Here's to the crazy ones. TUAW reader Tony Walla got to attend the Wisconsin premiere of the new Mac-doc film that's sure to be a crowd pleaser (depending on the crowd), and he sent us this report.
On April 6th, the documentary "Welcome to Macintosh" premiered at the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison, WI to a packed theater of about 275 festival goers. Josh Rizzo and Rob Baca, who co-directed and produced the film, were in attendance. Before the film began, attendees could be seen checking email on their MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and iPhones. Even a Newton or two was in the crowd. One audience member even used the iSight on his MacBook Pro to snap a picture of the audience. To the attendees, this was not just a documentary, this was an Apple event.
Rizzo and Baca's goal is to tell the story of the Macintosh experience. "In order to do the Mac experience, you've got to put it in context of the Mac history," notes Baca. Rizzo added, "You can't appreciate where it is today without knowing some of the past and the fact that there is a sprit, a personality. There is a flame that lives in Apple, that lives through some of the products that is dispersed though the creativity of the people that make them."
The year is 1976, two high school students young guys (Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs) are in their garage working on their latest invention: the Apple I. Almost 200 of these machines were built before the fruity little company known as Apple Computer became a reality.
Fast forward to April 1, 2008, Apple has now surpassed 32 years of making wonderful products that capture the imagination of everyone. Their products have almost a "magical" feel to them. iPods, iMacs, Mac OS X; Apple certainly has come a long way since 1976.
Here's to wishing Apple a happy 32nd Birthday ... we certainly can't wait to see what the next 32 years bring.
Do you have a story about Apple's early days? Be sure to tell yours in the comments.
This weekend marked a very special date as Mac OS X turned 7 years old. Mac OS X was launched on March 21, 2001. Throughout the years, Mac OS X has definitely seen its share of changes. In these 7 years, OS X has been through 6 versions (7 if you include the first public beta version). Below is a list of the version names, numbers and launch dates of each Mac OS X release:
9rules' Apple blog has an interesting look at the last ten years of the company that makes the Mac. In 1997, everyone from Wired to BusinessWeek was proclaiming the death of Apple, rumoring that they'd get out of hardware completely, or that they'd merge with Sony or even Nintendo (those rumors are still floating around, I think). Then, in 1998, Apple introduced that Bondi Blue iMac, and the rest is history. They became a company known for making simple, beautiful and iconic computer products, and in 2001, the deal was sealed with the iPod and in 2003, iTunes.
And now, ten years later, it's 2007, the iPhone has been released, iTunes is the biggest online music store in the world, and bumping shoulders with even traditional retailers. Apple's not quite on top of the world (let's not forget that while they dominate the categories they choose to dominate, they're still a fraction of the overall market), but there is no question that Apple as a company is going gangbusters. Amazing to see the difference between where the company was just 10 years ago, and where Apple is headed in 2008 and beyond.
AppleInsider has a nice long preview of the new Leopard Dock, along with a short history going all the way back to a company called Acorn Computers, and the NeXT Dock (there's even some good, healthy Windows TaskBar bashing thrown in the mix).
There isn't really anything new here, but it is a nice wrap up of everything we've seen about the Dock so far, including the new perspective that folks are so worked up about, and the idea of "stacks," special icons that will expand into a number of different icons. AppleInsider even runs down the default stacks provided with Leopard-- Applications, Documents and Downloads. I'm not sure how long those will last on my Leopard install, however-- I'm much more eager to make my own stacks and reorganize everything myself.
Very exciting. Unfortunately there's no mention of an update to how the vertical Dock looks, but Leopard is right around the corner, so we'll find out for sure very soon if Apple's new Dock lives up to expectations.
Donationware app MacTracker is great for those times when you need to look back at the history of Apple's products or the stats of one particular machine. If you're interested in more of a visual history, however, this picture from art director and designer Edwin Tofslie should satisfy your cravings for pretty pictures. Tofslie collected images from most of the major design revisions Apple has made to many of their most significant products, including the Mac, Newton, iPod, Xserve and iPhone, as well as their displays, mice and even the AirPort Extreme stations. It's an interesting look back over the evolution of Apple's industrial design that seems to include all the major landmarks.
Brandon sent us a great tip that I should have known was in Safari, but that I hadn't found yet. For you paranoids out there, the Safari 3 beta offers an easy way to clean up every single thing you've ever done, including the history, passwords, cookies, and even favicons and Autofill text. Under the Edit menu, there's a "Reset Safari" option which reveals a checklist that lets you hit the reset button on your browser. Firefox users like myself will notice that this was "gently lifted" from the Clear Private Data function under FF's Tools menu.
And it's not just for paranoid browsers out there-- the blogging engine here at TUAW, Blogsmith, is a great program but sometimes hiccups when the cache gets overwritten or pushed out of sync. When it does, the Reset options let me flush the cache in just a few clicks without losing any of my browser windows. If you ever run across a browser-based application that's not doing what you want, this is definitely an alternative to try before actually restarting the browser.
SiliconUser takes a short look at ye olde Hypercard technology, Apple's precursor to the concepts that eventually became HTML and the World Wide Web. The project was originally created in 1985 as an easier way to create programs on the Macintosh-- it consisted of a "cards and stacks" metaphor, as in you created one card that linked to another card in the stack, and so on. Early Hypercard stacks just worked as organized information databases, but eventually Hypercard ended up doing more and more-- cards could work as applications in themselves, and the links between them served as a precursor to hyperlinks and what we know as the Internet today. Personally, I only used Hypercard very minimally, and it's hard for me to imagine as much functionality coming out of Hypercard as we've got with CSS, HTML, and PHP today. But Hypercard faithful (of which the numbers seem to be not quite known), held onto the application for a long time.
Hypercard's downfall came arguably not because it failed to stand up to new concepts, but because Apple, in a blunder, passed the program away to Claris, who tried to sell it rather than include it free in Macs. By the time Apple took it back, in 1993, the momentum was lost, and after a short period with Apple's Quicktime division, Hypercard was discontinued in 2004. Previous to that, Hypercard 3.0 was shown at WWDC 1996 (including the ability to display Hypercard stacks in a web browser, which might have been the key to keeping Hypercard alive), but that release never came. There are a few traces of Hypercard left on Apple's site, but as a technology, it's as dead as dead gets. Thanks, Thomas!
Apparently Apple's been thinking about this whole phone thing for a long time. Here, courtesy of Fudder, you can see an Apple smartphone design concept from the middle ages (wait, I mean 1983). For you youngsters in the audience that strange thing on the screen is called a "check" and used to be a way for people to exchange money. Seriously, for 1983 that thing looks pretty cool.
For the Mac history buffs out there, a Memorial Day treat:Thomas Hormby at The Mac Observer has a fascinating look at the the story behind the original iMac. Of course, the iMac is considered by many the computer that saved Apple, and was Steve Jobs' first great triumph after his return.
Personally, I did not realize that the "internet Macintosh" was originally intended to be a Network Computer (remember those?) as promoted by then Apple board member Larry Ellison. Above you can see the video (pre-black turtleneck and jeans!) of the original iMac introduction, then go ahead and check out Hormby's story.
Behold. Via Charged.tv and Google Video, we present to you this silly history of the Steve Jobs success story. This video, which comes from Fox factory and Universidad de Palermo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is actually much more amusing if you don't speak any Spanish.
In light of the iPod's 5th birthday, I figured it would be fun to join Scott in some reminiscing about the early days of my first little white music player. I remember seeing them when the 10 and 20GB models completed the 1st/2nd gen lineup, and I knew that thing would rock my world. I had already been trying out other MP3 players at the time, and I hated all of them. The last one I remember before scraping together cash for a 5GB iPod was a Rio (from Creative, I think?), and I hated that thing too. Getting music onto the device was a chore, and flash memory cards were mind-numbingly expensive (I think it took SD cards). The Rio's interface was an exercise in walking barefoot on broken glass, and the moment I saw the iPod I knew someone had finally done it right.
After tearing the couch apart for that last penny to cover tax (and after a month of saving some cash by eating nothing but Ramen noodles), I rode my bike as fast as I could down to the University bookstore I was part-timing it at (I wasn't in school at the time), because I could get the discount there which made all the difference. The funny thing is: when I brought that 1st gen iPod home, I wasn't plugging it into a Mac - I had a Windows XP box (funny: 5 years ago, same ol' WinXP). While the original iPods were *officially* just made for a Mac (or so most of us remember), I picked up one of the first Mac+PC versions, so I was using Musicmatch and - I hope you're sitting down for this - an unofficial plugin for Windows Media Player. This admittedly blasphemous configuration worked decently, though it certainly didn't hold much of a candle to the integration of the dynamic iTunes+iPod duo that Apple finally brought to Windows. Fortunately, this iPod helped convince me to hop onto the Mac OS X train before that happened.
I'd like to consider myself one of the early benefactors of the 'iPod halo effect.' While I was using crappy software on Windows to manage my first iPod, I started (finally) getting curious about the company that made such an impressive little device. After all, I was in the middle of a design undergrad (I had to take time off to get in-state tuition in CO, and btw: that's a PITA), and the next semester a fellow classmate sat me down for a crash course in all things Apple and Mac OS X (and I was finally more open to learning about them). When the forces of the iPod halo effect and Mac OS X united, I once again embarked on a Ramen diet, this time of epic proportions. My destination? A RevA 12-inch PowerBook - my first Mac - for which many pennies were sacrificed.
So this blogger has that original 5GB iPod and a classmate or two to thank for making the switch to greener OS pastures. Of course, I can also bring incredible amounts of music along in my pocket now too, which isn't half bad either. It's been a fun musical roller-coaster, complete with scratches, too many wacky accessories to count, and a deeper understanding of my music library that just can't stop - won't stop - growing. Thanks, 1G iPod.
HistoryHound is a handy search utility for anyone who does a lot of surfing and RSS reading between multiple apps. It offers a full text search of most of the major Mac OS X browsers including Mozilla's, OmniWeb and even Opera, as well as two of the more popular RSS readers: Pulp Fiction and NetNewsWire 2. It can be called with a keyboard shortcut, or a small search panel can be left to float above other windows, always waiting to do your bidding.
How HistoryHound searches is customizable, as is how far back into the history it shines its spotlight. If you don't like bouncing between applications HistoryHound also includes its own WebKit-based browser for previewing any of your search results.
This swiss army knife of a history utility has also recently been updated to a Universal Binary, along with a few other minor but useful feature tweaks. A fully-functioning 30 day demo is available, while a full license is $19.95.
Amit Singh (the same guy who hacked the 'book motion sensor), author of the newly released "Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach," has made an expanded version of first chapter of the epic 1700 page tome available online as a free PDF download. Entitled "A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems," the piece covers the entire gamut of operating systems that Apple has ever shown the least bit of interest in since its birth 30 years ago.
Weighing in at 140 pages and 3MB, the chapter delves pretty deeply into the technical aspects of Operating Systems, and might be a bit dense for some less tech savvy readers. I haven't yet read much more than the first few pages yet (other than skimming), but I can tell this will be an interesting and invaluable read that will give me a better grasp on OS X by showing me where it has been.
Here's to the crazy ones. TUAW reader Tony Walla got to attend the Wisconsin premiere of the new Mac-doc film that's sure to be a crowd pleaser (depending on the crowd), and he sent us this report.
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9rules' Apple blog has an interesting look at 
AppleInsider has 
Brandon
SiliconUser takes a short look at 
Apparently Apple's been thinking about this whole phone thing for a long time. Here, courtesy of 
In light of the 
HistoryHound is a handy search utility for anyone who does a lot of surfing and RSS reading between multiple apps. It offers a full text search of most of the major Mac OS X browsers including Mozilla's, OmniWeb and even Opera, as well as two of the more popular RSS readers: Pulp Fiction and NetNewsWire 2. It can be called with a keyboard shortcut, or a small search panel can be left to float above other windows, always waiting to do your bidding.
Amit Singh (the same guy who hacked the 'book motion sensor), author of the newly released "
