Waar de de rest van de Nederlandstalige websites voor Apple nieuws
nauwelijks meer vernieuwend zijn, naar een muffe hangplek ruiken of
allang de geest hebben gegeven heeft uitgever IDG besloten, dat het
tijd is aangebroken om een Nederlandse MacWorld website te starten.
Dit zal er in ieder geval voor zorgen, dat de kussens van de
Nederlandstalige Mac-websites eens opgeschud zullen worden. In ieder
geval weer OK om een nieuwe speler te zien en te lezen.
As a 15-year user of Final Draft, I’m fairly accustomed to the program’s quirks and subtleties. I wasn’t really looking for an upgrade. But even I appreciated some of version 8’s feature refurbs and flourishes. For example, users who take advantage of Final Draft’s ScriptNote feature to give and get feedback from other writers will appreciate the readily accessible ScriptNote navigation controls, transplanted to the toolbar at the top of the main screen.
Similarly, newbies no longer have to search the drop-down menus to update their title pages; a button on the toolbar makes it quick and easy. Likewise, the Split Panels controls, which make it easier to view your Index Card outline and actual script pages simultaneously in parallel panels, have been relocated to this same prime real estate.
Final Draft 8 is also a lot easier on the eyes—literally. The once frail and marginally legible onscreen Courier font has gotten a collagen injection, making it plumper and easier to read. And the Zoom feature now boasts twice the range (75 percent to 300 percent) of its predecessor, facilitating a better user experience with today's large widescreen monitors.
Final Draft’s Index Card feature also gets a usability boost in version 8. The virtual index cards that are used for outlining and notes are now double-sided—one side displays scene notes and the other displays corresponding scene dialogue and description. Unfortunately, flipping the cards is a little clunky, as you have to select the appropriate Index Cards state in the View menu, which then flips all cards simultaneously. Though I really enjoyed the double-sided interface, I found myself wishing that I could just flip individual cards with a mouse click.
Also useful for story planning and evaluation is the newly added Scene View feature, which strips your script to its bare bones, displaying only slug lines, a little description, and page numbers. Most importantly, it lets you add a title to each scene, like “Hero Finds Amulet.” The resulting view essentially becomes a high-level skeletal outline of your story--very handy.
Final Draft 8’s Scene Navigator is a big improvement over previous versions’ Navigator function. First off, it’s now a floating palette, so you can leave it open all the time when you’re writing and use it to quickly navigate to portions of your script in progress. In addition, it now provides a variety of scene information in table format, including scene start pages, scene page count, and color coding. How is this useful? Well, one might color-code scenes according to whether they represent the adventure A-story, the romance B-story, or the humorous C-story. Thanks to color coding in the Scene Navigator, a single glance helps you identify improperly interwoven stretches of story.
Also new to Final Draft 8 is the Scene Properties Inspector floating palette. Here you can add and edit additional scene information, including notes and scene titles, as well as more color coding. Personally, I use it as a mini “grocery list” to make sure that I don’t forget any key ingredients of the scene when I’m writing.
Perhaps Final Draft 8’s most substantial change is its new XML-based .fdx file format, which allows Final Draft scripts to work seamlessly with a variety of third-party story planning, budgeting, scheduling, and storyboarding applications. The bad news: Previous versions of Final Draft are unable to open this new format. This could make it a little more complicated to script-swap with others who have not yet made the upgrade—which might irritate some users whose main reason for purchasing Final Draft was its universal, cross-platform compatibility.
The good news: Saving a script in the legacy .fdr format couldn’t be easier. But be forewarned that page count and pagination can vary when bouncing between Final Draft 7 and Final Draft 8 formats, and that can be irksome when your lean 110-page comedy puts on a few pages.
Overall, I was very impressed by the stability and formatting consistency of Final Draft 8. It does what it’s supposed to do, and it does it well. Veteran Final Draft users contemplating an upgrade can rest assured that all the bugs that plagued the release of version 7 didn’t show up for the picnic this time around. During 10 days of testing, I experienced nary a crash or freeze.
Also welcome was Final Draft’s continued commitment to multi-tiered customer support. In addition to e-mail support and live chat, Final Draft still provides 24/7 phone support, the first 20 minutes of which are free. Subsequent minutes will set you back a hefty $2.50 apiece, but when it’s 3 a.m. and your deadline is first thing in the morning, it seems like a bargain.
Final Draft 8 is simpler than ever for beginning users; subtle feature fixes, bountiful script templates, and top-notch support for the production rewrite process ensure that an aspiring A-list writer won’t quickly outgrow the software. But for existing users, the decision to upgrade may have less to do with new features than an increasing pressure to switch to the .fdx file format, which may follow in the footsteps of the .fdr format to become a new de facto industry standard.
That is an iPhone 3GS propped up on a cardboard box with three pens and a rubberband.
Macworld ID and id-Mac guys are a pretty high tech bunch!Spotted this link while following the link from Daring Fireball. Not much to say but WTF? ROFL :D
More than three months into a medical leave from Apple Inc., Chief Executive Steve Jobs remains closely involved in key aspects of running the company, say people familiar with the matter.
Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook runs the day-to-day operations at Apple, these people say. But Mr. Jobs has continued to work on the company's most important strategies and products from home, they say. He regularly reviews products and product plans, and was particularly involved in the user interface of the new iPhone operating system that Apple unveiled last month, these people say.
Apple co-founder Mr. Jobs, who is considered the company's creative leader, is also involved in the development of future projects, they say. People privy to the company's strategy say Apple is working on new iPhone models and a portable device that is smaller than its current laptop computers but bigger than the iPhone or iPod Touch.
Mr. Jobs, who was treated in 2004 for a rare form of pancreatic cancer, took a medical leave in early January, saying he would return in June and would remain involved in "major strategic decisions while I am out." But he has made no public appearances or statements since then, and it has been unclear just how involved he continued to be. Apple has been mum about how Mr. Jobs's absence is affecting daily operations.
Mr. Jobs didn't respond to requests for comment. Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said: "Steve continues to look forward to returning to Apple at the end of June."
Apple's fortunes appear to be linked in shareholders' minds with the health of Mr. Jobs, and Apple stock has suffered since last summer on speculations about his condition. At the same time, Apple has strenuously argued that its management bench is deep, and that while Mr. Jobs is integral to the company and its fortunes, Apple isn't wholly dependent on him.
Information on the health of Mr. Jobs, 54 years old, has long been scarce and contradictory. He has said his cancer treatment five years ago was successful while maintaining that his health is "a private matter."
But concerns among investors mounted, and the share price wobbled, after Mr. Jobs appeared in public looking noticeably thinner. The day after Apple announced in December that Mr. Jobs would not speak at the Macworld trade show, where he had been the keynote speaker since 1997, Apple shares fell as much as 8%.
In early January, Mr. Jobs said he had a hormone imbalance that was "relatively simple and straightforward" to treat and that he would continue as Apple's CEO. About a week later, he announced that the issue was more complex than he had thought, and said in a letter to employees that he would take a leave. He provided few details of his illness, raising concerns that his cancer may have returned.
In an interview last month, Philip Schiller, Apple's head marketing executive, declined to comment on how the company was faring without Mr. Jobs. "We're just trying to do what we do every day," he said.
People familiar with Apple's operations say they still expect to see Mr. Jobs return in June. Some of these people also say members of Apple's board of directors are monitoring the situation directly, communicating regularly with Mr. Jobs's physicians.
People inside the company, business partners and others who are familiar with the situation say life at the Cupertino, Calif., company remains much the same as it did before.
Those at other corporations who deal with the company also say their interactions with Apple haven't changed. Mr. Cook, who had already been handling most of Apple's day-to-day operations, has kept tight control over the company, say business partners and those inside Apple.
Concerns among employees have also eased as its stock price has bounced back, rising 40% since the end of last year, compared with an increase of about 5% in the Nasdaq Composite Index over the same period. Shares of Apple closed at $119.57 on April 9, 2009, up from $85.33 in January when Mr. Jobs announced his leave.
Apple's business has proven relatively resilient to the recession so far. Analysts on average expect the company to have increased its revenues by 5.9% to nearly $8 billion in its fiscal second quarter ended Mar. 31, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters, helped by the launch of new desktop computer models and a smaller iPod shuffle music player. The company will report its quarterly earnings on April 22.
In spite of Mr. Jobs's plan to return, some employees, business partners and investors are considering what Apple would look like if he doesn't. People familiar with Apple's operations have said Mr. Cook and the other veteran executives understand Mr. Jobs's thinking and have a product road map for the next several years. But these same people worry about the period beyond.
Job recruiters say they aren't seeing significant employee turnover at Apple. But executives at several Silicon Valley companies say they are getting more interest than before from Apple managers, particularly those in the mid-to-upper levels. Most recently, Greg Dudey, one of the lead engineers for Apple TV software, left the company to work for Dell Inc. Mr. Jobs's health is not necessarily the driver of such job moves, according to these people.
Shaw Wu, an industry analyst at Kaufman Bros., says investors are prepared for the possibility that Mr. Jobs could play a reduced role. "Most investors have factored in a management transition," he said. "What people are expecting is that Steve Jobs would retain a chairman role, and Tim Cook would formalize his role."
Of trade shows, conventions, gadgets, products, memes and... oh, I don't know, let's say pandas.
Did you ever notice that, when you've eaten enough of your Cheerios to have the remaining lingerers left bobbing on the ripple surface of the milk like so many little beige inner tubes, they tend to clump together? Their round shapes allow each unit to hug each other in a tenuous fashion until others come to shore up the group in flowery patterns around the central group leader. And with each bite comes decay, disruption, and even the occasional disassembly of one group that prompts scattered, bobbing floating to a new group. Such are the life patterns of the Cheerios who were far too busy with other things to join the masses of their of lemming-like siblings into the orifice of doom.
There used to be a time where the concept of an in-person social network involved a pub, a movie, a dance, a concert, or some other event where like-minded people would gather for the sake of a shared experience. You see, today there's really not that much need to go to a film when we've got screen that fill walls and surround sound that rumbles the seats. Yet we still go out in record numbers to big films, not because we're afraid we're going to miss them, but because of the shared experience. We need the cluster. Even by two we tend to roll off each other.
I used to find the activity of flipping through record or CD bins a couple of times a week very therapeutic. I would flip absent-mindedly, knowing there was little to no chance I would find anything to buy, but there used to be a culture to a record store that was unparalleled for someone in their teens and twenties. There was a certain level of comfort in being able to rhyme off the names of 1000 bands and song titles that most other people hadn't heard of. Sure, maybe we were music snobs, but snobs cherish a certain aloof status that can often breach the realm of xenophobic. We were not such animals. We could not live without the culture. I knew at least a dozen people by look alone that would rifle through over 60 covers a minute and just wait for the opportunity to share an ounce of precious knowledge with the assembled masses.
Woe be the neophyte that walked in and asked a clerk to identify a song by a broken, dyslexic boopboopbeep melody line that could have been a hundred songs. We craved the ineptitude of the clerk. We wanted to possess that grail of knowledge that could pluck the arcane track from the depths of oceans of discographies. We loved Pete Frame. We floated, avoiding spoons, in this bowl for years. We were comfortable. We were not alone.
And then, just as now, there were "shows". Comic book shows, record shows, trade shows, and collectors would gather from far and wide to barter on limited run indie comics or bootleg concert vinyl or video tape. Again, most of the stuff we saw there wasn't anything that we couldn't have had our local dealer order in, but the mass experience of dozens, if not hundreds, of people sharing a common interest, gathering to pursue acquisition dreams was just too good to pass up. Our clusters got larger. Soon we would fill the top of the bowl and leave nowhere to run should the utensils try to pick us off again. Because while we contained our quiet elitism in our home group, while the cluster ocean was exciting, our elitism was lost - we had become "normal" to this environment. This was not acceptable. We needed a sense of elitism yet again while not being robbed of the ocean's lure.
The face of the gatherings, or the "shows" has changed. Shows still exist at the local level, but the growing ability to communicate their existence has promoted the knowledge of the conventions to a wider audience. Conventions which only used to draw dealers, now reached for a select group of consumers. We had found our Panacea. We could live out the fantasies of the sprawling ocean of knowledge where we could abandon our elitism and forsake the gravitas we held back in our home clusters. We were no longer afraid to look occasionally uninformed because WE HAD TRAVELED TO THE CONVENTION!
By, like so many snowbirds going south on the I-75, traveling to the ocean, there would always be a locale to return to where we could be the expert. Some people considered us crazy:
"You're paying how much money to go and see a bunch of comic books?"
"You're going to Las Vegas for four days and you're going to look at TVs and DVD players?"
"You're taking time off work so that you can watch a guy in a black turtleneck get on stage and do a commercial for an hour about a computer named after a fruit!?!"
But for everyone of the unwashed masses that would bat an eye back home, we were the envies of those in the clusters and the stores and the shows. We finally found a place where we could indulge our obsessive knowledge and wander with admitted awe and reverence. We could share our joy with sometimes thousands of people who shared our predilection of medium or genre. We could share, relax, ingest, experience and enjoy. For when we returned home we would certainly be deities amongst our cluster. We were sure all the other Cheerios would rise on edge out of the bowl and cry, "He has returned! He has returned! Please share your invaluable knowledge with us!"
We were sure of all this until we remembered every one of our friends had watched a streaming video of the entire convention and subsequently read every blog, blogged themselves, tweeted and retweeted a thousand tidbits of information. You discovered that you wouldn't be revered, that your knowledge was maybe even less about the events you attended live than your friends. And your oncoming disappointment turned to surprise when your friends still gathered 'round, still in sufficient awe, still with excitement to ask, "What was it like?" Because no matter how much knowledge you have about something, no matter how many links you click, or followers you have, or blog postings you read or write, there's nothing that will replace a visceral experience of being among a thousand, ten thousand, or a hundred thousand people with whom you share something.
It's why, forsaking the store and local cluster, we flock to the web, because short of being at a convention, or a concert, or a movie every day, we can at least participate in the illusion of the full bowl of Cheerios all standing as one in defiance of the spoon - and when the visceral is unavailable or unattainable, maybe the illusion is the next best thing.
