Whazzup Pussy Cat?…….O o o o oooooSX

So, Apple have announced another of their special events, entitled ‘Back to the Mac’ for select tech journalists. The invite is in the form a a brushed aluminium ‘card’ with a cut-out Apple logo swivelling outwards, to reveal the image of a lion. The obvious interpretation of this is a new incarnation of OSX, though I could have sworn one a the beta versions was code-named Lion. Alternatively, the invites may be a ploy by Apple to gather the less than complementary members of the press in one room before releasing a starved African feline upon them. Then again, they could be announcing on update to the “Back to my Mac’ feature of OSX that now works reliably (or at all).

Hopefully, they will also be announcing an update to iLife, which is a bit overdue by now. It would be great to see something really useful added to iPhoto, such as Photoshop style layers. A nice addition to iWeb, the ginger-haired stepchild of the iLife suite, would be an automatic mobile-friendly formating of your sites for display on iPhones and other smartphones.

Also, anticipated is an update to the Macbook Pro range, probably the minor spec bumps usually seen around this time in the product cycle (increased processor speeds, maybe a jump to more cores). The Macbook Air is definitely due to refresh, so I would not be surprised to see something more interesting that a mere processor/drive space boost in this space.

The only certainty is that no-one outside of Steve Jobs’ golden circle of trust/iron-clad non-disclosure agreement will know for sure until next Wednesday.

Breathing new life into old hardware

The HP Jornada 720 - 206Hz of mobile productivity.

This is a quick test to see how effective my old Jornada 720 Handheld PC is as a little workhorse for updating WordPress.

I should be able to send updates using WordPress’s email gateway, via some iPhone tethering to my trusty Cisco Aironet 350 wifi card. The benefits of using the Jornada 720 is a nice hardware keyboard, large 640 x 240 touchscreen for editing and viewing most of the post. Of course, a ten year old piece of kit can’t do this out of the box. I needed to install QMail3 as the email client; the built in Pocket Outlook cannot be used for IMAP mail accounts, nor can it send emails directly (it needs to be conected back to a PC host). This setup should let me jot off the occasional quick post at lunchtime from my van based ‘office’.

Sent from my Jornada 720!