Steve Jobs saying ‘boom’ a lot. via boris.

Mac OSX Leopard: Translucent Menubar Fix. Upgraded to Leopard today. The translucent menubar is probably one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen Apple do.

[Fly on the Wall] Xerox logo, long receipts, Argentina, and Cook’s Illustrated - (37signals). read the “Argentina vs. US” part.

apple stuff

Apple’s new stuff today includes a subnotebook called the MacBook Air which is thin enought to fit in a manilla envelope and weighs 3 pounds. Cool stuff includes a multi-touch mousepad and an optional solid-state hard drive. Bad stuff includes only 1 USB port, no firewire, and no optical drive. Also released Time Capsule, which is just the Airport Extreme 802.11n wireless base with a 500GB or 1TB hard drive. And there’s a new AppleTV with a new UI and the iTunes store now has movie rentals including rentals in HD. I wonder how long those will take to download?

Biggest dumbass release is a software upgrade for the iPod touch which costs $20. No joke. I can’t believe they’d actually do that. It’ll piss way too many people off. Here’s the list of features. The iPhone got the same add-ons plus some cool stuff like auto map-location from cell-tower triangulation and sms to multiple people.

Apple also struck an interesting business deal with Fox which will now ship DVDs with copies of the movies already encoded for use on your iPod and for no extra charge.

Other interesting info, Apple has sold 4 million iPhones to date and 5 million copies of Leopard in 3 months. Considering there’s only 25 million OSX clients in the world, that ain’t bad.

Macworld 2008: 1960s Braun Products Hold the Secrets to Apple’s Future. Dieter Rams definitely made some cool looking stuff.

SafariStand. plugin that does smart keyword searches, auto-search as you type, and opens new window links in a tab. very nice. i’m totally sold on safari over firefox now. it’s so much faster.

Pimp My Safari: bookmarklets. there’s some really random ones in there like doing split-screens.

Google Search with cmd-K in Safari. this is the keyboard shortcut in firefox for searching. so much better than option-cmd-f.

FlickrBooth. Apple photobooth plugin to auto-upload images to flickr

Rogue Amoeba - Airfoil 3 ships. now with support for proper syncing of video.

Macworld | Can Macs conquer the enterprise?. some crazy stats in there about percentage of tech-savvy and student groups with macs.

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry. really, wireless web access on any other phone is just ghetto.


David Lynch on iPhone. oh man is he crazy. i love it.

Macworld | The 23rd Annual Editors’ Choice Awards. Amazon’s MP3 store made it on the list for the web section.

Apple posts Santa Claus Get A Mac ad. done in the style of that old stop-motion rudolph movie.

Apple Forecasts: Not Just Hype. that is, unless the author of the article is some stooge paid off by someone like Jim Cramer.

Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime® components. vlc has been annoying me lately, haven’t had any problems with this yet.

Skitch - Snap, Draw, Share. the demo is pretty cool. probably pretty useful if you’re emailing/sharing lots of graphics.

One BILLION: Pepsi and Amazon Giving Away 1 Billion MP3s. maybe this will help get all the other labels on board.

zune 2.0

Microsoft’s second generation Zune is due out in 10 days. You can see photos and specs at Zune.net. And isn’t it crazy that Microsoft couldn’t get zune.com? And an additional side-note on that site, what is up with the orange links on the brown text? It’s genuinely hard to read on my screen.

But that’s beside the point. I actually got to use a new Zune the other day and was actually pretty impressed. Not so much that I’d buy one (not that they even work with Macs) but you get the point. The one thing I thought worth mentioning is how the main navigation button works. It allows you to scroll up and down in three different ways:

  • Click it in a direction like a mouse button and it moves up or down by one item.
  • Hold down and it scrolls continuously.
  • Or slide your finger down the navigation and the menu will scroll and eventually slow down. You can also tap it to stop sliding at any point

I think this might actually work better than the iPod’s circular scroll wheel. Lately I’ve found that moving up or down just one item on my iPod can be particularly frustrating. This is especially so if you’re doing moving around (like walking somewhere) or can’t focus on the screen (like driving). The Zune’s nav button addresses this simple case.

I only got to use it for a couple minutes but the only other thing that struck me is that the font it uses is narrow which made it slightly hard to read. It’s definitely not as nice as the fonts used on the latest iPods (Myriad and Helvetica).

Another plus for the Zune, the weird-ass acid-trip ad campaign they’re currently doing features a Rogue Wave track.