Founded in 2004 by Mike Wendland, MacMove is a site for Macintosh and Apple enthusiasts who have come together to share their collective insight, information and inspiration about the Mac for the new user, the person who routinely moves between different platforms, those who take their Macs on the road and those who believe that operating a computer and all the devices that come with it should be fun.

Seth Dimbert was Macmove's Senior Editor but he is no longer involved with the day to day operations of the site. He's a Mac educator, programmer and writer, whose work has appeared on several other Mac sites. He specializes in the Internet, e-mail, Photoshop and Mac software and hardware.

I am "Jake." I am a long-time Mac user and I teach Journalism for a University. In addition to that, I work part-time for a major news organization. My responsibilities as the school include overseeing a building full of Macintosh computers, ranging from PowerMacs running OS 7 up to a couple of new MacBook Pros. I have extensive experience with – literally! – every version of Apple’s Macintosh OS and most of the machines they have produced.

As I understand it, my job here at MacMove is to answer your email and provide in-depth product reviews. Seth must have told me a dozen times that we are not a Mac news site, but I expect a little bit of commentary to slip in to things every once in a while. Oh, one last thing: I once, a while ago, worked in a retail store for a certain computer company we are all familiar with. I’m not supposed to talk about it, but the name of the company rhymes with “Snapple,” and that is part of the reason why I’m being so circumspect with the details of my bio (and why “Jake” is not my real name). I don’t think I will be doing anything wrong by writing here, but that company (the one that rhymes with “Snapple” and makes portable MP3 players that rock) is really, really secretive, so I’m not officially supposed to ever write anything about them.

Additionally, while MacMove does actively review products, we do not accept unsolicited products for review. Please use the contact to request a review or forward product information.

Thanks for visiting Macmove. We welcome your suggestions and comments.

That's right. After an unfortunate hiatus, MacMove is back.

As you can see from the spartan interface, we're still in a rebuilding period. It seems like all of our previous content was eaten by our last webhost and, embarrassingly, we didn't have any backups. So... one of the first orders of business will be to cover backup strategies. (At least we're learning, right?)

So, tell all your friends. If you are a recent Switcher, or if you know someone who is or is considering the Switch, go ahead and get excited: MacMove is back.

It took me a while to get hooked on Dashboard widgets. A similar revelation just happened to me regarding Spotlight and it's so compelling I just had to blog about it right now. I know that I'm coming to all of this Tiger stuff late (which is a good story, when I get to it), but bear with me.

My wife shares the home office with me and just now she said, “Do you have Laurie Soandso's phone number?”

"Sure I do. It's in my Address Book," I think. So, I got ready to hit Cmd-Space to bring up LaunchBar and type “Add” to get to the info (if it was there). Of course, I don't run LanuchBar anymore, since I upgraded to Tiger and almost lost everything (there's that story again!), but it was too late to stop my fingers. Up popped Spotlight and I typed the first 5 letters of Laurie's last name.

If you've used Spotlight before, you know the ending. It turns out that I don't have Laurie in my Address Book. But, buried 9 levels deep in my Documents folder, I have the school directory. A PDF. From the begining of the year. 10 months ago.

Spotlight found Laurie, on page 14 of a PDF I forgot I had. That's awesome.

OK. I don't need to provide hyperlinks for you; the entire MacWeb is abuzz with this story: At his Keynote this morning at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that Apple will move its line of Macintosh computers to Intel processors.

Wow.

I've promised myself that I'm not going to write about this right now. Maybe never. You see, first of all, this isn't the sort of thing most MacMove readers are interested in. We're a site about people who move to the Mac. Recent switchers, people considering a Switch, people looking to do more with their machines. Those people are probably not too interested in this story. Secondly, I don't know enough about the news to write about it yet. :)

Anyway, that doesn't seem to be the big story here (to me). To me, the story seems to be the end of the Jobsian Era of Secrecy (tm). Think back to the original iMac. Remember “one last thing?” Steve blew the socks off of the world with a computer that looked (and was) different than anything else available. He ushered in a whole new era of industrial design (including some great parodies) and changed the way people thought about personal computers. Then, he did it again with the iPod. Then the flat-panel iMac. Airport. The Xserve. The new iMac G5. Etc. People have said that Apple's strength is it's design team and that's true... but it's not the whole story. I've said before that Apple Computer's and Steve Jobs's real strength is the ability to "keep a new, creative, paradigm-shattering, first-of-its-kind product entirely under wraps, from the drawing board all the way to announcement day." They wowed the world with all three iMacs, Airport, Airport Express, iMovie, iTunes, iTunes for Windows, etc, etc, etc.

And now, I think it's safe to say, that is no longer something the boys in Cuepertino can do. Think about it. Back when rumor sites predicted the iPod mini, we all said, "Yeah. But they got the price wrong, the dummies." Then, when they predicted the iPod shuffle, we said "Yeah, but they thought it would be hard drive-based, not flash based. And besides, nobody saw the lack of a display coming!" We dismissed the way the sites predicted Pages and the accompanying Keynote update, too. But, truth be told, the cat has been missing from the bag for years now. With the possible exception of the Airport Express, Steve hasn't been able to pull a rabit out of his hat in years. There's nobody to blame, of course... and I'm not sure we should even care too much. But, I've always been the kind of person who didn't want to know what was in my birthday present until right after I blew out the candles. I hunted for the gifts, of course (and still do!), but if I find them, I'm upset at my wife for not hiding them better.

At today's Keynote Address, Steve broke the earth-shattering news that Apple is moving to Intel chips with a slide that said "It's true." In other words, he gave up on the idea of surprising us with the news, spinning in his own way. It's the internet, the enourmous number of rumor sites, backlash against the lawsuits... something. Maybe it's just that we're all growing up. And now we're old enough to want to see behind the magician's back. I am an amateur magician, and I think that's a shame.