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Deep Thought announces Macworld, CES 2007 coverage

By Nick, January 7, 2007

Deep Thought will be providing coverage of both Macworld Expo and CES, in what may be the busiest week in tech, well, ever!

Deep Thought will have extensive coverage of Macworld Expo again this year. Here’s what we have in store:

Keynote

Deep Thought is teaming up with TheMacMind to bring you live updates from Steve Jobs’ keynote address starting at 9 AM Pacific Time. Deep Thought will host the live text feed at dtgeeks.com, and TheMacMind will host the IRC chat, ##themacmind on irc.freenode.net.

From the show

We will also have staff reporting from the show floor itself, bringing you photos, audio, interviews, and product first looks from Macworld. We will bring you what you need to know from the heart of the action. Also, stick with Deep Thought after the Expo ends for reviews of some of the latest Expo wares (you might remember last year’s iLife 06 review).

CES

While we won’t have a physical presence at CES, we will provide news and analysis of announcements and new product releases from CES.

It’ll be a lot of fun, as always. We’d love to see you here for it all.

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My MacBook is a CrackedBook

By Nick, January 5, 2007

Are you having this problem? Have you contacted Apple? If…
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Adobe pulls a U-turn, brings Premiere for Mac back from the dead [UPDATED]

By Nick, January 4, 2007

Apparently Adobe has been working a little bit of voodoo or black magic, or something (or maybe they just used a defibrillator), as they’ve managed to bring Premiere for Mac back to life, according to Macworld. Premiere, Adobe’s digital video production application (akin to Final Cut Pro), disappeared from the Mac in 2003 partially due to Final Cut Pro.

Premiere will become part of a new digital filmmaking bundle along with Encore DVD and Soundbooth (a new audio application currently under development). Adobe cites two main reasons for bringing Premiere back: the growth of the Mac market as of late and Apple’s switch to x86. Quoth Macworld:

“If you look at the industry as a whole, Mac customers are very important to us, said Simon Hayhurst, director of product management for dynamic media at Adobe. Pulling Premiere from the Mac was probably the hardest decision we ever made. It was always our intention to bring that back, and AppleԒs move to Intel made it easier.”

Premiere will be re-written and will “have everything that the Windows version has, including tight integration within the suite,” according to Macworld.

Currently the Mac digital film editing marketplace is dominated by Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Avid’s Xpress Pro.

Adobe plans to demonstrate prerelease versions of the new Premiere at its booth at Macworld Expo. Deep Thought will be at MWSF and hopefully we’ll get the chance to check it out.

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How iLife ruined my Christmas

By UnnDunn, January 4, 2007

Now, whenever I see one of those Apple commercials, I feel like reaching into the screen and strangling Justin Long.

It all started simply enough. In early November my Uncle’s granddaughter turned one year old and we had her birthday party. During the party, I ran around with a video camera recording everything so that I could make a nice video of the occasion. The taping went well; I captured well over an hour of footage. My plan was to take it down to a ten-minute video which I would put on DVD using iDVD. I would present this, together with a photo book from iPhoto, as a Christmas present to the parents and grandparents.

The first problem I had was importing the video into iMovie. My camera was one of those DVD burning models, and it turns out that Mac OS X is not capable of reading those natively. I had to download a number of applications, each one costing a little money in order to read a DVD created by the camcorder. No matter, I bought the applications (spending upwards of $100) and imported the video.

Over the next couple of weeks, I spent a few hours a day editing the video. You must understand this was my first video editing project, and also my first use of iMovie, so it was slow going, as I learned the ins and outs of the software. But I was surprised as to how easy things were. I’m no Francis Ford Coppola, but I was able to put together some basic edits, splice in audio, add bumpers, titles and captions, and ultimately…
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The 2006 Worst Websites of The Year Awards

By Jay, January 1, 2007

Well everybody, this last year was one heck of a year here on Deep Thought, and as we start things for 2007 up I’m going to be giving you my quick list of the five worst websites of 2006. The explanation of a “bad website” is simple. Its a website that has one of three issues.

NOTE: All websites considered for worst website are mainstream; this will not include small one-man websites that have a reason to look and be crappy.

Three qualifying issues

The first of the three issues with a website is design: a muddled website just plain will not work. So if I can’t get around your website, you qualify. Secondly, their is the qualifier of customer support. Since I’m a jerk to many people I find it fun to write fake customer support email to websites and see how they handle things. Some of the replies I’ve gotten range from scams to just plain rudeness. The third and final qualifier for the “worst website” is purely how much I like it, just my opinion. Now lets get started with number five.

Number Five

This years number five worst website of the year award goes to THE WORLD’S WORST WEBSITE. This site proclaims itself to be the worst website out there, and even though it’s not mainstream I have to include it for trying. (Also, it was number two on Google search.) This website is really a horrible site and I couldn’t stand it for more than enough…
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