Apple has made the process very simple though: the first time you boot up your new machine, you’ll be asked to pick another Mac on your network. I usually connect to my network via wireless LAN, which is a bit slow for large amounts of data, so I just connected my old and new Macbook via an ethernet cable. 

The migration assistent will then check to see whether a compatible version of Migration assistent is installed on your old Mac. If not, you can install it off the DVDs that come with the new Macbook. To prevent unauthorized data access over the network, you’ll then need to enter a 4 digit code on your old Mac and your data migration will start. That’s it!

This process was very quick and painless using Firewire and I was sceptical whether Apple would be able to make it just as easy over a network connection - but it’s very straightforward.

Dropbox

Yes - I know I’m raving about Dropbox again. But we needed a way to share files and code with a 5 member team, without resorting to e-mailing things back and forth. With various team members using Mac, Linux and Windows, Dropbox’s OS-level, cross-platform integration is a perfect fit.

Setting things up is simple too: Simply create a Folder on the Dropbox website and e-mail a link to that folder to your team-mates. They can free Dropbox accounts (which offer 2GB of storage) and simply drag & drop in their own files or revise yours. But don’t worry - Dropbox has a full revision history, so you can revert to an older version of your file if somebody screws up.

Google Docs

Whilst Dropbox is great for sharing files, there are occasions where you might all be working together on a single file or project  in a local environment. In those cases I’d normally suggest using the excellent SubEthaedit collaborative writing tool, but unfortunately it’s only available for OS X.

Instead, we’ve recently started using Google Docs. It allows you to share a file you’re working on with other members of a team and is a good way to split up assignments without having the hassle of merging the work at the end.

The editing tools are fairly basic and there’s no easy way to redefine things such as headline styles without resorting to CSS hackery, but it’s a good way to pull your text together before you put the finishing touches on in a “real” word processor. 

MIA: Basecamp Webapp for Students

These tools are pretty good, but what’s really missing is a decent webapp to pull these types of tools together in a way tools such as Basecamp do. The free Basecamp account is pretty good, but the lack of file hosting is a pretty large omission and students aren’t going to pay for this type of service. A lot of colleges and universities use software such as Moodle to offer these types of services, but they’re mostly geared towards entire courses, rather than smaller group projects.

So if anyone feels like stepping up to the plate, I’m sure there’s a market for this type of webapp!

Whether G3 vs. G4, Combodrive vs. Superdrive, Mirroring vs. Screen Spanning, Plastic vs. Aluminum or Integrated Graphics vs. Dedicated Graphics, Apple’s low-end offerings over the years have always included some kind of “gotcha” to keep them from cannibalizing Powerbook / Macbook Pro sales.

But in my opinion, there’s just no way most customers would be “upsold” to a better machine that’s almost twice as expensive. Switchers especially would probably be more likely to reconsider the Mac altogether if something they considered essential was only available on the “Pro” machine.

The new Macbooks finally have the whole package: A sleek look, great CPUs, good enough graphics and a Superdrive. The only feature that’s really missing is Firewire - which is arguably a “Professional’s” standard. The differentiation between the two lines is now really more about size and performance and not about whether you’re willing to make the sacrifice and put up with a crippled machine as it used to be.

In that respect, the new Macbooks are in many ways the spiritual successors to the Powerbook 12″. The clock speeds are much closer to the Pro models, they are only missing one or two minor features and the price points are also comparable. 

This is a good move by Apple and I think we might even see these new 13″ models convince a whole new set of “on the fence” consumers to finally switch.

Support the site, purchase your new Macbook at Amazon.com!

Macbook 13″ 2,0 Ghz
Macbook 13″ 2,4 Ghz

Macbook Pro 15″: 2,4 Ghz
Macbook Pro 15″: 2,5 Ghz 

“Freedomtime” is basically a countdown app that lets users track George W. Bush’s last days in office. It’s obviously designed to poke fun at the current US administration, but isn’t really overly offensive in my opinion.

The application was rejected by Apple, so the developer wrote Steve an email. Steve responded personally (in keeping with the semi-new communication strategy Apple has been making use of) with the following statement:

Even though my personal political leanings are democratic, I think this app will be offensive to roughly half our customers.  What’s the point?

    Steve

Sometimes though, you’ll come across features or behaviours that leave you scratching your head. Today we’ll take a look at one OS feature that feels as though it was added with 10.0 and forgotten about ever since: Clippings.

Text Clippings

If you’ve ever selected a bit of text in Safari and dragged it to your Desktop, OS X will save it in a “Text Clipping” file. Double-clicking this file will open a small window displaying your text. That’s all you can actually do in that window though: You can’t select, drag or edit the text in any way.

The only way you can re-use the text is by manually selecting “copy” from the menu bar and pasting it into another application, or by dragging the text clippings file itself into another app. Both are fairly non-obvious to the casual user: The copy & paste method because you can’t actually select the text to copy (usually a requirement for copy & paste) and the file-drag method because you don’t always expect dragging a file to result in its contents being pasted (the exact result of doing this will also vary from app to app).

(Actually some experimenting reveals you can select text: Dragging the cursor over part of a clipping and then using copy & paste will only paste the part of the text that you dragged over. It turns out you are selecting - but there’s no highlighting to indicate your selection - which means this feature is actually more fucked up than I had ever dare to imagine).

Image Clippings

These are actually harder to produce: Some apps such as Photoshop will create them if you drag a selection to the Desktop. Most apps default to saving a copy of the current image file to the desktop instead, so it could be argued Image Clippings are only still around for legacy purposes. 

As with Text Clippings, you can’t really do anything with the clipping except view the image and there’s no really obvious way to retrieve your content to re-use it elsewhere. In fact they’re actually even harder to re-use than Text Clippings: You can’t open an Image Clipping in Preview or any other Image editor I tried. Dragging it to Mail will attach it to a new message and dragging it to TextEdit will open a surprisingly low-quality version of the image. The only way to access your image is via the Clipboard - pasting the image will usually work.

Missing Modern Amenities 

Neither file format supports thumbnail previews or even Apple’s much-touted Quick Look feature and Spotlight will only find your Clipping’s file names.

Get to the Point…

Okay, enough snarkyness: Clippings are an interesting idea that were probably great in the NeXTStep era, but are not very practical nowadays.

A better solution would be to simply create “proper” files that other applications can interact with normally. Instead of creating Text Clippings, the Finder could create .txt (or preferably .rtf to preserve formatting) files with your text contents and instead of creating Picture Clippings, store a .PNG file with your image contents. Both are file formats most users are accustomed to and can be used by most applications.

Hopefully this is one forgotten corner of OS X that Apple can finally dust off and give some new spit and polish in Snow Leopard.

Apple also gives a reason for keeping the NDA in place for so long: They claim the NDA gave them an additional layer of protection for the innovations found within the iPhone’s software and that they’ve now dropped it in favour of promoting the platform amongst developers.

I see this as Apple’s reaction to all the recent flak they’ve been getting over the “closed” nature of the iPhone in general… perhaps new AppStore submission guidelines are on the way as well?

However, in recent years Apple has been more chatty than ever before: Steve Jobs has written a whopping total of 2 blog posts, and even allowed 3 entire posts about the Mobile Me launch before silencing poor David G. 

Traditional Media Communication

Apple’s primary channels of communication haven’t really changed since Jobs returned to Apple in 97 though. They are (in order of importance):

- Live events

- Press Releases

- Traditional media outlets

However these are mostly put to use when large product announcements are made:

The live events are self-explanatory: a Steve Jobs keynote is guaranteed to cause weeks of speculation and coverage all across the internet and news media. These events are supplemented by Apple press releases and Jobs will occasionally even give TV and magazine interviews as well. The “Big Two” tech journalists, Walt Mossberg and David Pogue usually have their reviews ready to go immediately as well.

Why does “the Media” play along? Because an Apple product launch has the potential to be something truly newsworthy and revolutionary. These expectations are amplified by weeks of speculation on the internet, increasing the attention paid to these types of announcements and any stories about them.

“Underground messages”

More interesting though is the new approach Apple seems to be taking in regards to announcements between large announcements. Instead of relying on their traditional outlets, they now use three alternative channels of communication:

- Articles by Steve Jobs posted to Apple.com

- Email responses to complaints sent to stevejobs@apple.com

These types of messages receive attention firstly because it’s so unusual to hear anything besides meticulously prepared PR releases or rehearsed events from Apple. But they also receive coverage because they almost always include some new product news or information as well:

Both of Jobs’ Apple.com articles so far have had a political motive. The first was an attempt to force the music industry’s hand in the DRM wars, the second was a response to negative PR Apple had been hit with by Greenpeace (who carry a substantial amount of authority in Europe). 

The secret is the sauce

But the real secret is the slip of the tongue that is almost always included. “A Greener Apple” included the tidbit that Apple was planning to introduce LED-backlit displays during 2007. That piece would have been a boring bit of eco-fluff on any other company website, the LED backlighting revelation made it a news piece.

Emails to customers purportedly from Jobs seem to serve a slightly different purpose that his “blog” posts: They are usually designed to address customer criticism about a product directly. One revealed that the iPod touch would be gaining calendar editing functionality, whilst two more recent emails have divulged information about the iPhone 3G connectivity issues. Coverage on the internet was against assured by the calendar functionality revelation in the first case and the promise of a new software update by September in the second. 

This allows Apple to address concerns amongst users effectively, without having to go through the embarrassment of publicly announcing shortcomings.

Conclusion

Apple’s legendary secrecy has also been seen as a weakness by some pundits: Whilst other companies will readily comment on ongoing issues they may be having through spokespeople or interviews, Apple traditionally hasn’t. The new avenues of communication they’ve opened up seem to suggest a willingness to address issues more directly than previously - a good move for consumers.

So far it’s worked great: The VPN connection is established within a few seconds and all applications are able to access services through the VPN tunnel immediately. 

Browsing speed over wifi doesn’t seem to be impacted at all, as I’d already mentioned in my first look.

My only gripe? An on/off switch for your default VPN connection that’s accessible from the top Settings menu (similar to the current “Airplane Mode” toggle) would be useful for users who frequently need to access the VPN client.

So here’s a few productivity apps that students might find are worth checking out. Affordable, intuitive and ideal for quick notes, references, links and more.

VoodooPad

As I mentioned in my look at VoodooPad Lite a few months back, VoodooPad is a great tool for storing all your notes, links, images, PDFs etc in a wiki-like structure. This ability to create your own structure out of a collection of notes is really useful and as simple as typing in a text file.

I really enjoy the simplicity of this app, however there are limits to it’s usefulness as a general note-taking app, mainly the way images and other files are handled. Images and other files are either linked to or pasted in, meaning you either have to click each file link to view the file’s contents, or you have huge images in your document that you can’t resize. On the other hand, VoodooPad offers support for custom scripts and can run code in various languages with a simple keystroke, so CS students will love VoodooPad for storing code snippets.

Overall it’s very useful for text-based notes and the wiki-like structure is a very flexible way to organise information.

VoodooPad 3 - $29.95, free Lite version available

Schoolhouse 2

This awesome, free app has a slick UI that allows you to easily track and manage your assignments and other homeworks tasks on your Mac. It can also help you collaborate with partners, keep track of notes and request feedback from your instructor. 

Whilst it’s probably a little overblown for most freshman-year assignments, it’s great for larger projects that need quickly become unmanageable without some sort of structure or if you have a lot of projects going simultaneously. 

I ran into one crash whilst trying it out, but it’s fairly solid overall and is a great app at an unbeatable price. Definitely take this one for a spin and consider donating if you like it.

Schoolhouse 2 - No license fee, donations accepted

Circus Ponies Notebook

Notebook’s UI basically mimics your typical college ring-bound notepad and lets you sort your notes and files into pages inside a notepad. The concept works pretty well, but I found that the navigation tabs for individual pages  can become a bit cluttered if you’re not diligent about filing pages into sub-categories.

Notebook has great support for other file types though: Just drag in PDF files, images, timetables etc. and they’ll all show up in your document as images that you can resize and position as you need them. A double-click will then open the file in its native application. This is a great for creating a rich-document notebook entry with a proper layout.

Notebook 3 is due out soon and new features such as sketching, support for graphs and more have been announced. Anyone who buys Notebook 2 now will receive a free upgrade to version 3 when it’s released.

Circus Ponies Notebook - Academic license: $29.95

That’s it for this roundup, more Back-to-school tips are coming soon though, so be sure to check back or subscribe!

The Genius feature is the only one that is really new, whilst the Grid view is mostly a new take on the old “Albums with cover thumbnail” list. To be honest, whilst it’s visually quite appealing, I don’t find it very practical for actually finding music. iTunes very rarely finds the covers for all the songs in larger libraries (CoverScout anyone?) which will leave most users with a lot of black missing covers.

The same goes for the Genres Grid-view: Whilst Apple includes attractive artwork for the most common genres, others such as Funk, Grunge and Porn Groove (don’t ask) are instead assigned the cover of one of the artists within that Genre, leaving you with an odd mix of album art and genre-designs.

The Genius feature works fairly well and seems like a great way to find new music or just rediscover your own library. Whilst some have suggested Apple could have gone with one of the existing similar services Pandora or Last.fm, it’s easy to come up with half a dozen reasons for not doing so (e.g. tracks not available on iTunes, require customers to sign up to another service, both not available in all the countries iTunes is etc.).

The service first needs about an hour to analyze all of your tracks (your mileage may vary) and then uploads that information to Apple. I almost expected the upload not to work yesterday, given the amount of users probably trying the new service out, but everything went without a hitch - kudos to the iTunes team!

The visualizer was also updated, as rumored, but isn’t much to write home about in my opinion (who even uses visualizers?). 

Overall iTunes 8 seems like a pretty solid update, even if it’s a bit light on new features. The Genius is pretty cool though and even the iTunes store integration is fairly discreet and doesn’t feel intrusive.