Apple PR pulled out the big guns this week and invited, nay “encouraged” tech and entertainment media luminaries to pack the Yerba Buena Center for Steve Jobs’ “Let’s Rock” in San Francisco on September 9th.

The now-familiar rumors and speculation, with “leaked” photos and drawings that precede these Apple “events” have been flying back and forth for weeks, and soon enough we’ll see how all the pieces fit together. Join us on Tuesday as we twitter the proceedings.

We invite you to follow along with us as the morning unfolds, using the keynote bingo card below to keep track of both likely and rumored items that could appear during the presentation.

Writer Scott Gilbertson has a very cool Mac netbook that cost him only $550.

It’s got a slick black case, weighs nothing, gets hours of battery life and runs Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. It’s not a MacBook Air.

It’s a hacked EeePC — a tiny liliputer , as they’re now called, fresh from Asus, a Tawainese manufacturer best known for PC motherboards.

Gilbertson’s netbook is the device Mac fans have wanted for years: A low-cost cousin to the beautiful but pricey MacBook Air.

It runs like a champ but has a couple of quirks (one big one) and may not be strictly legal, though Apple’s never going to prosecute unless these machines are sold commercially. Hit the jump for details.

Read the rest of this entry »

What appears to be a genuine spy shot of the new iPod nano has surfaced on MacNN (heavily Photoshopped and disguised for some reason) before it got picked up and surfaced for the wider public in this AppleInsider thread.

As rumored, the new nano appears to be taller than the current model, with a rounded body and screen. Presumably, the screen is designed for the iPod to be tilted to watch widescreen movies in landscape mode.

The device is expected to be unveiled at a Steve Jobs “Let’s Rock” special event in San Francisco next Tuesday. But fear not — there’s likely to be other surprises. Apple PR is telling journalists the event is a “big deal,” which implies there’s more than a tarted-up 2G-looking iPod.

Amazon.com is now offering what it calls “instant ad-free movies and TV shows” on Macs, PCs and Sony BRAVIA TV sets at the newly re-branded “Amazon Video On Demand” website.

A few months ago, consumers greeted the giant webertainment service’s “Unbox” partnership with TiVo with a collective yawn, due mainly to complaints about the lack of on-demand streaming options, according to the director of Amazon Video On Demand, Roy Price, who says “the ability to watch content instantly without downloading first was among the most requested features of our customers, and now it’s live–customers can instantly watch the ad-free title of their choice …”

Some promotional videos are free and you can preview the first 2 minutes of any offering. Episodes of TV shows cost $1.99 and movies are $14.99. Movies can also be ‘rented’ for 24 hours for $3.99. Purchasing allows download to two machines and unlimited viewing online. The service claims to stock over 14 thousand movies and 1,200 TV shows including pre-purchase-able rights to upcoming seasons.

Amazon claims to be the only digital video service in the US offering the choice of streaming as well as downloading webertainment content.

BoingBoing guest blogger Lisa Katayama has tracked down an amazing work by Japanese cartoonist Mitsuru Sugaya, recounting the story of the founding of Apple from the 1970s to about 1984. The full series of comics is on uagaya’s web page, and it must be seen, if only for the scene of young Woz speaking to an octopus alien via Ham Radio.

Sugaya via BoingBoing

Shouldn’t the Dems be on the Left and the Repubs on the Right?

Just in case you didn’t get enough of the Democratic and Republican conventions from the mainstream media during the past fortnight, Apple has kindly made the speeches from both conventions available for free on iTunes. The collections include audio files for almost every speaker as well as audio and video for the more prominent ones.

Given how often politicians are known to be for something before they are against it, these could come in handy someday.

Check out our gallery of original artwork from Swedish painter Erik Saxen, who painted the work in 1987 for a huge poster campaign and newspaper run promoting the launch of the Macintosh SE in Sweden.

Saxen is seeking a serious collector for the set of oil paintings (some with mixed media), which are currently in climate-controlled storage in Florida. For additional information and contact links see My Old Mac.

Startup 280 North on Thursday released a new online programming language that promises to bring Mac-like software to the web.

Called Cappuccino, the programing language will allow developers to bring the look and feel of Mac OS X desktop apps to online apps. 280 North promises that online apps will have drag ‘n drop, copy and paste, undo and redo, and document saving functionality simply by pointing your browser at a URL.

A major trend in the development of Web 2.0 functionality is toward applications that work within your browser as opposed to relying on desktop programs that live on your hard drive and use up CPU resources every time you call on them. Cappuccino will let designers create apps like 280 Slides, the highly regarded presentation application the 280 North shop released in June to showcase the framework’s robust capabilities.

Unlike existing web app development frameworks, such as Prototype or Sproutcore, Cappuccino doesn’t expect its developers to know any HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - the languages used traditionally for standards-based web development. Cappuccino’s Objective-J works in every major browser, is completely extendable and comes with useful language features not available in JavaScript.

280 North co-founder Ross Boucher says “Cappuccino is an attempt to restore control of the language and basic building blocks of web development to the developers” and is quick to point out that it’s not about building web pages. “Cappuccino is about building applications - think 280 Slides, GMail, Meebo,” he says. “We believe the future of the core technologies of the web should not be in the hands of a select minority and that no one company [should] control the destiny of any other.”

Cappuccino is being released as open source software under the lesser general public license which Boucher and his colleagues hope will build a strong open source community around the development platform. “We believe in the importance of getting the entire community involved, so that we can experiment and move forward at our own pace.”

In addition to the 280 Slides site, Cappuccino developers have a Flickr Photo Demo and a Puzzle Demo to showcase the platform’s capabilities.

I just caught the “Pizza Box” Get a Mac spot during the Top Design premiere, and it struck me. Not because it’s particularly brilliant — it hits the same mark exactly that all the other college-related Apple ads have lately — but because I realized it was the first time I had actually paid attention to a Get a Mac ad in almost three months.

Nor have I talked about one with anybody in more than a year. People don’t even get upset about it or make parody ads anymore. PC and Mac have been up there so long that I’m expecting them to introduce their children at any minute. Worse than being annoying or controversial, Apple’s core Mac marketing campaign has become the one thing the Cupertino Collective can never allow itself to be: boring.

Apple’s been here before. Switch had its (rather desperate) day. Think Different saved Apple during its darkest times. But each of them eventually outlived its usefulness based on where Apple was as an organization.

Today, Apple has become a powerhouse in media and a top-three computer maker. The iPhone is poised to become as ubiquitous as the iPod. And Get a Mac’s playful jabs are starting to make Apple look small. “Able to run Microsoft Office” isn’t news to anyone who could be swayed by a TV ad. What’s the next narrative? How does Apple start its next growth curve, whether through marketing or design?

iTunes 8 will launch next Tuesday at Apple’s “big” media event in San Francisco, according to Digg founder Kevin Rose. Rose was the first to report rumors of a September 9 Apple event back on August 23rd, which the company confirmed with media invitations issued yesterday.

Among the new features in iTunes 8 is something called Genius, which makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together, according to the “tipster” Rose cites in his blog posting. Genius also includes Genius sidebar, which recommends from the iTunes Store music you don’t already have.

Other goodies supposedly will allow you to browse  your library’s artists and albums visually with a new Grid view; download your favorite TV shows in HD quality from the iTunes Store; sync your media with iPod nano (4th generation), iPod classic (2nd generation), and iPod touch (2nd generation); and enjoy a stunning new music visualizer.

Salling Software’s MediaSync is a brand new application that synchronizes playlists, music, and podcasts in iTunes onto mobile devices from Sony, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. President of the Swedish software maker, Jonas Salling, says “There are a lot of frustrated phone owners out there who love iTunes, but can’t easily get their tracks onto their non-Apple device.” His application works with iTunes 7.6.x and 7.7.x, is compatible with many popular phone models, and requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or 10.5.x. A Windows version is also available for Windows XP SP2 and Vista with Windows Media Player 11.

The basic installation is free, though the paid app features “smart” sync, allowing you to sync faster by minimizing the amount of data transferred in incremental syncs.

With a compatible phone connected to a USB port, you simply select the playlists and podcasts you want on your device. Media Sync not only uploads the music tracks and podcast episodes, but also replicates each actual playlist on your device and–on devices that support it–transfers play count metadata for each item, reinforcing the sense of having a piece of iTunes in your pocket. Although Media Sync works with most media in iTunes, it will not transfer DRM-protected content.

Apparent dimensional drawings for both the fourth-generation iPod nano and second-generation iPod touch have appeared, suggesting the devices will have familiar measurements but with interesting new shapes and features, according to a report at iLounge.

With all eyes looking toward Apple’s “Big Event” scheduled for next Tuesday in San Francisco, rumors of what might be announced are sure to come fast and furious over the next several days.

Zach over at Boy Genius Report shares that he’s getting tons of e-mail from iPhone owners on the East Coast reporting that data services are completely out, but that it’s iPhone-specific. AT&T is investigating and has issued  # TT000008107719 to blanket all such problems.

What are you seeing, Eastern Seaboard?

Or maybe, in the best Super Hero tradition, it started out that way.

Steve Jobs will host Tuesday’s “Let’s Rock” media event at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco

Apple PR is pulling out the stops to get media in SF next week, saying the announcement on the 9th is a “big deal.”

One East Coast journalist, who writes for a big news weekly, said Apple PR called and urged him to fly to San Francisco next week for the press event.

“Apple just told me it’s a big deal and I should try to be there,” said the journalist, who asked to remain anonymous.

The call is unusual for Apple’s PR department, which rarely gives clues to the import of its press events.

The event is scheduled for 10am, September 9th at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and is widely expected to showcase updates to the iPod product line, with some hoping for new Mac notebooks and even possible indications of a touch-screen Mac tablet.

Veteran Mac expert and writer Joe Kissell is among the first to report that Google’s brand new Chrome browser appears to be “way faster” than Safari, even running in a virtualization environment like VMWare Fusion.

Kissell ran a quick, informal head-to-head on his MacBook Pro, comparing Safari on OS X to Chrome running under Windows XP and VMWare Fusion.

“Chrome launched in the blink of an eye (really shockingly fast) and I tried a few web pages side by side in Chrome and the Mac Safari, and they loaded noticeably faster in Chrome,” said Kissell.

Chrome is Google’s entry in the web browser sweepstakes, currently a Windows-only offering that launched today. The browser is based, however, on Apple’s webkit, the same rendering engine that powers the Safari browser. Mac and Linux versions of Chrome are in the works but Google has yet to announce a time frame for releasing those versions.

Kissell’s initial report came over Twitter, saying he ran Chrome in XP under VMware Fusion on a MacBook Pro and that it “is way faster than the Mac version of Safari on the same machine. Wow.” But some of his reaction may be chalked up to perception, and later off-the-cuff speed tests presented a mixed bag.

In tests done on a regular work machine with a zillion things running in the background, not a clean environment to be sure, but representative of the “real world” in which many are likely to use the browser,

• Chrome launched in < 2 seconds in XP under VMware Fusion
• Native Mac Safari launched in ~9 seconds

LifeHacker Stopwatch

• loaded in 7.254 seconds in Chrome
• loaded in 9.531 seconds in Safari

How To Create Css Test

• rendered in 162 ms in Chrome
• rendered in 37 ms in Safari

Despite his admittedly highly unscientific testing, Kissell reported “AJAXy things like Google Docs seemed zippier in Chrome, but it’s possible that my perceptions are incorrect, because I expect everything in a Windows VM to be slower.”

Let us know in comments below how Chrome works for you.

Via Gizmodo

Apple has scheduled a “special event” for September 9th at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The event is presumably to announce long awaited, much-rumored updates to the iPod product line and, who knows what else?

If you’ve accumulated any amount of gadgetry in the past several years you may consider from time to time the carbon footprint you lay down charging their batteries up every day and overnight.

Well, if designer Vivien Muller ever gets production funding for her concept solar charger, you’ll be able to rest easy and get visitors talking about your impeccable taste in futuristic decor.

Via Gizmodo

Blogger Ian Hoar details a method for creating a custom icon for your website that will show up on iPhones when someone bookmarks your site.

I made icons out of images I created for a couple of projects called China Works and Nickie’s BBQ, and bookmarked them to my iPhone. Hoar’s process is easy and it works!

Basically, just save any graphic image you like as a 57×57 PNG file, name it apple-touch-icon.png, put it in the root directory of your webste, and iPhone will do the rest. Hoar details a method for saving multiple icons in different directories by using a “link rel=” line in the “head” of your web page, so be sure to check it out.

O2 finally announced today its pricing for pay as you go iPhones in the UK. The 8 GB model will cost £349.99 and the 16 GB model will be an extra 50 quid. Bundled in is a year’s unlimited browsing and Wi-Fi, which then costs a tenner a month, although you can unsubscribe prior to that if you feel the need.

The all-important date: September 16. The all-important caveat: no visual voicemail (bizarrely) and call-merging on Pay & Go. Still, for those iPhone-loving Brits who think mobile phone contracts are the work of the evil one, this is clearly great news.