Wow, what a day for Mac people!
This had to be one of the best MacWorld Keynotes ever. I’m blown away that the rumor sites were right about the Mini Mac. That’s a lot of Mac for $499. Would I buy one? I don’t know. I kind of promised myself I’d only buy laptops from now on, but that would make a great machine to dedicate to GarageBand.
Which was also updated. The two best features in the new version are multitrack recording (even Jen was excited about that; we can lay down bass and guitar at the same time now) and a built-in tuner. The tuner isn’t much, but sometimes it’s the details that count.
I love the changes to the rest of the iLife suite as well. I’m going to save a bunch of money on Christmas pictures this year. Jen is excited about the changes in iMovie and iDVD. Personally, I’m relieved to finally see iWork. Something to update AppleWorks! I hate Word with a passion, becuase it’s so freakin’ overly helpful. But iWork will open my old AppleWorks docs, and my current Word docs, so I’m happy. And I love that Keynote 2 can read and write Flash. That’s so cool. I’ve been using Keynote 1.1 at church, and it’s nice, but PowerPoint definitely has it beat in some areas. I mostly use Keynote because it does drop shadows on text sooooo much better. Keynote 2 should give PowerPoint more of a run for its money.
The iPod Shuffle is cool, but I wouldn’t buy one personally, at least not at this point. I have a 30GB iPod already, so I don’t really have a need. Now if I didn’t have an iPod, I’d certainly be tempted to get one, just for in the car.
And some surprising news: Bare Bones, the awesome company that they are, has released TextWrangler 2.0. Not only that – they’re giving it away! It’s the return of BBEdit Lite! I just shortened my dock. I had icons on it for SubEthaEdit (for most text editing needs, I like its syntax coloring) and BBEdit Lite (for when I needed heavy duty search and replace). Now I’m back to one, since TextWrangler does both. TextWrangler is a stupid name, but for free, sure, I’ll use it.