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Apple finally released its long-awaited iOS update to iPhone and iPad users on Wednesday, October 12 at exactly 10:00 a.m. PST (just as users furiously hammered their iTunes 5.0 “Update” button). Below is the list of changes that accompanied the 700+ MB iPhone update:

iOS 5 Software Update

This update contains over 200 new features, including the following: 

• Notifications

• Swipe from the top of any screen to view notifications in one place with Notification Center
• New notifications appear briefly at the top of the screen
• View notifications from lock screen
• Slide the notification app icon to the right on the lock screen to go directly to the app
• iMessage

• Send and receive unlimited text, photo, and video messages with other iOS 5 users
• Track messages with delivery and read receipts
• Group messaging and secure encryption
• Works over cellular network and Wi-Fi*
• Newsstand

• Automatically organizes magazine and newspaper subscriptions on Home Screen
• Displays the cover of the latest issue
• Background downloads of new issues
• Reminders for managing to do lists

• Syncs with iCloud, iCal and Outlook
• Location-based reminders when you leave or arrive at a location for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4
• Built-in support for Twitter

• Sign-in once in Settings and tweet directly from Camera, Photos, Maps, Safari and YouTube
• Add location to any tweet
• View twitter profile pictures and usernames in Contacts
• Camera improvements for devices with cameras

• Double click the home button when device is asleep to bring up a camera shortcut on iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch (4th generation)
• Volume Up button to take a picture
• Optional grid lines to line up shots
• Pinch to zoom in the preview screen
• Swipe to camera roll from preview screen
• Tap and hold to lock focus and exposure, iPad 2 and iPod touch (4th generation) only support exposure lock

• Photo improvements for devices with cameras

• Crop and rotate
• Red eye removal
• One tap enhance
• Organize photos into albums
• Mail improvements

• Format text using bold, italic, or underlined fonts
• Indentation control
• Drag to rearrange names in address fields
• Flag messages
• Mass mark messages as flagged, read or unread
• Customize mail alert sounds
• S/MIME
• Calendar improvements

• Year view on iPad and new Week view for iPhone and iPod touch
• Tap to create an event
• View and add event attachments
• Game Center improvements

• Use personal photos for your Game Center account
• Compare your overall achievement scores with your friends
• Find new Game Center friends with friend recommendations and friends of friends
• Discover new games with custom game recommendations
• AirPlay Mirroring for iPad 2 and iPhone 4S
• Multitasking Gestures for iPad

• Use four or five fingers to pinch to the Home Screen
• Swipe up to reveal the multitasking bar
• Swipe left or right to switch between apps

• On-device setup, activation and configuration with Setup Assistant
• Software updates available over the air without tethering
• iCloud support

• iTunes in the Cloud
• Photo Stream
• Documents in the Cloud
• Apps and Books automatic download and purchase history
• Backup
• Contacts, Calendar, and Mail
• Find My iPhone

• Redesigned Music app for iPad

• Hourly weather forecast
• Real-time stock quotes
• Wireless sync to iTunes
• Keyboard improvements

• Split keyboard for iPad
• Improved autocorrection accuracy
• Improved Chinese and Japanese input
• New Emoji keyboard
• Personal dictionary for autocorrection
• Optionally create keyboard short cuts for frequently used words
• Accessibility improvements

• Option to light LED flash on incoming calls and alerts for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4
• Custom vibration patterns for incoming calls on iPhone
• New interface for using iOS with mobility-impairment input devices
• Option to speak a selection of text
• Custom element labeling for VoiceOver

• Exchange ActiveSync improvements

• Wirelessly sync tasks
• Mark messages as flagged, read or unread
• Improved offline support
• Save a new contact from a GAL service
• More than 1,500 new developer APIs
• Bug fixes

Products compatible with this software update:

• iPhone 4S
• iPhone 4
• iPhone 3GS
• iPad 2
• iPad
• iPod touch (4th generation)
• iPod touch (3rd generation)

* Normal carrier data rates may apply. Messages will be sent as SMS when iMessage is unavailable, carrier messaging fees apply.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

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Excited. Empowered. Confident. That’s how I felt when the Amazon package arrived containing our new Drobo S video storage array and controller card. Coupled with two speedy 3 TB Seagate Barracuda XT SATA 6 hard drives (also known as SATA III), this was going to be a metal box of pure badassery. How did it turn out? If you’re impatient, skip down to the review. Otherwise, grab some popcorn…

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Background research (aka mini iMovie vs Final Cut Pro review)

In my team’s quest to improve workflow and speed during video post-production, we decided to make the move from iMovie and Final Cut Express to Apple’s new Final Cut Pro X. Yeah yeah most producers are gonna hate me for that but I believe X will soon greatly improve upon its initial state the same way iMovie ’08 matured into iMovie ’11. We pushed iMovie to its limits —in ways not intended or even imagined —and we got results. Unfortunately, iMovie ’11 is firmly a consumer-oriented product and never takes full advantage of the hardware it’s running on. Though image stabilization is now multi-core aware, other production aspects aren’t. Encoding H.264 HDV movies in iMovie on our eight-core Mac Pro takes nearly an hour and is very unstable.

Final Cut Express wasn’t quite the transitional solution to professional production I had hoped for. Although I’ve spent many years in a Final Cut environment, my team was accustomed to the iMovie UI and workflow. The daunting choice i faced was (1) Piss off my producers with a complex prosumer app like Final Cut Express to address iMovie’s serious stability issues and lack of professional production features or (2) pray that Apple will someday patch iMovie to run like a champ on a Mac Pro. Fat chance on the latter…

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The moment I saw the April announcement video demo for Final Cut Pro X, I knew right away that it would be the blessed Great Hope that my production team was waiting for. Its UI and workflow philosophy is based on iMovie ’11 while bringing in dozens of polished, professional features. Now while i know it is missing a lot of filmmaker-grade tools and options, I am confident Apple will roll those into future versions while I get my team accustomed to the application. This is Apple’s modus operandi —they’re famous for ditching traditional models, turning them upside-down, and creating insanely-great alternatives —all the while winning over fierce critics.

Anways, awesome features aside, deploying Final Cut Pro X to our production team meant carefully rethinking our file storage strategy. Apple Intermediate Codec is no longer a viable post format for cutting video —ProRes is the way to go, adding better color fidelity, higher proxy compression, and a variety of color space quality options ( 4:2:2 or 4:4:4). Since FCPX allows storage of original files as well as “optimized” and proxy formats, this can potentially chew up multitudes more disk space than in an iMovie workflow.

Part one: Gobs of frickin’ storage

Our original Drobo v2 had four storage bays and could connect with our workstation via FireWire 800. It worked well for a while when loaded with four 2 TB SATA II Western Digital Caviar Green drives. However, our team noticed problems with sustained write operations when importing footage from the camera into iMovie. It was ALWAYS falling behind during the live transcode though this is probably because so much of iMovie is unoptimized. Final Cut Express imported to the Drobo v2 dutifully but sometimes would just stop in the middle of the process, indicative of a write error. It didn’t inspire confidence at that point and we quickly stopped using it during production. We now just archive finished projects to the Drobo v2 and edit full-time on our OWC Mercury Elite Al-Pro drives.

We’re now starting to see degradation in performance in Finder operations like Quick Look of video footage from the old Drobo. Our older clips are stored in Apple Intermediate Codec and the data rates range between 8 MB/sec and 20 MB/sec. These will freeze on playback off the Drobo v2. At first we thought it was a chain issue because the Drobo was sitting first on a FireWire 800 chain with an OWC Mercury Elite Al-Pro. Nope —switched the Drobo to run solo via FW 800 and it still stutters.

So for those of you who are wondering if the rumors are true about the Drobo v2 slowing down after a while: YES, IT IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE. All you have to do is fill it past 60% capacity (six out of ten blue lamps on the Drobo front panel). As of this writing, we can’t swap out any of the loaded drives with the new 3 TB SATA III Seagate Barracuda XTs because the Drobo v2 firmware doesn’t support them.

Part two: Enter the Drobo S

3 TB hard drives are barely hitting the market, 4 TB drives nonexistent —and since we currently can’t expand our Drobo v2 beyond 4x 2TB we simply had to get another unit. We knew we shouldn’t get the same one from experience so moved a step up. The Drobo S 2G has impressive specs:

• Five storage bays supporting drives 3 TB and larger
• Three connectors: eSATA, FireWire 800, and USB 3.0
• Faster ARM processor promising a 150% performance boost over the original Drobo

The letdown is that its throughput will bottleneck at 3 Gbps (SATA II), not 6 Gbps (SATA III). Even though drives currently cannot reach these theoretical speeds, I almost always buy technology based on future potential. That being said, we expect this unit to pump data at a nominal sustained rate of 80 MB/sec.

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Reading comprehension FAIL

Why connect the Drobo S to our Mac Pro via FireWire 800 (800 Mbps) when we can use eSATA (3 Gbps)? In my haste to cobble together a totally awesome storage setup, I shopped by brand name and totally forgot about compatibility —Bam! Received a NewerTech MAXPower eSATA 6G PCIe controller card promising up to 750 MB/sec peak data. I installed the card into our Mac Pro and hooked up the new Drobo S —then wondered why Drobo Dashboard didn’t recognize the drive. After various frustrating sessions of rebooting and disconnecting everything, i realized the Drobo was recognized properly only via FireWire 800. WTF does that mean?

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Apparently something was wrong with our eSATA connection. I checked the Drobo S website —lo and behold, down the page is this little tab called “Supported eSATA Cards“…

Not only was the NewerTech card not shown in the “supported” section, it was listed under “eSATA cards with known incompatibilities.” Good grief! Okay, bad to worse… Anyways I’m not the type that likes to ship stuff BACK because I goofed up on my research so I had to make this rig work.

Things to note:

• You currently can’t daisy chain eSATA devices together
• Drobo works with eSATA cards that have port multiplier support BUT not if they provide RAID functionality
• FireWire 800 devices can be daisy-chained but a growing number of professionals recommend against this if heavy data like video is going over a single bus
• The fastest drive interface across all Drobo models is SATA II (3 Gbps)

The solution

Our final setup after much trial-and-error took into consideration all of the points above. We were lucky because we have surplus cables to test different scenarios but I can foresee problems if we add more work storage (not archive storage).

• Archival: The Drobo S 2G and the Drobo v2 are connected to the Mac Pro via FireWire 800, each as solo devices on their own bus
• Production: Our two Mercury Elite Al-Pro hard drives are connected to the Mac Pro via eSATA, each as solo devices on their own bus

It’s a shame that I have to emasculate the Drobo S by putting it on a relatively slower bus (800 Mbps, ~100 MB/sec theoretical but unlikely) but I’m sure our team will be able to solve this over time, on the cheap.

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Final thoughts

Always check for cross-vendor hardware compatibility and firmware updates on manufacturer websites before purchase!

I’m glad ProRes 422 has great video quality with the added benefit of vastly better compression than Apple Intermediate Codec. Because its bitrate is lower we probably won’t see performance dips in Final Cut Pro X anytime soon if we edit on the Drobo S. However, if we get more fancy in post with a half-dozen or more tracks, this may change. It’s not fair to benchmark this new drive against a 60%-full Drobo v2 but from what little I’ve seen so far in testing, I’m optimistic.

The Drobo S via eSATA supports a very small set of PCIe controller cards so do your homework carefully. I’d say Sonnet Technology’s Tempo SATA E2P is the best-suited and stay away from SATA III controllers for now —although many support port multiplier functionality, all the ones I see have on-board RAID software which will not work with the Drobo. Good luck!

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Broadcast all over social media and even sent to customers via email, Netflix spilled its plans to quietly spin off its DVD division into a self-contained subsidiary known as Qwikster. In doing so, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is pushing forward a strategy to shield its cutting-edge media streaming business from a quickly graying DVD market.

Though Hastings didn’t explicitly mention this, it’s obvious that tracking, shipping, and handling physical discs is a big financial burden to Netflix. And once customers start abandoning DVDs with momentum, Qwikster price hikes will undoubtedly occur to balance costs (although many will remain latched on to DVDs the same way some folks are inexplicably married to AOL). In theory, these price hikes would not affect Netflix streaming-only customers, and Qwikster can eventually disappear at its own pace, similar to a dying leaf falling off a tree. The trunk simply says, “meh.”

via Akschaefer

Will it work? It’s a huge gamble but Netflix has paid a huge public relations price in the last couple of months due to a number of business blunders, and its leadership has been forced to cauterize the company’s bleeding wounds.

Everyone knows on-demand is the future, and streaming is currently the way to go. Although movie studios are focusing their efforts on their own bottom line and ignoring the needs of consumers, I anticipate they’ll eventually come around in a few years. After a few botched attempts at rolling out their own complex, user-unfriendly media apps, studios will realize that sticking to content creation (not distribution) will better serve their customers and increase revenue over time. One only has to point out the biggest success story: iTunes.

I’ll drink to that

What better way to spend a Wednesday evening after work than with high-energy industry peers, downing wine, great food, and networking among professionals? A diverse and peppy crowd of marketing, public relations, and media types came together on August 24, 2011, at Proper Gastro Pub in PETCO Park for Wine Wednesday, a follow-up event to the annual San Diego Social Media Symposium.

Nuffer, Smith, Tucker —a prominent and highly social public relations firm —hosted the event on behalf of Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), a non-profit dedicated to “advancing and advocating the discipline of credible word of mouth marketing.” Wine Wednesdays are part of a series of WOMMA social gatherings intended to bring together industry folk to share ideas and have a generally awesome time talking —in person!

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Now before this turns into a long-winded press release, let me stop myself and get to the good points. After attendees had a chance to mingle and enjoy a first round of wine, NST President Bill Trumpfheller presented the keynote. Some major highlights:

• A large majority of effective word-of-mouth communication and marketing nowadays is still done offline (according to Pew Research)
• Many people who are increasingly active communicating via social media and most young people have a vastly different understanding of privacy, if at all, than folks of an older generation
• QR codes are still hot and yet still aren’t being used creatively enough
• Augmented reality is an upcoming communications tool which may transform not only geospatial marketing but travel and tourism as well
• Payment system companies are working closely to integrate with location-based social networks; Check-in at a restaurant via Foursquare and pay for dinner in the same app!
• The quality of marketed sales deals may be less attractive to consumers than the level of engagement with the businesses themselves
• Of course, customer service can make or break your entire social media campaign

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Brief photo gallery of the event:

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Ever since Geekbrief.TV host Cali Lewis demo’d the very simple-to-use Data Robotics Drobo ($499 MSRP) storage system as it was introduced in early 2008 at Macworld Expo San Francisco, I’ve followed the product’s evolution cycle with great curiosity. Imagine for a moment a self-managing high-speed data array with simplified RAID-like qualities, all in a handsome, compact enclosure– AND easier to use than an iPod Shuffle! Does the Drobo actually deliver all this awesome-sauce? Well, for the most part yes, at least in this first chapter of my product review– I’ll explain later. Note: At the time of this writing, Data Robotics has unveiled the big brother to the Drobo line: The eight-bay, rack-ready DroboPro.

Slick packaging

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Data Robotics takes a page from Apple when it comes to packaging: Quite slick. It’s not the same fit and finish that Steve Jobs would be proud of but you can tell this company pays attention to subtle details. Speaking of details, the Drobo is built solid with a metal finish and a magnetic faceplate that pops snug into place. Data Robotics was nice enough to include both a USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 cable to connect the device to a host system. For our use we kept the FireWire cable and shelved the USB one, since its really only useful for “dumb” devices like printers, mice, and non-DMA intensive data stores.

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The Drobo’s front housing has the drive bays with four simple eject latches and some indicator lamps. Four lamps, one beside each drive bay, are lit either green, yellow, or red depending on the health and capacity of the respective inserted drive. Below the drive bays are some simple status lamps and a row of lights which indicate the total used space of the storage array. Beyond that there isn’t much more to monitor and the short summary of directions is printed right on the inside of the magnetic faceplate. As Cali Lewis said on the demo video, “that’s as technical as it gets!”

I have to admit, you can’t really just plug this thing in and go crazy sans user manual. It’s not an iPod Shuffle, folks! There are some important details to note during installation, one of which will affect your long-term workflow, so you’ll want to unwrap the instruction booklet that most DIY buffs toss aside.

Adding drives

One installation screen casually asks to what capacity should the Drobo be formatted, and this one stumped me for a second. Based on the selections, it became obvious that my choice would affect future usage when adding storage.

The Drobo can be formatted virtually to simulate total storage capacity of 2, 4, 8, and 16 terabytes. Yes, even if you only bought two 120 GB drives. The implication here is that if you choose say, 2 TB as the volume capacity, the Drobo will cap that initial “chunk” at 2 TB and split the remainder of the virtual space into another volume. This may be a necessary option for some users as their operating system may not be able to address a device larger than that. If you have a fully 64-bit OS like Mac OS X, this isn’t a problem. However, Data Robotics makes it clear in all its FAQs and during installation that larger virtual volumes require more time to prep and protect on-the-fly. At the top-end (16 TB), volume preparation is said to take 15-30 minutes, a far cry from the mere moments demonstrated by Cali Lewis. If you don’t mind have multiple volumes with a maximum capacity of 2 TB each, choose the smallest size on the installation screen slider. It should be quick to format and faster to update if you swap drives a lot (for what reason, I can’t imagine).

For our use, I chose the 16 TB maximum volume size because we envision rarely needing to swap out drives (except in cases of capacity or drive failure). The lengthy setup time of about 15 minutes was bearable because in the long run I don’t want to hunt down b-roll video clips across multiple mounted volumes.

Speed

Okay let’s get down to business: how fast is this unit and is my data really safe? Most benchmarks don’t give me data I can translate to real world usage so I set out with my usual workflow.

35-50 MB/sec read and write speed over FireWire 800. There, that’s all there is to say! In my tests (which are by no means scientific) the Drobo will push about this much data over your 800 Mbps connector to your local computer. The only thing I will note is that I was moving very large files back and forth between the Drobo and a MacBook Pro internal drive (SATA, 7200 RPM). These files ranged in size from 250 MB to a few gigabytes. This, of course, isn’t even close to the theoretical maximum of the interface or the drives in the Drobo and this is due to Data Robotics’ proprietary overhead method doing its thing to keep the data intact over redundant drives. While I lamented about not breaking any speed records, I found that the throughput was more than enough to sustain smooth playback of multiple instances of high-definition video (1080p) locally. I was also able to have multiple remote workstations on my LAN crunch on video projects from the shared Drobo, albeit very clumsily (more on that later).

Initial thoughts

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The Drobo is a solid piece of stand-alone technology that manages itself and your data without the need of an IT department or storage gurus, if you can afford the intial price plus a couple of SATA drives. Because its storage capacity grows over time at your pace, the Drobo is hands-down the best solution for small, fast workgroups. You can add drives of any size at any time… that’s it! You can share the Drobo with your networked computers using the optional DroboShare ($199.00 MSRP) or use your computer’s built-in file sharing capabilities. The Drobo’s speed isn’t spectacular considering the incredible interface it provides but should be more than enough for most SMBs and SOHOs.

You want more to consider? My next review will be a hybrid of Drobo usage and iMovie ’09 editing… over a network! What? How? Yep, it sounds outrageous and crazy but my team has attempted this stunt during our typical workflow. Stay tuned! …And as always, if you have questions or comments about the Drobo, please leave me feedback below or on Twitter.

Enjoy the full set of photos:

iPhoto '09 face recognition in action

If you’ve had the chance to play around with Apple’s new iLife ’09, you no doubtedly have encountered some pleasant surprises with the updated iPhoto. No, I’m not talking about the useful geo-tagging or the integration with Flickr and social-media heavyweight Facebook… I’m referring to iPhoto’s amazing facial recognition which uncovers subtle things that make ya go hmmmm…

• The people who shoot from the camera most often at family or group events don’t appear much in albums
• iPhoto ’09 does a darn good job zooming in on individual faces and cropping close for previews, resulting in portraits that are sometimes more flattering than the original photos.
• While training iPhoto to refine facial matches in a large collection, you may realize how closely your features resemble those of your relatives (as much as you may want to deny it)
• You’ll finally understand why some people repeatedly mistake some of your friends for you.
• After confirming a bunch of your own photos you may wonder why you always pose using the same silly grin or smirk
• There are some people you know whose faces are never detected at all by iPhoto… Maybe you should look them carefully in the eye and ask them for proof of human sentience
• Apple’s demos of iPhoto ’09 must have been running on a zillion gigahertz Mac… That or their demo iPhoto library had no more than 20 pics in it

iPhoto understands faces even from different angles

With those considerations in mind iPhoto ’09 may sound like a crude beast of an app. Hardly. Apple engineers painstakingly integrated a powerful technology feature from Japanese firm Omron and tossed in more niceties like Google Maps geo tagging. As a basic photo organizer, iPhoto retains its simple system of smart albums and traditional keywording which eases the chore of finding photos in your collection.

Scrolls like butter

Though some features really weigh heavy in legacy hardware (this means those of you still on PowerPC Macs) multitasking works surprisingly well within the app. As long as you set some certain display preferences, namely uncheck Apperance > Border: Outline and Border: Drop Shadow, iPhoto truly “scrolls like butter” as Steve Jobs puts it.

Some facial expressions may trip up iPhoto

iPhoto uses an extraordinary amount of CPU time during facial recognition processes but thankfully you can switch away to other parts of your collection and continue. Upgrading an existing iPhoto library was quick but the initial process of scanning my personal 10,000+ photos for facial features took over two hours (2.16 GHz MacBook Pro, Core Duo, library on a 7200 RPM external drive connected via Firewire 800). Some of the functional elegance comes at the slight cost of general performance if your library holds many pics.

Facebook and Flickr Integration

Social networks are huge and Apple understands this. Facebook alone has over 150 million users worldwide, more than 25 million of them interacting using mobile devices. You can upload individual photos, groups or sets of photos, and entire Events to Facebook. Once this is done with a few simple clicks, tagged faces will be seamlessly integrated with Facebook. In face, if extra faces are tagged from the Facebook network, it can sync those changes back down to your Mac’s collection if you wish. What about those folks who already have a thousand photos on Facebook outside of their Macs? Looks like they’ll be out of luck. The integration only occurs when the initial synced upload begins from iPhoto.

Auto geo-tags

Flickr usage is less flashy but welcome nonetheless. Google Maps data is automatically read from GPS-enabled devices like the iPhone and geo-tagged images can show you where an image was taken. If the area happens to be well-known (something that ironically isn’t well-explained) then it is spelled out in the photo’s Information box. Otherwise you will get something generic like “Anaheim” when I really want it to say “Anaheim Convention Center”. Geotags are used extensively on photo services like Flickr to sort and categorize the vast libraries of online pictures, and are also integrated into event systems like Upcoming.org, a service owned by Yahoo.

Useful shortcuts

While wading through photos making sure people’s faces were tagged, I discovered some keyboard shortcuts worth mentioning for your navigate and tag process. After selecting a photo and clicking Name, you’ll get the single photo view with rectangles around recognized faces. Some may be named, some are “unknown face”, and others may have a name confirmation question. Use these helpful keystrokes to speed up your workflow:

• TAB will cycle the name rectangles between recognized faces
• RETURN on an “unknown face” or an established name will let you edit an identity, letting you either type or select a stored name using a handy drop-down menu
• If you TAB to a rectangle where iPhoto asks “Is this [name]?”, use RETURN to checkbox (accept) it or TAB to select the X (reject) icon then use RETURN to confirm
• Use the left or right arrow keys to switch forward or backward between photos in Name view
• When you’re through editing names for recognized faces, click Done to see the normal photo browser

Huge CPU spikes when processing faces

Scalability

I’m not sure how Apple will tune iPhoto in the long run to scale when collections swell to the tens of thousands or many years worth of photos… it’s apparent that you and I are expected to maintain and back up a giant, monolithic library on a single volume and pray your hard drive doesn’t fail. My advice is to back up your photo collections in two-year, overlapping increments or in chunks of 4 GB, whichever is collected first. This may save you headaches if a drive fails or Time Machine is inadequate, but will split your library. Serious photo collectors will want to invest in a giant storage solution like a Drobo with DroboShare to house a family library. Recent versions of iPhoto will let you choose a library from an arbitrary volume, even one shared over a network. There is no offline data support, however, so if need access to split repositories, you may need to look for something more powerful (and likely much more expensive). It would be nice for Apple to include a feature to import old, burnt-onto-disc iPhoto libraries which can be then re-exported to disc with updated info like geo-tags and face data.

Great fun overall

Even with its occasional quirkiness, Apple has greatly improved iPhoto with the addition of facial recognition. The subtle refinements show in things like the slideshows, where subjects’ faces are automatically centered in the video frame. Note: If selected faces in a vertical photo are spread out, slideshow will not show the entire photo and you may not see faces at all. Confused? Trust me, you’ll spot the quirk sometime, unless Apple catches this first. Speaking of slideshows, iPhoto ’09 includes some exciting new styles with equally impressive soundtracks, some of which obviously draw from Jobs’ ties with Pixar. The printed books feature has also been reworked and will allow embedded Google Maps which is nice for family trip albums. Apple definitely has a winner on its hands with iPhoto ’09 and makes for a no-brainer purchase as part of the wildly successful iLife suite.

Sure, there have been many tutorials done about how to replace the memory chips in Macs but doggone it, I just had to make one myself. This one is custom-tailored for the IT staff at the public agency where I work to demonstrate how simple the procedure is. Don’t worry guys, it’s a piece of cake!

[youtube width="580" height="356"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RF0IAH_8Ow[/youtube]

Note: This video covers the steps needed to work on an early-2008 MacBook Pro (Penryn), NOT the aluminum unibody models that came out in October 2008.

Jennifer Van Grove from the high-powered social media site Mashable wrote a great, comprehensive article about Google Maps and how to take advantage of its various features beyond simple address searches.

Excerpt:
Google Maps has become the standard mapping utility for everything from getting directions and finding nearby food options to viewing the surface of the moon. Are you getting the most out of your Google Maps experience? Keep reading to get some helpful hints on how to maximize (or minimize) all your mapping desires. 

See entire article at Mashable…

The good folks over at Project Lore have noticed that Blizzard did a major revamp to its World of Warcraft Armory site and the changes are quite revealing to say the least:

“…Now the new Armory goes a bit beyond that; not only can you check out a persons gear, you can check to see if they have cleared that heroic before, or any heroic, or if they have ever earned an emblem of heroism. You can even see if what raids they’ve done, how much gold they’ve earned, and how much their biggest heal has been for. It’s all amazing really…”

Crazy news! It’s going to be plain as day to my guild that I’m terrible at raising cash and that I apparently don’t farm enough raid resources as I should be! Is this level of transparency a cause for concern? Maybe it depends if you’re a casual player trying to get buy or a gold farmer whose keeping it on the down low… Hey! How’d you earn only 15 gold yesterday and today it says you earned 1,000 gold? Aha!

Update: Anyone notice that the Armory no longer shows your profile with the buffs you had when you last logged off? Ugh, I sure don’t feel very adequate without the Aspect of the Hawk buff on me!

Thanks to Dana D from FriendFeed for posting this gem:

My take: Don’t know how much weight this system will have on actual results but it could potentially change the entire way SEO and placement strategies work.

Marketing and SEO agencies, take note. If this becomes a defacto standard you will need to refocus some of your resources toward manual placement promotion.

Unfortunately for a lot of businesses and small sites this may create a work pill because they will need to constantly push promote their search engine results to keep them from disappearing from listing. It’s definitely an interesting use of the Digg method but I think Google is making search technology non-pragmatic at the cost of accuracy.