The Sakurina Show

Caution: Anyone reading this will be subject to Apple spoilers. I'm assuming you know about them already when you read this post. Close now if you don't want to get the spoilers.

I remember when Stevenotes were surprising. That was when rumor sites were either wrong, or didn't exist. But now, here's my ideas on why rumor sites are so spot on nowadays:

• Apple is predictable as fuck.
• People speculate too much and eventually get it right.
• Apple refers to rumor sites when it comes to product roadmaps.
• Someone was/is being/will be fired.

So first, let me just say that the following will only be based on what I've read throughout the afternoon on MacRumors Live. Haven't really looked everything up on Apple's site yet, so my reasoning might be a bit off. Bear with me.

Mobile Me (a.k.a. .mac Redefined)
I was one of the few people who found .mac's lack of push email to be incredibly odd, considering Apple charges for .mac, and Yahoo offers push IMAP to iPhone owners for free. Well, that's gone with Mobile Me. Push email. Go them. There's also push calendar and push contacts, which should theoretically mean no more sync conflicts for .mac users.

Amazingly, Mobile Me's Web interface is very very Mac-like, I wouldn't be surprised if it was based around something similar to the Objective-J framework the 280 North people showed off last week. Definitely nice to look at. I'd also like to add that the Contacts and Calendar apps both look better in the on-site screenshots than Address Book and iCal (on Tiger).

One thing that needs adding, and many people have said this at some point: There's an iDisk app in Mobile Me that lets you send/recieve files with people using the Public folder, but why is there no iDisk mobile counterpart? Imagine dragging an Office/iWork document to your iDisk's documents folder and being able to view it automatically on your iPhone. DropCopy does this! It works incredibly well! Do it! Some people would jump on Mobile Me if that were the case... this is just a slightly enhanced .mac.

iPhone 3G
Predictable. :P Rather surprised about the GPS though. Didn't see that coming.

However, notable things that may/may not be coming with software update 2.0:

• Support for multiple calendars. Finally.
• Scientific calculator on 2.0 is also looking pretty nifty.

And yes. iPhone will be on both Rogers and Fido. On July 11. Bandwidth rape plans haven't been announced yet. Stay tuned!

So ummm, Snow Leopard?
Apparently Bertrand Serlet is giving a demo of the new OS X "after lunch", which I can only assume means that it'll be a part of the OS X State of the Union... (I hope someone breaks NDA?)

Around the month of March, I discovered LaTeX, the popular typesetting engine, and decided that in order to learn how to use it, I'd use it for all homework assignments until the end of the year. So I did, and to this day, all of my homework assignments since March 27th have been authored with LaTeX.

A little later than that, I stumbled upon git, the distributed version control system that's all the rage nowadays. Because it's decentralized, you can have a local repository that you can commit to and mess with on your home machine, and then push updates back up to the Internet if you have a main git repository somewhere.

So then it clicked. I'd use git and LaTeX together. git to manage revisions I've made to projects, so if I screwed something up, no big deal, I could restore from the previous revision. LaTeX would be used because git originally dealt with source code, and LaTeX documents are essentially macros. That would mean running diffs on revisions would be readable, unlike binary file formats like RTF or Word's .doc files.

A month ago, I signed up for github. This is what really makes it click for me.

github is a git repository host. They have a free plan (100MB max storage, more on that limitation later) and essentially everyone can have their projects hosted on a git repository. Not only is their website amazing, but pushing an update to github is as simple as typing 'git push origin master'.

And this simplicity is what will save your ass.

If you're a mildly braindead person like me who accidentally forgets to print a history project that's due after lunch, but you typed in that one command after committing, that .tex file (and in my case, .pdf file as well) is automatically available from anywhere in the world you can log into.

So you just have to find a working computer, log in, download the latest revision, print it, and you're safe.

Four words saved my ass. No needing to type in a complicated ftp URL or launch a new app or anything. Four words and a password equals an automatic backup and being able to access it from anywhere.

Miracle of the year.

Time for a short overview of what'll be going down in the next week:

I'll be in New York City from May 7-9th without my computer. That's right, I'll be off the grid and relying on my iPod touch for all forms of communication. How's that going to work?

If you want real-time status updates of what I'm up to: go to Twitter. I'll be unblocking my tweets for a limited time, but be warned: it's uncensored. Your initial reaction may vary, welcome to the Internet.

Any direct communication should be done via the following means in order:

• Twitter direct messages. This'll only work if you're on my contacts, but both my iPod Twitter clients do direct messages, so I'll be checking those a lot.
• Send me an IM on my mobile account. Those of you who want it will have to ask for it, if you're any good at guessing AIM screennames, you'll find it.
• Email at the usual address. If you don't know it, go to r-ch.net to find it.

There's some state of confusion as to if our hotel has Wi-Fi, but I'm pretty sure it does. In any case, this is New York, Wi-Fi is all over the place. Most of my stuff will be going over the air will be encrypted, no worries. Photos won't be uploaded due to lack of any camera connector for the iPod, so you'll have to wait until my return for those. Same for videos.

I hate to amplify the collective nerdgasm, but Persona 3 definitely deserves the praise it's been getting since its regular release last October. Picked up Persona 3 FES this morning, and I've played it for a little over 6 hours today. Definitely an entertaining and original JRPG, and absolutely recommended to anyone who's looking for an amazing PS2 game.

Starting quite soon, I'm going to take a new approach to blogging and all that stuff.

I'll be making less long blog posts in favor of posts on a currently non-existant tumblelog. My text posts on said tumblelog will be 200 words at most. Anything longer than that will get its own page on my site, and will be linked to on the tumblelog.

Anyone who wants to follow my day-to-day craziness can just stalk me on Twitter, provided I know you and I don't mind you hearing about everything I do.

Stay tuned for info on when the tumblelog goes up. (99 words)

About a year ago, I started thinking up a score tracker for Guitar Hero. About a month later, I started coding it. It started actually working around the end of May 2007, and I officially launched it to the world this summer.

As you may have noticed, I haven't touched it since last October, with the introduction of the mobile version. The userbase hasn't really been active either, and so, I'm announcing that I'm dropping support for cherrypie until further notice.

I'm not taking the site offline, I just want to officially state that I'll only deal with issues on a case-to-case basis if brought up by a user and if notable enough to be fixed. In the case that I do take the site offline, every user will be notified, and I'll have some sort of exportable data so you can use it elsewhere.

I do have other projects down the pipeline, and you should be hearing about them pretty soon.

Today, Apple held a press conference about the iPhone developer roadmap. I took notes while watching the keynote. So here they are:

• Enterprise functions look pretty cool. This means ActiveSync licensing, IPsec VPN, WPA2, mass device config, and remote wipe.
• They renamed UIKit to "Cocoa Touch". Twitter people immediately started going on about how that'd be a great name for a porno. (I still saw a reference to UIKit somewhere in the Xcode demo though.)
  
• Core Location is a new API they announced today for location-aware applications. Pretty sweet.
• Developer tools are: Xcode, Interface Builder, Instruments, and the much-awaited iPhone simulator.
• Not sure what Interface Builder exports, given that Mobile OS X doesn't have .nib files. :/
• TouchFighter. It's essentially an Apple-built StarFox clone. In full 3D and positional sound. If it ever gets multiplayer, it is the killer app.
• AIM. They managed to make a decent-looking client, much nicer than Apollo or MobileChat today. I want it. (Icon sucks though.)
• Super Monkey Ball. It's tied with TouchFighter for best game. Give it the fun minigames from the GameCube versions and this wins it.
• Someone in the audience laughed when the App Store's badge showed an update was available, probably because of how much it looks like Installer or Cydia's badge.
• Apparently iPod touch users have to pay (again) to get this. Fuck you Apple. Or rather, Sarbanes-Oxley.

Oh well, at least this means there's actual documentation for some of the shadier APIs now. Worst part of the keynote: when Steve said there were refreshments right out the door, and there actually weren't.

When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go... Downtown!

So I looked at the Hebdo for this weekend, and what did it say?

Free downtown Wi-Fi is now available in Trois-Rivières. As of now, outdoor areas like the Parc Portuaire, the Ursulines park, Champlain Park, and Rue des Forges have free open Wi-Fi, thanks to the wonderful folks at the relatively unknown telco, Xittel.

According to the Hebdo, this would make Trois-Rivières the first city in the Mauricie region with free downtown Wi-Fi. I happened to think that Shawinigan was first, as their project was announced in May of last year, but either they're uninformed or Shawinigan is slow at deploying their network.

What does this mean?

• Keryx, a local ISP doing solely wireless Internet in three different areas is going to suffer significantly (in downtown). They were charging people around $15 a month for 500MB transfer on their vast wireless network downtown. This is essentially the same for free. At least the city hasn't said anything about attacking the Cap yet, otherwise they'd be even more pissed.
• Café Morgane's paid networks will probably suffer as well. I remember using my laptop on their network 2 years ago when it was still free, and apparently usage got so high that they decided to start charging for it. While I don't disagree with the concept of making money off Wi-Fi, I'm not going to get off the bus and go pay someone at a counter for ~5 minutes of access at the bus terminal.
• While there's still nothing to do downtown, I have less reasons to stay away from it now that it's not an Internet dead zone. (If the network has a range far enough to be accessible from the Torréfacteur, this may be the best municipal decision ever.)
• I still want the 2 to be the Wi-Fi bus. So far, the 1 and 6 lines have been Wi-Fi buses. If the pattern of "buses that go to the Cegep" still applies, the 2 line should eventually get a trial period as well. (This is where I run MobileTorrent on my iPod and use so much bandwidth that they think it's being used a lot, and then they permanently make it a Wi-Fi bus.)
• This does not change the fact that our mayor is completely oblivious to the world around him. Seemingly, the 80% satisfaction rate also seems to say that most of our city is as well.

Now we just need an accessible wireless network at school (hint hint, wink wink) and everything will be fine.

I miss the good old days when no one actually guessed what was going to happen at the keynote right. Or when Time Canada "accidentally" leaked the iMac G4. Those were the good days. Nowadays, you usually have a pretty good idea of what Apple'll unveil ahead of time whenever they have a keynote.

I think that's why I didn't enjoy this keynote as much as the others. There have been subnotebook rumors for god knows how long now, it was only a matter of time before they actually announced it. Some may argue the same thing happened for the iPhone, but the iPhone was probably way better than anyone expected it to be.

I've rarely been impressed by hardware releases, and for some reason the MacBook Air disappoints more than the others. There's nothing really special about it other than it's really thin and only has 3 ports and a power connector. It's still only a laptop running Leopard, like the original MacBook and the MacBook Pro, but with slightly lower specs, and a new case.

Then Apple brought out the movie rentals, which were expected by pretty much everyone. Same for the Apple TV update.

1.1.3 was expected to appear at Macworld, and it did, bringing with it the hideous iPhone dock. The "pay $20 for MobileMail" update for the iPod touch isn't bad for iTouch users who don't know about jailbreaking, but anyone who's somewhat of a geek can mess with their iPod for less than a half-hour and have MobileMail running fine. Why bother upgrading when you can have the same features and more? :/

Am I forgetting Time Capsule? Not really, because it's AirPort Disk. That's all it is. It's AirPort Disk with a built-in hard drive. Except it actually works out of the box with Time Machine, and AirPort Disk doesn't for some odd reason. (Not that that matters, you could just use a better backup tool for that.)

The products themselves are great. I'm just disappointed about the lack of surprises. The biggest surprise I had today was the "there's actual Wi-Fi on the 1 line" thing I mentioned in the other post. (That and Twitter not surviving the Macworld keynote, haha.)

Time for some preliminary Macworld opinions. I haven't looked at all the pages thoroughly enough, nor have I actually seen the keynote yet, but a bigger post will come once I have. In case you've forgotten the keynote's theme, "there's something in the air". Sadly, they didn't announce Apple Airlines, nor did they announce that Adobe AIR is getting a less retarded name. Oh well.

MacBook Air
The subnotebook everyone wanted is out now, so hopefully they'll shut up about it. It also has a "multitouch" trackpad, so I need to see the video to be convinced if it's that big of a deal. If it's anything like the other MacBooks though, the trackpad is probably way too huge. :/

iPhone/iPod touch software update
Not a surprise, seeing as how we've pretty much heard about it already a few weeks ago. Not so thrilled about the software update for the iPod touch actually costing something, but hey, if that means iTunes won't bug me to update my jailbroken beauty, I'm all for it. (Besides, I can do all of that and more for free?)

Time Capsule
It's an AirPort Extreme with a built-in hard drive. Woo. Nothing much else to say. Surprised to see Luc-Olivier's prediction be half true. (His prediction was that now that our school upgraded all their Wi-Fi access points to AirPort Extremes with N, they'd make new ones. Right on.)

Apple TV and iTunes movie rentals
Nice to see Flickr on the Apple TV now. As for movie rentals, are we really supposed to be surprised? People have been predicting this for months. Not liking the new Apple TV UI though. :/

The rumor mill ruined the show, because they actually turned out to be somewhat right. Still wanting to see the keynote to see what this stuff is actually like. (The Leopard default background is still ugly and needs to be changed.)

On a completely unrelated note, it appears the 1 line now has on-board Wi-Fi, apparently thanks to a partnership with Rogers. I'm hoping the 2 line picks it up soon, which it probably should due to the high amount of people who go to the CEGEP via the 2 line.