The hot news from the Macworld Keynote 2008 of Steve Jobs in brief:

• Intro: new Get-a-Mac commercial.
• Leopard Mac OS X 10.5: Steve presents the Leopard success story: until now over 5 Million Macs run on Mac os X 10.5, alias Leopard. No other OS version reached that fast market penetration rate before.
• TimeCapsule: Airport Extreme base station is extended with a server-scale hard drive to a new wireless NAS (Network Attached Storage) system. It’s now called TimeCapsule. It’s the missing piece for TimeMachine, the integrated Backupsolution of Mac OS Leopard. 500 GB USD 299.00. 1 TB USD 499.00.
• iPhone: Until today more than 4 Millionen iPhones have been sold worldwide. Smartphone market shares in the US: 1. RIM (39.0%), 2. Apple (19.5%), 3. Palm (9.8%) … Apple surpasses Palm from the beginning and is second biggest player in that market. The iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit) will be released in February. Softwareupdate for the iPhone with lots of new features … most of them have been posted on rumor sites in the last days. Available today for all existing iPhone users.
• iPod touch: iPod touch Update for USD 20.00 including 5 new apps: Maps, Mail, Stocks, Notes, and Weather
• iTunes Movie Rental: the rumored movie rental is introduced to iTunes. All major film studios joined. Basic rule: 30 days to start watching, 24 hours to finish. US Rental will start today, international rental will start later this year. 2.99$ / 3.99$ for new releases. Movies should be available 30 days after DVD release.
• Apple TV Version 2: The new generation works as a stand alone solution without a computer. The improved Apple TV solution can play DVD and HD quality (with Dolby 5.1 Sourround Sound) movies. In addition it’s possible to consume audio- and video-podcasts as well as Flickr & .Mac photos.
• MacBook Air: The Thinnovation of the day is the MacBook Air, Steve Jobs revealed at the end of the keynote. The thinnest notebook in the world with a 13.3 inch widescreen display, a backlit keyboard and a multitouch trackpad. But Apple cuts off some "od technologies": No optical drive anymore, no Firewire, no Ethernet. It’s a real wireless device - every CEO will get jelious. The 80 GB version with a state of the art hard drive costs USD 1,799.00 - the 64 GB SolidState harddrive is priced at exclusive USD 3,098.00 and is the dream of every CTO … and the nightmare of every CFO.

This year MacHeist again bundled a bunch of great Mac shareware pieces tho their well known MacHeist Shareware-Bundle. Like last year MacHeist create a Win-Win-Win-Win situation:

• Win for the buyer: purchased seperately the Shareware programs would cost more than 300$.
• Win for charity: 25% of the purchases will be donated to a charity of the buyers choice.
• Win for the shareware programmers: they dramaticaly incerease their marketshare
• And also MacHeist will have their "Win"

I use 1password, CSSEdit and Snapz Pro X for now - and I am absolutely pleased! Snapz Pro X alone for 69$ will cost you more than the complete bundle for 49$ … you can order it until January 23th.

The Mac market share is constantly rising. But there is an other side of the coin: Varmint. Right now, according to F-Secure, the first “Rouge Application” appeared for the Mac. Windows users have to deal with junk like that for a long time - but that’s cold comfort. MacSweeper makes the ingenuous user believe that there are dangerous files on his/her Mac (even if there are NO files like this). And sure, the user is told that only by buying the software these files can be cleaned up ;-(

So: Keep away!

Don’t mix MacSweeper with the old freeware “Mac Sweeper 3.0″ … but that utility is not actively developed any more - so you also should not use that either.

For all of you, who want to tidy up their Mac once in a while, there are some effective alternatives out there - like the freeware-utility Onyx or the commercial product Spring Cleaner from Allume.

Sources: F-Secure Weblog, fscklog.com

This morning, at 9 PST the time has come again: Steve Jobs starts the new Mac-Year with his traditional keynote at the beginning of the Apple centric fair and conference MacWorld in San Francisco. Even back in 1986, when introducing the legendary Mac, Steve celebrated his performance like a rock star - and we’ll get a real show act today, too.
Today it’s remarkable that this time even the Apple homepage is pointing it’s attention straight to the San Francisco event. The Apple marketing strategists sent out a cryptic but promising slogan “2008. There’s something in the air …”. The upgrade of the MacPros probably wasn’t spectacular enough for Steve - so this info was released last week.
So we only can wait and read what all the busy bloggers in the auditorium of the keynote will report - like the colleagues from macrumorslive.com - thanks to built in Airport. Hopefully we can hear the legendary sentence of Steve: “… there is one more thing!”

In the afternoon (PST) Apple.com will provide a streamed version of the keynote speech.

Great news for all web application developers: David Heinemeier Hansson, the rails-core-team and many others from the rails community put an early present under the xmas tree: Ruby on Rails 2.0.1. Thank you!