I’m really looking forward to switching my main work over to Mac. Windows has been driving me crazier than usual and Vista is making the problem worse, not better. I wish it was a full switch, but we still have the workhorse PC at home that manages all of our photos and music. One of these days that thing will get replaced with an iMac or Mac Pro. I’ll also have to maintain a Windows environment for work. I’m hoping I can accomplish this in Parallels or Boot Camp.

Seems I’m in good company.

XML is like violence: if it doesn’t solve your problem, you aren’t using enough of it.

I wonder if Michael’s seen the work that Mark Hemphill‘s done at UPEI. Last year Mark’s students used TypePad weblogs in class (here and here). This year, Mark is heading up a much more ambitious project: in BEAT he’s put together an inter-institutional, inter-disciplinary group to work on cool, useable, web-application development projects for credit. They’ve already started a weblogging platform for all of UPEI and Holland College … similar to the Harvard Weblogs project.

Check out the UPEI Weblogs site. They even have The Cadre, the student newspaper, blogging.

I would love to have one of these along with a nice small digicam like a PowerShot S400. Alas, I’ll stick it out with my now-ancient (4 year old) Olympus C2020.

Sure there will be some cannibalization of iPod sales, but look down, not up. That is, for an extra $50 look at what you get with an iPod mini vs. the $200 competition. I see a bunch of 256MB flash players from the likes of Rio and Creative. I think there are reasons (size, battery, affordability for people at the margin) to buy an iPod mini over a normal iPod. I don’t think there are any reasons to buy any $199 MP3 player over an iPod mini.

Jobs spoke of the 30% of the MP3 player market that is “high-end flash players.” Apple will own this market in 6-12 months.

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball seems to share my take on this.

The other MacWorld item that looked good, though overdue, was the update to iPhoto that apparently allows it to overcome it’s 600-or-so photos/library limitation. Apple is saying it handles 25,000 with speed. When I switched for a while last year, iPhoto’s basic shortcomings in this regard were a significant source of disappointment with OS X.

Anybody have any pointers?

My real hope is that the folks at Six Apart rev MT a few times now that they’ve officially launched TypePad. They’ve promised MT updates, including a Pro version that would incorporate many of the new features found in TypePad. Hopefully soon.

When I read a while back that Apple were coming out with a new wireless mouse and keyboard I was certain that they’d finally address this, but the product details unveiled yesterday reveal no such new thinking on Apple’s part. Oh well. At least the specs for the updated, now aluminum 15″ PowerBook rock.