Notes from ‘The Fringe’: New Apple iCandy dazzles

Good-bye Office 2004, hello iWork ’08. And welcome new iMacs and .Mac boost — all well worth skipping LinuxWorld Expo for, writes Tom Yager.

I wear that moniker proudly, remembering the not-too-distant days when Apple, too, was dismissed as a fringe player and when Jobs himself was written off by the financial media for investing in some crazy idea, considered by pundits inside the sparsely populated fringe as the enemy of profit and market share — namely, innovation. Apart from habitually being at odds with conventional wisdom, I share one other trait with Jobs: Far more often than not, when everybody else writes me off as an idiot, I turn out to be right. It’s just a matter of patience. It’s OK with me that by the time the rest of the world catches up to my way of thinking, they’ve forgotten who told the truth in the first place.

My editors have my permission to call me “Fringely.”

But enough about me. The big news from Apple’s Town Hall is the three models of completely redone iMacs. Think Cinema Display but with a flush, glossy glass display area where the inset matte viewport whisks users away from mind-numbing PC mediocrity. The iMac’s reworking in aluminum and gloss-finished glass is as much about pulling commercial buyers into iMac as it is about imbuing desktop Macs with iPhone-inspired style. Jobs repeated the standard iMac line about getting rid of PC cords and cables with iMac’s all-in-one design, but he’s also after the market that uses notebooks as desktops.

Now, why do that when Apple’s MacBook Pro leads in “portable workstation” notebooks? Because Apple wants to get ahead of any potential saturation in the Mac market by moving to a “two Macs for every user” policy. Jobs also alluded to the fact that the least-expensive 20-inch iMac is now more cost-effective than a MacBook Pro, and like MacBook Pro, iMac is now expandable to 4GB of RAM. Jobs had an unusual repeating theme in his presentation that got its first mention in the drumming out of the 17-inch iMac for the product line: “We’re obsoleting our own products.” If you can’t fight a market perception, own it, use it.

I’m an exceedingly happy guy because Apple addressed a too-long-neglected peripheral: the Mac desktop keyboard, which has, in recent years, inflicted everything from digital discomfort to nausea. Hooray, it’s dead, replaced by a thin, aluminum number that’s reminiscent of MacBook Pro. That keyboard has wavered in quality as well, but I find that in the latest Santa Rosa MacBook Pro, Apple has come back to its senses. A user’s rating of his experience is only as good as the poorest human interface device. Yes, the new keyboard will help drive Mac sales, and it’s available in Bluetooth and wired.

As an aside, I’m typing this in Apple’s parking lot, unaided by Apple’s press packet, so you’ll find details in my Enterprise Mac blog after I get back to my hotel.

Other notable new goodies from Town Hall included iLife ’08, iWork ’08, and .Mac, Apple’s personal media creation suite, business productivity suite, and online service, respectively. In iLife ’08, the standout component for business and professional users will be iMovie. Apple has moved the video editing process from the storyboard straight to the content bin. In other words, the window of thumbnails representing the clips, titles, and graphics that you used in your video is where you actually put your video together. Apple goosed the performance considerably, so you can finally “scrub” through video clips at higher than regular playback speed. Previously, you had to go to Final Cut Express or Studio to get that, and it changes the entire production workflow. As I predicted, Apple has overhauled .Mac to make it the burgeoning center of Apple’s online universe. It raised the puny 1GB storage limit to 10GB. Click on “send to Web Gallery” in iPhoto or iMovie and .Mac will build you a very Web 2.0-y gallery, complete with multiple downloadable resolutions of images and videos. The integration, as well as the .Mac Web Gallery’s overall design, is fabulous.

Bye-bye Office 2004 for Mac, hello iWork ’08. Maybe. It’s too early for me to judge–Jobs’ demo was a little hasty, and I don’t have the software yet–but Apple blended at least three things into iWork that make a big difference for Office users. Pages has taken on a new word processor mode to complement its powerful page layout mode. It also handles Word-compatible change tracking, and Apple has finally done a spreadsheet called Numbers.

I have to drive out to Sun to see its new 64-thread SPARC CPU, so I need to wrap this up fast with one killer feature and one prediction that might have gotten past those dreary mainstream types. Keynote, iWork’s presentation program, has a bunch of new effects and templates, as you’d expect, but it does something that, if it works, is pretty incredible: Instant Alpha. This makes the background of a scanned or imported graphic (I don’t think it works on video) transparent, making nonrectangular graphical elements much easier to create. I wonder if Keynote will allow you to save that alpha-mapped graphic as a 32-bit PNG image to use on a Web site.

The sweet part of Apple’s raising of .Mac’s standard storage from 1GB to 10GB will come in or shortly after October, when Leopard brings Time Machine automated backup to Mac clients everywhere. Since .Mac is so closely married to the Mac, it stands to reason that those who aren’t using those $100-per-year gigs for video and photos will want to put them to use for online backup.

Freeing oneself from the bonds of conformity inspires all kinds of visions for what might be done with the technology around us. As long as you come by a dissenting position honesty and defensibly, I recommend speaking your mind. If you get a nickname, own it. Use it.