I know I’ve been rubbing it in everyone’s faces recently, but let’s take a look at the performance of a few companies stock prices over the last year. The blue line is Apple. Orange is Gateway. Red is Dell. Green is Microsoft. Black is HP.

Interesting.

I think today’s Keynote was possibly the best keynote in recent memory. I’m totally excited about everything we announced. Check this stuff out:

iLife ’05 – With new versions of iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, and Garage Band. Each one has too many features to list, and they all work together to do crazy-awesome stuff with video and audio and photos, and… you’ve just gotta see it. Print exquisite books made from your own photos. Shoot high definition video and burn it (even in 16×9 aspect ratio, if you like) to a DVD. Burn a DV tape from your camcorder straight to DVD with only one click using OneStep DVD. It even rewinds the tape for you. The one-click is literal, it’s not just a name. Record multiple simultaneous audio tracks, do music notation, and add effects with GarageBand. I could go on and on. I can’t wait to create with this. Oh, it’s only $79 for the whole thing.

iWork – Successor to the admittedly-sucky Appleworks. It includes Keynote 2 for presentations, and Pages for word processing. Way more options. Way more Mac OS X-era text manipulation. Pages edits and exports Microsoft Word documents too. No one but a Spreadsheet Nerd would spend $399 (yes, really) on Microsoft Office if they’ve got this. iWork is just $79.

Mac mini – Just what the doctor ordered. Now, switching to the Mac will only cost you $499. Bring your own display, keyboard, and mouse, and you’re set to go. It comes with iLife. It comes with iWork. It comes with Mac OS X Panther. (Geez, that’s $287 worth of software right there.) It comes with a 1.25 GHz G4 processor, and plenty of everything else for basic day-to-day stuff. Now you’ve got no excuse not to switch.

iPod shuffle – Tiny. Tiny tiny. Starts at only $99. Players with half the capacity of that iPod shuffle are going for $149 in the market right now, and they don’t have Apple’s design and ease of use to back them up. The concept is simple: people love listening to their music on shuffle. So the iPod shuffle automatically shuffles it for you (if you want) when it syncs with your music library. Every time you sync it and go, you’ve got new surprises waiting for you. You’ve got no reason not to join the digital music revolution now, if you haven’t already. As Apple’s page says, “Give chance a chance.”

Apple’s marketshare of MP3 players went from 31% to 65% in the last year. 29% of the remainder of the market is made up of thousands of different kinds of crappy MP3-playing stocking stuffers. Don’t worry. The horror will end soon, and everyone will be shuffling.

I just love good keynotes. It’s like the Super Bowl to me. Except this is on QuickTime.

I just had a great idea for functionality that should be integrated into Mac OS X. Here’s the premise: people spend a lot of time getting files over email (or from other sources) and trying to figure out how to use the files. You’ve got all sorts of files, often times with their own metadata and file extensions. But how would you know what kind of file something was if someone didn’t tell you? Look at this list of extensions: .bin, .cwk, .doc, .exe, .gif, .graffle, .html, .idx, .info, .jar, .java, .jpg, .lha, .mov, .nib, .php, .plist, .png, .ppt, .raw, .rdf, .rsrc, .rss, .rtf, .sit, .strings, .tar, .tiff, .txt, .wmv, .xml, .xls, .zip.

Some people may recognize all of those extensions, but not many. Average users never would, so the question becomes this: why would we author our software in such a way that it expects people to recognize extensions? The full list of extensions is probably 100 times longer than the one I’ve made above, and it’s just going to get longer and longer. The problem in our scenario becomes even more difficult when the file has no extension on it and no custom icon.

Truth be told, usually the OS will automatically recognize a file as long as the application is installed (and in some cases, when the application has been run at least once). What I’m saying is that it shouldn’t require that. The OS should be able to tell you what kind of a file you’ve got even if you don’t have the software to run it. It should look at the file and say “This file is a _____ file. You need _____ to use this file, and it appears that you do not have ______” if you don’t have the application. I’m not aware of any OS that does that. Are you?

It’s time to make the bad man stop.

I promised a script to make it easy to close comments in Movable Type 2.x a few days ago, and I’ve finally found a few minutes to finish it off. It’s written in PHP and it’s available right here. My working installation is here (but you need the login and pass to use it). It’s still in beta phase. Here are the requirements for use:

• You don’t hold me responsible if something horribly bad happens
• You’re using Movable Type 2.x. (I don’t yet know if this works with MT 3.x. Anyone wanna take a look? It should be easy to make it work unless they changed the database structure a lot.)
• You’re using a MySQL database (version 4.x?) on the back end (Movable Type supports other kinds too, but MySQL is probably the most popular database for MT).
• You know the login and password to your MySQL database. Note: This is not necessarily your MT login. This is the login and pass used to access your MySQL database directly. If you’re not in charge of your database, you may need to ask your database admin to run this for you.
• You must put this script on the server that hosts the database it will be run against. (Translated into Geekish: this script assumes you want to use “localhost”).

I’ve already used the script on this blog, and it worked flawlessly. It’s ridiculous how easy it is to use. Just go through the script, and rebuild your blog. Done. The whole process takes far less than a minute.

This script asks you to select which database you want to query if you have multiple databases in your MySQL installation. It also asks you which blogs you want to affect if you have multiple blogs. I would love it if a few geeks out there with knowledge of PHP and MySQL could help me test this thing out. Just comment out line #130 (at least in the script’s current iteration) and the script won’t do a thing to your database, so it’ll be safe to test. It’s well-commented, so you should be able to follow it. I especially need someone to test this that has multiple databases in their installation of MySQL, and has different MT installations in each database. I don’t have the setup to test that scenario.

I look forward to hearing your feedback! Tell your friends about this (after you’ve seen a few success messages aside from mine, of course) if you think it might be useful to them.