Well if Gates believes that Apple’s claims about Vista and Macintosh are a pack of lies he obviously thinks that they’re powerful lies because he appears worried. And why wouldn’t he be?

The part about a Vista upgrade being major surgery and the PC guy offeing to donate his peripherals if he doesn’t come through it has some real elements of truth.

Refering to the new I’m a PC, I’m a Mac ads (also in HD).

But I seriously think Bill should leave Microsoft now. Why wait until July 2008? Now he’s just making a fool of himself. This is what he told Steven Levy of Newsweek the other day:

NEWSWEEK: If one of our readers confronted you in a CompUSA and said, “Bill, why upgrade to Vista?” what would be your elevator pitch?

Bill Gates: The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar, show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might edit a high-definition movie and make a little DVD that’s got photos. As I went through, they’d think, “Wow, is that something I could use, would that make a difference for me?”

That’s it? You have a sidebar with widgets, sorry – gadgets. You can search things, photos too? You have parental control? You can edit in HD? You can make DVDs? Come on. That’s it?

Lying in front of people

Bill also thinks Apple got all their ideas from Longhorn:

NEWSWEEK: In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.

Bill Gates: You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, “Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,” that’s fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?

What an utterly STUPID thing to say! I’m speechless. This must be the most stupid lie Gates ever has told. “Security guys break the Mac every day?” Plain lie.

I’m sure Vista is much safer that XP. And if it’s safer than Mac OS X, then a big applause! Good for computers, good for people. But the CEO of one the world’s biggest companies can’t lie to Newsweek.

I’m a PC, I’m a Mac

Then Gates talks about the “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” ads.

NEWSWEEK: Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?

Bill Gates: I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.

I can understand that lots of people don’t like the ads (and some of them ARE lame). But they’re not about PC users! They’re about the machines!! There’s a clue here. The ads always say “I’m a PC”, not “I’m a PC user”. Bill Gates doesn’t get it.

PC users are not klutzes. And not dullards. But PCs are more complicated to use than Macs, even though I understand that Bill Gates can’t admit that.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball and Peter Cohen at MacWorld came to the same conclusion: Bill Gates is lying.

Or simply FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. My dictionary on FUD: “fear, uncertainty and doubt, usually evoked intentionally in order to put a competitor at a disadvantage”. Exactly. Joy of Tech is spot on.

Why Vista

I have a Windows Media Center with XP. Is there any reason why I should upgrade to Vista? The PC is wicked, so that’s not an issue. Are there any really good reasons to spend lots of money upgrading the Media Center?

In response to very popular demand (to the tune of 150+ requests on the Labs CS3 forum), I’m happy to say that Adobe is now making it possible for Windows customers of Photoshop CS2 to get a Mac CS3 beta serial number, and vice versa. To request a number, you can send mail to photoshopcs3beta@adobe.com & include your CS2 serial number.

We made this decision a couple weeks ago, but I didn’t want to publicize it widely until the staff was back at full strength after the holiday break. Please note that this is a manual process on our side right now, and we appreciate your patience as we handle requests.

Related: If you find that you want to switch an Adobe product license from Mac to Windows or vice versa, please contact Adobe Customer Service. They’ll walk you through the process.

Record companies – listening?

I wish more companies were thinking like this. The principle here is simple: We have a customer who bought something from us, and now he/she wants to change the carrier of the product. It’s almost no cost for Adobe. They will get good PR. And probably sell more software because people know they can change platform if they want.

Now imagine if records companies could start acting this clever? Stop acting like idiots and announce the following:

Do you have a huge stack of LPs you never play anymore? Sure you do. And you paid for those. The artists have already got their money for the making of the music. Now guess what: We are going to start being nice! As of monday 29. January 2007 you can upgrade your music. You have already paid for the art, so you only pay for the actual CD (or downloadable DRM-free file if your prefer), shipping and a small handling fee.

Go to www.musicupgrades.com, check if your LPs are covered with the new MusicUpgrades Plan, order stickers to the nearest central. We have one in most European countries and USA/Canada.

Yes, sure… Anyday now…

Simple interface, but maybe too simple for my taste? Not sure yet. I think the tasks should have had more importance (in style), and the buttons under them be less visible. But I must admit they have great taste in colors.

It worked flawlessly in Safari on Mac and Firefox on Win XP. Dragging things around works and editing is fast and responsive.

Todos kan be tagged with tags, which can be used like David Allen the way David Allen suggests you set things up with contexts.

You can also set dates for tasks that need to be done before a certain date.

You can sign up for a free test account but I couldn’t figure out if it was always free, or if there was a fee after some time. Data can be exported out of the system. They haven’t got around to write an export feature, but they will send you your data if you cancel the account.

Try it out! I wish there were an offline system to go with it, but if you’re always online and trust Tedium to also be, this could be your next way to get things done.

Watch the screencast to have an idea of what it does. I just imported the whole iTunes library. Wicked fast and no problems.

Several tries at making the computer understand the simple salutation “Dear Mom” was read by Microsoft software as “Dear Aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all.” Attempts to correct or undo or delete the error only deepened the mess.

And Chris Messina has made his suggestion for a t-shirt already:

Original at Flickr

Here’s a video showing the actual event:

Poor guy. Must be horrible demoing things when they go as bad as that.

English only?

Fun, but including voice recognition in the operating system is interesting. The biggest problem with it is – languages. Ok, so maybe Microsoft can manage to get Vista to understand “Dear mom” as… “Dear mom”. But how about “Kjære mamma”? There are several thousand languages in the world, and most of them are so small that they never even get their own version of Vista or OSX. Only 24 languages have their own version of Windows XP Pro (and 33 more as socalled “Multilingual User Interface Pack Languages”). I doubt that voice recognition will work any but the English version when Vista is launching sometime in 2007 (2008?)

And what about dialects? It will be a long, long time before computers understand all the different ways to speak English…

…if people look at it and their initial reaction is “Oh, it’s an iPod rip-off,” that’s a pretty crummy first impression. Does anyone at Microsoft realize that rip-offs aren’t considered cool?

A: MY SOURCES SAY NO.

Q: Then again, Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” By that standard the people on the Zune team must be a bunch of Michelangelos, eh?

A: CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN.

Excellent analysis as always from John Gruber.

Although the comparison is a bit unfair (DVD recorders are much cheaper, and also typically sold almost everywhere. Even my grocery store at the corner sell them…), it proves a point: Media Centers are not for most people.

I got a Media Center four months ago. I love it. And hate it.

Media Center – things I like

The concept. The fact that we’re now able to record and time-shift programs. The kids can watch their favourite shows when they want, and don’t have to stop playing or eating to watch tv. And we can sleep when we should and still see those late-night movies later if we want.

Clean. I like the interface. The Media Center interface is the nicest thing Microsoft has made. It looks a zillion times better than Windows, and people I show it to, figure it out immediately.

The guide. The program guide is a great feature. After it’s set up (see the hate-list below too), it gives me quick view of everything on tv the next days.

Always something great to watch. If I’m bored and tired, I don’t have to watch “Walker Texas Ranger” reruns, but can choose between a bunch of Simpsons episodes, 30+ movies recorded that last months and interesting documentaries that always are aired when I’m sleeping or at work (why is primetime so filled with crap?)

Quiet. Thanks to Eirik, I got a Media Center with no fans. And so should you if you want one. It’s ok listening to the fan of the Xbox when you are running around shooting green monsters, beacuse – well, you can’t hear the fans. But when watching a quiet movie, it’s very annoying listening to the fans spinning and spinning. The only thing coming from the Media Center is the ticking of the harddisk. I can live with that.

Then – the things I don’t like…

Media Center – can be (much) better

Stability. I have to restart the Media Center every second day. It’s very unstable. It freezes, doesn’t display colors (goes to black and white for no reason), plays audio but not video, and the opposite, loose the connection to the net, and slows down to the point when even arrowing up and down feels like syrup. “It’s probably not set up right”. Yes, I hear you. Maybe it is. But it’s set up by clever people, and why should I have to tweak and tweak to make it work? I have this philosophy: Things should just work. The Media Center does not. I feel like I’m running a bad beta.

The guide. It sucks. Yes, it’s on the love-list too. But it could be so much better. Lot’s of channels are missing, like MTV. And when the stations change their schedule, it takes ages before the guide updates. One of the major networks in Norway were on strike some time ago, and the guide on the Media Center were totally wrong. Adding stations to the guide is way to difficult. And there’s no info about where it comes from, and no feedback button to complain.

Programming. In the guide, every program is set up as a separate program. So if there are five short movies in the childrens program one afternoon, I have to add all five of them to record everything. That’s fair enough. So I have added a timebased recording: Record whatever is aired between 1800 and 1840 on NRK1 every weekday. Works perfectly. BUT – when I look at the guide, the Media Center doesn’t show me this. It only shows programs that are added one by one (with a red circle). So it looks like I’m not recording these programs. Lame. At least there should be a red line at the top or something.

Same program 15 times. After returning from Japan, I added a keyword search in the Media Center: “Record everything that has “Japan” in the title or description. Nice feature. So now I have 15 recordings of the match between Bhutan and Montserrat in 2002. Heh. Somehow the Media Center doesn’t understand that I don’t want the same program 15 times, even if National Geographic airs it at different times every time.

Photos. I sent most of our digital pictures into the Media Center. It’s nice being able to watch pictures from the couch, with friends of family. But it’s like iPhoto 1998: No smart folders, which means that I can’t make an album that takes all pictures containing “Japan” in album, and a five star rating. Oh, no rating either. And the rotation doesn’t work. All good digital cameras have a feature that mark the EXIF data with information about whcih way the camera was held when the picture was taken. This works perfectly on the Mac, but the Media Center doesn’t understand it. And it takes 6 clicks (!!!) to rotate a picture (feel free to enlighten me in the comments if I’m just stupid). No way if I’m going to manually rotate 4000 pictures…

Videos. Why isn’t there a way to move a recorded movie from recorded content to movies? Maybe there is? I have some good movies recorded from tv, that I want to keep – forever. So it would be natural to put them in the Movies category. Also: Why isn’t it possible to set a new starting point and end point to a recording? If I record a great movie, and there’s 12 minutes of advertising in front of it, it should be possible to tell the Media Center that every time I watch that movie it should start at 12:08, not 0:00.

OK, that’s my list. Again: Feel free to comment if I have missed out on some great feature or key combination.

My main point is: Media Center is a great product that is too hard to use, and has too many errors. I’m sure the Media Center in Vista will be much better. But until then, I would not recommend people buying a Media Center unless there are at least one person around that is geeky enough to google for solutions, and tweaking the system when it behaves badly.

But – if you are that kind of person, go ahead. You’ll love it. And you could probably just drop the googling and go right to Eirik’s HTPC pages, especially these tree articles:

Recommended HTPC hardware
HTPC Frontend roundup
The media center software list

The Enquirer article sums it up nicely:

The technology is good, if a bit too confusing for the general consumer to get so excited about they’ll actually part with their cash.

True.

Update: Krunker.com has lots of screenshots from the preview of Media Center in Vista. Looks nice, and even better than Media Center in XP. But the preview version chrashed a lot:

MCE frequently crashed on me when I alt-tabbed back into Windows Vista. I would also lose the video at times if I switched between applications. However, I expect Microsoft to iron out these issues before the final release of Vista which is right around the corner.

We’ll see. I have a feeling that Media Center needs to impress a LOT to make normal people buy PCs for their living rooms…

What I like the best is the fact that you need to move more to use it: You use a pen and make circles, lines across the desktop. Not the static mouse we all have gotten so used to. In other words: More Africa in your computer.

Dunechaser does it again. This time he has made a set of co-called minifigs with “Geek Luminaries”. The above is of course Steve Jobs with a first generation iPod (BTW, this demonstrates the beauty of the iPod design: What other gadget could be immediately recognized as itself with just one simple piece of Lego…?)

See also the corresponding post on his blog.

Others include Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds (with a penguin), Larry Wall, Steve Wozniak, Charles Babbage, Tim Berners-Lee and Jeff Bezos – on a Segway!

Custom made Lego

And here’s an idea for Lego: Start making a total list of all bricks you make. Every single one. Put it on a web page.

And when people like Dunechaser make models like these, make an easy system for people to tag their pictures with the names of all the bricks they have used. Example: The Steve Jobs model is 5 pieces, or bricks. The hair, the head, the upper body, the legs and the iPod. And I guess you could say that the hands are changable to other colors to, so then it’s 7 pieces.

If all these had a number, one could add these numbers in the description of the drawing, and put it in some kind of format that was clickable. And which set me right to the “Custom Lego” webpage. A form was automatically filled in, and all the little pieces were picked up by a robot in a Lego storage somewhere, and sent to me.

Imagine the coolness of this: There are thousands or millions of Lego figures that people have created and put on the web. But unless you – like Dunechaser – have collected a huge number of Lego bricks and pieces, you’re not able to make Steve or Bill or Linus yourself, even if you can figure out which pieces that are used in the models.

Does anyone know if there is something similar for the Mac, or if it is possible to port it to OS X? See more pictures made with Chaoscope here and here.

The picture in Dagbladet shows Eirik’s nice living room, but I’m still a bit worried. I have to call him and tell him that there’s a man standing in his closet. According to Hollywood there’s only two options: Wife’s lover or axe murderer. Or maybe its the goatse man…

I’ve been noticing lately that I could really use an easier way to trigger certain things on my computer. I’m thinking perhaps some sort of foot pedal is the way to go. “Right-arrowing into” items in Quicksilver comes to mind. I’d love to be able to use a foot switch to navigate folders, etc. in QS. I’m sure more ues would become quickly apparent.

Three products are so far suggested:

• Savant Elite Programmable USB Foot Switches
• X-keys® Foot Pedal (3 switches)
• Footmouse

NuLOOQ

I also came over the new NuLOOQ input device from Logitech. It’s a wheel-y-kind of thing with software that makes it easier to access tools and menus faster. You can download a 30-day free trial version of the software and try it without the actual USB device. If you have used the NuLOOQ (what a name!), I’m interested in hearing from you.

Jump to hit return

The Xkeys site mentioned above, also sell an amazing collection of USB devices, including the X-keys® USB Switch Interface (12 Ports), which let you put up to 12 buttons and pedals to it. It would be cool if some of these buttons were bigger and that you had to hit them really hard to make them work. Example: You had to punch a big red button to check your e-mail. Or to update your RSS feeds. How’s that for productivity?

To get some action, I guess I could put one button on the ceiling, so that I had to jump up to hit it. Maybe put the return key on that one? LOL. I would get in shape in no time. And would have to keep towels and extra t-shirts next to my editing desk.

Chew Chew…

The weirdest controller is the RailDriver Desktop Train Cab Controller, originally made for controlling the Microsoft Train Simulator, but I guess you could use it for anything that use USB controllers.

“What’s pissing me off is that it uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. You’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It’s imprisoning.”

Africa is still far away…

And now it’s 2006. Still no Africa in your computer. Maybe even worse than before. People sit still for hours and hours, using four fingers and their eyes locked at 45 cms. Bad bad.

So StepUI from Microsoft is a step (pun intended) in the right direction.

There are lots of dance pads and alternative input devices out there. But the OS need to be able to use them in an effective way, or nobody will use them. I hope Microsoft and Apple will implement these things, and not just make fun projects of them.

EMIL!!!!!!

Also have a look at what I call EMIL – Exercise Machine Interchange Language, a new standard for storing data from exercise machines (treadmills etc.) and moving them between different machines and online storage.

vCard

So I got an idea. And if it already exists, feel free to tell me in the comments below! Here’s the idea: My Mac has an Adress book with my contacts, and my own adress data. I can export any person as a vCard and e-mail that to someone. When the person who receives my vCard clicks on it, it will open the default contact manager and put my data in there.

This works on any modern OS, Macs and PCs. Most modern laptops also have 802.11. Or WiFi. Or Airport. Many names.

Broadcast it!

I would like to have a meny item under the Airport icon in OS X. It should read: “Broadcast vCard”.

What it does is to listen for other’s sending me their vCards, and also sending out mine. When it finds them, the OS show me a list of who else did this around me, and let me check off which ones I allow to get my card. The others in the room do the same. This is to prevent anyone else around to get all our vCards without our permission. Like this:

It’s crude, but you get the picture. What do you think? Would this be useful? Would it be hard to put this on OS X or XP/Vista?

Update
Now this is “almost” possible. See Bonsoir, here’s my vCard.

“If there’s one thing that really stands out about Apple lately, it’s that its products keep getting smaller and smaller. Just as Apple shrank the iPod with the nano (and subsequently its packaging), the company’s latest consumer software offerings are also arriving in ultra-thin, super-small retail packaging. The retail boxes are now just big enough to house a single dual-layer DVD and documentation.”

Excellent. Like the author of the article, I have wondered why software boxes have been so big? Maybe it was to prevent theft? And of course to stand out in the shelves.

But the software industry should just agree to make smaller boxes. It saves them shipping, storage space, production costs – and trees.

Last summer I installed lots of new software, both OS, applications and plug-ins, on five computers. You wouldn’t believe the pile of boxes by my desk when finished. Most of the plug-ins were big A4-size boxes with a single CD inside. Fun for the kids (who played with all the boxes), crap for nature.

The worst ones are memory cards and accessories to gaming consoles. The last Xbox controller I got, was wrapped in a plastic that was amazing: No knife or scissor in our house could open it. I tried everything. And in the end I had to search in the woods for hours, until I found an old jedi knight living alone in a cave. After some nagging, he agreed to open the controller with his lightsabre. Which aaaaalmost broke during the operation. I’m sure they could make a space shuttle with the same material, with no problems with heating during landing.

So do nature a favor: Mail the URL of the Gizmodo story to your software developer.

“Apple has finally done software packing right and hopefully sent a telegram to the rest of the huge-friggin’ software box industry.”

Jeff has been raving about his ever since. I asked him “has it crashed?” He says he hasn’t had a single crash yet in dozens of hours of play. He says it’s the best device he’s ever purchased.

What? When did playing for dozens of hours without chrashing become a sign of quality? I’m suspecting someone isn’t used to things w-o-r-k-i-n-g…

I’m putting my standards high above that! I want quality games and machines not chrashing at all.

It’s from security cameras at the Panama Canal, timelapsing 1 week into 11 minutes. The video is made by Stephan van der Palen, and he has made the software that made this possible, PhotoLapse 2.0:

PhotoLapse is a freeware jpg to avi convertor.
It will convert any number of jpg into a (by codec compressed) movie.
I created it for making timelapse movies of large series of digital jpg stills
and couldn’t find any freeware programs to do the trick.
PhotoLapse needs no installing nor does it modify your registry, just an executable.

It’s for Windows only. See other examples of work made with PhotoLapse at Google Video.

OS X for Intel would change the PC landscape like no other operating system has or could. Apple should open-source their operating system, port Openoffice.org to Aqua and bundle it for Intel PC’s. Offer it for $199 for a home edition and $299 for a professional edition and the world will say goodbye to Windows for good.

Why? OS X is a stable and secure platform and offers the proprietary multi-media applications lacking in Linux. Reports of OS X for Intel indicate it performs well, has a great interface and provides a better overall experience than Windows. Some say the experience is vastly improved.

With Microsoft Vista borrowing heavily from the OS X look and feel, why wouldn’t someone want the original?

Link

Picture from Stepmania.

Seems like quite a few has started dancing already. Also, here’s a list of dance pads that works.

Photo by Niall Kennedy.

It’s so bad that I wonder if there are any designers at Microsoft at all? Can’t be. It’s so bad that good sites write long interesting articles on it.

If you’re new to Last.fm, it works like this: You download a plugin for your music player software. There are a number of plugins found here. Install the proper plugin for your OS and player. Some of the plugins also works with mp3-players like the iPod. So when you sync your iPod, it sends the tracks played to the plugin.

Register with Last.fm and create a free account.

Next time you play a song, the plugin will send the artist and track name to Last.fm. Now the whole world can see what you’re playing. Scary for some, cool for some! My Last.fm status page is here.

When you have registered (or if you already are a Last.fm user), head over to the brilliantdays.com group, and join. When 15 people have joined, you can see the collective music taste of the members at the group page.

7) On clients, they want to choose the highest-reach platforms. That doesn’t mean a Windows app. Or even an app that runs only in IE. It must run on every variant of Linux and Macintosh too.

In my opinion, this alone is good enough reason.

I’m so tired of Microsoft making non-standard stuff that doesn’t work in other browser, and on other OSes. One of the worst examples is Microsoft’s own IE 5 browser for Macintosh, that has msn.com as the default homepage. But what happens when you try to msn.com with a Mac? Doesn’t work.

From Tuaw.com:

They’ve made a change to http://www.msn.com that crashes Internet Explorer 5 for the Macintosh. Yup, that’s right…Microsoft has changed the coding on the default homepage for their IE5 browser on the Mac that crashes the very browser in question. And it gets worse. Since the only easy way to change the default homepage in IE5 is to do it in the browser itself (in the Preferences) and the browser is crashing with a spinning beachball of death (SBOD) when you launch it, there’s now a classic Catch-22. How can users change the homepage to something else if you have to do it in the browser, but the browser crashes loading the page?

Why can’t Microsoft code msn.com so that every browser that follows standards can use it without problems?

Now Microsoft is planning a new service called Windows Live. Will this work on other platforms? I don’t think so. Many people use Windows at work and Mac at home. Or the opposite. Or Linux at work and Windows at home. As the biggest player in the field, Microsoft should make it possible for people to use other OSes on their pages and services.

By making services uncomaptible with other OSes, Microsoft forces people over to their platform. Because people who are not as nerd-like as many bloggers, don’t want trouble. They just want to things that works. Whichever computer they’re sitting at.

Update: I might be wrong (and it would be so nice if I were!): They are trying.

Update2: Also see the Live.com blog at Spaces.

Update3:: Russell Beattie thinks Windows Live is Monoploy 4.0. And man, is that powerpoint behind Bill Gates ugly. Do they even have designers at Microsoft?!? Looks like some car sales person’s first slide after using Powerpoint for… 30 minutes. And what’s with that old iMac down in the right corner? Oh, I see. It’s there to fit the excellent blue color scheme…

A very short summary:
- Public broadcasters should use open standards
- People in general agree on this
- Microsoft Windows Media is not an open standard
- The public broadcasters should choose something else
- People question the knowledge of the broadcasters

Is there an open streaming platform that can meet the demands of broadcasters that wants an alternative to Windows Media. Eirik at Eirikso.com wants to know.

Still, I fail to find one single blog, comment or article that actually suggest a complete, working alternative.

Post suggestions to the article, or use Del.icio.us with tag “opencast”.

This isn’t about surfing the Web anymore – it’s about having a lifestyle that doesn’t require you to think or reprogram. The days of the blinking 12:00 are long gone, but it’s obvious Microsoft and its vendors don’t know that yet.

Chris Pirillo thinks.

Apple’s iPod success shows that its not being the first, or being the one with the greatest number of features that translates into market share. Instead it is helping millions of consumers ease into the digital lifestyle that is the key.

Om thinks that the “Broadband-over-Video market” will take off by the end of 2006, and that Apple will have a more complete offering by then.

I agree. This is a test: Will people download video over broadband? I think they will, and by this time next year the iTunes store will have much more to offer: TV programs from all over the world, music videos, short films etc.

How long do you think it will take before a short film festival or animation film festival teams up with Apple to offer most movies presented in the iTunes store? Not long.

And by next year, the first Macs will be on Intel and Apple will have fixed the shortcomings of Front Row 1.0.

As big and as important as Microsoft is, the coverage of the company is quite mediocre. This is particularly true in the mainstream press. The reason for this is that today’s newspaper and magazine tech writers know little about computers and are all Mac users. It’s a fact. This is why when Microsoft actually does have a good idea, people look to trash it out of hand. With 90 percent of the mainstream writers being Mac users, what would you expect?

The logic of this is amazing. Windows has a 90+ marketshare, Macs about 4%. And then it turns out that all media is controlled by Mac-loving fanatics? Wow.

Scoble does of course agree:

At blogging conferences you’ll see something like 60% Macs. So, will they be able to write authoritatively about anything that comes down on the Windows side of the house?

More great logic. Because 60% at conferences use Powerbooks, Apple will get better PR than Microsoft? Hmmm.

I have read lots of rave reviews of Xbox 360 and Windows Vista. And people have slaughtered the iPod. Of course people can write that something they use themselves is crap. Or needs to be improved.

I think the there are two reasons why Apple sometimes are more hyped than Microsoft.

1) Steve Jobs is better communicator than Bill Gates. He knows how to put up a show. Bill Gates is an amazingly clever person but hasn’t the charisma of Steve Jobs.

2) Apple delivers. When Apple show a new product, it is available in the Apple Store the next hour most of the time. The biggest example of this NOT being true is faster G5 processors. So they change to Intel next year.

This commenter on Scoble hits it right on the head:

Look at the difference in the announcements from Apple and Microsoft. Apple is very secretive about future products. When they do make an announcement, you can order their product from their web site. Microsoft hypes their products for years telling everyone how great their software will be in a few years. When they do have a sincere announcement about a new product, it gets lost in all their old hype announcements and Apple’s real announcements.

BTW, I love the mac, and use Windows XP over 20 hours a week. I love the Xbox, and will can’t wait to get the 360.

I even asked Scoble for countdown bagdes to put on my site, but never got some. So there you go. Apple are better marketers. Dvorak should watch some movies. Smell some flowers. Have some wine. So tired.