Macgasm

During today’s “Back to the Mac” event, Steve Jobs asked, “What would happen if an iPad and a MacBook hooked up?”

The new MacBook Air is the answer.

No thicker than 0.68 inches, the new 13.3-inch MacBook Air weighs 2.9 pounds. Battery life clocks in at 7 hours, with a 30 day standby time. It has a 13.3-inch screen, with a 1440×900 resolution, with no optical drive or spinning hard drive. Every MacBook Air will ship with an SSD drive.

Apple isn’t using a normal, off-the-shelf SSD for the new Air. Instead, this new notebook sports a custom flash solution, right on the logic board — just like the iPad and the iPhone. This means future upgrades aren’t possible on this machine.

The smaller MacBook Air is built around an 11.6-inch, 1336×768  screen, weighing just 2.3 pounds. It sports the same features as the larger MacBook Air — even the battery life.

Both machines ship with stereo speakers (new for the Air line), 2GB of RAM and NVIDIA GeForce 320m graphics.

The 11.6-inch MacBook Air starts out at just $999 for a 1.4GHz Core2Duo and 64GB of storage. Bumping up to 128GB of storage is an additional $200.

The 13.3″ Air starts at $1299 with 128GB of storage and a 1.86Ghz Core2Duo. Bumping to 256GB is an additional $300.

The new MacBook Air is available today.

Today Apple announced that they would be taking some of the best features from iOS and moving it to OS X 10.7 Lion.  While the application won’t support touch screens, it will have a number of multi-touch gestures.  Steve Jobs said that they will be focusing on using the MacBook Trackpads and Magic Trackpads as the primary input devices for multi-touch functionality on the Mac lineup.

Multi-Touch Gestures
Steve stresses that touch-based vertical screens do not work well. They’ll be sticking with touch-based pads for Macs – no touch screens.

App Store
Hell yes! There will be a Mac-based App Store in 10.7. The 70/30 split remains the same as on the iPhone App Store. Best of all, the apps will be licensed for every Mac you own. This is great news for users.

Mission Control
Mission control combines Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard, and Fullscreen apps into one interface. About time that Dashboard received some love!

Just with a gesture on the trackpad, you now have access to every window, screen, and app on your Mac. I’m stoked.

Home Screen
Just like the iPad and iPhone, we’ll get something called “Launchpad.” It allows you to have home screens to organize your apps in a consistant way. Frankly, I think this will make a big difference.

At today’s event, Steve Jobs announced and demoed FaceTime for the Mac. The application is designed to be simple and purpose-focused. It ties into your existing contact list, supports full screen, and will flip the video of the Mac user to match the orientation of a user on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

It will be available as a beta as of today.  You can download FaceTime from Apple’s website already; however, there has been some mention of bugs and delays in getting the app running.

FaceTime has not been integrated with iChat, nor does it let you chat or send files.  It’s a straight up video chatting application, as it was expected to be.  Upon downloading and installation you will be asked to log in to your AppleID and then add an email address to your account.  You can either use your AppleID or a secondary email address as the primary email for your FaceTime account.  For instance, my Apple ID is a Gmail account, and I’m now using my @macgasm account for FaceTime.

The application pretty much works exactly like the phone version.

In today’s event, Apple showed off the new version of GarageBand. Highlights include:

• “Groove Matching” – A tool that will lock different instruments to the same rhythm without making the whole thing sound “robotic.” It can fix timing based on an entire sample of music.
• “Flex Timing” – A new waveform tool that allows individual notes or clips to be stretched to fit within a certain timeframe.
• “How Did I Play?” – While lessons were added to GarageBand ’09, the new version of the application brings several new features. New piano lessons take place with a full-sized symphony  in the background, instead of just a metronome. Lessons now include real-time feedback and are saved into a history, showing a student’s progress overtime.

Much of Garageband — like much of iPhoto — takes advantage of a full-screen mode.

Randy Ubillos presented the new iMovie enhancements added to the iLife ’11 package. Some of the main features include showing audio waveforms, which you can adjust with fades and boost. You can also select a segment of audio and adjust that portion of it, as with the larger, more expensive film editing programs. ‘One step effects’ is also a new feature that they are showing. This is a really easy way to get the video edited with only a few clicks. There are a number of effects that you can select and apply to a clip. Once the clip is selected you can try several of these effects and you will get a preview of the video with the effect, which you can then select if you like it.  Just a single click implements it all.

There is also movie trailers, which is a suite of 15 trailers with a preview that you can add to your movie. You can add a studio logo and cast names as well as credits. It will use details you put it or pull from your address book to build a trailer for you.

The sound to acompany these trailers is recorded by a full orchestra, which is an amazing feature to add. They also have video recognition of people so it can tell how many people are in the video for example. From watching what Randy put together in a matter of minutes, it is pretty amazing. Again a nice piece of software for the casual user and it will enable them to create dramatic looking movies within a short space of time. The music and text effects are really great considering that it is included as part of the iLife suite.

Also you can export it for a variety of video services including Vimeo, YouTube and many others.

At today’s Back to the Mac event, Steve announced iLife ’11. In this post, I’ll overview iPhoto ’11.

iPhoto

In the new version, there will be a more fleshed-out full screen mode. You can now do more without looking at the app chrome. Your library, Faces, and Places all have full screen capability now.

Facebook integration is now better than before. Frankly, this is extremely important in today’s market. All the hip kids are using Facebook. iPhoto will now pull down your albums from Facebook regardless of how you updated it. Best of all, it will also pull down any comments on your photos directly into the app. Cool, huh?

It now has a brand new in-app email interface. You no longer have to export your pictures to Mail.app to send them to friends. You can now share your photos without leaving iPhoto.

Also, the professional printing interface has been revamped. It is beautiful and completely full screen capable. Best of all, Apple is introducing the ability to order letter-pressed cards. This is really great news for the crafty folks in the Mac community.

We had previously reported that Sid Meier’s Civilization V, the latest version of the highly addictive turn-based strategy game, would be coming to the Mac. Now we have more info on the release, although there is no exact date set.

Aspyr announced yesterday that they will be developing and publishing the Mac version of Civ V, and expect it to be available this holiday season. “The Civilization franchise is a fan-favorite and one of the best-selling Mac games ever. We are thrilled to be able to participate in this newest version and bring Mac gamers this native experience so close to the PC launch,” said Ted Staloch, Aspyr Media’s Executive Vice President. The PC version of the game was released on September 21st. Aspyr was also responsible for the Mac port of Civilization IV.

According to GameAgent.com, the Mac edition of the game will come in boxed and digital download versions. No word as to whether it will require a Steam account in order to play, like the PC version.

With new DLC coming, including a new map and another playable civilization for the PC version on October 25th, and a promised patch for the game to address AI issues and other bugs, hopefully Aspyr will have enough time to incorporate some of those fixes into their Mac version.

Article via MacNN

According to MacStories, an Italian Apple press release indicates that there will be a live stream of today’s Back to the Mac event starting at 10AM Pacific.

In a press release to setteb.it, Apple Italia indicates that there will indeed be a live stream of the event. As with the September event, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Safari, or an iOS device is required to watch the live stream.

Here is the press release:

Media Alert

Apple fornirà il video streaming live dell’evento di oggi

Cosa:
Video stream live dell’evento Apple del 20 Ottobre

Quando:
Mercoledì, 20 Ottobre, 2010, 10:00 a.m. PDT (7:00 p.m. Ora italiana)

Dove:
www.apple.com

Video Streaming Live

Apple® trasmetterà online il proprio evento del 20 Ottobre utilizzando il Live Streaming HTTP di Apple all’avanguardia nel settore. La visione richiede o un Mac® con Safari® su Mac OS® X versione 10.6 Snow Leopard®, o un iPhone® o un iPod touch® con iOS 3.0 o versione successiva, o un iPad™. Il broadcast live inizierà alle 10:00 a.m. PDT del 20 Ottobre, 2010 su www.apple.com.

Questa trasmissione è proprietà di Apple ed è protetta dalla legge sul copyright americana e dai trattati internazionali. Qualsiasi riproduzione o distribuzione è strettamente proibita senza esplicita autorizzazione scritta da parte di Apple. Si prega di rivolgersi alle Relazioni Pubbliche o all’ Investor Relations di Apple per qualsiasi informazione.

Apple progetta i Mac, i migliori personal computer al mondo, insieme a OS X, iLife, iWork e i software professionali. Apple sta guidando la rivoluzione della musica digitale con i propri iPod e con il negozio online iTunes. Apple sta reinventando la telefonia mobile con i suoi rivoluzionari iPhone e App Store, e ha recentemente introdotto il magico iPad che sta definendo il futuro dei dispositivi portatili e dei media in ambito mobile.

Contatti Stampa:
Tiziana Scanu
Apple Italia

Article via macstories.net