MacShrine would like to wish everyone a happy and successful 2007! Just 9 days to go until Macworld which is set to be the best yet. Thanks to all of you for visiting us over the past year, we really do appreciate it. We’ve lots of exciting changes coming early next year so stay tuned!
Apple posted in their most recent annual report that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has received just $1 salary - the same amount as the past 2 years. He also got 10 million shares which if he sold at todays stock price would be worth around $848,400,000.00. Not bad for a years work…
No change since last week… Beyonce still reigns in at the top spot, Fergie still at 2, Mariah at 4 with her Christmas track and Avril with “Keep Holding On” from the film Eragon at 7. This is the final chart of the year.
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MacShrine will be experiencing delays in new story updates from today to the 28th December due to staff shortages over the Holiday period. However, we will do our best to stay in the loop and keep you updated!
Update: Hope you all had a great Christmas and holiday, MacShrine is back to normal posting as of today. Seems we didn’t miss anything major in the past week anyway. Only around a week and a bit until Macworld!
Two new games - Sudoku and Royal Solitaire - have been released by EA for the 5G iPod. Based on the internationally successful Japanese grid number matching game, Sudoku is a 25.1MB download. Royal Solitaire features “10 of the most popular and well-known versions of Solitaire,” including Canfield, Klondike, Peaks, Pyramid, Beleaguered Castle, Aces Up, Yukon, FreeCell, Golf, and Scorpion. It is a 45.6MB download. Both titles are available from select iTunes stores including USA and UK.
Beyonce still reigns in at the top spot, Fergie is the highest new entry at 2, Mariah enters at 4 with her 1992 classic Christmas track and Avril also enters with “Keep Holding On” from the film Eragon at 7.
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Adobe Labs have released the beta for the upcoming release of Photoshop CS3. The Mac version is a Universal Binary, and system requirements call for a 1GHz+ G4 or G5 or any Intel-based Mac with 512MB RAM. A Windows version is also available. Adobe says the beta will expire soon after the formal release of Photoshop in Spring 2007. Final pricing is yet to be determined, but should be around $649.
Packed with new features, Photoshop CS3 beta also includes a pre-release version of a major upgrade to Adobe Bridge, as well as a preview release of the all-new Adobe Device Central. Photoshop customers can use Adobe Device Central to design, preview, and test compelling mobile content, created specifically for smaller screens. This new tool, built into Photoshop, simplifies and accelerates the creation of mobile content with a preview environment and built-in device profiles.
Update: Users are reporting that you must have an exisiting CS2 serial to activate the 30 day demo. If you do not, then the demo time is limited to 2 days. “Academic” Photoshop CS2 serial numbers not working either.
Apple today seeded Mac OS X 10.5 build 9A321, which is around 4-5 days older than the build seeded recently only to internal Apple employees. Apparently the reason an older build was supplied is so as not to give away new features that will be previewed at Macworld in January.
California Water Service crews are cleaning up what’s left of a major water leak that left more than a foot of water lining the floor of an Apple Computer Inc. building in Cupertino early Wednesday morning. At one point more than 100 gallons of water per minute were flooding into the building from a leak under the first floor, a Santa Clara County Fire Department dispatcher said. The leak was first reported at 12:55 a.m. Wednesday when a security guard called to report that water was coming out of a wall in the building, the dispatcher said. It was later determined that the leak was coming from under the building.
Blogging Stocks (no track record at all with rumors) is reporting that the long awaited iPhone will launch on January 15th - just three days after Macworld finishes. We’re holding our breathe…
The Register is reporting that Apple’s iTunes has suffered from a collapse in sales revenues this year. Secretive Apple doesn’t break out revenues from iTunes, but Forrester conducted an analysis of credit card payments over a 27-month period. And this year’s numbers aren’t good. While the iTunes service saw healthy growth for much of the period, since January the monthly revenue has fallen by 65%, with the average transaction size falling 17%. Forrester revealed some fascinating details about iTunes purchasing habits. Some 3.2% of online households (around 60% of the wider population) bought at least one download, and these dabblers made on average 5.6 transactions, with the median household making just three a year. The average transaction per household was slightly under $3.
Just found out (maybe everyone knew already?) that Adobe is not dropping Fireworks, but in fact currently developing the new version. Fireworks 9 is currently in private beta and is one of Adobes first Universal apps.
So the ad is cute in a Tim Burton-esque way and the sharing of cookies relates to the sharing of music. But how on earth are you meant to know what the ad is about, without already knowing about it?…
Apple yesterday seeded a new version of Leopard (build 9A326) to internal Apple employees. This latest build is reported to have fixed bugs from the last build (9A303) such as Quicktime crashing, printing problems and issues with .Mac such as iDisk synching. Apple continues to gloss over the interface, refining it even more and there is an overly presence of black gloss. This build is also completely stable on Apple’s latest Core 2 Duo MacBook and MacBook Pro. Apple is trying to gear down development to get this build out to developers before the New Year. New “internal” features include improved Core technology, faster boot-up times and support for external flash memory as temporary system memory (similar to Microsoft Vistas tech). Boot Camp 1.2 is included in the build but no readme was accompanied and we cannot identify any new features, it appears the same as the current 1.1.2 beta to us. Spotlight has got new meta search abilities including the ability to search other Macs on a network. Safari 3 has improved RSS support, with ability to view videocasts and listen to podcasts in browser. iSync is not present in the build it has been replaced with a new Sync Manager. TextEdit also features support to export and open new Word 2007 documents.
Update: For those wanting screen shots, sorry we won’t post any because we really don’t want have to deal with Apple Legal for like the millionth time. Just wait until January or the proper developer release.
Apple today has quietly released two new bug fix updates for the iPod shuffle (v1.0.2) and iPod video (v1.2.1). Simple plug your iPod into your Mac and open iTunes, the update should start automatic from there. The updates are not available from Software Update or the Apple website as of this moment.
The chart hasn’t changed since last week, the first time this has happened in several months. Beyonce has recently topped the Billboard charts with her number one single “Irreplaceable”, to the left, to the left…
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AppleInsider is reporting that Apple is set to launch three new iPod models during 2007. The first model is set to be a “video-centric” device, not the true iPod video we’re still waiting for. They make no comment on what the other two models will be. Analysts have recently said Apple could launch a 16GB iPod nano and also bump up the iPod shuffle specs.
Pembroke Pines police are investigating a complaint by Best Buy into the disappearance of more than $35,000 worth of iPods from the electronics retail giant. Managers of the Best Buy at 11450 Pines Blvd. called officers to the store Monday. A preliminary investigation revealed that there has not been a break-in or forced entry to the store, leading police and store managers to believe that the thefts could be an inside job.
Toshiba’s new 1.8″ hard drive can store 100GB of data whereas current models hold a maximum of 80GB. Toshiba plans to start mass producing the drives in January next year. Updated iPods at Macworld?
New browser numbers from Market Share have come out for November 2006, and they show good things for Safari. Safari use grew 2.5% between October and November of this year (from 3.93% to 4.03%), and shows an almost 45% increase over the Safari numbers from November of 2005. Back then, Safari use was at 2.78% of the overall browser market. Go Safari! The market share can only increase when the amazing Safari 3 launches next year alongside Leopard. The growth also shows that the Mac market share is growing too since Safari is the default browser on Macs.
As expected, Apple today launched the iTunes Store in New Zealand. Most songs are priced at NZ$1.79, music videos at NZ$3.59 and most albums at NZ$17.99. So which other countries can we expect it to launch in?
Microsoft have said that they secretly swapped 100 random Zunes for a limited edition Pink one. According to Microsoft this is one of their various marketing schemes for the Zune. I can’t help but feel for the shoppers who drove for hours to buy a Black Zune only to find they’ve a Pink one - “great” surprise. Oh well, at least they can earn a bit from popping them on eBay. What next? Microsoft is going to swap over 1000 Vista Ultimates for Vista Basic editions? Yay! Poor Microsoft, they do try…
Fastforward this week announced the release of FinanceToGo, a new finance manager application for Mac OS X that “seamlessly integrates dozens of intuitive financial management features into one affordable software package.” FinanceToGo allows users to track multiple accounts and thousands of transactions simultaneously. Transactions can be categorized, and graphs are automatically generated displaying where your money is being spent and on what. Reports and budgets can also be produced from the financial data you enter. FinanceToGo requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later and is priced at $34.95 as part of a special three-week introduction offer, which ends on December 18th 2006, after-which the price will be $44.95.
