Reminders: Apple iOS4 Goes Live

Hey Poor Macs, a friendly reminder for those of you with an iPhone 3GS/3G, Apple's iOS4 goes live in a few minutes. Run to iTunes at 1PM EST for the update.

Hat tip: Kaiser_Machead via Twitter

UPDATE:
The update is free for both iPhone users AND iPod Touch users. (iOS4 update will only work with 2nd gen iPod Touch or later.)

Mac Mini. Redesigned in a Very Big Way.

It's a unibody Mac Mini. A 7.7" aluminum square that is 1.4" tall. This thing looks amazing. There are two versions as before - the "regular" one with optical drive and the server with dual 500 GB hard drives instead of the hard drive/optical drive set up. Also, this baby packs 4 USB ports, a Firewire 800 port, Mini-Display Port and HDMI for the home theater PC crowd. With the same base price as the previous Mini, $699 for the regular and $999 for the server, this looks like a good buy for all the Poor Macs out there.

Correction: Base price for the previous Mini was $599, originally this post alluded to it being $699 like the current offering. Hence the strikethrough. However the server has the same base price for what it's worth.

Twitter for iPhone: the official app

When Twitter acquired atebits and announced their intent to release an official Twitter client I must admit I felt that will be end of a good thing. The idea of an official app that was geared to their search algorythm was just plain scary to me (after all the last thing I wanna see when I openup the Twitter client is how high Justin Bieber is trending).

In actuality Twitter for iPhone is a solid app. Without a doubt it is the fastest Twitter client for iPhone and although Tweetie 2 users may not be thrilled with the limited background themes you'll deal.

iPhone 4 Pre-orders begin tomorrow

It feels like just yesterday that we were all focused on the Moscone Center for the unveiling of the latest iPhone, and starting tomorrow you can pre-order one.

You can pre-order via Apple online, your local Apple Store, AT&T corporate retailers, Best Buy, Radioshack, and even Wal-mart. How's that for covering your bases?

Now there some different things to expect for each retailer and PMB will be updating a little later tonight.

Life Moves Fast - Better late than never.

I realize that I may be late here but I saw this after tonight's NBA Finals Game 3. It's Palm's, yeah you know the guys that had a really great smart phone that nobody cared about because it wasn't an iPhone, latest ad campaign titled "Life Moves Fast."

The 30-second spot is for the Palm Pixie and it features a woman going about her day (listening to Mos Def I might add) and using the phone to track down shoes. She's checking email, directions, listening to music all at the same time. In fact, if I weren't into these sorts of things, I'd actually have a pretty damn good idea as what this phone does! It might even make me want to find a store that sells it and you know buy it.

Full commercial below:

Some brief thoughts on Safari 5

I’d like to start off by saying that currently I am waging an inner struggle to determine what my “main” browser will be. Prior to today the battle was between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. My biggest issue with Chrome has been that there is no bookmarks menu as there is in Safari or Firefox (or Opera, or Camino, or Flock et al). Rather it just throws your bookmarks into folders visible on your browser window. I don’t like having all my bookmarks visible, that’s what the bookmarks menu is for - to have a bunch of bookmarks that you don’t use that often but are still worth keeping. My biggest issue with Firefox is the lack of support for the HTML5 friendly version of Youtube. Oh and another pet peeve is that on my iGoogle page, which is my Home page, the Google chat sidebar never looks right. The fonts are either strangely extruded or cutoff and the search bar looks crooked. So I am not sure which pet peeve is worse and the battle rages on between browsers... when... all of a sudden... HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!

Safari 5. Safari has always had a special place in my heart. It was never a bad browser but I felt it lacked many of the cool extensions that are available for Firefox (and Mozilla based browsers like Flock) and Chrome. It has always been quick and since Safari 4 has had some quite beautiful eye candy, and little things like web clip that proved useful every now and then. And it is the browser that best suites OS X visually and integrates nicely with other standard Mac software like Mail and iPhoto. I think Safari 5 is a great addition to the dilemma of choosing your “main” browser. It has opened itself up to having extensions developed for it. Granted, prior to 5 you could have plug-ins like the ever popular 1Password and Safari AdBlock, which I never used for some reason. Now Safari 5 looks like it is set to have extensions more like Chrome and Firefox, built around scripting languages like JavaScript and CSS as is the case with Chrome extensions. That was my only major issue in fully accepting Safari as my main browser. Now it would hopefully be possible to have something like AdBlock Plus on Safari, and the various Youtube video-downloading extensions.

That is the not-to-distant future, but the one stand-out feature you can use right now is both remarkably simple and remarkably awesome. That feature is Reader. Essentially it is Quick Look for reading articles on the web. It looks like a Quick Look preview within Safari and has the benefit of showing you just the pieces of the webpage that pertain to the article you’re reading like the text and associated images. You basically get rid of any unimportant or distracting information on the page. Great for those of us with limited attention spans. This is great if you’re reading the NYTimes with all its superfluous webpage stuff, or a blog like Gizmodo where you don’t necessarily want to block their ads (those dudes deserve to get paid) but would like to focus more on the content. All you have to do to activate this awesome feature is click the “Reader” button that appears on the address bar on compatible webpages. Reader alone is worth using Safari 5 extensively. Trust me. It. Is. Cool. Look!
Good news, bad news time. Good news. If you’re running OS X 10.5 and up you can get Safari 5 via Software Update. Bad news. If you’re one of the many Poor Macs running 10.4 you’re left out in the cold. There is a Safari 4.1 update that has some of the characteristics of 5, such as the return of the blue inline progress bar in the address bar and um, more HTML5 friendliness. Really it’s not bad, you’ll live. Just not that awesomely.

P.J. O’Rourke once said that we should “Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it”. Safari 5 and Reader will make sure that if you die reading a webpage at the very least you will look good doing it.

More info on Safari 5: Apple