Japan's
Apple Store in Tokyo is in the high-end shopping distr
ict called
Ginza. Specifically, Block 3, or Ginza 3. The locat
ion is a bit intimidating for the budget-conscious among us, since it's ensconc
ed in a place where across the street is
Tiffany's and
Bvlgari, but the prices seem to be roughly the same as in
Man
ila, my home base. Its advantage is that everything is there.
It's roughly in the middle of the enormous shopping area, and only the Ginza su
bway line goes directly there (the cab flagdown rate is Y660, so that option wa
s out). You'd have to know which exit to get out of to avoid walking a lot. I w
as told to find exit A13 which pops out right across the street from the store,
in front of the classy
Matsuya Department Store.
The Ginza store has the distinction of being the first Apple Store to open outs
ide of the United States, and I was excited to go there. I had broken off rooti
ng for stuff in
Akihabara (something I could have happily done
for weeks) Friday afternoon to go to Ginza for the
Leopard la
unch, not realizing that being an authentic Apple Store, they'd shut it down fo
r a couple of hours before the 6pm release.
I was there 4:01.
There were some guys at the door, and oblivious me tried barging in only to be
stopped by one of them saying in rapid Nippongo that I should line up like ever
yone else, or something like that. I took a look to one side and saw the formin
g line and it dawned on me I wouldn't be able to get in for a couple of hours y
et.
After the Apple guy realized
I didn't speak Japanese, he managed to explain that they had just closed in pr
ep for the 6pm launch, and that I should line up. I went to the end of the line
, which was nearly a block long already, and waited. The people around me all h
ad white earbuds on, and they were all just calmly looking around. I realized I
was among my kind and relaxed. (I did cause a bit of attention when I pulled o
ut an iPhone to listen to music - their phone system requires 3G, so an iPhone
was a rare thing over there.)
I have to explain though that October 26 was a very rainy day (which is why som
e of the pics are spotty - the lens UV filter kept getting sprayed on), and the
average temp was 16 degrees centigrade. I had a waterproof jacket and an umbre
lla but it was still looking like a miserable two hours ahead.
Twenty minutes later I figured I should get out of the line since I wasn't real
ly buying Leopard yet, and I still hadn't found my Japanese wife's
Shis
eido moisturizer. The two hours could be put to better use. I jumped s
hip, and bought all the stuff my family had asked me to find. I tramped through
the rain for an hour and got thoroughly soaked, and came back at 5:30.
The line was four blocks long already.
The rain was pouring buckets, but no one was budging. I got to the end of the l
ine and tried not to visibly shiver. Apple guys came up periodically to babble
some reminders or something that I couldn't catch.
Pedestrians looked at us like we were loonies for standing out in the rain. One
businessman-type stopped to ask one of the cops watching over the line what wa
s going on, and they spoke briefly. The man's last reply was in English, and he
said in a scoffing, incredulous tone: "Software?!?" That's the story right the
re. Small conversations like this were probably occurring in front of Apple Sto
res all over the world.
At precisely 6pm, a bell tower chimed the hour. Behind me the line had lengthen
ed a further half block. By 6:02, we had started moving. Amazing Japanese promp
tness and efficiency. In stops and starts, we moved ahead, and by 6:20, I was i
n front of the doors.
It seemed like there was a riot inside. Music was blaring, there were two TV cr
ews taping, one in and one out, and there were a pile of Apple employees crowdi
ng the cordoned-off entrance as guards.
We were ushered in, and as I entered an Apple guy shoved a free black special e
dition t-shirt in my hand, a giveaway for the people who waited in line. The ne
xt guy up shoved a copy of Leopard in my other hand and pointed me to the neare
st cashier. I stammered, "English version?", and he took the box from me, shook
his head and pointed me up to the second floor.
So I stumbled into Apple Store Ginza, which today for all intents and purposes
was having a rave party. I didn't know what to do first, so I climbed the stair
s to the second floor which had the
Genius Bar, where a DJ was
spinning on two vinyl turntables, two CD platters, two
iPod h
olders and some other stuff. It was hard to move around, but I managed to go th
rough the low shelves and looked at the goodies being sold, a lot of them I hav
en't seen in Manila. I wanted to get a
[Product]Red shuffle re
al bad.
I went through the other floors, six of them. One whole floor was iPod-centric.
All the Macs on display were being hogged by the crowd, leeching off the bandw
idth. (Strangely, my iPhone couldn't get on for some reason.) One entire floor
was a gigantic theater full of fanboys, and an Apple employee was getting ready
to deliver a Leopard presentation. The floor above, the accessories floor, was
a bit more manageable, but it took every once of self-control not to pick up a
nything.
I went down in the legendary all-glass elevator, which was completely button-le
ss. There was no way to pick a floor; it just went casually up and down, stoppi
ng at each of the floors. Steve really does hate buttons.
I gave myself an hour in there, no more, but was open to an extension. But with
no sign of the frenzy abating, I reluctantly squeezed out at 7:30, since I was
still to figure out the daunting task of how to get back to my hotel clear acr
oss town on the confusing subway system during rush hour on a rainy Friday.
I got back to my room at 8:30, tired and shivering, but elated at my first wait
-in experience and the thrill of being in a real Apple Store. At least until I
realized that all I had to show for it was a lousy t-shirt.
GALLERY:
It seems odd to think th
at a publication such as PC Magazine, that seeming bulwark of
all things Windows and PC, would even deign t
o review Mac OS X, much less give it the highest accolade and
praise they've ever given an operating system.
(It's an unfair and misguided notion of what PC Magazine is, whose "PC" is real
ly plain-vanilla, non-partisan "personal computer" - meaning everything is fair
game, including Apple products. It's a prejudice I fought against when I was E
ditor-in-Chief of PC Magazine Philippines, but it was like asking the tide not
to come in.)
Well, don't be too shocked - PC Magazine, in a PCMag.c
om review by Edward Mendelson gives Leopard a near-pe
rfect rating, and says the new version of Mac OS X is...
I have fond memories of Sherlock, Apple's old and venerable se
arch utility. He has saved me in many a time of need, and has himself survived
many an OS update. But it seems he has finally outlived his usefulness, eclipse
d by the upstart 21st century detective Spotlight, who has com
e into his own with Leopard. The King is dead! Long live the King!
With the introduction of the new OS, Sherlock seems to have completely and tota
lly disappeared, spirited away into the ether unceremoniously, without fuss or
French horns, although there hasn't really been any official announcement one w
ay or the other.
Never mind a clean install; if you upgrade from Tiger to Leopa
rd, Sherlock is simply erased from your system. Searching for him on the Apple
site leads nowhere; he's just vanished from sight, erased from memory. Sniff.
A moment of silence, please, for our dear, good, dependable friend Sherlock. Ma
y flights of angels sing thee to thy rest...
It's hard not to talk about
Apple and Steve Jobs without mentioning the o
ther Steve - Steve Wozniak.
Long since parted ways from Apple, Woz was instrumental in the creation of the
first Apple Computers and the Mac (and that's putting it mildly: Jobs was just
the sales guy, really; all the tech magic came from Wozniak), and he's largely
the well from which originally sprung the Apple mythos and ethic. Today the App
le co-founder does his own thing, but remains a big influence on the industry.
On the eve of the Leopard release, 
Apple Inc. says over two million people have purchased a copy
of Mac OS X Leopard, or OS 10.5, since its official release 6p
m of October 26. The figure includes retail, reseller, online, new Mac sales, v
oluntary arrangements and agreements.
It's shaping to be the fastest and hottest selling Apple OS so far, even surpas
sing Tiger sales.
And to mention an unmentionable, the over-6GB install is the hottest download o
n torrents and the net in the past 48 hours, making a large and incalculable le
ap over and above the 2M legal acquisitions. (You know who you are. Tsk. Tsk.)
At an Apple Store, you can now buy anything you want, as much
as you want, except if they're iPhones.
Apple feels bad about the quarter million iPhones people have
bought, but have not activated. (Guess what happened to those.) It seems people
have been buying in bulk, with the precise intention of reselling them, for ev
entual unlocking and use with different carriers, or for use outside of the con
tinental United States.
Hoping there won't be more of that kind of Think Different business this Christ
mas season, Apple is now limiting over-the-counter purchases to just two iPhone
s per customer - and you'll need to use a credit card; your cash is no good to
Steve Jobs.
Hoooookay...
In fact, they're so serious about it they aren't even allowing iPhone purchases
using Apple Gift Cards, even if the gift cards themselves wer
e bought using credit cards.
It's one of the rare times a company Thinks Different and deliberately refuses
perfectly good business.
Feh! All this Thinking Different is giving me a headache.
In an earlier post, I asked why there weren't more free and useful sites around
like that screen test thing.
Ha! Apparently there are!
A friend of mine, Ryan, recently had to restore his iPhone and
was worried about jailbreaking it again and putting in Installer.app <
/strong>and he texted for advice.
Well, gone are the good old days of circuitous and tedious hacking - today, for
people like Ryan its just a matter of navigating to a website with your 
Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, 7:31pm, Oct. 25, 2007: Water, water everywhere, but not
a drop to drink.
Those
of you who've bit the bullet and sprung for an iPod Touch (or
an iPhone) and are concerned about the screen issue that has
come up (faulty rendering of blacks and all) but can't tell if your new toy is
one of the defective ones, or if you're just worried about stuck or dead pixels
like we all are, there is a free online test that you can use to detect any pr
oblems. (Would that there were more of these free and useful things around, huh
?)
Just pop on over to 
5:30pm, Friday, October 26: Hundreds form a four-block line ou
tside the Apple Store in Ginza, Tokyo, braving the rain and co
ld (the Doodler being one of them), waiting for the doors to o
pen at 6pm for the launching of Mac OS 10.5. One more:
Two updates have popped up on the radar, if Software Update ha
sn't updated you that you should update.
One is iLife Support 8.1.1, a 10.3 mb download, and it
If you have a .Mac account using Panther and
think you can get by without upgrading to Leopard (like you di
d with not upgrading to Tiger the last time), this time you're
SOL. You're going to have to bite the bullet and bump up to O
S 10.5, or at least the latest Tiger update, if you hope to continue using the
US$99 service.
Starting last Friday, Apple began the process of abandoning fu
ll .Mac syncing support for users of OS 10.3. To have "uninterrupted service",
Panther users will have to pony up for at least 10.4.10 or lat
er.
A technical note from Apple states that they are doing this to
support .Mac enhancements that will emerge with the release of Leopard today,
and will leave users of older versions out in the cold, especially with Calendar syncing.
Apple says
OS 10.5's got lotsa new stuff, particularly in the field of se
curity. In fact, Apple's got about 11 new security features in
corporated into Leopard.
Perhaps the most interesting of the lot is the security technology called 
One of the most striking features of Leopard is the "stacks" o
ption on the Dock where you can see a stacked representation o
f a folder's content. This is essentially an implementation of the old "Piles"
concept, but Apple seems to have a way to make an old thing ne
w, and wholly its own. Whatever the case may be, it is still a cool thing to ha
ve.
Of course you knew someone was going to try and do it on the iPhone and the Touch, right?
A Google Code project called mobilestack ("Br
inging Stacks to iPod touch/iPhone's Dock") is being developed that tries to do
exactly this. Still a work in progress, it's getting a bit of buzz on the net.
As to why it's being done is moot and academic; the fact that it can be done i
s reason enough. Sigh.
Details on 
The iPod turns six today, October 23, 2007.
Original specs (2001): 5gb. "1000 songs in your pocket." Mac only. Format - 160
Kbps MP3. Mechanical scroll wheel. Firewire only. 10 hours battery life. 2-inc
h monochome backlit LCD. 6.5 oz. US$399.
iPod Classic specs (2007): 160gb. 40,000 songs, 25K photos or 200 hours of vide
o. Mac/Windows. Audio: MP3, AAC, Protected AAC, MP3 VBR, Audible, Apple Lossles
s, WAV and AIFF; Video: H. 234, MPEG4. Photo: JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PSD and PNG
. Touch wheel. USB 2.0. 40 hours audio, 7 hours video. 2.5-inch color LCD. 5.7
oz. US$349.
Now that unlocking and jailbreaking are commonplace, some folk have come up wit
h a gallery of all the different ways an iPhone might look lik
e these days.
Check out the 
On the heels of the J
obs announcement of the iPhone/Touch SDK's release in February comes t
he announcement of 
The buzz and anticipatio
n for the release of the next version of Mac OS X, known as 
Nullr
iver Software's just updated their Installer applicat
ion for jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches t
o v3.0b3 this morning, and now works with 1.1.1 iPhones.
AppTapp is an install program that downloads packages off the
net and is a central clearinghouse for new stuff from different community sourc
es - and is a source of great delight for the multi-touch masses the world over
.
Among other things, AppTapp Installer 3 uses a different core
repository (as if I knew what that actually meant) and incorporates improvement
s to the UI and the packaging back-end. More surprisingly, it recommends firmwa
re 1.1.1 - which many jailbreakers and unlockers are still wary of.
Visually it features a new, more professional look-and-feel, providing a five-i
con cool-looking all-black dock at the bottom of the screen with Featur
ed/Install/Update/Uninstall/Sources icons, as opposed to the clunky fo
ur-button row on top from the previous version. It reorganizes and presents the
available installs in easy-to-navigate categories that look like a typical iPh
one webapp, and makes more sense. Also, it might be my imagination, but it seem
s there's a heap more new installs after re-running Community Sources.
As a work-in-progress, there are still a few little things that need some fixin
g, but nothing major, and these are outlined in a detailed listing from the 
It's official. Apple's made a habit of producing long, large a
nd reasonably thorough introductory videos for major new hardware and software
they're releasing.
It's great for hungry fanboys and tech journalists who can't get it elsewhere,
and I guess for the growing number of folk who want a look at the stuff before
plunking down coin for the new stuff coming out of Cupertino. Largely overkill,
the hype usually should be enough for other manufacturers, but Apple tends to
go overboard about these things (hey, new iPhone TV ads are st
ill coming out up to now, man). Don't have a problem with it, though.
Recently, some of the better ones have been the iPhone and iPod Touch guided tours (although they need serious help sourcing less awkward hos
ts for these things - less of the hand gestures, guys! And seriously, we're sic
k of the black t-shirts.)
Now, they've just released on the Apple site a half-hour video for OS X
Leopard, which is coming out on Friday. (For which I will take off fr
om the Tokyo Motor Show and sneak out to the Ginza App
le Store on the 26th to see how they do a product rollout in Japan.) C
ool. Us fanboys anticipate these videos like sequels to the Transformer
s movie.
Watch the Leopard Guided Tour in different resolutions or down
load it (108mb for iPods and 379mb for the bigger version) 
From the Now-We've
-Seen-Everything Department:
If you hate smudges on that beautiful iPhone or iPod T
ouch screen, some folk at the imaginatively named company 
If you can stand the ridu
cule and vaguely fetishistic nature of the product, then by all means, get a se
t. Me, nothing a hankie can't fix. Whatever you choose, live long and prosper.
From the Yeah-I-Knew-This-Was-Going-To-Happen Department:
Apple's just dropped the cost of DRM-free, 25
6kbps AAC tracks from the iTunes Store from U
S$1.29 to the usual US$.99 per track, making the high-quality iTunes Pl
us tracks the same price as the regular stuff while "offering audio qu
ality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings" and fr
ee from oppressive digital rights management to boot. (They used to charge a th
irty-cent upgrade fee to bump up previously-bought tracks to iTunes Plus level.
)
In addition to the EMI catalog of these songs, Apple has added
(among other labels) Sub Pop, Nettwerk, Beggars Group, IODA, The Orcha
rd and more. Now at over 2 million tracks, this makes the iTunes Store
the largest DRM-Free high-quality online music source thus far.
Hopefully someday soon, it'll all be like this. And even cheaper.
Three more to be exact.
Watch 'em 
Steve Jobs has maintained since the launch that the iP
hone is a closed ecosystem: Apple will keep a tight r
ein on their product's integrity by allowing only web-based apps.
Well, since the contraband's coming out in waves anyway, might as well let them
, right? At least he can regulate it (to a point).
So Jobs released a 
Tag Mobile Service, that unique barcode system being used to e
xpand once-static print media into dynamic, updatable wide-ranging content acce
ssible through mobile phones, has gotten on the iPhone express
.
All you need do is take a phonecam shot of a TMS tag, and you immediately get c
ontent associated with the tag onto your phone - audio, video, animation, text,
wap sites - all for free (or just the measly cost of the bandwidth; the conten
t is free.) The software that lets you do all this on your phone is likewise fr
ee, downloadable directly to your phone, or through the net from the TMS site.
In the unlikely event your phone has no cam, there are short codes that you can
just enter through the TMS Reader app that does the same thing.
My 
Apple's put up a detailed listing of all that's new and dear (
all 300+ of it) about the next version of Mac OS X. Just click
Ambrosia Software
has released the next gen iteration of a much loved app called 
While not quite professional studio level, this baby's far more than we can exp
ect for something that is still shareware. (This is something my director frien
d Mike Cabardo would love to have on his Mac.) Goes for US$69,
US$30 for upgrading from WireTap Pro or Audio Hijack Pro. The
Doodler gives this one 8 of 10 Apples.
...next Friday.
Apple's announced, finally, the official release of Ma
c OS 10.5 Leopard on October 26, at 6PM.
It requires an Intel or PPC G5 Mac, or a 
Here's a first-person recounting (mine) of an iPod Touch being
liberated via iJailbreak:
Envious of the new iPods? A firmware hack's come out that lets
you have the nice, split screen interface of the new nano and
classic on your old and creaking 5G or 
BREAKING NEWS: A 2.5mb application that is a turnkey solution
for jailbreaking iPod Touches has just been put up online. It'
s the plug-and-play GUI solution everyone's been waiting for.
iJailbreak is the first of its kind and automates what is larg
ely a daunting process for most people - the Doodler included. (A friend of min
e named Bernie texted over the weekend to say that he jailbroke his unit follow
ing the detailed instructions posted online, and I balked when I took a look; B
ernie's an IT guy used to these things and probably thought it was child's play
. Brrr.)
iJailbreak is free and works only for Intel Macs at the moment
, and a PPC version is in the works. Windows
users are SOL for now (although this app seems to based on the Windows hack 
Al Gore's been put on the front page of the Apple website to honor him for winning the Nobel Peace Prize fo
r his efforts at making the planet aware of global warming. Another award! Way
to go, Al.
We just wonder though if his being on the Apple board have anything to do with
it. The bigger wonder is seeing Jobs be the suck-up this time
around.
But, really, Al deserves it anyway.
(Sorry for all the screencaps and Macpics lately. Have been in Fort Ilo
candia, Ilocos Norte for a conference for the past few days and it's b
een hell posting anything from here. Things'll normalize tomorrow, don't worry.
)
From the Now-We've-Seen-Everything Department: the .999 harden
ed 24 carat gold iPhone, from 
An iPhone user named Carl Mercier had an erro
r message on his iPhone the other day, and it showed an intriguing screen that
might a harbinger of things to come. Carl had his camera handy so he snapped a
pic and posted it on his 
Apple has just launched a speci
fic webpage on its site listing all (acknowledged and above-board) webapps avai
lable thus far, particularly for the iPhone and the iP
od Touch. It's the first overt sign of things to come. Among the webap
p categories listed are for entertainment, games, news, productivity, sports, t
ravel and utilities, and can be found 
It hasn't happ
ened to me, but a lot of users of the new metal iMacs have bee
n experiencing inexplicable freezing incidents where the only solution is to ha
rd-boot the computer, and recently Apple has acknowledged the problem, accordin
g to 
The iPhone Dev
Team worked furiously on getting Jailbreak and 
If you use an A
irTunes network (that's the unwired version of iTunes
done through an Airport Express - click 
Late Beatle George Harrison has finally made it onto
the iTunes Store as a solo artist, at last completing the 
Ten-year growth chart of Apple vs. Dell, from NASDAQ
.
I've been anxious
about the chrome back of the iPod Touch I'm reviewing, as I've
always been for all my iPods since 2001. Afraid of scratches and frustrated by
the options available in my country as of now (none), I found a solution that
might even be better and less expensive than anything that might turn up in the
near future.
It's called 
A couch made of 20 Macintosh II computers. Mac Store in Maryland Heights, Missouri.
(via 
For those few who still need convincing (or Macheads who can't get enough), 
One of the bigge
r issues in the release of the iPod Touch is the inability to
manually add entries to the Calendar app on the iPod itself. C
urrent users are forced to just do everything on the Mac's iCal application and just sync up with their iPods.
We wonder why this PDA function has been removed (probably because the iPod is
not meant to be a PDA - new multi-touch Newtons, anyone?) but
why'd they let people tweak Contacts directly on it anyway? Fo
r that matter, why even add wifi to the iPod? Just so people can surf to the
Owners should fire up iTunes and get the new 1.0.2 fir
mware updates for both the iPod Classic and the 
Well, not q
uite ringside. Am typing this from inside Cinema 5 of
Gateway Theater in Cubao, on free wifi on an iPod Touch. Might as well be ringside for how close the ring seems.
This is a traditional father-son bonding activity my Dad and I have been doing
for several years now. We don't see each other as often these days, but when th
ere's a Pacquiao fight, there's an unspoken agreement that we'
ll see it together pay-per-view at a theater without fail.
The main bout doesn't start for several hours, but we're here for everything. B
ored, I check for wifi with the Touch, and there are three free Gateway signals
. So I'm here surfing and typing in the dark between bouts. Mainly because I ca
n.
Am thinking of live blogging the fight but if I do that I won't enjoy the event
. Besides, I don't know how JV Rufino and the Inquirer.Net guys would feel abou
t that. And this is a Mac blog, not a Sports one.
Nothing really. Just one of the nice things technology lets you do these days.
Ok, back to the festivities. Another bout starting.
Pretty in its simplicity, much easier to use, yet I was all conflicted about it
.
Steve Jobs has trumpeted the Phone/Touch browsing on S
afari as the "full internet experience", which for anyone who's used i
t for at least 60 seconds would quickly realize that Jobs is full of it. While
it's way better than surfing on a smartphone or PDA, it's hardly the full exper
ience.
Even if you do get to see the full page on the screen, it's tiny; you still can
't read a thing. The screen is still way too small, and all that tapping and pi
nching and dragging gets old really really fast. It may be convenient and easy
to use, but it's nowhere near surfing on a laptop. You can't download, you can'
t access some fields on some pages, and a lot of page features are wonky on som
e sites. "Full internet experience"? Sorry, Steve-O, but that's a COS. It's nic
e we have these new things now, but I'm afraid it still ain't it.
Even Apple itself contradicts Jobs. They have 
It should be a no-brainer prediction that one of the high-capacity optical form
ats will be included in an impending iteration of iMac (nice a
lliteration, huh?) or other new Mac, but its still anyone's gu
ess which of the two warring standards Steve-O will side with, and we won't lik
ely know until the next Macworld Keynote. (Blu-Ray is emerging
as the dominant format, but you never really know with notorious contrarian Jo
bs.) But for those portable Mac users with ginormous storage needs, you don't h
ave to wait (well, maybe a month): 
We all kno
w that iPods are hot items, we just never took the expression
literally.
An airport employee from Douglasville by the name of Danny Williams will never make that mistake again. That's because Danny's first gen 
Apple
refuses to comment on the incident, but promised to replace Danny's charred nan
o with a new one once he turned it in. Some poeple say that while this is a ver
y rare occcurence, it does happen. My question is, what the heck was he listeni
ng to when the nano blew up?
See the news report on video 
Got one yesterday. Full review to follow soon. Pics after the jump.
There's b
een a rash of thefts of Macs and Apple produc
ts lately, particularly from parked cars. Some friends of mine have lost 
(I honestly am not sure what these posts about Microsoft digit
al music players are doing in an Apple-centric blog, except fo
r the fact that these things give us perspective - and make us feel better abou
t our biases.)
More details and official confirmation has come out about the new version of Mi
crosoft's beleaguered music player. These include:
A pair of posters sighted in New York City over the weekend. Wapakkk!!!
(Via 
Like I announced some time ago, Mac-A-Doodle is moving over to
the Inquirer.net blogging network, although I didn't say when
. Well, I'm saying it now: that move is sometime today, October 1, 2007
.
Later today, this WordPress blog at this URL will freeze, and commenting and po
sting will move over to this new URL:
