7:30pm – 10pm
The ACAMUG board will meet Friday evening, February 19th at the Great American Pub and Grille (3944 Black Horse Pike, Mays Landing, NJ) in the Festival Mall across the Black Horse Pike from the Hamilton Mall. The board will be setting the agenda for the coming year and members are welcome to come and sit in on the proceedings and contribute to the discussion.
The plan is to eat dinner at 7:30PM with the business meeting taking place about an hour later and lasting about an hour.
Well, as expected, today Apple introduced their entry in the tablet market and it’s called the iPad (the event video is now available on Apple’s web site.) Built to be better than the iPhone and MacBooks at common tasks such as web browsing, email and reading books, here’s a few quick specs:
[[via engadget]]
Features:
Apple’s book reader application is called iBooks (guess that’s why they changed the name of the entry level laptops to MacBook) and has an associated iBooks Store where you can buy content (hmmm, iTunes / iTunes Store, iBooks / iBooks Store.)
They brought iWork to the iPad: Numbers, Pages and Keynote, $9.99 for each.
Some models available with 3G cellular wireless reception (still through AT&T.) Two plans:
WiFi only:
WiFi + 3G:
OK, so who other than Dennis (and me) are planning to buy one? Post your comments!
More details and photos available at engadget: Live from the Apple ‘latest creation’ event
UPDATE: Here is an interesting post by John Gruber at Daring Fireball regarding his hands-on experience with an iPad:
And here is engadget’s round-up of all things iPad:
And definitely read the comments on the engadget story, they’re supremely entertaining. You’ll find out all the myriad ways Apple screwed up the iPad and made it an “epic fail”. Yeah, that Steve Jobs. He just doesn’t understand what people will buy.
One more take, this time by British actor, comedian and gadget freak Stephen Fry:
Sample quote:
I have always thought Hans Christian Andersen should have written a companion piece to the Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone points at the Emperor shouting, in a Nelson from the Simpson’s voice, “Ha ha! He’s naked.” And then a lone child pipes up, ‘No. He’s actually wearing a really fine suit of clothes.” And they all clap hands to their foreheads as they realise they have been duped into something worse than the confidence trick, they have fallen for what E. M. Forster called the lack of confidence trick. How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say “Not impressed”. I’m not advocating dumb gullibility, but it is has always amused me that those who instinctively dislike Apple for being apparently cool, trendy, design fixated and so on are the ones who are actually so damned cool and so damned sensitive to stylistic nuance that they can’t bear to celebrate or recognise obvious class, beauty and desire. The fact is that Apple users like me are the uncoolest people on earth: we salivate, dribble, coo, sigh, grin and bubble with delight.
This year the Holiday party will be held in the Vineyard Room at Gourmet Italian Cuisine in Galloway NJ. SEATING IS LIMITED in the Vineyard room to about 30 people so you MUST RSVP! CLICK HERE for the details.
We now have an official ACAMUG Twitter account! If you add “acamug” to the list of Twitter users you are following you will get tweets whenever something new is posted on the front page of our web site.
For those who haven’t discovered Twitter yet, it is a free “micro-blogging” service. After joining you can post “tweets” of up to 140 characters which other Twitter users can see and respond to.
Visit the Twitter site for more info.
It’s time for some changes here at ACAMUG.org and I’d like to hear from the members about what you want to see. Ideas that I’ve been tossing around include the return of discussion forums and more member contributed content. I’m talking about beyond just posting news items on the front page. I mean, for example, an area where any member can create a How To on whatever Mac related topic strikes their fancy. Live chats a la the old AOL forums might even be possible.
But I want to make sure that people will actually use the new stuff, so I’m starting the discussion with this post. Add your comments about what you like and don’t like about the current site and what you’d like to be able to see and do through the site that you can’t do now. And I’d really love to see more than just basic suggestions like “add forums”. Think about how you’d like them to work. How they should look. What you could do with them. Describe it in words or make some sketches, however you think you can get the idea across. But start the ball rolling with a short comment about your idea on this post.
I don’t have a definite time frame for this but I’d like to get an idea of the scope of the final result so I can begin marshaling resources.
Let’s start talking folks.