Every year, the International Consumer Electronics Show yields dozens of exciting, useful and just plain silly high-tech gadgets. Sometimes they're even useful and silly at the same time.
Big 3 U.S. auto giants plug electric cars
Rather than focus solely on muscle cars, embattled U.S. automakers General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler touted a coming generation of electric vehicles at this year's North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
Road to Fuel Efficiency Is Lined With Orange Cones
DETROIT, Jan. 11 Within the halls of the North American International Auto Show, the world's automakers were jockeying yesterday to promote their electric cars.
MacChat: Snap-happy new year for Macheads
THERE might have been no life-changing “one more thing” and no Steve Jobs, but for digital photography buffs there was a lot to like about Apple’s Macworld swansong.
No sooner had Google announced a long-overdue Mac beta of its Picasa photo organising application, than Apple threw the wraps off iPhoto ‘09 and gave users more reasons to stick with it.
iPhoto ‘09 introduces facial recognition technology and support for geotagging, letting users sort their photos by “Faces” and “Places”, in addition to the existing “Events”. It also features integration with Facebook and Flickr accounts for easy uploading to your favourite photo-sharing site.
The Faces feature is the most interesting. After iPhoto learns to recognise a person’s face with a few suggestions it will scan your library and tag all other photos they’re in.
The geotagging feature makes use of the GPS data recorded by the iPhone and most modern cameras, or lets you add your own, so you can locate where your photos were taken and sort them by Places as desired.
Facebook and Flickr integration makes it a “snap” to share your photos online with a few clicks. And iPhoto will create albums for your online shares, so any additions, deletions or edits are automatically reflected on the relevant site.
iPhoto ‘09 also adds several new slideshow themes, including Classic, Shatter, Snapshots, Scrapbook, Ken Burns and Sliding Panel. And a new Travel Maps feature makes your photobooks look even more polished, with professionally rendered maps to accompany your holiday snapshots.
Probably the main criticism of iPhoto is that you can’t store your photos anywhere you like - iPhoto insists on saving them to its own database directory, meaning you have to go through iPhoto find them easily. This is where Picasa comes in: It lets you leave your photos wherever you like on your system, and will still sort and preview them for you.
Picasa lets you organise your photos, perform some basic editing functions, create slideshows and upload your pictures to Picasa Web Album to share with friends. Some features of the Windows version such as geotagging, webcam and screen capture, HTML output and screensaver are not yet in the Mac version.
Picasa requires an Intel Mac running OS X 10.4.9 or above.
Google also has worked hard to make Picasa a complement, rather than a competitor, to iPhoto. It will include your iPhoto snaps in its library, but it won’t edit them, so as not to tread on iPhoto’s turf. But you can always export a photo from iPhoto to another location to edit it in Picasa.
The iPhoto update was part of iLife ‘09, an overhaul of Apple’s suite of digital lifestyle applications. In response to users complaints about the “rebooted” last version, iMovie ‘09 gained more editing options, as well as frame magnification and cool new effects such as frame-in-frame, green screen and Indiana Jones-style animated maps. GarageBand ‘09 adds basic piano and guitar lessons, as well as music lessons from popular artists including Sting, Sarah McLachlan, John Fogerty, Norah Jones and Ben Folds. New guitar amps let you plug ‘n’ play in styles from Brit Pop to Seattle Sound and Lowdown Blues.
Accompanying the new iLife was iWork ‘09, which continues Apple’s move towards “cloud computing” in which data is stored online for access anytime, anywhere. iWork documents can now be shared and edited online, and Apple launched the iWork.com domain for this purpose.
Other enhancements in iWork ‘09 include full-screen view, dynamic outline and saving as Word documents in Pages, mail merge with Numbers spreadsheets, and new animations, themes, transitions and effects in Keynote.
iLife ‘09 and iWork ‘09 are free with new Macs or $A129 each to buy shrinkwrapped. Apple also announced a Mac Box Set, bundling Mac OS X, iLife and iWork at a much cheaper price of $A279. This may sweeten the deal when the relatively feature-less Mac OS X Snow Leopard is released later this year.
Also announced at Macworld Conference and Expo:
iTunes DRM-free: After unfairly offering DRM-free music to every online distributor but Apple in an effort to break iTunes’ stranglehold on the download market, the record labels finally admitted defeat and let iTunes dispense with its copy protection too. In exchange, Apple allowed variable pricing for tracks, rather than the $A1.69 flat rate. Users wanting to unlock their exisiting purchases will have to pay a small amount per track.
Unibody MacBook Pro 17”: Rounding out its portable range in the new “unibody” design carved from a single block of aluminium, Apple announced the largest MacBook, the 17-inch version, was getting the treatment. Like the MacBook Air, it has an ultra-thin enclosure and built-in battery. Unlike the rest of the MacBooks, it offers a matte screen option. While the built-in battery may be a turn-off for some potential customers, Apple claims it has the industry’s longest life at eight hours, and is good for 1000 recharges. The unibody MacBook Pro 17” costs $4499.
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