Hi, my name is Chris and I’m an Apple addict

My screens in my 33-foot boat – photo shot on an iPhone

by Christine Kling

Last Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. when I should have been hard at work on this book that is due in less than a week, I was watching the Apple event being streamed live via my Apple TV hooked up to the new 19″ Samsung TV that I mounted on the bulkhead of my boat shortly after I arrived here in Merritt Island. On the screen of my new 21″ iMac I was listening to the chatter of tech pundit Leo Laporte, the CNET crew, and the MacWorld gang while on my iPad I was watching the feed from my Twitter list of Apple folk.

So, yes, I am an Appleholic.

At this event in San Francisco, they announced a new version of the operating system for Macs called Mavericks (and made the upgrade free).  Apple people will recognize on my computer pictured above that I have already upgraded. Nope, there’s none of that “I’m going to wait until they’ve worked the bugs out of the new OS” for me. I was fighting to be among the first in the virtual door to download it.

Happily, the iBookstore has now separated from iTunes and Mac users can read their ebooks on their computers with the iBookstore Mac app that is part of Mavericks. There has been a Kindle app for the desktop for years, so Apple is playing catch-up here. There is no Windows desktop app, however.

One of the most exciting things they announced was a new feature for this version of Apple’s word processing software for the Mac called Pages — it will now allow real time collaboration. Two people can work on the same document in the cloud doing all sorts of things like adding photos and making corrections simultaneously. Yes, we have had Google docs, but it doesn’t work anywhere near as well as the new Pages. Already we are seeing more writers collaborating on novels than ever before, and this will make it so much easier.

The second most interesting thing was they changed the name of the full size iPad to the iPad Air. Apple already makes an incredibly light and thin laptop called the MacBook Air. I think this name change was the first step Apple has taken towards merging these two devices. Many people are already starting to use their tablets as their travel computers instead of their laptops, and with the addition of a keyboard cover, this becomes very easy. For the first time at this event, the presenters were talking about iPads as something one does real work on, not just a device for media consumption. I think Apple will introduce their own keyboard cover when the Macbook Air and the iPad Air merge to become the new iteration of the travel computer. (Hopefully, Keith and company will have the iOS version of Scrivener complete by then).

There still remains one area of Apple tech that I haven’t dabbled in and that is the creation of multimedia books using iBooks Author, a Mac app.What many people may not know is that we get many visitors every day to this blog who have searched the web for Marine Navigation iPad Apps and they find the post I wrote last year. Since my brain will need a rest from fiction writing for a while, I’m going to try my hand at writing a multimedia book on the topic. Unfortunately, books created using iBooks Author cannot be read in any other bookstore so this book will have to be exclusive to Apple. But, since my market will be people who own an iPad, I’m not going to worry about trying to get the book in other online stores.

Since I’m going to be starting this book in a few weeks, I’ll really need to know everything there is to know about iPads. I mean how am I supposed to know how it will look on the new high-resolution iPad mini unless I own one to check it and see, right? What’s one more screen?

Yes, that’s me. My name is Chris and I am an Apple addict.

Fair winds!

Christine