Are Unicorns Real? The White iPhone on Sale 4/27?

According to 9to5 Mac, Best Buy will begin selling the coveted white iPhone 4 today. Now I'm sure we're all tired of being teased but we're officially on white iPhone watch and will be sure to keep hitting refresh on Best Buy's page to be sure we don't miss it.

For what it's worth, Vodafone customers in the UK and various customers in the Netherlands may already have the unicorn version of the Jesus phone - that means something right?

9 to 5 Mac via GeekSugar

Hyperbole Thy Name Is CNN Money

So the latest big news to make its way around the web lately is Apple's recent round of intellectual property suits it filed against Samsung for the line of Galaxy devices. The screen capture above, comes not from Tom Dick Nobody's personal blog; nope that headline comes straight off of CNN Money's site.

Let's face some facts here kiddies, Steve Jobs is the CEO of a public company with real shareholders and other interested parties. If his Board and sharholders felt his sister were infringing upon Apple Inc's intellectual property, damn right they're gonna sue. For all the warm and fuzzy ads that we see on TV where Apple is this great benevolent company, they are in the business of making money.

CNN running with the headline above is nothing more than link bait and just a lame attempt at getting a controversial quote. The actual law suit does seem to be at least plausibly viable; the claims of Samsung infringing upon trade dress has a lot more to do with UI than it does the devices' packaging. CNN did not really add to the discussion other than picking up a blogger's hyperbole laced quip to cover the fact they produced a short listicle.

For a thorough breakdown of Apple's lawsuit against Samsung, be sure to check out This Is My Next's Nilay Patel's article.

via CNNMoney

Coming Soon: Final Cut Pro X

It’s been nearly 2 years since Final Cut Studio 3 came out, right before the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. As such the previous Final Cut, Final Cut Pro 7 was not built to support Grand Central Dispatch, which is found in Mac OS X 10.6, so expect that to be the minimum requirement. (Final Cut has been Intel only since Final Cut Studio 3, just to make it abundantly clear to you Poor Macs in PPC land.) From the screenshot it looks to be a bridge between the traditional Final Cut Pro interface with some elements found in iMovie. Curiously you could argue that because of the timeline, it actually looks like a combination of iMovie ’06 (arguably still the best iMovie version) and Final Cut, more so than a modern iMovie combined with Final Cut. Perhaps the interface is intended to be more user-friendly?

Also of note is the price-point. Final Cut Pro X will $300. Currently Final Cut Pro is not available as a standalone software. It comes packaged as part of Final Cut Studio 3, costing $999. Final Cut Express currently retails for $200, so there was no middle ground, you either went all in or got Express. Perhaps this means the end of Express and a focus on Pro exclusively. There may also be a Final Cut Studio, but it seems you’d be able to just get Pro if it’s all you need. A pretty smart move. Final Cut Pro X will be available in June.

Photo and info via MacRumors

Living with Firefox 4: Two Weeks In

Firefox is a stalwart of the web 2.0 era. It was the first real competition to Internet Explorer in terms of browser-share and mindshare. It standardized the web for users of Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems and was probably the first time people heard of free open source software. Firefox was blazing the trail toward a unified web experience... and then 3.0 happened. At first it was cool to be part of that world record 8 million+ downloads back in ’08. But nearly three years later we were still on 3.x. The experience wasn’t as nimble as we had become accustomed to. The browser hung up on startup. Opening new tabs and loading web pages seemed to take forever. Many jumped ship to Chrome, the younger, slimmer and sexier web browser (I went back to Safari).

Most people know whether or not they like a web browser within the first few minutes. Upon using Firefox for the first time I remembered why we all loved Firefox in its heyday. Firefox 4 instantly felt faster, lighter and looked better than its predecessor. This is a weird way of putting it but here goes: going from Firefox 3 to Firefox 4 felt like going from IE 6 to Firefox way back in 2004. Personally, this Poor Mac doesn’t use many Firefox extensions: just AdBlock Plus and Easy Youtube Downloader. Both extensions have worked seamlessly from the beginning, as well they should considering Firefox 4 has been in beta for ages. Also if you’re in uni and need to use Blackboard or a similar portal, chances are it is optimized for IE and Firefox. For those on the Mac trying to get their college assignments in, it is nice to not have to experience the pain of using Firefox 3 and Blackboard.

While its still working like the old Firefox there are cool new features as well. For one the UI is entirely overhauled, the most noticeable difference being the tabs-on-top look. Where before Firefox looked and felt like the IE of the non-Windows world, it actually looks quite attractive now by default. Of course you can tweak the UI to your hearts content - put a button here, extend/contract the address/search bar - and skin it just as you always could. Also, you can now pin tabs that you use regularly much like you would in Chrome. The bookmark manager is one of the best I’ve seen for the default setup on a browser. There is a bookmark button on the window from which you can bookmark a page, view all your bookmarks. It may seem like a redundancy considering you could do that from the bookmark menu but it proves to be quite useful for whatever reason. I found this strange because the “Other Bookmarks” button on Chrome has always annoyed me because it takes the place of the “Bookmark Menu” found in most browsers but is less useful. Also, arguably the coolest feature is the ability to sink Firefox on your desktop to Firefox on your mobile.

Firefox 4 is a great browser. It finally closes the gap between itself and browsers like Chrome and Safari (and Opera, for all the Opera zealots out there). The only negative thing that can be said is that it does not work with PPC machines. So we’re pretty much at the very end of that era in terms of support from 3rd parties. Also, for many this may be too little too late. Many of us, myself included, have developed a workflow that no longer incorporates Firefox. Personally I use Safari as my default/“main” browser - I have my Google accounts linked there, my Twitter and other “real” email/Dropbox/misc. website accounts. There are probably many more of you who use Chrome as your “main” browser. My browser for social-networking sites has become Flock. My browser for “junk” browsing is still Camino. As much as I like it, I just got used to life without Firefox, as have many others. And that’s pretty unfortunate.

The TOTALLY Multi-Touch iPad

Have you been pining over the latest iPad as much as I have? Well clearly we're just no being creative enough or we would've fixed that problem a long time ago. No lines, no cues, just a lot of creativity and patience.

By the way, I love the game and the keyboard synth app. Almost beats Korg's synth. Almost.