I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
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New Apple toys
Posted by Rod in Apple at 9:40 pm on Friday, 24 August 2007

I stopped off at the Apple store on the way home tonight and found they had a new collection of toys just in.

I picked up iLife & iWork 08 Family packs and the new AirPort Extreme 802.11 wireless access point. The family packs are great value. $NZ120 for 5 users.

But the coolest thing I picked up was the new Apple Keyboard - the new one that comes with the new iMac.

The keyboard is very different from anything I’ve used before. It is incredibly thin and is nothing but keyboard. My old keyboard feels clunky now. It’s like a naked keyboard, sitting really close to the desk. It feels very different, but right. $NZ72. It has Mac specific keys which are useful. It is a flat keyboard through so not sure how it will go long term. I used to feel like I was getting RSI before I got my Microsoft Natural keyboards which have a gentle curve. My hands have been fine since. Going back to a flat keyboard does feel like it might get sore.

The AirPort extreme base station I think allows a USB Drive to be connected. I need to have a play with that as that will be great for backups and sharing files around the house. A cheap NAS.

Lots of new software to play with now. iPhoto Events seem to work really well.

Update: The NAS disk on AirPort Extreme works great. The trick is to install the Airport CD on each Mac, which installs the AirPort Disk Utility which monitors your AirPorts for any attached storage. Then the shared drive just appears.

I had a big USB drive attached to an old XP machine I was using. It plugged straight in to the AirPort. So now I can decommission that old computer. Nice.

Looks like the shared drive can be used for Time Machine in Leopard. That’s cool.

Question:  Is it now possible to drop the PC out the mix? The PC has 2 NIC’s in it. One NIC is connected to my Paradise cable modem and the other NIC connects to a switch which the home network runs off. Can I connect the Paradise Model directly to the AirPort and drop the PC. I guess Airport would have to provide the DHCP service? (Not that I know much about networking).

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Comments(10)

    Comment by Sam at 11:40 pm on 24 August 2007

    If you’ve got decent upstream speed from home and don’t mind some DNS hackery, you can get your Airport Extreme to advertise the USB disk globally. Your home disk then appears where ever you have Internet. Assuming you have a Mac laptop too!

    Oh, and it will do IPv6 if you can find an ISP that supports it. :)




    Comment by John Younger at 3:45 am on 25 August 2007

    Hi Rod

    Mac-specific keys to one side, can we use that fairly impressive keyboard on a non-Mac bog standard Wintel box ?




    Comment by David MacGregor at 11:13 am on 25 August 2007

    You must make a fair amount of presentations - do you use Keynote (which I understand has some pretty sexy new features) or do you rely on good old PowerPoint?

    I have wanted to use Keynote but until now I have wondered if the downsides-such as the ubiquity of PowerPoint vs Keynote - are worth the grief. I always have anxiety when I show up with my laptop to give a talk about whether the technology will ‘talk’ to each other.

    Rationally I realise Macs talk to pretty much all peripheral equipment now. But it is often simpler to save the slides to a memory stick and plug it into the host’s machine.

    I was reading about KeyNote on the excellent presentation zen blog




    Comment by Rod at 11:31 am on 25 August 2007

    I try to speak without slides whenever possible. Slides are so 2006 :)

    If it is a personal presentation I tend to use Keynote. For company decks it’s PowerPoint. Often I’ll design in Keynote and present a PDF if the presentation computer is wired in, like at conferences.




    Comment by John Rothlisberger at 12:43 pm on 25 August 2007

    G’day Rod,

    The AirPort Extreme will definitely serve as your router/firewall/DHCP/the-works — it’s what it was designed for.

    Happy to help you set it all up.

    –John




    Comment by Rod at 3:26 pm on 25 August 2007

    Hi John flick me an email so I can entice you over with promises of tea and cake.




    Comment by John Younger at 10:58 pm on 27 August 2007

    Hi again Rod

    My question was a serious one, can I use the new Mac keyboard that you speak so highly of on a non-Mac PC ?

    Thanks
    John




    Comment by Ben Kepes at 6:31 am on 28 August 2007

    John - ex the AppleNZ website comments page re th new keyboards

    “I bought this to match my Dell 1501 laptop (silver and white). I’ve always liked Apple keyboards for years. On a whim, I thought I would try it with my PC. Works find, but no “print screen” function. There are programs out there that will allow ma… Read more > [This is a link to part of http://store.apple.com/0800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/nzstore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=162919D6&nplm=MB110LL/A pping of the keys, etc. “




    Comment by Leon Breedt at 9:33 am on 28 August 2007

    John,

    I am using that keyboard just fine on both my Ubuntu Linux and Vista PC’s (Command becomes the Win key).

    You’ll want to grab the Apple keyboard driver on Windows so that F13 behaves like Print Screen though.




    Comment by John Younger at 9:08 pm on 28 August 2007

    Ben, and Leon

    Thanks muchly

    John Y