Mac vs. PC by Nick Green­lee is inspired by Trans­form­ers, this short Visual Effects piece shows us what really goes on inside our home computers… that’s right, they’re robots, and they wanna beat the crap out of each other. This is the short descrip­tion of the movie on YouTube. The qual­ity even when set to ‘High Quality’ was so poor that I had to post it myself in a “real codec”. Flash, how shall I say it nicely, sucks monkey balls when out­putting video.
You can view the movie here (Movie 23,9 MB).

The World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence 2008 had an unusual high atten­dance (52.000 atten­dees). CEO Steve Jobs announced a couple of inter­est­ing items during the event: Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leop­ard), Mobile Me and of course the iPhone 3G. The ses­sion of Mac OS X 10.6 this after­noon will be cov­ered under non-​disclosure, so don’t expect any offi­cial fea­tures or announce­ments to be coming from Apple but as usual some infor­ma­tion is cer­tain to leak. The iPhone is finally coming to the Nether­lands, sorry you guys who’ve bought it recently on eBay. Again and again I’ll tell people the same mes­sage, it’s a devel­oper con­fer­ence not a con­sumer event. So for those who are dis­ap­pointed wait for the next event and you’ll be amazed!

MobileMe will hope­fully bring the long over­due upgrade to .Mac. Now I only have to wait until July 11 to buy myself an iPhone 3G.

iTunes (Music) (Games) (Movies) Store hence the name! iTunes already left it’s origin a long time ago. Apple should work out some­thing (iMedia Store or what­ever). iTunes is a strong brand, but it doesn’t cover it’s orig­i­nal propo­si­tion any­more! Apple lost the Com­puter in it’s name to state: more then just com­put­ers. The iTunes brand has to be updated! It’s an online store where the con­sumer can buy music, games, movies, audio­books etc. not just music! If I’ve under­stood cor­rectly Apple’s is going to offer soft­ware in it’s line-​up. The iPhone/iPod Touch are the first to receive it’s apps through iTunes.

Online ser­vices are the next big evo­lu­tion­ary thing after Web 2.0. You already see some com­pa­nies making the shift, like Adobe with it’s Adobe Pho­to­shop Online (PSX), Adobe even branded the Pho­to­shop line with a new very much dis­cussed (Web 2.0 Aquaish) logo. Google is also exper­i­ment­ing with online apps (Cal­en­dar, Docs, Talk etc.) and Apple already has it’s .Mac ser­vices for years (thanks to WebOb­jects). I think and pre­dict that a lot of com­pa­nies will offer these kind of ser­vices in the future and see a tighter inte­gra­tion between web-​based appli­ca­tions and desktop-​based appli­ca­tions, maybe even elim­i­nat­ing their desk­top cousins and trans­form into a sub­scrip­tion based model.

Accord­ing to online trend research firm Net Appli­ca­tions, Apple con­tin­ues to gain market share. Last month, Net Appli­ca­tions reported that Apple’s share was up to 6.8% with cor­re­spond­ing declin­ing Win­dows market share. Today, Net Appli­ca­tions reports that the Mac has crested the 7% bar­rier and is at 7.31% for Decem­ber 2007. Mean­while, Microsoft’s Win­dows OS con­tin­ues to decline in market share, with a still dom­i­nant 91.79% in Decem­ber having eroded from 92.42% in Novem­ber. Apple (and to a lesser extent, Linux) have been steadily taking market share from Microsoft for the past 6 months.

When Apple rebranded iTools to .Mac, Apple made fun of Microsoft’s .Net (.Net is Microsoft vision of an appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming frame­work for future Win­dows appli­ca­tions). When Apple bought NeXT, NeXTSTEP and WebOb­jects were part of the pack­age deal. NeXTSTEP and WebOb­ject were light years ahead of any­thing out there. The pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ment was capa­ble of run­ning on sev­eral dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems. Parts of NeXT’s soft­ware were later used as the foun­da­tion for Mac OS X. WebOb­jects is suc­cess­ful being used for the Apple Store, iTunes Store and .Mac (.Mac is Apple’s vision of easy to use Web Ser­vices).
I see .Mac as (online) soft­ware and soft­ware has to be improved and get new fea­tures over time. The devel­op­ment of .Mac is slack­ing and get­ting behind other ser­vices, is .Mac ever going to improve? Even Apple’s board of direc­tors asked Steve Jobs what was going on? If you com­pare .Mac to Google or Yahoo you’ll soon get the pic­ture. 1GB disk space… common Apple, that’s old school! Where’s the PHP sup­port? Where’s the stan­dards sup­port? You’ll have to keep up!!! I am even con­sid­er­ing drop­ping my .Mac account! 99 dol­lars a year for this? Sorry, Apple you’ll have to do better! But there’s light at the end of the tunnel, if we can believe the rumors. Leop­ard (Mac OS X 10.5) will offer loads of enhance­ments and even tighter inte­gra­tion with .Mac. I’ll sit this one out till Leop­ard, but if Leop­ard doesn’t bring any improve­ments I’ll def­i­nitely end my sub­scrip­tion and say .Njet to .Mac (njet means “NO” in russian).

>Okay, I am a Mac-​head, the truth is out! But I don’t have a Steve Jobs poster above my bed and I love good humor. Now and then some­thing funny passes around the web, I think this is one of them. Watch this great spoof of Mac vs. PC at YouTube and this one