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Tuesday, Steve Jobs gave his annual MacWorld SF keynote satisfying our thirst for the latest and greatest Apple products (at least partially). Apple announced the release of two great products AppleTV and the iPhone. They also silently release the new AirPort Extreme, which uses the MIMO technology found in the 802.11n draft standard. Apple did not speak of iLife 07′, iWork 07′, Leopard Updates, or any new Mac/iPod products.

Steve started the keynote summarizing Apple’s 2006 results, minus the last quarter. He quickly covered iTunes Store updates including the acquisition of Paramount movies for sale. Did not say much about Macs and iPod’s other than they are great (which they are) and that updates will come later. He then started talking about the product code named iTV now AppleTV (Apple Symbol + TV). With AppleTV, Apple is hoping to jump into the market that utilizes everyones large HDTV’s. We have so much great content on our computers: music, movies, photos, websites; yet it all seems disconnected from our living rooms. Unaware of this problem until I was the owner of a 32″ HDTV earlier this year, I immediately realized how great it would be to have a Mac connected to my TV at all times. Unable to convince my wife into purchasing a low end MacMini for $500, I found out last December that Apple was already working on the product I needed.

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Flickr is a great way to share photos with family, friends, and the rest of the world. However, there are a few simple features that Flickr lacks the ability to do. The most annoying one is the ability to download an entire set of photos. Very often I upload a set of photos and want to share them with my friends (at original resolution) and the only way Flickr allows them to download the set is one image at a time. Any set containing more than a few photos will therefore never be downloaded. However, there are a few simple tools you can use to automate the process and allow you to share your high quality images with your family and friends.

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Apple made some significant improvements to their Music lineup on September 12 with the release of iTunes 7, New iPod’s and a new gadget code named iTV. iTunes received a nicely designed upgrade to the interface and features different viewing modes that allows you to “rediscover” your music. All of the iPods received some kind of update including the shuffle. iTV seemed like a cool tool to get multimedia content from our computers to the living room but depending on it’s price point, it may be cheaper to just get a Mac mini and reap the full benefit of a computer on our large LCD TV screens.

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According to a tip of information by Steve Beeks, President of Lions Gate, iTunes will be opening an iTunes Movie store and allow users to download full length films. In a recent press conference, Gate stated, “In terms of iTunes movie downloads, I think most likely some time before the end of the year. We know when they are planning on launching, but since they have not announced it publicly, I do not think it is our place to say anything more about that. Calendar year.”

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For years I have had my homepage set to blank. Mainly because I rarely go to the same website everytime I start my browser and trying to load a page that I don’t need to visit is a waist of time. There are a few tasks that I like to check daily as soon as I sit down at my computer: Check Google News, Apple, the weather, and a few blogger’s sites. I also look at my calendar and of course check my email. So where am I going with this???

Netvibes offers a Web 2.0 service that allows you to create a custom page. Netvibes was created using AJAX and has several integrated features that allow you to add weather, flickr, RSS feeds, notes, to-do’s, and icalendar feeds. It does take several seconds, about 8, to load up, but this depends on the amount of information you have.

To start using netvibes, all you need to do is visit www.netvibes.com. and start draging and dropping boxes around. If you want to be able to visit your homepage using any browser, anywhere in the world, you need to register a email address and password.

The only other way to describe netvibes is to show you or just dive in for yourself. Here are some shots of pages I created. All information is updated live.