Apple’s latest round of product announcements included a range of updates to existing lines such as the iMac, the MacPro and LED Cinema Displays. But mixed in amongst those heavy hitters was the introduction of a new desktop-based input peripheral, the Magic Trackpad.

Yes. We’ve got yet another “magical” Apple gadget.

Following the Magic Mouse and the magical experience of the iPhone 4 (am I missing anything else?), the Magic Trackpad brings the multi-touch capabilities of Apple’s current notebook computers to the desktop. This new trackpad is reportedly 80% larger (seems about right) than the trackpad on the MacBook Pro, and offers all of the same multi-touch functionality as Apple’s portable devices. From the comfort of your desk.

So is the experience truly magical? That’s probably a bit much. Will Mac users be abandoning their mice in droves? Some most certainly will. Is this a sign of things to come? Absolutely.

Look, from performance and functionality standpoint, anyone who has used a recent MacBook or MacBook Pro (all of which incorporate at least some degree of multi-touch via their trackpads) knows what you’re getting here. The Magic Trackpad works as advertised. Paired with the recent Safari 5.0.1 update and the multi-touch software update that Apple pushed out yesterday, it brings some fun new touches (pun intended) to the desktop computing experience. The inclusion of inertia scrolling (vertical scrolling that slows down at the tail-end of a scroll, mimicking natural momentum), is a particularly nice feature.

I picked one up at our local Apple Store Wednesday evening (the last one on the shelves) and have been playing with it throughout the evening. I can definitely see using the device for the majority of my non-keyboard input, but not exclusively. Despite it’s strengths, a multi-touch trackpad simply can’t replicate the degree of precision capable with a high-end laser mouse. As a designer, there are tasks that require this level of precision, and for those, out comes the Magic Mouse. But for day-to-day use (email, web browsing, most app functionality), the Magic Trackpad will work like a charm.

The key takeaway here is all about forward thinking. The Magic Trackpad is another step in Apple’s slow and steady transition of our computing experience to touch. The touch experience began with the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007, followed since by the iPod Touch, multi-touch trackpads on the MacBooks and MacBook Pros, the (multi-touch) Magic Mouse, the introduction of the iPad, and now the Magic Trackpad. Steve Job, Apple and its design team are slowly but surely evolving the everyday computing experience of the typical consumer away from the 25-year-old keyboard/mouse combination and toward a multi-touch based input environment.

Does that mean the mouse’s days are numbered? No. There will always be markets for the precision control provided by a mouse. Designers, visual artists and gamers need that level of precision. For them, there will probably always be some iteration of a mouse input device marketed by someone (however niche that product may become).

But for the general consumer? Five years from now, the typical consumer’s computing experience will be almost entirely touch-based. And Apple is leading the way.

Over the recent Memorial Day weekend, Revision3, a company specializing in producing ad-supported video podcasts (including the immensely popular Diggnation, of which we are big fans), fell victim to a denial of service (DoS) attack that knocked their website, RSS feeds, email and much of their content distribution offline for most of the weekend. These type of malicious attacks are not uncommon, particularly against well-known companies.

What makes the story particularly disturbing is that, according to Revision3′s CEO Jim Louderback, the DoS attack was launched by MediaDefender, an anti-piracy group employed in the past by the RIAA, MPAA and other old media companies. The DoS attack was apparently targeted at Rev3′s BitTorrent servers (BitTorrent is a popular peer-to-peer content distribution protocol, often utilized to disseminate copyrighted material such as music, movies, etc.). Revision3, however, only distributed their own content over the BT protocol, so there was no clear reason why MediaDefender would choose to target them (BTW, such vigilante DoS attacks are illegal).

The story gets murkier as Rev3 has investigated and apparently the FBI is looking into the matter as well. Clearly, Revision3 has done nothing but distribute their own content over a perfectly legitimate content distribution network, so they should in no way have to fear being targeted by such old-media industry “watchdogs”. MediaDefender has clearly overstepped their bounds, targeting a legit small business venture, and one can only hope that they pay a price for that. FBI involvement in the matter is certainly a good first step.

Get the full story direct from Revision3′s CEO Jim Louderback here.

Obviously, Windows machines still dominate in overall market share, particularly below the $1,000 mark, where Apple doesn’t really compete and where the vast majority of IT department purchases lie. But given the overall stagnation of the current PC market, the fact that Apple is able to generate such strong growth is really phenomenal, and speaks to the dominance in user experience (as well as an the introductory/halo effect of the iPod and iPhone.

(via Daring Fireball)

The betas are functional for 48 hours, unless you have a valid license for CS3. If so, they are (presumably) functional until the official release of CS4 (for which Adobe hasn’t yet mentioned any potential dates).

Verizon has marketed LG’s Voyager as very much the iPhone-style, touch screen-driven device, but the Voyager’s touch functionality is significantly limited and isn’t even the primary interface for the phone’s OS.

Garmin, however, producers of some of the best-selling hand-held GPS devices, is now entering the smartphone market later this year with the Nüvifone, and based some of the initial available screenshots, it may be the first competing smartphone to really give the iPhone a run for its money.

Electronista highlights just how the phone’s GPS core will integrate with its smartphone functionality:

Almost entirely controlled by a 3.5-inch touchscreen interface, the device centers around its native GPS unit: in addition to straightforward navigation, a host of Google apps allow it to search for local businesses, check traffic, and view nearby weather. Any photos or videos taken with the built-in camera are automatically geotagged for positioning in location-based services.

Of course, we’ve yet to see a working model of the Nüvi. As noted by John Gruber, the only “screenshots” we’ve seen thus far are entirely mocked up vector art; they are currently no legitimate screengrabs available. So who knows where this announcement falls on the vaporware scale, but assuming it does make its way to market at some point this year, Garmin may well have a hit on their hands.

Based on their release, it appears that the functionality will be added as a software/firmware update, meaning existing Blackberry users should be able to install the update and gain the functionality on their current devices, rather than necessarily needing to purchase a new Blackberry model.

(via Campaign Monitor)

At the moment, most of the buzz coming out of this morning’s presentation is surrounding the new MacBook Air, Apple’s almost-but-not-quite-ultra-portable notebook computer. Weighing in at less than three pounds and barely 3/4″ inch, it’s clearly one sexy machine, and one that I’m sure will sell like crazy.

Sitting back and digesting this year’s event, I’m focusing on today’s announcements from the perspective of a small business owner; what did Steve Jobs unveil that we can really incorporate into our workflow to help us work better, faster and more efficiently for our clients?

For what it’s worth, the MacBook Air doesn’t really fit that bill for Bainbridge Studios. Would I love to have one sitting on my desk right now? Absolutely! Would it be the right fit for our technology needs at the moment? Not really. With it’s fixed amount of RAM (2GB, built into the Logic Board), small hard drive capacities (80 GB HDD or 64 GB SSD), it doesn’t have the horsepower to really serve as a workhorse or desktop replacement.

It would make a hell of a portable for traveling and for client pitches and presentations, no question. Heads will turn the moment you open one of those bad boys on the office conference table. Plus it light weight and svelte dimensions would make it easy to travel with. Definite selling points for the heavy duty business traveler, but at a starting price of $1,799, it just doesn’t offer the degree of power and functionality that would make it a good investment for our office.

So what did catch my eye during the Stevenote? Time Capsule. Time Capsule is essentially a new version of Apple’s Airport Extreme wireless base station with a built-in server-grade hard drive. It’s offered in two flavors (500 GB for $299 and 1 TB for $499) and is designed to work seemlessly with OS X Leopard’s Time Machine feature (Time Machine is an automated back-up program that incrementally backs up your Mac every hour to a network drive).

We will be picking up Time Capsule and configuring it as our primary backup here on our office network. Currently, we’ve got Time Machine functioning on our two primary machines, backing up regularly (when docked) to a Firewire 800 and USB 2 external drives. Time Machine works pretty seamlessly when you’re connected to your computer’s selected external drive, but (as of today) doesn’t offer wireless backup.

Just the ability to have incremental backups constantly done here in the office, for all machines, is a huge time-saver and a great safety net to have in place. Previously, we’ve gone through a number of backup utilities, including our previous favorite, SuperDuper!, but all of them required an additional degree of interactivity that Time Machine does not.

In the words of the great Ron Popeil, we hope to use Time Machine and Time Capsule to “set it and forget it.”

The fine folks at Dreamhost, one of the better known (not always for the right reasons) low-cost shared hosting providers, managed to incorrectly bill all of their users for past-due web hosting services. For most of those users, though, their accounts weren’t past due. The billing happened because an automated billing system and one keystroke error: billing every as if today was 2008-12-31 (they intended to bill accounts that hadn’t paid up as of 2007-12-31).

You can see the fall out on their blog, the main posting for which currently has more than 1,000 comments (most of them none-too-happy).

This is just the latest in a long string of problems folks have experienced with Dreamhost’s shared-hosting services over the past couple years. We used to host our site and mail servers with Dreamhost, but their frequent outages (which always seemed to come at the most inopportune times) finally forced us to move on to our current hosts, MediaTemple (who do a spectacular job, btw!).

It’s a fairly intriguing read, and seems to fall in realistic spot as far as expectations – this would be a good, though not earth-shattering set of announcements (hey, we can’t have the introduction of something as big as the iPhone every year).

The only item on this list that really makes me doubt it’s authenticity is the “one more thing”, which would simply be the ability to download Y0uTube clips (yawn). There’s no way Jobs is ending any Macworld keynote with an announcement that lackluster.

Still a good read though, whether it turns out to be authentic or simply a well-written fake.

The practice is known as “front running”, scanning domain search records to find domains to purchase based on others having searched for them, and Network Solutions is claiming that what they’re doing is specifically designed to “protect customers from frontrunners.” By front running themselves. Of course, it makes perfect sense.

Network Solutions is defending the practice by emphasizing that they release such domains after four days, and do not charge a premium (above their standard registration fees) for such domains. Still, the practice clearly undermines the customer’s ability to shop around for the best deal on domain registration, as you can frequently find more affordable registration pricing via any number of competing registration services.

Still, undertaking the same practice they’re supposedly trying to eliminate? I don’t think most people are buying it. It’s just one additional reason (along with their ridiculously overpriced domain registrations – $34.99, while many competitors offer the same service for $10) to avoid Network Solutions completely.