Apple just released a public beta of Safari 4. First impression: it’s fast! Second impression: What happened to the Tabs bar?

I haven’t had so much fun with the iPhone camera. QuadCamera is a fantastically simple App that takes quick fire snaps and stitches them together in a grid. £1.19 in the App Store. Here’s a quick shot I took earlier today of Ric, one of the guys at work. Genius.

Boy was I wrong. I capitulated and bought the package and from the quick play with iPhoto and iMovie I’ve completely revised my opinion. iPhoto is fast fast fast now. Faces is just phenomenally fun and Places is just, well, cool. 

Okay, I’ll post a more in depth review later. I’m off to eat humble pie now.

For the past few years I’ve had a little Apple-related ritual. Whenever iLife is released I walk over to the Apple Store in Regent St and buy it. iLife ’06 and ’08 (they skipped ’07 I think) sit on a shelf in the study upstairs.

The one application from the suite that gets used much more than the others is iPhoto. iPhoto ’06 was a slow, clunky beast but I still faithfully used it to organise, tag and upload to Flickr (using Connected Flow’s FlickrExport) and even created and ordered one or two hardcover books. The ’08 version was much faster and the Events feature was fun to use.

iMovie ’06 was simple and straightforward. ’08 had me scratching my head a few times and came to the conclusion that I preferred the previous version. As for iDVD ’08, I don’t think I even launched it once. That’s no reflection on the software which I think is pretty good but times have changed. The ’06 version was used and used a lot. Garageband is great for recording scratch tracks for work and the ’08 release had a very handy Movie layer to sync voiceovers.

The one app I never used was iWeb. The fact that it doesn’t talk to TypePad, WordPress or Blogger was a great disadvantage and even though I know that it isn’t tethered to .Mac/MobileMe, it still feels constrained.

So, iLife ’09 is the one that’s going to break my little ritual. The one I have no interest in buying. Faces and Places? My D60 doesn’t have a GPS function (there is a third party shoe-mounted one apparently) and I can tag my photos with the person’s name. iMovie? No thanks, Final Cut Pro does the job a lot better. If iDVD had BluRay support it would be really interesting as opposed to being nearly useless now.

There isn’t a single feature that would compel me to buy this version, not one. Does anyone else have a different opinion?

Finally! A delicious plugin for Safari. DeliciousSafari even puts an icon on the toolbar to add a bookmark, including all the popular tags a particular entry has. To add icing to the cake, there’s a free iPhone App!

UPDATE: Ignore the iPhone App. On a uselessness scale of 1 to 10 it’s 9.99995. Delete.

What a great idea! You download the NumberKey connect software, download the App on your iPhone, et voilà! An external number pad for your MacBook Pro! And with skins to match your laptop. Now if there’s only a way to keep the iPhone 3G from bobbing around while I enter timecodes….

The codecs seem tightly optimised and I’m able to play 1080p without the CPU hitting 50%. And it can play anything I can throw at it. It also supports Subtitles. All of these grown-up media centre features make Front Row look like a distant unliked cousin.

Here’s what the Movies view in Plex looks like:

The App scanned my library after I added it as a source, downloaded all the artwork including the background fan art and lots of info. Then I added a few TV shows and this is what that interface looks like:

And the TV Series interface: