Wow, what a few weeks! Well, specifically a week :P. First off, school started up again on Monday, which unfortunately, has taken away both my time and my energy. Luckily, we had a two hour delay Monday, a snow day Wednesday, and a two hour delay yesterday, so it wasn’t a ‘full’ week per se.
But anyway, it’s Friday, so I have a lot to talk about! First off, the Macworld Conference and Expo kicked off Monday, with Apple’s final keynote at the event happening on Tuesday morning. In my personal opinion, it was a major letdown. That being said, it was a keynote that had to happen (which is why Apple is pulling out to begin with). While nothing exciting was announced, products that had to be updated or introduced (read: new 17” MacBook Pro) were taken care of, and it leaves the rest of the year for new innovations and products. To be perfectly honest, there are only two things that I am stoked about coming of the keynote: iPhoto ‘09 and GarageBand ‘09. iPhoto’s new Faces and Places capabilities are incredible, though the use for Faces far outdoes that of Places. Basically, Places takes geotag data from photographs and creates groups of photos that are from that specific place (even more specific than Paris, France, would be, for example, the Eiffel Tower), which is great. That being said, Faces not only detects a face in photographs, but also takes a face specify a name to and searches for more photos of that person with that face. It’s great! I can’t wait to use it. The coolest thing in GarageBand ‘09 is the Learn to Play feature, where a black turtle necked guy tries to teach you how to play guitar and keyboard. That isn’t very cool, so they now have these lessons from actual musicians, such as Sting, Nora Jones, and many others. They teach you to play a song from their repertoire, as well as background information on the song. Pretty neat stuff.
The second thing I want to talk about is god damn PayPal. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like describing the entire story right now. so you will have to forgive me. I will post a separate article on the matter later.
Finally, the official Windows 7 beta came out today. I have been using the ‘leaked’ beta for a few weeks now, and I just reinstalled to the official one. All I have to say is nice job Microsoft, this is a truly epic operating system.