I just wanted to say Thank You so much for those that took the time to complete the site survey. The results confirmed many of the things I had in my own head about the site and also the fact I hadn't communicated other things clearly.

It also pointed out the dilemma web designers face daily...more news/less clutter...more functionality/simplified pages...more news/less text....etc etc....you get what I mean? I've always said that NZMac.com is a work in progress and 5 years on, that's still the case....but I thought I would share the plan for this year and how your feedback helped.

I don’t know what made me do it, but I typed in the old www.macguide.co.nz address a few moments ago...and got a pleasant surprise...and then got confused....and then got angry...and then got spam.

It’s great to see the Macguide site finally come alive, although the redirection to a domain called “woop.tv” had me freaking out a bit. On the surface, this looked like the Macguide site I was expecting....Apple and Mac news etc.

Obviously even though it is early days, I was curious to see who was using the site and noticed a number of blog entries. Str

It's not been a great time for NZMac.com over the past month or so. More often than not, you've experienced a message that the site is offline. It's also meant hours of work, lack of sleep (Palmerston North is very quiet at 3am by the way) and new additional costs for me in order to get the site back up and running to the standard that I set for myself and that is required for site users. Things are going really well with the move to a Virtual Private Server system, but it's not all over in terms of glitches. That said, I consider most of the issues are resolved (or close to) and like life, this site will always be a "work in progress".

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you all for your patience during this time, to thank the advertisers for their understanding and supportive comments, and to ask one simple favour - your continued support.

This is not a plea for donations or for funds...well not directly anyway ;-)

In the past month many costs associated with the site have had to increase. Hosting costs have gone up and are now close to triple of what I had been paying a couple of months back before the site started getting IP attacks. These costs are going to be ongoing. It's been an amazing learning experience, but an expensive one at that....and one I could have done without...but that's life!

Completely ignoring the launch of the New Zealand iTunes Store and online Apple store for a moment...2006 was an impressive year for Apple. With the smooth launch and transition to Intel Macs (it seems so much longer than 12 months ago that the first was released) and the promotion by Apple of products such as Parallels on your Mac, Apple is (as ever) evolving beautifully.

Then factor into the mix local news in the December launch of an iTunes Store (finally!), lower prices than we had experienced (thanks in part of the new online store), and it really has been an amazing year of Apple news and of forth-coming promise.