Category: Miscellaneous

The burgeoning field of Mac implementations of the GTD philosophy increased again today as a new shareware application was released.

Developer Don Adams says that his new application is designed for those looking to get into the latest productivity trend: Getting Things Don.

Adams said “Where the ‘Getting Things Done’ strategy is aimed at organizing tasks that have been collected through ubiquitous capture, ‘Getting Things Don’ focuses on the simple fact that guys named ‘Don’ are just more efficient.”

Adams says that after reviewing the traditional GTD process, he realized that if more people just acted like him and other Dons, they wouldn’t have to worry about carrying around a stack of note cards held together with a binder clip.

“I don’t care what Merlin Mann says,” Adams said, “That’s just a crock.”

Getting Things Don allows the user to assign items they might need to certain Dons that they can then seek to emulate in that particular context.

“For instance,” Adams said “I might decide that I need a male truss – and I don’t – I can then assign that item to noted author Don DeLillo in the context of ‘support’. Then later I could look up what kind of male truss DeLillo uses and buy that one.

“Because he’s a Don, I know it’ll be the most efficient male truss I can buy.”

Getting Things Don is a free download but in its unlicensed version only supports up to three Dons.

Seen by some as having been given short shrift at January’s Macworld keynote, the Apple TV has recently been pumped up by speculation that it will be an industry-changing device that could beat Netflix and TiVo and will be more important than the iPhone.

As if that weren’t enough, Crazy Apple Rumors Site has learned that Apple’s digital media hub cemented its own legendary status by pulling a 3-year-old Oklahoma girl from a well over the weekend.

Little Kimberly McCain was playing with her cocker spaniel puppy (also present may have been butterflies, a pony and several characters from the Berenstain Bears) in her yard (which was covered in flowers) when she tripped (possibly over a kitten) and plunged 40 feet (which really should have killed her) into ankle-deep water (that may or may not have contained the trash compactor monster from Star Wars).

According to MacJournals editor and Oklahoma resident Matt Deatherage – who arrived at the scene after the incident, hoping the Apple TV was his and had simply been delivered to the wrong address – “McCain spent several hours calling for help while all the animals and animated characters just kind of stumbled around dumbly. This just confirms my long-held suspicion that Berenstain Bears are completely useless in an emergency.”

Asked where her parents were during this period, police chief Randall Phelps noted that McCain was an orphan, her parents having been killed last year in a freak zeppelin accident.

Turning and looking quizzically at McCain’s house, Phelps said “I don’t know if she’s been living here by herself since then or what. The whole thing is kind of weird, if you ask me. Like it wasn’t well thought out or something.”

McCain’s cries were eventually heard by a KOCO-TV Channel 5 news team that happened to be patrolling the area looking for white children that had fallen into wells. Within the hour, over 400 members of the media had gathered around the well. Police and firefighters pulled up shortly thereafter.

As authorities were admonishing themselves for not bringing any rope or a ladder, the Apple TV appeared on the scene.

“It was a white and chrome streak of toddler-saving hardware!” said firefighter Greg Murkowski. “It looped an HDMI cable over the railing of the well, jumped into it and lassoed little Kimberly with a component video cable and pulled her up. I have never seen anything like it in all of my two and a half months as a firefighter.”

The Apple TV also entertained the gathered media and emergency response teams by streaming the latest episode of Heroes to a 42-inch plasma television screen it was attached to.

“That’s a darn good show,” Murkowski noted. “I may have to tape that on my VHS.”

Before it left to be delivered to its rightful owner, the Apple TV reunited McCain with her parents who actually hadn’t been killed but had amnesia which the unit cured by virtue of being so shiny.

Apple spokesperson Cynthia McLaren said “That is so like the Apple TV.”

An uncharacteristically chastened Steve Jobs was forced to admit today that the Apple TV was, indeed, nothing but vaporware and will never be coming.

According to sources close to the usually mercurial Apple CEO, Apple TV is the product of his hyperactive imagination, invented of whole cloth and demoed through the use of smoke and mirrors (in several cases literally).

“Steve carved the demo units out of balsa wood,” senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller told Crazy Apple Rumors Site. “He spray-painted them in his garage and even pressed the Apple logo and letters on the units himself with a special Letraset sheet. He made the whole thing up.

“Didn’t you?!” Schiller loudly asked Jobs, who was standing meekly next to him. Jobs winced and shuffled uncomfortably.

“And he’s a very, very bad boy!” Schiller added. “Don’t you have something to say to everyone who ordered an Apple TV?”

“I’m sorry.” Jobs mumbled, looking down at his Nikes. “But…”

“Oh, don’t you ‘but’ me, young man!” Schiller said. “Or I will give you something to be sorry about!”

“I said I’m already sorry!” Jobs whined. “And, hey, I write your review!”

“Don’t you sass me!” Schiller responded. “Just you wait until the board gets home! No more options for you, mister! And don’t even think about using the Lear jet. You are grounded!”

“Oh, this is so bogus!” Jobs replied.

Schiller said the company just didn’t understand where it went wrong with Steve that he would attempt to sell a product that was clearly impossible to manufacture.

When told that there were actually several other products already on the market that, while lacking Apple’s signature ease-of-use, provide similar functionality, Schiller cut reporters off and suggested they “talk to the hand.”

Other than Schiller, Jobs, several other executives and a bunch of engineers and people in marketing, Apple declined to comment for this story.

Apple will unveil new displays next month that sources indicate will be teh totally awesome!

Crazy Apple Rumors Site reporters spoke to a number of individuals who, admittedly, have absolutely no inside information at all. But, if what these sources say is true, the new Apple displays will use startling new anti-gravity technology that will allow it to float at any height for perfect ergonomic placement.

“Apple has perfected a touch-sensitive hardware solution that is a micron thin and is made of anti-protons,” said Gordy, an unemployed 42-year-old who lives with his mother. “Which everyone knows defy gravity.

“Or maybe it’s leptons. Or… anti-leptons… I can’t remember.”

Larry, a 62-year-old greeter at a large national retailer that shall not be named, said “Apple’s new touch-screen interface brings the pure sexual glory that is Multi-touch to the Mac. It’s going to be a totally hot touching experience between man and machine.”

Unfortunately, Larry said that at the front door of Wal-, uh, the retailer, as a group of school children were entering and was immediately fired.

Also, he was stealing. But, you can’t really blame him since he’s 62 and they pay him, like, $5.75 an hour and make him work 80 hours a week.

Well, not anymore because he’s unemployed.

Meanwhile, Rudy, a…

Actually, we don’t have any information on Rudy.

But Rudy said “Apple’s new monitors are going to make sunshine brighter, puppies more prevalent and happy fun spring with flower of technology!

“I really got that off a Japanese t-shirt but I think it’s relevant.”

Apple refused to comment for this story but did not deny that this was all true, so it probably is.

Parallels announced yesterday that Parallels Desktop is out of beta and now provides compatibility with Leopard and Vista.

But Crazy Apple Rumors Site has learned that the company has plans to expanded its product line-up beyond merely allowing Mac OS X and other platforms to run other operating systems in separate environments.

Parallels Desktop for Reality, expected to go into beta shortly, goes one step further, allowing separate bubble universes to form on any computer running Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X, and releases of Linux that do not contain the word “foobar” in source-code comments.

Desktop for Reality uses the hypervisor feature of modern processors to tear small rents in the fabric of time and space, and then encapsulate those in a graphical user interface. Because processors can calculate at rates that allow relativistic effects to appear in each window’s frame (or window) of reference, time can be slowed or sped up within each bubble universe.

For instance, a Photoshop rendering operation that might take 100 years in regular time can be launched in a virtual window in which time is sped up to a factor of 100,000 relative to our own. While this would require a display that could handle 1024 by 1920 parsecs to display, Desktop for Reality can scale to fit. Also, sources warns that Photoshop images will be red-shifted or blue-shifted, depending on time dilation and the observer position in our universe, and require additional color correction.

Sources believe that its Incoherence mode will be used the most, however. In Incoherence, fundamental events in the computer history timeline can be modified before a bubble reality is launched. The beta comes preloaded with “Woz decides to keep building calculators for HP,” “Jeff Bezos was killed in that helicopter crash and replaced with a robot named Amazon Prime,” and “IBM buys MS-DOS outright from Ballmer, Gates, instead of licensing it.”

Preliminary release notes for the beta of Desktop for Reality say that side effects may include vertigo, nausea, and hallucinations due to the computer’s localized control over the creation of bubble universes and time flow, but only because they need to tweak the USB 2.0 drivers a bit further. They also warn that you should make sure and leave Ironic Outcome unchecked in the Edit menu, as it might result in you being trapped within a universe of your own making in which Mac OS X never existed.