New Apple Stores bear fruit for aficionados

The University Village Apple Store opened Sept. 26, and I was on the spot to see several hundred people lined up on a surprisingly warm day waiting for their first glimpse of ... what, exactly? A store?

Not quite. The Mac faithful are still eager to see, touch and try out hardware and software that they've only read about online. Sure, they could go to other resellers, but there's something shrinelike about the Apple Store, with its simple design and wide open spaces.

The U Village outlet is gorgeous, with a brushed metal façade nearly a story tall above the entrance sporting an Apple logo cutout and typical wood (or woodlike) floors. The Bellevue Square Apple Store toes a similar line, but its smaller size and inside-a-mall setting reduce the grandeur.

Apple Stores typically have a theater space in the back for presentations, the Bell Square location being an exception. The U Village store has rows of airline-terminal seating — don't ask me why, but it is comfortable — and a full slate of free events and presentations, a schedule of which is available online at www.apple.com/retail/universityvillage/.

The Apple Store also has free Wi-Fi wireless networking with a high-speed Internet connection. The head of Apple's retail division told me a few months ago that the stores encourage people to drop in and use the service whenever they want.

Given that all of U Village will soon have a mallwide, fee-based Wi-Fi network, the Apple Store will provide a free haven — as will the benches out front, to which the Wi-Fi zone extends.

The Genius Bar, where you can ask questions and get free advice, also offers hardware and software assistance for a fee: The staff can install software, migrate you from one machine to another, or add memory. If you've purchased AppleCare, Apple's extended warranty and support contract, some of these services are included. All services are at the store only; other Apple resellers in town, such as Westwind Computing, can provide more extensive consulting and on-site services.

Fiorini Sports stood for decades on the Apple Store's spot in U Village; the sports store has moved into the newer Crate & Barrel building nearby. I still wonder what the Apple experts at the Genius Bar will say after first snowfall this winter when a distracted Fiorini customer enters without looking around too much, grumbles about the remodeling, then asks to have his or her skis waxed.

Knowing Apple's Nordstrom-like can-do attitude in the stores, they'll probably just take care of it.

iblog: The product name sounds like a parody of Apple's iApps (iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, and so on), but iBlog is real: it's a $19.95 package that Apple is offering free to its .Mac (www.mac.com) members until Nov. 25. The .Mac service costs $99.95 a year with various offers, discounts and free trials available.

Web logs, abbreviated "blogs," are a popular way for people to communicate brief or long thoughts or links and commentary to news items that almost always involve chronologically archived individual entries.

Many people treat blogs as public journals. I and many other journalists run news blogs; mine is about Wi-Fi networking (wifinetnews.com). There are dozens of other kinds of blogs, too.

iBlog lets you write entries within the program and incorporate photos, movies and music from the various iApps. (Don't ask me about the issues of incorporating copyrighted music on your blog.)

Most blog entries are probably still written through a Web-page interface, but the trend seems to be growing for freestanding programs that offer more control over creating entries, especially incorporating multimedia.

Marc Canter, one of the founders way back when of MacroMind, developer of the original multimedia authoring tool Director, is especially articulate on the subject of adding media to blogs (blogs.it/0100198/).

After creating a post and saving it, you can publish it to your .Mac account. My test blog, for instance, appears at homepage.mac.com/glennf/iblog/.

The program lets you create multiple blogs and save drafts until you're ready to publish, as well as go back and edit later. Behind the scenes, the software is building HTML pages and uploading files, but it hides that all from you.

iBlog has both Blogger and Reader modes: Click the lightswitch icon at the bottom right of the screen to swap between them. In Reader mode, you can subscribe to news feeds that use the RSS format, links to which are found on most blogs and many news sites. (RSS doesn't exactly stand for anything these days because of its complicated history.)

There are other, more sophisticated ways to blog directly from a Mac and to subscribe to news feeds, too. Ranchero Software's NetNewsWire Light (free) and NetNewsWire ($39.95) are powerful newsreaders that manage as many feeds as you can throw at them (ranchero.com/netnewswire/). The paid version lets you post directly to a dozen blog-hosting services or software offerings, such as Blogger or Movable Type.

Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com.

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