I think the MacBook Air is a beautiful piece of industrial design. Beautiful. I probably wouldn’t buy one, but I really admire it. I bet Yingwen would like it though. It is a sexy machine that is more about portability and fashion than functionality.

I know I am a power user at heart, and I’m always going to have my eye on the higher end systems that have long-term expansion capability, but I have to say that Apple did a good job on the specs given the space limitations. For one, the soldered RAM is set to 2 GB, so thanks for maxing it out. And 3 pounds for a full-size keyboard and screen is right there about the single most important reason I’d actually consider blowing upwards of two grand after tax and add-ons on such a machine. If I were still a hard-core BART commuter, this would make it a no-brainer.

Apple TV now looks cool now that it no longer requires a computer to connect to online services and they dropped the price, but the 24 hour limitation for rental downloads is too short. Yeah I know on-demand rentals from cable and satellite are about the same duration, and the iTunes downloads are a lot cheaper overall, but the current on-demand rental durations are too short anyway. Well, maybe it’s no big deal – I suppose the difference between paying $3.99 for a 24 hour rental and $12.99 for the full rights are pretty minimal in the long run. Ultimately I think the Apple TV features are pretty cool – especially with Flickr and Youtube connectivity. I was still hoping for an Apple TV that was actually a TV, and maybe with a built-in DVD player too. Less boxes and wires and stuff hanging off the back – something I could just stick on the wall. The only remaining complaint I have is that they still to this day have not implemented subtitles. Seems like a major failure on the part of accessibility here.

The iPhone updates were welcome. I think the most significant of these is the Maps app, where it now tries to triangulate your location. It actually works! Not perfectly accurate, but it seems to find me within the range of the circle that it renders. So much easier to now use “current location” as the starting point for generating driving directions.

I don’t get why they would charge $20 to iPod Touch users to get the software upgrade that gives them the same basic app suite as iPhone. Boo. Just give it to them already. Come on.

Time Capsule seems like a great idea, and certainly makes a lot of sense when used in conjunction with MacBook Air as a backup solution. This is a nice and convenient luxury item: If I had $500 bucks to burn, sure I’d go for a 1TB box. Otherwise I’d probably look for a decent tethered backup drive. UPDATE: Now that I look around and price these things, it isn’t that much more expensive than a standard off-the-shelf enclosed 1TB drive, and if you factor in the convenience of ubiquitous wireless backups, it is an attractive offer.

All in all it was a nice suite of announcements. Couple all that with last week’s Mac Pro/XServe items, and it is actually quite a lot of cool gadgetry. Apple TV seems the most significant to me at this point, and I hope they eventually make me my Apple HDTV already.

Just a quick note about the new Apple Wireless Keyboard: It is notably more compact than its wired counterpart. More “laptop-like.” More “couch-top” like. This clearly was thought out as “hey, if we’re going to do a wireless keyboard, then what are people going to want to do with it?”

Clearly they’re going to want to sit on their couch and operate their Apple HDTV with it…

Ah, well that’s what I want to do anyway. With the addition of a trackpad, this would be a no-brainer.

Odd that this was not set by default, but TextMate did not include XML Schema (.xsd) documents to be recognized as XML. No matter – TextMate is beautifully extensible. This is easy to set using TextMate’s Bundle Editor for this and any other document extension that you’d like to be recognized as XML:

1. In TextMate, choose Bundles > Bundle Editor > Edit Languages. This filters bundles to only show language options.
2. In the Bundle Editor, expand the XML category and select the XML language icon.
3. The second line sets a variable for “fileTypes”. Add .xsd to the comma-separated list.
4. Close the Bundle Editor and you’re done.

The Bundle Editor in TextMate is a really powerful utility for customizing the handling of any language coding. This is a simple example, but it certainly opens the door to much more customization and functionality.

Here is a basic MySQL tip regarding application users:

When building applications that use MySQL, it is a best practice to create a MySQL application user that is dedicated to your app and has privileges to access only the database it is assigned.

With the latest version of phpMyAdmin, you can do this all in one step in the Add New User screen. Look for this fieldset and check the “Create database with same name and grant all privileges” box:

You can then retract privileges from the given database, i.e. like if the app is only going to need SELECT and you are uploading tables manually, then you can uncheck everything except the SELECT box. Or maybe the user needs only standard CRUD operations, in which you can assign it SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. As a best practice, you want your user to only have the minimum amount of privileges it needs for the app to function.

It may be just me, but TextMate appears to be the crashy-est program in my arsenal of web development tools. It seems to regularly occur when bringing up dialog boxes, such as a find/replace box. This is starting to bum me out at close to 1 AM as I try to finish my homework…

I am a fan of the Google Reader application for managing my RSS subscriptions. The advantage of having all my feeds organized in one convenient web repository is proving to be quite handy (much as del.icio.us has been for bookmarks) and I like Readers’ own ability to produce new RSS feeds from my content categories.

But the UI, much like a lot of Google’s apps, leaves a lot to be desired. (Gmail – I’m looking at you.)

Fortunately, Jon Hicks has put some lipstick on this pig. Enter Google Reader Theme. Installation is fairly trivial, and the result is a more pleasant and usable interface. As of this writing, it works for Firefox, Camino, Opera, Omniweb, and Safari.

Nice work! Looks much better now – thank you.

Jon also mentions he was using CSSEdit for the skinning work. I like this tool – have been using it since somewhere in the 1.x days. I find it very useful for quickly digesting the styles in an existing theme, such as an open-source project that I want to skin by leveraging existing styles. For starting from scratch, nothing can beat TextMate or Dreamweaver for cranking out standards-compliant XHTML and CSS in rapid-fire mode.

This is a great capability, to be able to create your own skins for sites you visit frequently. User customization supports even further the idea that we as web developers need to continue to separate content from design as much as possible, to produce semantic, meaningful markup, and to make our code as simple and as well-documented (self-documenting/semantic) as you can.

I had my first look at an AppleTV yesterday. Two things I could say right off the bat:

1. The user interface is spectacular
2. Why would you want to show sub-par quality videos on HDTV??

The user interface was incredibly easy to use. The only complaint I have is that the remote is small and feels cheap. On the other hand, it’s probably cheap to replace… those things have got to have a lifespan when small children are involved. In fact, the user interface was just startling – it was so simple to get at just about every bit of digital media I wanted to on the system. Very impressive. Selecting things to listen to or watch was such a piece of cake. And the Photos features were spectacular – very cool stuff.

So now really my complaint is the downloads from the iTunes Music Store, which is no longer solely a music store, nor does the “tunes” part really fit the iTunes brand. But I digres… the main point is that the quality of the videos one downloads from the iTMS are obviously not HDTV quality – the are jagged and grainy. The target market here cannot be the traditional Mac-using designer base, because obviously those folks all have their high-resolution monitors and are used to looking at imagery in excruciating detail. But even a casual user should notice that these downloaded video files, be they music videos, TV shows, or movies, all look poor on HDTV systems. The HDTV actually amplifies the poor quality of the media. These things look spectacular on iPod Videos, and presumably will do so as well on the iPhones, but that’s about the limit. Thinks like podcasts I can understand. But for movies, I really don’t see the point in downloading from iTMS for a low-quality video at this point.

Another thing I don’t like about the downloads is the lack of subtitles and closed captioning. This is an enormous omission for persons who cannot hear or speak different languages. Even an English language track with English subtitles can help someone who does not speak English all that well get more comprehension from the show, and I am seriously concerned about deaf users being completely left out of the loop on this one.

What I’d like to see on the iTunes Music Store includes:

• An option to get a discounted purchase the full commercial DVD-version of the programming.
• Video downloads with subtitle tracks and closed-captioning functionality
• Higher-quality video downloads

While I’m a big fan of the music offerings of iTMS, I think the video offerings leave a lot to be desired.

For f’s sake, just when I was getting ready to plan upgrades this summer for my home array of computers, Apple delays release of their OS. Why do I care so much? Because I want to wipe a couple of badly-behaving machines clean, and I can’t find my 10.4 DVD install disc… I was hoping to just wait until the new OS was released and use the opportunity to do a mass upgrade. Ah well…