Here is the infor­ma­tion about the new iPhone update and new model in no frills form:

iPhone OS 3.0

So the Apple Store is down, and the blog­gers are at the ready because today Apple is announc­ing updates to their Mac­Book line of prod­ucts. We’re already seeing photo’s and reports of what these lap­tops look like and have in them but we won’t know for sure until Steve tell’s us. Some of the spec­u­la­tion is quite excit­ing. Pic­tures have been leaked and con­firmed and the Mac­Book Pro is finally get­ting a style update. The cur­rent case design is one that has been around for a while mainly because it is so good, there’s not much wrong with it. But as Apple does they always find a way to make it better. The case is one piece of alu­minum no plas­tic around the edges con­nect­ing the top and bottom. The dis­play now has black plas­tic fram­ing like the iMacs and I’m hear­ing that there will be no matte dis­play (boo to that). There is no phys­i­cal latch but the magnet style latch that the Mac­Books have had and the key­board has been updated to the newer Mac­Book style. Also a new glass track­pad that has no seper­ate phys­i­cal button but is a button in itself. Rumors of new dis­plays are also flying around and pos­si­bly a sub $1000 notebook.

And what rumor post would be com­plete with­out the oblig­a­tory blurry pic­ture (source Engad­get):

You can follow along with all the offi­cial action today on a few sites:

• Engad­get
• Giz­modo
• Ars Tech­nica
• Mac­world

Have fun refreshing!

UPDATE:

Well that was fun. Most of the rumors were right about the new Mac­Book Pro. The new look is great and the updated hard­ware is won­der­ful. I’m won­der­ing why the updates weren’t applied to every­thing the 17″ Mac­Book Pro didn’t get the case refresh so I wonder if they are con­sid­er­ing phas­ing that model out. They came close on the sub $1000 note­book, the old white plas­tic MacBook’s are now priced $999, with new models that have the same styling as the Mac­Book Pro start­ing at $1299.

The new Cinema Dis­play is prob­a­bly where the most inno­va­tion took place. The new Cinema Dis­play now has a mini-​dvi con­nec­tor and a magsafe power con­nec­tor to plug into your new Mac­Book or Mac­Book Pro making them great for lap­tops. The styling gets an update with a black bevel. A few new fea­tures includ­ing an iSight camera, speak­ers in the mon­i­tor are great features.

You can get more info on the Mac­Book, Mac­Book Pro, and the Cinema Dis­play on the Apple site and poten­tially go even deeper in debt at the Apple Store.

The new iTunes 8 brings a new fea­ture for your musi­cal plea­sure: Genius. This fea­ture works by pick­ing a song and having it sug­gest up to 100 others songs you would like based upon that one. For exam­ple: I picked “Aeroplane” by the Chili Pep­pers and it suggested:

• All Mixed Up - 311
• Pepper - But­t­hole Surfers
• Been Caught Steal­ing - Jane’s Addiction

And numer­ous others. It’s a great fea­ture because it cre­ates a playlist of songs that oth­er­wise I might not have chosen. And it does so with great insight into what I want to hear. How does it know what I like? No doubt it was inspired by Pan­dora, but does Apple use the same algo­rith­mic approach? After some sig­nif­i­cant research, the answer is no. The genius behind iTunes Genius come from the behav­ior of the iTunes community.

Using my exam­ple from the Chili Pepper’s “Aeroplane”, Genius works like this:

• Who else on iTunes has down­loaded “Aeroplane”?
• What other iTunes songs did the “Aeroplane” com­mu­nity play within the same genre and release date?
• How many times has the com­mu­nity played “Aeroplane” com­pared to other songs in their library?
• What other iTunes songs did the com­mu­nity pur­chase? Skip over? Rate favorably?

There is a high pri­or­ity placed on the release date. “Going to California” from Led Zep­pelin brings up sig­nif­i­cantly more 70’s songs than “I Want to Be the Boy…”, a sim­i­lar blues tune from The White Stripes. All of these fac­tors are com­piled into a “tag” that is then picked up by the Genius playlist gen­er­a­tor. As more data is uploaded to iTunes, the rec­om­men­da­tions will change and improve.

Notice I say iTunes songs. Genius doesn’t work for The Bea­t­les or any­thing off the bonus disc of Radiohead’s In Rain­bows. The song must be avail­able for pur­chase in iTunes for Genius to rec­om­mend it. It can’t rec­om­mend a song it doesn’t know the com­mu­nity lis­tens to.

The inter­est­ing thing about Genius is that it proves that for the most part, people tend to like the same things musi­cally. If you like, “Aeroplane”, chances are you also like “Remedy” by The Black Crowes. Apple proves a con­cept of musi­cal com­mu­nity by sug­gest­ing songs that our friends and their friends are play­ing. It’s a social media appli­ca­tion in the largest con­text. Instead of our friends burn­ing mix CDs for us to explore, their mix CD choices are sent to Apple along with mil­lions of others to create the world’s largest mix CD for all of us to enjoy. And if you don’t have the songs every­one is play­ing, the “convenient” Genius Side­bar tells us what songs our friends are lis­ten­ing to that we don’t yet own.

While there’s no doubt Apple is get­ting a boost from this fea­ture (I’m sure incre­men­tal song pur­chases through Genius are sky­rock­et­ing), I’m thank­ful that Apple cre­ated the tech­nol­ogy to bring us all a little closer. Like Face­book or Twit­ter, the power of social media is not in the tech­nol­ogy itself, but in how it draws us to those with sim­i­lar inter­ests. Social Media works like a cell phone. People don’t marvel in cel­lu­lar tech­nol­ogy as much as that they can chat with grandma in New Jersey while stuck in traf­fic in Dallas. The genius behind iTunes Genius is that through aggre­gat­ing our favorite songs, we are pleas­antly sur­prised each time a for­got­ten song flows per­fectly into our (and our mil­lions of iTunes friends’) earphones.

Hey did you guys know a new iPhone came out a couple of weeks ago? Along with that Apple launched the App­Store so you can now install third party appli­ca­tions on the iPhone. One of the great appli­ca­tions that was recently released is Word­Press for the iPhone. This is an appli­ca­tion with some great fea­tures that allows you to write for your blog on the go. In fact I’m writ­ing this post on my iPhone right now!

Set­ting up the app to use with your blog is quite simple. It is a matter of giving it your blog URL and your login infor­ma­tion. After it logs into your blog it shows all of your cur­rent posts and you have the abil­ity to edit any of those and create new ones.

Cre­at­ing new posts is where this appli­ca­tion comes in real handy. While it isn’t that great to type on for long posts (my thumbs are already tired) it’s great for quick posts and it even gives you some great fea­tures like being able to add photos from your library or camera very easily. Posts are auto­mat­i­cally saved as local drafts on the iPhone and you have options to save as a draft on the blog, pub­lished, pri­vate, or pend­ing review. You can also assign cat­e­gories and tags to the post. Sync­ing with your blog works very well too as soon as a post is saved on the iPhone it the changes show up on the blog.

While this is a great tool for writ­ing blog posts it has no tools for admin­is­tra­tion you have no access to dis­able or enable plu­g­ins and there is no way to admin­is­ter com­ments at all. Over­all I think it is a great app for the iPhone that makes post­ing on the go easy and fun.

Great customer experiences aren’t perfect at first. Initial launches are released into the jungle of customer interaction and improved using their feedback. That’s what we’ve done with the Marblehead Blog. Let us know how to make it even better in the next revision.

1 Threaded Comments

Our old format fol­lowed a two column newspaper style for com­ments. After sev­eral blog con­ver­sa­tions, we noticed it became dif­fi­cult to pair replies back to the orig­i­nal com­ments. Threaded com­ments are fairly new in the blog­ging com­mu­nity, but we felt it was a func­tion­al­ity stretch worth work­ing out. After spend­ing a week trying to get Intense Debate work­ing, we scrapped the idea as too fea­ture rich to fit within our design. Why include things like rep­u­ta­tion voting when it has no pur­pose for us? After a few more false starts we finally found an approach that matched the design style while still giving the func­tion­al­ity desired.

2 Design and Typography Fine Tuning

When the blog launched, it fea­tured sev­eral lay­outs and type styles that were exper­i­men­tal for a dynamic site. The head­lines, spac­ing, and columns were very tough to get right. After a few months of watch­ing the site grow and expand, we decided we could do even better. The front page might not look much dif­fer­ent, but almost every­thing you see has been resized, tweaked and moved just a bit to improve the clar­ity and pre­sen­ta­tion of the over­all expe­ri­ence. Indi­vid­ual posts got a face lift and extra tweaks as well. The text is larger and we now have the abil­ity to add sub­heads, para­graph titles, pull quotes, and bullet lists. You can see some of these new style changes in this post. We worked very hard to improve the over­all look of the site while main­tain­ing the spirit of the orig­i­nal. If every­thing “just seems a little nicer” to you, then we’ve done our job.

3 Email Subscriptions

Every­one at Mar­ble­head lives and breathes within the social blo­gos­phere. We gleam infor­ma­tion from RSS, dis­trib­ute links on del.​icio.us, and twit­ter everything in between. How­ever, with RSS still in an early adapter phase, we real­ized many of our read­ers were coming back to the site or putting our blog on iGoogle to get new con­tent. Some people simply preferred to get the new arti­cles on their hand­helds or inbox for read­ing offline. To that end we added an email sub­scrip­tion page where you can have our blog hand deliv­ered to your inbox. If you’re inter­ested in how RSS can help you, a great expla­na­tion can be found at ProBlog­ger.

4 About This Blog Page

The first link I look for when notic­ing a new blog is the About page. I want to know why the blog was cre­ated, what point it’s trying to make, and what spin that infor­ma­tion will take. Once we got the con­tent writ­ten and pub­lished, we made it easier for our new read­ers to find. You can now find a link to our About page in the top right corner of every page.

5 New and Improved Author Bio Pages

The most common feed­back we’ve received about the Mar­ble­head web­site and blog was that while inter­est­ing, it seemed a bit imper­sonal. People wanted to meet the faces behind such arti­cles as Sex and Vio­lence in Design and A Toy’s Inner Robot. Who knew? To bring our faces to the con­ver­sa­tion, we had the great people at Hoffman+Karlsson pho­to­graph us inside the eclec­tic Merid­ian Room. Below our photos we put our var­i­ous social net­work­ing links and a short bio. Viola!

»Jay    »Brandon    »Blake

6 Subscribing to Comments

One of the design prob­lems I don’t think the blog com­mu­nity has been fully solved yet is fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tions once you’ve com­mented on someone’s blog. Cur­rently you can either sub­scribe via email to the entire post (not good if you’re com­ment #2 out of 75), or pulling com­ments into your RSS reader (better, but it’s a hassle to man­u­ally unsub­scribe and quite often you don’t have the orig­i­nal post to go along with the com­ments). How­ever, it’s almost impos­si­ble to follow con­ver­sa­tions with­out one of these solu­tions, so until there is a better way, we pro­vided both.  All posts now have a “Follow This Post” RSS link at the top of the com­ments sec­tion and “Notify me of fol­lowup com­ments via e-mail” check box at the bottom.

7 Utility Page Updates

We increased the number of Recent Posts listed to make find­ing new con­tent easier, added a new email sub­scrip­tion link, and put our twit­ter link out front for all the exciting things that happen between posts. If you join, maybe you too can cause Twit­ter to crash.

8 You!!!

The absolute best fea­ture that’s been added to the Mar­ble­head blog are all our new read­ers like you. In fact, for if you’ve read this far, you deserve a pat on the back. Thanks to every­one whether you lurk and observe or par­tic­i­pate in the dis­cus­sions. You rock!

I was shocked today when I clicked on a link titled Man gets Win­dows Vista to work with printer. I thought surely this is just a funny story on The Onion poking some fun at Win­dows Vista. Boy was I wrong the arti­cle tells the woes of Charles Walling trying to get his Dell printer to work with Win­dows Vista.

Mr. Walling bought a new Vista com­puter and tried to install his old Dell printer mis­tak­enly using the Win­dows XP dri­vers. Doing this made it nearly impos­si­ble to remove the old XP dri­vers and impos­si­ble for the new Vista dri­vers to work for Mr. Walling. The Seat­tle Post-​Intelligencer told of his plight in a Jan­u­ary 30th arti­cle and the test man­ager for doc­u­ments and print­ing at Microsoft con­tacted Mr. Walling and made mul­ti­ple trips to his house to try and fix his computer.

While this was admit­tedly an edge case that hasn’t hap­pened to many people where was the break­down in usabil­ity? Win­dows Vista is a very dif­fer­ent system from Win­dows XP. So when an installer tries to put mul­ti­ple files into direc­to­ries where it doesn’t have access in Vista when it would have that access in XP you could rea­son­ably assume this installer was meant for the old system. How hard then would it be to let the user know that they prob­a­bly need to find an updated driver. I think Vista can handle putting another dialog box in front of users.

Dell also could have done a few things to improve the prob­lems Mr. Walling faced. Maybe clearly label­ing the CD as an XP only CD could have helped. Pro­vid­ing a way to check for new driver updates before you install would be a nice touch too.

I’ve found through my years of build­ing web­sites that usabil­ity is all about the little things. The things we don’t really pay atten­tion to in the big pic­ture. One poorly worded label can change a forms com­ple­tion rate, or a poorly named nav­i­ga­tion item could result in people not find­ing what they came for. It’s impor­tant to spend time on those little things, test them and get them right.

Last week I told you to dump that old browser and start dating again. Because we both know it, you deserve better. After living with it for so long, you stop notic­ing the nag­ging required to get it to do what you want. And let’s not men­tion the lack of magic in the per­for­mance area. It’s just not as good as it used to be. It’s time to move on.  There are other browsers in the sea. In fact, I’d like to intro­duce you to one: Fire­fox 3

• Fire­fox 3 was comes from a great family.  He was raised by the good, sweet folks at Mozilla.  
• Fire­fox 3 knows how to have fun. The enhance­ments made to the user expe­ri­ence will have you laugh­ing and smil­ing and enjoy­ing your­self more than your last girl’s night out.
• Fire­fox 3 is secure. You will feel absolutely safe while spend­ing time together. When Fire­fox 3 wraps his arms around you, it’ll feel like noth­ing in the world can get to your per­sonal information.
• Fire­fox 3 is will­ing to change for you. With a new add-​ons man­ager, there are more than 5,000 ways you can make Fire­fox 3 into just what you need in a browser.
• Lastly, Fire­fox 3 is an absolute pow­er­house in the per­for­mance area. You know the Cosmo arti­cles about the 5 ways he can please you?  He’s read them. Twice.  With a speed faster than any other browser there, you’ll wonder how you could have ever enjoyed web surf­ing with another before.

For those of you just join­ing in, I bought my first Mac after 23 years of PC use. I talk about my first couple of days here and here. While the con­ver­sion is not com­plete, I wanted to share a few unex­pected items that have made a big impres­sion on me. When you see intu­itive func­tion­al­ity and stun­ning design come together on in an oper­at­ing system, it’s hard not to get excited.

Multi-​touch track­pad
Tech­nol­ogy orig­i­nally designed for the iPhone is now incor­po­rated into the Mac­Book track­pad. Multi-​touch allows you to per­form advanced mouse tech­niques on the track­pad by using mul­ti­ple fin­gers. You can right-​click, scroll, zoom, rotate, and nav­i­gate just by using the appro­pri­ate fin­gers. My favorite has been scrolling through web pages and RSS feeds with­out click­ing or plug­ging in a mouse. read more » 

Dash­board
The dash­board is a spe­cial desk­top con­tain­ing tiny pro­grams called wid­gets giving instant infor­ma­tion. There are thou­sands of wid­gets to put on your dash­board. Weather, train sched­ule, sport scores are typ­i­cal wid­gets. Dash­board works like iGoogle, but incor­po­rated into the desk­top and looks MUCH better. read more »

Spaces
Spaces is one of those things that seem superfluous at first, then genius after a few days. Spaces allows you to create mul­ti­ple desk­tops and switch between them in two clicks. This helps you orga­nize your open pro­grams by groups. I cur­rently use 4 “spaces” (desk­tops) and keep iTunes and Twhirl (a Twit­ter client) on one, email on a second, cal­en­der and address book on a third, and open doc­u­ments on the last. When new email comes in, click­ing on the mail icon “slides” you to that desk­top where mail is open. Then you can click back to the desk­top with your work. It’s sim­i­lar to the XP taskbar, but grouped in what­ever order you see fit. You can also assign pro­grams to be vis­i­ble on all win­dows, which I do with Adium, my IM client. read more »

Exposé
Exposé is a fea­ture that allows you to zoom out and see all your open win­dows as thumb­nails. This makes it easy to find win­dows that may be on top of each other or lost in the clut­ter. It also makes switch­ing between win­dows super easy. The PC rel­a­tive would be the alt-​tab func­tion, but visu­ally and you can jump to any window with two clicks rather than mul­ti­ple clicks through a list in order. read more »

Spot­light
Spot­light isn’t func­tion­ally dif­fer­ent than Microsoft’s Desk­top Search to find files, email, IM logs, etc con­tain­ing key words, but it wins mul­ti­ple points for better exe­cu­tion. I can’t tell you how many times I waited for pro­grams to open while Search con­ti­nously indexed the files. It was a huge per­for­mance drag and some­thing Microsoft itself called “bloatware”. I’ve never noticed Spot­light drag­ging per­for­mance and it also has a great visual effect when locat­ing an item on the desk­top. read more »

Appli­ca­tions
The coolest thing I noticed about appli­ca­tions in Mac is that they are con­tained within a single file. If you want the Fire­Fox appli­ca­tion, you down­load it and drag that one file into Appli­ca­tions.  If you want to delete Fire­Fox, you drag that one file into the trash. There is no “Add and Remove Programs” wizard that leaves fold­ers on your hard drive, no random files and reg­istry entries that remain after remov­ing pro­grams. Over the years I became an expert in edit­ing reg­istry set­tings and “manually” remov­ing pro­grams because I had to become one. No longer need­ing to be an expert?  Priceless. read more »

The other thing I noticed was the lack of third party pro­grams pre­loaded on the Mac. No AOL, trial ver­sion this or scaled down OEM ver­sion of some­thing else. I remem­ber remov­ing at least 10 of these pro­grams when I got my Dell. Noth­ing.  Nada. Just a fully func­tional OS and beau­ti­fully clean desktop.

Print­ing
When it came time to install my printer, I asked about the dri­vers disk and “Add printer” wizard. My Apple friends said, just plug it in. “Then what?” I asked. “Then print,” they responded. It started print­ing instantly with no setup. “No way.” 

Boot­camp*
Because some of my clients require Windows-​only VPN login, I had a choice. Keep my old PC laptop around or figure out how to sim­u­late Win­dows on my Mac.  I discovered Leopard had a fea­ture called Boot­camp. This allows you to create a space on your hard drive and install Win­dows like a stan­dard PC. When you power on it asks if you want to run Win­dows or Mac OS. Choos­ing Win­dows turns your Mac into a native Win­dows run­ning machine just like a Dell or IBM. Except faster. Apple even made a com­mer­cial about it. read more »

*I haven’t gotten this far, so I don’t know of any hic­cups or chal­lenges. If anyone has feed­back about Boot­camp, please let me know. 

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on how Inter­net Explorer 6 is rob­bing users of inter­net bliss. Devel­op­ers of pop­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tion pro­gram Base­camp agree:

IE 6 is def­i­nitely the most painful browser for us to sup­port – it’s seven years old and doesn’t even fully sup­port the CSS 1.0 stan­dard cre­ated in 1996. Microsoft’s done an incred­i­bly poor job of get­ting users to upgrade.

Finally some­one is taking a major step toward IE6 retire­ment.  Apple has chosen not to sup­port IE6 for their upcom­ing per­sonal man­age­ment ser­vice, MobileMe.  Basecamp devel­op­ers noticed it in their arti­cle here.

I say it’s about time.  We’ve cre­ated some great web designs only to scale them back to func­tion prop­erly in IE6.  I’m look­ing for­ward to putting it in the attic right next to this guy:

Apple debuted the newest ver­sion of the iPhone today at the Apple World­wide Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence (WWDC). Apple 3G will be avail­able for pur­chase on July 11th, 2008. The new ver­sion will still be exclu­sive to AT&T and require a 2 year con­tract com­mit­ment to pur­chase. But, it is also 3G which makes it crazy fast and it is a whop­ping $400 less than the orig­i­nal. Below are the bullet points of the new features:

• 3rd gen­er­a­tion (3G) net­work sup­port.  Web brows­ing and email are now 2.8 times faster than the pre­vi­ous iPhone.  It’s also 36% faster than Nokia and Palm 3G phones
• Longer bat­tery life over pre­vi­ous iPhone
• Inte­grated GPS sup­port.  Google maps will now be able to pin­point your location
• Dra­mat­i­cally low­ered price.  New prices: 8GB $199 and 16GB $299
• 3rd party appli­ca­tion sup­port.  Some of the new apps are eBay, Asso­ci­ated Press, Type­Pad, Loopt
• Native Microsoft Exchange server sup­port with push email / con­tacts / cal­en­dars, auto-​discovery, and global address book
• Updated design with rounded edges now avail­able in black and white.