Last Friday I treated myself to a new 17″ MacBook Pro (that’s a story for another post though!) One thing that always puts me off is as soon as I buy one a new one comes out, so I thought I would be safe buying a couple of weeks after the WWDC when it was upgraded. Of course the other big news at the WWDC was the upcoming official release of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard due to be released in September.
It made me think, do I have to pay the full price to upgrade my OS even though it’s not far away and I’ve just spent a small fortune in the Apple store?
So a bit of poking around on the Apple website came up with an interesting page (one I might add that is not well linked to!)
UK – http://www.apple.com/uk/macosx/uptodate/
US – http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/
So the deal is simple if you bought a new Mac on or after June 8th you get a special upgrade price! $9.95 USD and £7.95 GBP (gotta love Apples currency conversions!) You have to claim within 60 days of purchase and before December 26th 2009 but it seems well worth it.
You can apply at the above links pay by credit/debit card and it will be shipped upon release. Makes a nice change for Apple to do something nice seeing as they charged me £20 to buy a Mini-Display Port to DVI adaptor!!!!
How many times have you been to an event, conference or convention and wanted to be able to cover all sides of the story? Often times these events will break up into different sessions and obviously you alone can’t be there to report on what’s happening. If you could, you’d be spending perhaps hours recording and then writing blog posts about what happened in session 1, then you probably missed a good part of session 2 because you weren’t paying attention while writing up something about the opening session and so on and so forth.
You could allow other people to help you report on what’s going on in these events. And that’s a novel idea, but if you went the conventional way and went through your blog, then you’d have dozens, if not close to hundreds of blog posts where the size of these entries could be summed up in one or two lines – and chances are they could too. That’s where live blogging comes in…and there are a couple of web applications that come to mind, perhaps more prominent is Scribble Live.
Scribble Live is basically a community of live bloggers that can keep track on what’s going on with different events. Take this month’s WWDC event in San Francisco. Scribble Live became Twitter blogging and in short bursts, multiple authors were able to post their observations and thoughts to the same area. While live blogging seems simple enough, Scribble Live has made it even more easier by allowing you to use either your Microsoft Live, OpenSocial, or Facebook ID as your login. So you don’t even have to worry about having yet another login that you’ll probably forget the username and password to in a few months when you’re not using the thing.
Okay, so it can get boring after a while to just continually typing short (or long) bursts of copy into this simple interface. You can actually do much more than that. It’s a mini-version of WordPress, I would say except you don’t have to install it onto your server. Everything is hosted on the Scribble Live servers and you can share images from your camera, computer, etc. and also video.
However, for large conferences that you might go to, whether it’s South by Southwest (SXSW), WWDC, Ad:Tech, LeWeb3, or any big name conference and you want to share with the world, try out Scribble Live and keep the world posted. It’s free use but the pain in the ass, but obviously understood, is that the developers embed Google Ads into your live blog so every few entries or so, you’ll see an ad that looks kind of out of place. You’ll see what I mean. Another issue that I’m worried about is allowing people to post to live blogs seemlessly via text or SMS messaging. I believe right now they only allow you to go through the web interface. I’m sure that it’s fine for those with the Apple iPhones but for folks like me with a Blackberry, I’m not able to access Scribble Live.
So get your “account” on Scribble Live now and start live blogging. Don’t worry, I don’t think you’ll be giving up your Twitter account anytime soon, but it’ll be good to have live blogging at any of your next big events. It’ll help keep people informed on what they’re missing. Be the first to catch up on the good stuff.
Apple is currently announcing all kinds of iPhone related stuff right now at a keynote speach, happing at WWDC, a lot of bloggers are excited about the new features, functions and price points. How excited? Well check out how many tweets MacRumors has sent, if it loads at all. I keep seeing this wonderful illustration from twitter:
