larger cities like Bristol). Fear not though, as Apple is indeed planning to open an Apple Store in Bristol later in the year.

Apple has posted job vacancies for the (to be determined) location just today - meaning that the store will likely open in advance of Christmas. If you hear anything about the location, be sure to let us know.

Thanks to all those who sent this in!

Update: Multiple tipsters say the Cabot Circus development (scheduled to open in September) is home to the new store. Thanks folks!

Are you a browser fiend? The sort of person who loves Safari, yet can't quite live with some of its peculiarities? If you hadn't guessed, I certainly am one of those people. I love the speed and simplicity of Safari, but it never worked as well as (say) Camino, particularly when it came to persuading links from the likes of Gmail to open in the same window. No number of SIMBL hacks (yes, hacks) seemed to persuade Safari to open links in the existing window - driving me away from Safari, and instead swear by Camino.

But that's about to change, as Apple has added a hidden preference to Safari 3.1 that allows you to tell Safari to stick to one window. Even in Gmail. Tipster Dennis Stevense, explains in a blog post that through a simple Terminal command, true one-window mode is finally, finally, here for Safari. All you need to enter is the command below into Terminal, hit enter, and you're sorted.

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Thanks Dennis!

Update: If you want to reverse the change, it's a simple matter of entering the following into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool false