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It was inevitable. That lovely little friend known as my iPod kicked the bucket last week. I was trying to sync it up so I could listen to some recent podcasts on the road and it was fighting me the whole way.

First it synced about 4 of the dozen or so that I wanted. After a few more attempts at getting it to sync the rest, I got fed up and decided do a full reset. It meant having to re-sync every song in my library (6500 songs takes about 3 – 4 hours), but in the past, it’s fixed my issues.

Well, I think the reset was about as much as it could take. Shortly after plugging it into AC power, it stopped responding entirely to button pushes. I plugged it into my PC, it recognized it, but still wouldn’t transfer. I’ve had drive problems since a few months after I got it. It would randomly freeze and the only fix was a hard smack against the palm of my hand. I’d also done a self-install of a new battery after the original stopped holding a charge and the warranty was up.

Yesterday, I stopped by the Apple store and picked up a 160GB Classic. I’d been planning on only getting an 80GB, but I remembered Apple’s recycling program. Bring in any iPod, working or not, and they’ll give you 10% off any iPod purchase the same day. Not only did I get rid of the old brick, but I got a nice little discount. When it was all said and done, I got double the space for only $40.

My biggest complaint is that they no longer include an AC adapter in the box. Something that’s not a problem for me because I still have my old one. The other minor annoyance is that the backlight now stays on the entire time the iPod is connected to a PC or in my car whereas the previous version turned off after a few seconds.

Update: Yesterday, I got a Griffin Reflect case for my iPod too. It’s shiny!

Being the good Mac fanboy, I was anxiously awaiting Apple’s announcement today. With a title like “The beat goes on,” you knew it was going to be new iPods. Having just taken it all in, I have some reactions.

Well the word is out and so are the new iPods. New colors for Shuffles. Blah. New “fatty” nano. Don’t care. New iPod “Classic.” Interesting, nice price point. iPod Touch. I was hanging on every word until they got to the size, 8GB and 16GB. Wifi enabled. Sweet! Wifi iTunes Store. Also sweet! Starbucks partnership. *silence*

I was all ready to go to the Apple Store after work to buy me a new iPod Touch until I found out they were only going up to 16GB. I can’t live with 16GB. I’m the kind of person who likes to be able to hear a song on a whim. The only way to do that is to carry my whole collection around with me. I reached the point where I could no longer fit all my music on my 60GB iPod not long ago. I deal with it by only putting the stuff I listen to somewhat often on it. That reduced collection is somewhere between 25-30GB. Why couldn’t you have made a 32GB version, Apple? Charge me $499 for it. Everything else about it is sweet, but if you have a device that’s supposed to hold my music, video, and photos, it’s going to need to be larger than 16GB.

A week or so ago, I noticed the power cord for my laptop was becoming increasingly sensitive. If it wasn’t at just the right angle, it wouldn’t charge. Knowing my laptop was out of warranty (I thought it was 90 days, but I guess it is a full year) and with a replacement costing $80, I dealt with it. Sunday, I plugged in the adapter and went back to working on my desktop. I looked over an noticed it wasn’t charging. I reached for the cord to try and fiddle with it to get the magic angle again and immediately became alarmed at how hot it had become. I quickly unplugged it from the laptop and the wall as to not start a fire or damage the laptop. After I did this, I noticed there was a small hole in the plastic coating of the cord and it had partially melted.

Rick, Kristi, and I were planning on going to see Superbad (so hilarious!) at the mall and so we left a little early to stop by the Apple store. Once there, I was informed by an employee that I needed to make an appointment to see someone at the Genius Bar and that their next appointment was right in the middle of our movie time. The nice thing is you can schedule appointments online at any time. I got one set up for 1:30 the following day at the Apple store a few miles from work.

At work the next day, my laptop lasted for about an hour before the battery was pretty much drained, so I was forced to use my old Linux desktop machine. Man is it slow compared to my Macbook Pro. After spending about 2 hours just getting the thing updated to where I could start programming, I tried to get some work done. The results were less than amazing to say the least.

I never realized how much more efficient I am on my Mac. I have to give credit to the excellent text editor, Textmate. I felt crippled without it. All it’s little bundles and keyboard shortcuts add up not only a much more enjoyable programming experience, but a more productive one as well.

As 1:30 rolled around, I took my seat at the Genius Bar. The store was packed and the Genius Bar was obviously behind schedule as I sat around for a good 15 minutes before anyone called my name. Eventually, a Genius, Dave, came over and called my name. He explained that he’d seen the melting power cords before. The cause seems to be when the cord gets bent at an extreme angle and breaks a small wire inside the cord. After some trouble pulling up my info (it was due to the purchase being made under my boss’s name), he replaced the adapter without any further questions. I thanked Dave for his help and was on my way back to being an efficient, Mac loving, web developer for the rest of the day.

Any time Steve Jobs gives a keynote, you know it’s going to be huge. I told my coworker, Caroline, that today is like Christmas for Apple fans like myself because Steve always has something cool to show off.

Of course I was all over every bit of live coverage I could find for the last hour and a half. I did a little live commenting on my Jaiku page for anyone that’s interested. The biggest announcements had to do with Leopard which I’m excited as hell to see in person. The iTunes CoverFlow interface is now the main interface for Finder. Apple’s been criticized in the past for not having a consistent interface across even their own apps. I guess they took it personal because now you see it everywhere. Even their website has been updated.

Now all of this Leopard stuff will have the Apple folks buzzing, but the rest of the world could probably care less. Steve had something for those other people today too. Safari on Windows. My initial reaction was “Meh. Another browser to worry about when coding.” However, they claim the rendering speed and Javascript performance is vastly superior to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. I’ll have to wait until I get home and get on my Windows machine to find out I guess (Windows Beta available now). I’m wondering if it’ll force Cocoa style on form widgets like the Mac version does. Supposedly Safari 3 is going to allow more control over them with CSS though. My final thought on Safari 3, you release a beta for Windows but not OS X (I guess I was too quick, there is a beta for OS X too!)?

[Normally I'd post some pictures, but I've been slacking off of work for the last 2 hours.]

Last December, after making the switch to OS X, I began looking for equivalents to the normal set of applications I was using. After some poking around the interwebs, I was finding that the term “OS X freeware” to be a bit of an oxymoron.

Macheist to the rescue! If you’re unfamiliar with the event, go read up on Wikipedia. I was going to purchase TextMate for $50 anyway, might as well donate a bunch of that to charity and get a bunch of other apps as well.

One of the apps that came with Macheist happened to be NewsFire. While there was nothing wrong with Thunderbird, I decided to use Mail.app for my email which doesn’t have an RSS reader. Being that I just bought a shiny new RSS reader app in NewsFire, I gave it a shot.

It took just a couple of minutes to dump my most read feeds into NewsFire. The interface is gorgeous. After finding out you could simply flick through items by pressing spacebar, I was flying along. Then, I started running into all the things I missed about Thunderbird.

First of all, NewsFire doesn’t display the web page. It only shows you what the feed text. That’s OK a lot of times, but there many times where I would just read the entire article right from Thunderbird and if the site had commenting, I was also able to read them right there. Now it does pull down images and Flash (I believe it’ll also download enclosures like podcasts), but I want the full sit. I suspect that Thunderbird’s close ties to Firefox gives it this ability with little effort on the developers end. At the same time, I know WebKit (Safari) is able to be used by third-party applications, so this isn’t too far out of question.

In Thunderbird, it is not easy to do, but it is possible to view authenticated and https feeds. Really, all it involves is copying some files from a hidden Firefox directory, but it’s neither intuitive nor is it anything the average user would attempt. I can’t say the same for NewsFire; it doesn’t even have a dirty super-nerdy workaround. I can’t count the number of times that I ran into a situation where using an authenticated feed would’ve been useful.

In short, NewsFire is very well put together visually, but is still lacking some advanced features. Please David, update. All of your other apps have been updated recently, now it’s time for NewsFire.

I always love big Apple events. They never do things quietly. Leading up to MacWorld every year there are rumors flying like crazy. Everyone is waiting with bated breath for what will come off of Steve’s lips. iPhone rumors have been flying for over a year and now it’s here.

This thing does it all. It’s an iPod, it’s a cell phone, it’s a camera. The thing has a wide touchscreen that automatically knows whether it should be in landscape or portrait mode. It runs OS X, so you can have real applications like Mail and Safari, not neutered ones. It has wifi, bluetooth, and EDGE: It’s always connected. It’s got a 5 hour battery life while doing video, photos, surfing, calls and 16 hours of just audio. It’s got 8GB (or 4GB) of storage. This thing is fricken amazing.

The problem; it cost’s $600 for the 8GB version and $500 for the 4GB version (prices with a 2 year contract) and you can only get it on Cingular. And not until June! Steve, you had me up to that.

The iPhone, it really does sound great, but I think they took a huge gamble by going exclusively with Cingular. People don’t like to be locked down like that. I predict they work something out with the other carriers within a year.

My big question after the MacWorld keynote was that’s it? I really want to see a large iPod like the iPhone. Touchscreen iPod with wifi and bluetooth? You could get rid of that big dock connector on the bottom and just add a charging port which could be mini-USB 2.0. Ahh…what could be.

If you didn’t notice Apple’s stock (APPL) took a 7+ points (roughly 8.5%) hike today. Damn! If I’d only had a spare $10k yesterday!