AdweekMedia today announced the winners of its “Best of the 2000s” advertising awards. Apple took home top honors in a number of categories, including Steve Jobs for “Marketer of the Decade”, Apple for “Brand of the Decade”, Apple’s ‘Get a Mac’ ads as “Campaign of the Decade”, and the iPod as “Product of the Decade”.

- Marketer of the Decade (Steve Jobs): Calling Jobs “visionary, iconoclastic and fearless”, Adweek points to his role in saving Apple in the late ’90s, followed by his remaking of the music and mobile phone industries as his defining achievements. His close collaboration with ad firm TBWA/Chiat/Day is seen as being instrumental in positioning Apple for success.

- Brand of the Decade (Apple): Apple’s devotion to “relentlessly improving its products” and its “emotional connection to consumers” paved the way for its selection as Brand of the Decade, with its close ties to iconic CEO Steve Jobs serving to cement its marketing prowess.

- Product of the Decade (iPod): Likening it to the Sony Walkman of the 1980s, Adweek cites the iPod as “redefining” the MP3 player and the driving force of iTunes as being key to Apple’s domination of the digital music industry.

- Campaign of the Decade (Apple, “Get a Mac”): The work of TBWA/Chiat/Day’s Media Arts Lab, Adweek points to the ads’ “neat trick of making the brand look laid back and cool while it mercilessly skewered its rival” as its key to success. The ads, which debuted in 2006 and now number more than 60, are also praised for personifying computers and demonstrating people’s emotional connection to technology.

- Out-of-Home Ad of the Decade (Apple, “Silhouettes”): Also the work of the Media Arts Lab, Apple’s “Silhouettes” ad campaign launched in 2003 and offered a unique and consistent message of “frenetic happiness” in promoting the iPod. The instantly-recognizable ads are also notable for achieving the “nearly impossible: defining a product without showing what it even looked like up close.”

- Digital Campaign of the Decade (Nike Plus): A joint venture of Nike and Apple to link music and athletics, the Nike Plus campaign “defined how a brand can build a self-sustaining platform” simply using the Nike+iPod receiver. Seen as a community devoted to the “product experience”, Nike has increased its share of the running shoe market from 48% in 2006 to 61% in 2008 while Nike Plus runners have logged over 100 million miles.

In this tutorial, we show you how to manually add menu bar extras in Mac OS X.

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TechCrunch reports that Google has begun testing a new Android device with their employees. The new device is said not to be just another Android-based phone, but the official Google Phone that has been rumored for some time. From TechCrunch:

Google is building their own branded phone that they’ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba).

There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.

This new phone is said to be a no-compromises version of an Android phone and has been reported to include these details/features:

- Sold as an unlocked GSM phone, so in the U.S. T-Mobile and possibly AT&T
- Android 2.1
- Uses Snapdragon chip and is “really, really fast”
- High resolution OLED screen
- Thinner than iPhone
- Two mics, one on the back to reduce background noise
- “Weirdly” large camera
- Touchscreen keyboard
- Voice to text for dictation

The Google Phone is said to be due for release in January 2010. The Snapdragon chip appears to be based on the same generation of ARM processor as the iPhone 3GS, though could be running at a higher clock speed. Apple, of course, is rumored to be working on their next generation iPhone, though it is not expected for release until mid-year.

SunSpider JavaScript Benchmarks of Mac Browsers
(Shorter bars represent faster performance)
One of the most known features of Google’s Chrome browser has been its speed in loading and rendering pages. In investigating that aspect of the browser, Computerworld has found that, while Chrome performs extremely well in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmarking test, it only comes in a close second to Apple’s Safari browser.

According to tests run by Computerworld, the Chrome beta, which Google launched yesterday, is the second fastest of four Mac browsers tested. Chrome renders JavaScript 10 times faster than Opera 10.10 and almost twice as fast as Firefox 3.6 Beta 4, the most recently-released Mac version of Mozilla’s open-source browser.

But Chrome can’t match Safari 4.0.4’s speed: Apple’s browser is approximately 12% faster than Google’s beta.

One great thing about having a Mac is that you can run both Mac OS X and Windows. In an earlier tutorial, http://cuthut.com/DVZ, we show you how to accomplish this. However, Windows OS’ ship in two versions, 32-bit and 64-bit mode. When going to install drivers after installing Windows using Boot Camp, most users will notice that they will get an error message, “Boot Camp x64 is not supported on this computer model”. I myself ran into this issue when installing Windows 7 x64 on my Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook. Here is an easy solution on how to solve this issue (Works for Windows XP, Vista and 7).

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Expose has been completely transformed in Mac OS X Snow Leopard with a new look, features and ease of use. One new feature of window Expose is the ability to Quick Look open window to get a preview of them before selecting them.

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In this tutorial, we show you how to setup and use the beta, codename ‘Jazz UI’, Google search interface. The new blue interface of the Google search engine is in early testing and takes on the look of Microsoft’s, Bing search engine. Follow the following tutorial on how to begin using the ‘Jazz UI’ and test it yourself. In a later review, we will give you a walkthrough of the ‘Jazz UI’ and a full description.

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In this tutorial, we show you how to install the Google Chrome OS. The steps should be pretty similar for setting it up on VMWare Workstation on Windows. Chrome OS is Google’s light-weight, mobile OS. It runs in a cloud and is designed for net-book use Please note that this is a VERY early build of the Chrome OS and because of this, things may be damaged, buggy or not working at all. Install at your own risk! At this time, Chrome OS must be installed in a virtual machine environment, or it will not work.

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In this tutorial, we show you how to download and play YouTube videos from Apple’s Safari web browser. One great thing about downloading videos is that you can take them on the go and play them without Internet access.

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