Hey all
I went to the Apple Store yesterday, the one in Regent Street, London and this is what I found from the latest updates.
First of all, the new iMacs. They really do look much better than the previous one, I never really liked that huge white plastic case. Not going into another debate about iMacs being good for games or not, I feel that the 2.4Ghz is really well worth buying. To my feeling this is the most "snappy" processor I ever tried out. Everything opens really fast and the reactions on input is really instantly. At a certain point I felt it was going to well that I started to doubt if those macs were already running OsX.5, but they weren't
Even opening Adobe PhotoShop and Illustrator went really fast but playing around in PhotoShop presented me with the biggest issue I found on... iLife '08.
It seems iPhoto '08 doesn't present itself on your harddrive as being a folder anymore. If you check the Finder you'll see an iPhoto Application Icon. One you can still enter by "Show Package Content" in the Finder but it's impossible to load a picture from the iPhoto '08 library from within PhotoShop
It's not even possible to simply open a picture from within Preview anymore. In the PhotoShop Browser (or Adobe Browser), if you browse to your iPhoto '08 library, you can still press "open" but what happens is... iPhoto '08 opens itself. From within iPhoto you can set PhotoShop as your external Editor but isn't this abit to complicated? Maybe there's a setting in iPhoto '08 to have your library behave as a "folder" or as a "package" but I haven't checked that out.
Pages and Numbers really surprised me a little. Being a designer and although I like to design my own stuff I can imagine that a lot of people will like those packages. Specialy with the choice of templates in both.
I tried out the new keyboard and all I can say is that, after 10 or 15 seconds getting used to the new keys I was totally convinced with it. And when I say "getting used", then I don't mean how the keys feel, but more how I have to put my fingers on the keyboard to strike the correct keys (I can type blind). Smooth is the only thing I can say about that
I tried one of the new Minis also and... gosh... although they do use the Intel Core Duo 2 processors now, it was really dissapointing to feel their "speed"... cause there wasn't much of it. It probably has to do with the graphic powers of the Mini also but realy, this is not somehting you want if you wish instant reactions on any request you have for the system.
