As you probably know, we’re as fanatical about WordPress as we are about Apple these days. The agenda for this year is absolutely stellar. We’ll certainly be tweeting quite a bit and we may do some blog entries here from our iPhones.

If you guys have any questions you’d like us to ask or any specific information you’d like us to gather while we’re here just let us know.

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

About six years ago, The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 put in place some very good guidelines and rules that must be followed by email marketers. One aspect of this act dictates that every email communication must include a link that allows the subscriber to opt-out of future communication. From a mechanics perspective, here is what the act dictates as it relates to Unsubscribe Compliance:

• A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.
• Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days.
• Opt-out lists, also known as suppression lists, are used for compliance purposes only.

The Nightmare

This part of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 is fairly cut and dried. What is not well defined or mandated in the act is the ease and simplicity of the unsubscribe process. As a result many people click on an unsubscribe or subscription management link, typically found at the bottom of an email, and end up on a website somewhere with about 30 or 40 decisions to make before they can officially unsubscribe. In other instances, the subscriber that wants to opt-out ends up reading an opt-out message that is confusing, worded in a very tricky manner, and because of such ends up actually not being unsubscribed. See the graphic below for a great example of clever wording, trickery, graphics placement, and overall deception practiced during the unsubscribe process. This is one that I personally experienced just a few days ago.

I’d like to point out a couple of things here. First, notice that I had to highlight the text in the second paragraph so that I could actually read it. Mysteriously, the logo is placed behind that text making it hard to read. (Anyone got any thoughts on their motive there? Yeah, me too). Secondly, take a minute and actually read the highlighted paragraph. Is it me, or does it take three to four times reading through it to decipher what action needs to be taken? Notice two other things please. The submit button is placed well above the check box that must be unchecked in order to discontinue getting emails. I’ll point out too that when I experienced this, I was on my MacBook and because of the smaller size, I didn’t even see that checkbox initially because it was below the bottom of the display.

Piss Poor Experience with IDG

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the email marketer behind this is IDG Connect. Their email content is never SPAM. However, their opt-out/unsubscribe process is ridiculous. It’s always in the best interest of the email marketer to make the unsubscribe process as simple and clean as possible. Here’s how it should work…

1. Click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.
2. You get directed to a nice clean web page that says, “Thank you. You will no longer receive our email communications. If you wish to subscribe again in the future please visit: http://websitename.com.”

Hey, I haven’t ranted in a while. If you’ve got some experiences to share about the unsubscribe process, either positive or negative, please share them in the comments. Oh, and if you work for or are affiliated with IDG, please feel free to engage in the conversation as well. I’d be happy to dialogue with you about it.

Today we launched a new Highrise feature that makes it a lot faster and easier to file a note or email under a case or deal. This new feature will save you clicks and time — especially when filing a lot of notes/emails one after another.

One thing that I note related to this new feature is that it appears that you must be in Excerpt view in order for the new feature to work. I was trying to do this from the List view and it doesn’t seem to work from within that view. I have queried the guys at 37signals about this and I’ll update any information that they provide.

A quick thanks to our friends at MacDailyNews for sharing this with us. Wikidot has published a fairly exhaustive list of Mac applications and more importantly are sharing information about their compatibility with Snow Leopard. I suggest that you take a moment and go visit to see what the status of your applications are. Also, they are encouraging early Snow Leopard adopters to share their experiences here.

Whether you plan to upgrade as soon as you receive your install DVD on Friday or are planning to wait a few weeks or months, this post will detail the minimal steps you should take in preparation for upgrading your Mac to Snow Leopard.

Step 1 – Check for application updates/Snow Leopard compliance

Start with your most regularly used, mission critical applications, and make sure that they are up to date. More importantly make sure they are ready and compliant for running in Snow Leopard. If you are running applications that are not Snow Leopard compliant, you might want to wait on the upgrade until the developers release a Snow Leopard compliant version.

Step 2 – Purge

If you are like me, I NEVER take time to purge my Mac. Ever since Leopard was installed and all downloads went to the downloads folder instead of the desktop I haven’t purged a single thing. I’m certain that at least for me, 90% of the contents in my downloads folder can be trashed. While your at it, go through your applications folder and do the same thing. I probably have at least 100 trial versions of applications that I need to trash. Chances are that you do too. Don’t forget to empty trash after you finish purging.

Step 3 – Verify/Repair Disk and Verify/Repair Disk Permissions

When you are installing or upgrading an operating system, it’s always a good practice to make sure that the Disk onto which you’ll be installing or upgrading is in tip top shape. Apple has an application called Disk Utility that you can use to make a quick diagnosis of your hard drive’s condition. This application can be found in the Applications > Utilities folder. When you launch Disk Utility you’ll want to select your internal hard drive on which your current operating system is installed from the left hand sidebar and then click on the Verify Disk button which can be found toward the bottom right hand side of the application interface. Upon completion of the Verify Disk process you’ll receive a short synopsis of what the process found when it ran. If all is well, the final message will be listed in Green text. If there is a problem with your Disk, the final message will be listed in Red. If you get a Red message, your first course of action should be to manually initiate a Time Machine backup. Your second course of action should be to return to the Disk Utility application and click on the Repair Disk button located just beneath the Verify Disk button. Apple’s Disk Utility application is capable of making minor Disk repairs. If after running the Repair Disk process you still receive a Red final message, you should call AppleCare or make a trip to the Genius Bar and let them take a look.

After running the Verify Disk and/or Repair Disk processes, you’ll then want to run the Verify Disk Permissions process by clicking the Verify Disk Permissions button. If you’ve owned your Mac for any length of time, it’s quite possible that there may be some permissions that need to be repaired. If after running Verify Permissions the Disk Utility application lists permissions that need to be repaired, simply click the Repair Disk Permissions button just below the Verify Disk Permissions button. The repair process should take a few minutes and then you should get a message indicating which Permissions were repaired.

Step 4 – BACKUP!!!!

At a minimum you should manually run a Time Machine backup before inserting your Snow Leopard install DVD. I also recommend that you download Carbon Copy Cloner and create a bootable clone of your existing Macintosh Hard Drive. You’ll of course need a spare Hard Drive of some sort on which you’ll create the clone. After you’ve created the clone you’ll want to boot from the cloned copy to verify that it works. Once you’ve booted and verified that the clone works, you should be about ready to move ahead with the Snow Leopard upgrade.

Step 5 – Enjoy Snow Leopard and leave us some comments about your experience

As always, we’d like to hear about how your upgrade experience went. Did you have any problems? Are there any big exciting features that are surprises? Did any big exciting features not make the final release? Leave us some comments.

I’ve heard from a lot of people who plan to upgrade to Snow Leopard as soon as they have it in their hands on Friday. For many this will be no problem. Others may find regret in their haste. Here are three reasons to consider postponing your Snow Leopard upgrade.

1. Apple projected a Snow Leopard release date of September. Most developers took Apple at their word because of their past track record on delivery. As a result, we’ve heard directly from several developers such as Marketcircle, Agile Web Solutions, and yes everyone’s favorite, Adobe, with news stating that their current versions are not compatible with Snow Leopard. Further these manufacturers don’t expect to have Snow Leopard compliant versions available for at least several weeks after release.
2. While early reviews from beta testers indicate many positive things in Snow Leopard including stability and Exchange compatibility, no one, not even the beta testers know what will officially be released to the public. You may recall that when Leopard was released, there was much hype about a lot of great new features that didn’t make it into the initial release; i.e., Air Disk functionality for Time Machine. While a few missing features may not be deal breakers, the features that you are planning to use after upgrade may not end up in the initial release. Believe me, wait a day or two and you’ll know for sure what did and didn’t make the final cut.
3. This reason specifically applies to business. If you use your Mac as your primary or even secondary business computer, exercise prudence and wait. Production equipment, desktops or servers, should be upgraded with much deliberation. You can always argue a worst case and say that if for some reason Snow Leopard isn’t all it’s cracked up to be or is problematic that you could do a reinstall of Leopard and restore from a Time Machine backup, but remember, that will cost you the better part of a day for most users. Lost productivity = lost revenue.

If you can’t stand it and you must upgrade on Friday, swing back by here tomorrow and read about how you should prepare your Mac for the Snow Leopard upgrade.

There has been a lot of talk about stability improvements and many minor, “under the hood”, enhancements that are coming in Snow Leopard. We’re certainly excited about getting our hands on it and learning about what has changed and what is new and different. While Kevin and I are sure that Snow Leopard is going to be an awesome upgrade, we are recommending that our clients wait until we give the upgrade nod before diving in. We’ll be sharing our Upgrade experiences and our initial thoughts here. As well, we’ll be posting regular updates about what we are finding relative to enhancements as well as any problems or bugs that might arise.

At $29, Snow Leopard is no doubt going to be a great value. Feel free to click here to pre-order your copy of Snow Leopard from the DDS Amazon Store. If you “must” have your copy of Snow Leopard delivered on August 28, 2009, click on the graphic above to purchase your advance copy directly from Apple, Inc.

If you have any questions, please leave us some comments.

What is WordCamp? If your answer is a camp where you learn how to use Micrsoft Word then we really need to talk. We’d sooner gouge our eyes out with a rusty fork than attend anything related to Microsoft. WordCamp is described as…

Take some passionate WordPress users and folks interested in blogging from throughout Alabama and the Southeastern United States. Add an incredible weekend of activities already happening here in The Magic City and of course, barbecue!

Throw in a keynote by Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg and you get WordCamp Birmingham 2009!

Join WordPress users from all over as we come together as enthusiasts, bloggers, developers, podcasters and designers to learn more about where our favorite open source software currently is and where it’s possibly going.

Both Kevin and myself are quickly becoming HUGE fanboys of WordPress. So much so that we have been digging our heels into it since January of this year and are now proficient enough to be offering WordPress Consulting and Design Services for our existing and new clients. We are having more fun with this aspect of our business than we have had during the past 3 years with our Apple Consulting. We’re still doing Apple Consulting and will continue to do so, but at the moment, WordPress is our favorite. We’ll be posting our current portfolio here soon.

Do you have any questions about WordPress and what it’s all about? If so, leave us some comments and we’ll be glad to answer them.

To all of our Twitter followers, we’d like to say thanks. We’ve got a really great giveaway planned for August, so stay tuned to our updates. Ok, a little hint…

It’s another goody made by Apple.

Kevin and I have racked our brains, small as they are, to come up with a way to Bcc the Highrise Dropbox in an automated way. We’ve spent countless hours fiddling with Apple’s Automator, and we’re still at ground zero on this. Until now that is…

While doing a little more research late last week on the topic of automatically Bcc’ing the Highrise Dropbox, I finally came across a hack for Apple Mail that does just this. I’d like to offer a big shoutout to Travis Vocino of Vocino Labs for originally sharing this out. The hack does of course require that you are comfortable with using the terminal application and entering information via the command line. ***Please read the entire post before performing the hack.*** Here is the hack:

1. Open Terminal.app
2. $ defaults read com.apple.mail UserHeaders
3. If nothing shows up, you don’t currently have anything set and you should be golden to move to the next step.
4. $ defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"BCC" = "dropbox@YOURDROP.highrisehq.com"; }'
5. Restart Mail.app

When I first completed the hack I was quite excited. I restarted Mail as instructed and quickly used the hot key combination command+n to create a new mail message. I was quite disappointed when the new mail message opened up and I didn’t see anything in the Bcc field. My first assumption was that perhaps since I was running a newer version of mail that the hack didn’t work. Fortunately, my trusty sidekick and business partner, Kevin Gilbert, decided to go ahead and send some test emails anyway. What we found was that the hack did in fact work, it just doesn’t place anything in the Bcc field.

A word of warning, if you use the Bcc field a lot or with any regularity, be aware that performing this hack will cause Apple Mail to only send a Bcc to the Highrise Dropbox, regardless of what you enter manually in the Bcc field. In plain English, executing this hack means that you cannot Bcc any other contact besides the Highrise Dropbox even if you manually type their email address into the Bcc field.

To learn more about Highrise, click on the graphic at the beginning of this post or the link below. Give Highrise a NO-RISK 30 day FREE TRIAL. We offer Highrise Implementation and Consulting Services so please let us know if we can help in any way.

With that out of the way, I’ll also tell you that we are BIG, BIG, BIG, on the “Create Once” philosophy; create your content once and then distribute that content in as many ways as possible. In keeping with that philosophy, we’re using the MailChimp RSS Campaigns to Auto-generate a lot of our Email Marketing content. I’ll give you a simple explanation on how it works.

1. MailChimp looks at a feed that we have specified on our blog. It doesn’t pick up the entire blog feed because there is content that we don’t necessarily want to use as an Email.
2. Anytime MailChimp detects new content on that feed, a new email is generated and sent to our subscribers.

This is just one of the many new enhancements that MailChimp has recently rolled out. We like the idea of this better than Google’s Feedburner because of course, we get loads of great metrics along with the MailChimp method.

If this sounds like something that interests you, please make contact with us. We’d be honored to help you make your blogging and email marketing as efficient as possible.

We’ve got an additional gift, prize, present, or whatever you wish to call it. We’re going to give it away at then end of July as well. As I mentioned in the post this morning, what we’re giving away is made by the fine folks out in Cupertino, CA, Apple, Inc. Drumroll please…

We’re giving away a 1GB iPod shuffle. After all, everybody could use one more iPod in their lives, right?

So here’s how to get entered into the drawing for the 1GB iPod shuffle. Simply become a fan of DDS on the DDS Facebook page. Already a fan? Then you’re already entered. Not a fan yet? Better hurry, there’s only four and a half days left to be eligible for this drawing.

If not, do it, NOW! There are only 5 days left till we draw the four (4) winners of a DDS Web Presence Development Package.

So far, response has been great. We have 112 eligible followers and that number is growing daily.

We’ve also decided to give away one more awesome prize. A little hint, it’s made by a company out of Cupertino, CA called Apple, Inc. We’ll be announcing this prize and how to win it on our blog today at 1:30 P.M. EST.

1. Within your Email client, navigate to the culprit email. (That would be the one that you sent without bcc’ing your Highrise Dropbox and it should be located in your SENT folder).
2. After locating that email, hit the Forward button in preparation to forward it on to your Highrise Dropbox.
3. Before you forward the email to your Highrise Dropbox, you’ll want to go and change the From information. At present, it should show that the email was from You. You’ll want to edit this so that the email shows From the Contact or Company you wish to link it to in Highrise. Here’s how:
4. Email currently shows this information: From: Me <me@mail.com>
5. Edit this information to show the Contact name and email address that is in the Contact record in Highrise, ie: From: First Last <firstlast@mail.com>
6. Once you have edited the From information, make sure that you have entered the forwarding address to go to your Highrise Dropbox.
7. Hit the send button and then check your Highrise Dashboard. You should see the email there, linked to the Contact or Company that you specified in step 5.

Highrise is an amazingly efficient and easy to use Client Relationship Management application that is completely web based. Click the Highrise graphic above to explore Highrise in a little more depth and find out how to get your 30 day free trial. We offer Highrise Implementation and Consulting services so feel free to call on us if you need assistance.

Helpful relevant links for this post: Highrise, CRM (Client Relationship Management), Highrise Consulting Rates

]]> http://digidsolutions.com/2009/07/23/forgot-to-bcc-your-highrise-dropbox-no-problem/feed/ 0 http://digidsolutions.com/2009/07/16/were-movingto-the-cloud-our-hub-on-the-web/ http://digidsolutions.com/2009/07/16/were-movingto-the-cloud-our-hub-on-the-web/#comments Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:11:42 +0000 Jarrod Skeggs http://digidsolutions.com/?p=1079 Our Hub on the web

In my recent posts, I talked about our move and also shared a little background about what really began driving us to make the move. If you haven’t read those posts, take a few minutes and get caught up before you dive into this one. It will make a lot more sense if you do so.

What we’ve learned through this move is that the WordPress “engine” is a great foundation and very capable of powering our one-stop Hub on the web. This is not just the case for a small two person company like Digital Design Solutions. There are many HUGE organizations using WordPress. Want some examples? How about…

• United States Postal Service
• Ford Motor Company
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• American Express
• University of GA

So at this point in time, we’ve fully embraced WordPress as our Content Management System and web development platform of choice. In fact, at present, between Kevin and myself, we have five web properties that are running WordPress. These include our business sites and our personal sites. We’re also in the process of helping a number of new clients develop their Web Presence utilizing the WordPress platform.

Here, at DigiDSolutions.com, we’ve created a full on communications Hub that we use for staying connected with our clients and prospects. If you take a look around you’ll find a number of very important connecting points. We really liken these connecting points to the Spokes on our Hub. All of these Spokes are web or cloud based services. As well, each of them is accessible outside of and independently of our Hub but, we’re integrating them all here to make it easier and simpler for our existing and future clients. I’ll list them below and I’ll be discussing each of them in a good bit of detail in future posts in this series.

Marketing and Social Media – On our Tribe page you’ll find quite a few connecting points. You’ll first notice the Social Media icons. These aren’t just pretty graphics, they actually link you back to our Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and LinkedIn pages. At the bottom of that page is a form that can be completed for opting-in to receiving our email marketing communications

Highrise Client Relationship Management (CRM) – If you take a look at our Contact page you will see a form which new visitors can complete in order to make contact with us and talk about how we may be of service to them. What is great about this form is that once they complete it and hit the submit button, their contact information is entered directly into our Highrise CRM database.

Project Management – If you hover over the Tribe link in the menu bar you’ll notice a sub menu item entitled, Project Center. We’ve integrated our online Project Center so that it functions right here within our website. Our primary reason for this is that we want our clients to be able to visit one web page to interface with us, regardless of what type of information or communication is necessary.

Support/Help Desk – On every page of our website you’ll find a Support tab on the left hand side of the page. Again, we wanted to make it simple and easy for our clients to submit a Support or Help Desk Ticket from our website.

Billing/Accounting – Hover your mouse over the Tribe link in the menu bar again and you’ll also notice a sub menu item that is entitled Your Account Info. This is where our clients can go to login and check on the status of their account with us. Once logged in, clients can see and print their outstanding invoices, pay their invoices electronically, and can also see whether their payments have been received.

Hopefully you get the idea here. Our website is the Hub that our clients use to interact and communicate with us. All this is and so much more is possible with the WordPress “engine“. We have a number of other additions and plans in the works; what we’re doing with WordPress so far is really just the tip of the iceberg. That’s why we are now offering WordPress and Web Presence Development Consulting. If you, your organization, or anyone else you know is in the process of considering a new website, or an enhancement to their existing website, please let us know. We would count it an honor and privilege to receive your referrals. As a way to thank you, we’re offering an unlimited, 10% referral fee for every new referral that you send our way. Just have your referral mention the Promo Code DDSHUB in conjunction with your name when they first contact us.

So, you’ve heard by now that we’re moving…to the cloud. Throughout this series of blog posts we’ll be explaining and sharing our entire experience with you. This post should really frame everything and give you an overall perspective on why we’ve decided to make this move.

A little background

Our move to the cloud really began in late 2008. During our end of year review and planning one of our biggest topics of discussion was our website and blog. At that time, we were using a very capable WYSIWYG, (What You See is What You Get), Website design software package called Rapid Weaver. We chose Rapid Weaver as our Website design software shortly after we began business. Our primary reasoning for making this choice was the WYSIWYG feature because at that time, we knew just enough HTML and CSS to be dangerous. Rapid Weaver had the ability to create a blog page and we initially used that feature until we quickly realized how inconvenient it was to use. Essentially, every time we wanted to add a new blog post, we had to open up the software, draft the blog, and then re-publish the changes to the website. While this is not a huge deal if you only have one person blogging, it is quite inconvenient when there are multiple authors.

In an attempt to make it easier for both me and Kevin to blog at will, we opened a Typepad account, largely because it was web based and either of us could access it from a web browser (and because Kevin really liked the iPhone interface). Our dilemma with that however was that we had a fairly static website at one web address and our blog located at a completely different web address. So, if we got traffic to our website, people didn’t have access to our blog content, and if we got traffic to our blog, people didn’t get a lot of the important information they were looking for about our company. Plus, we were paying a monthly fee for Typepad as well as paying a monthly hosting fee for our website.

So, to bring this back around to the subject at hand, we discovered and began investigating the WordPress platform late last year. Both Kevin and I had heard about WordPress in the past, but had never really given it much consideration because we thought that it was quite similar to Typepad. What we learned was that WordPress is quite possibly the most innovative Content Management System platform in the world. As we began to investigate and learn more about WordPress, we realized that it was exactly what we had been looking for when we started our business three years ago. We realized that WordPress had become much more than a blogging engine, and could function as our Hub on the web and be a central place where our clients and prospects can connect with us.

In the next post, I’ll be giving you some examples of how we are utilizing WordPress as our Hub.

In case you didn’t hear, you can win one (1) of four (4) Web Presence Development Packages that we are giving away by simply following us on Twitter. If you haven’t done so, go there now and follow us. The drawing for the Web Presence Development Packages takes place on August 1, 2009.

I’m probably not the world’s best marketeer, (pretty sure that title belongs to Seth Godin), but there’s one thing about marketing I believe in 100%. Talk about how your business or organization outshines the competition. In this case, they were probably attempting to be honest. Honesty is important in marketing, but these folks needed to spend just a few more minutes in the tagline brainstorming session. I dare say that, “Closest to the River” or “Friendliest Staff” would have served them better.

What are you thoughts? Leave us some comments.

Happy Independence Day from DDS.

We’re moving…to the cloud. You’ve probably heard of the cloud, but just in case you haven’t here’s how Wikipedia explains it:

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them.

Another term that is often used interchangeably with the cloud is Software as a Service, or SaaS. Essentially, the software lives in the cloud, on someone else’s technology infrastructure, and it is accessed over the internet with a web browser. Simply put, by moving to the cloud, DDS won’t have to continue to invest our hard earned capital in Server ownership and maintenance. Instead, we’ll be paying a monthly subscription fee for the Software as a Service (SaaS) that we utilize.

Since we began business, a little more than 3 years ago, we’ve utilized some very good desktop applications that have helped us run every aspect of our business. Many of these desktop applications connect back to a Server side application running on our Macintosh OS X Server. These applications have included Daylite, Billings, and MYOB Account Edge, to name a few. They are top notch and they have served us very well.

As great as these applications have been, we’ve concluded that moving to the cloud is what will help DDS continue to to bring our Clients the best service and value in the long term. There have been many factors that have impacted our decision and we’ll be sharing those and chronicling our move to the cloud experience here on our blog. It is our hope that by documenting our experience here that we can help you and your company make a determination about whether such a move is right for you and, if so, hopefully you can learn some best practices. You might even learn a few things that you shouldn’t do.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for us along the way, please leave us some comments. We’d really like to engage as many of our readers as possible during this process.

We’ve decided to make the DDS birthday celebration a month long event. So, here’s what we have planned…

We’re going to be GIVING AWAY some of our services for FREE. Yes, you read that right, FREE! Here’s how the giveaways will work:

• We’re giving away four (4) free Website setup and design packages. On August 1, 2009 we will select the four (4) lucky winners. They will be drawn at random from our Twitter followers. (Please visit DDS Birthday Celebration Rules for details).

To enter, just click on the Twitter icon in the right hand sidebar and make sure you are following us. Or, click this link: Follow DDS on Twitter

We’re really excited about how our business is growing. Because of our growth, we have embarked on some really big changes at DDS. We’re excited about these changes and know that they will benefit not just us, but you, our clients as well. We’ll be talking about these changes during a series of blog posts that will begin on Wednesday, July 1 ,2009. Be sure to visit our subscribe buttons over on the right hand sidebar and get subscribed in whatever manner you wish so that you can learn about the changes and how they will benefit you and your business.

I’m going to go ahead and let you in on the biggest change that we are making. WE’RE MOVING!!!

I can’t really say any more than that at the moment. You’ll have to subscribe or check back in here to get the details.

Once again, we’d like to say thanks for making the past three years a huge success for DDS!

• New MacBook Pro 15″ – improved display, improved battery life, processor speed increases, SD Card reader now included, entry level price dropped to $1,699.
• Enhancements to MacBook Pro 17″ – entry level product now has 2.8 GHz processor and 500GB Hard drive, entry level price dropped to $2,499.
• MacBook 13″ Aluminum is now MacBook Pro 13″ – tops out at 8GB RAM and 500GB Hard drive just like 15″ big brother, entry level price drops to $1,199.
• MacBook Air – entry level price drops to $1,499, processor clock speeds bumped up to 1.6 GHz, 1.8 GHz, and 2.13 GHz.
• Safari 4 is out of beta. (It is super fast BTW).
• Snow Leopard to ship in September – $29 upgrade for existing Leopard users, $49 family pack available too.
• iPhone 3G S – launches on June 19, 2009 in North America and parts of Europe, the S stands for Speed, will ship with iPhone OS 3.0 (which is available on June 17, 2009), includes Video Recording/Edtiting, Voice Control, 3 megapixel camera with auto-focus. Available in 16GB or 32 GB option at $199 and $299 respectively. iPhone 3G 8GB option continues to be available and price is reduced to $99.
• iPhone OS 3.0 – available on June 17, 2009, free to iPhone owners, $9.99 for iPod touch owners, over 100 new features including cut, copy, paste, and spotlight search.

I didn’t think so.

“Apple has spent some time outlining technology that would add a new level of interaction between iPhone users, such as the ability to share and control playback of digital media files like music tracks and video during a telephone call,” Slash Lane reports for AppleInsider.

“The concept is outlined in a 19-page patent filing discovered by AppleInsider this week titled ‘Methods and systems for mixing media with communications’ and credited to Apple software engineer Jeffrey Terlizzi. It begins by noting that while media items are becoming increasingly portable for mobile users these days, they’re still not as easily shared with others located remotely in real time,” Lane reports.

via MacDailyNews.

This certainly opens the door for some interesting possibilities. Audio conferencing and sharing a Pages, Numbers or Keynote document (or an Office document) with the person to whom your talking? Maybe? They wouldn’t be able to get away with allowing purchased music to be shared, would they?

Just one day after North Carolina lawmakers approved changes to the state’s corporate tax laws designed to lure Apple and a $1 billion server farm project to one of their rural communities, the state’s Governor signed Senate Bill 575 into law and announced that the iPhone maker is coming to town.

via AppleInsider | North Carolina greets Apple and $1 billion server farm project.

Let the speculation begin. Why would Apple need a server farm on the east coast? Is the fact that it’s on the east coast even important? The fact that they are building a server farm at all indicates an expectation on their part to increase web services over the next few years. iTunes Music, Movies, Apps and Games Store growth? Maybe. Improved with more features and more reliability MobileMe service? Maybe. Whatever it is, I’m sure it will be good.

“iPhone is not only a great creative tool — it’s a great way for any business to stay organized,” says Jeff Turlik, Associate Creative Director and Music Director for Blue Man Group. “It’s easy to share information and connect with each other, from scheduling meetings to sharing audio and video files or even spreadsheets.”

via Apple – iPhone – Profiles – Blue Man Group.

Apple profiles Blue Man Group and their use of the iPhone in their business. While they use it on-stage for creative purposes, there are several applications for which it is used that might surprise you. There’s a profile video as well that’s worth a look.