13/09/2006
Apple have just released their latest version of iTunes. The update has some nice new features. It seems Apple have recently purchaced the freeware CoverFlow application and integrated it with iTunes, and it’s now available as one of the new views. Tied in with this update is the ability to download album artwork for your songs, although doing so does phone home to Apple, and as opposed to CoverFlows ability to seemingly find album artwork for the most obscure songs, you are now required to have an iTunes music store account and thus can only get artwork for their limited number of mainstream titles.
Another addition is downloadable movies and TV episodes from the iTunes music store. I’m not going to go into any detail other than to say that the movies are a measly 640×480 and DRM packed, you can make of that what you will.
The interface has had an overhaul again, diverting even further from Apples own interface guidelines, admittedly it is very pretty, but it doesn’t look very OSX like, perhaps this is a glimpse of what things will be like in Leopard and beyond.
Last but not least, the logo has been changed again. Going back to the pre iTunes 4.x blue logo instead of the green one we have all come to know.
9/09/2006
This is a rather neat little app by MC Hot Software, it sits in your menu bar and updates you on the status of your favorite World of Warcraft realms. It supports US and EU realms, and the free version can track up to 2 servers at once. The full version ($5.99 - I’ll let you work out what that is in a real currency by yourself) offers unlimited servers, various kinds of alerts and that warm happy feeling that you get from knowing you’ve paid for the developer to buy another couple of beers.
Go take a peek at the WoW Status site.
27/06/2006
Creativebits have a lovely little trip down memory lane for those old enough to remember that far back. They have a set of screen shots from the first ever version of Adobe Photoshop for Mac, released way on back in 1990.
Go and take a gander.
24/05/2006
isnoop.net have a blog entry about a wonderful piece of software that uses the sudden motion sensor (the little dohicky that senses you’ve dropped your mac and parks the hard drives) to imitate a lightsabre. Move the mac and it makes authentic light sabre sounds!
14/05/2006
An article posted on eweek details some of the fixes in the latest security update (2006-003) for OSX, 43 vulnerabilities are patched, almost all of them offering remote code execution abilities!
Go read the eweek article.
20/04/2006
I found a rather interesting blog entry by David Weiss, a Microsoft developer who works on their mac software. He’s done a nice photo tour of the lab he works in over at Redmond, and all the shiny mac stuff they have there.
Go check it out.
26/03/2006
According to an article over at hdbeat.com. Plugging a mac via DVI into an HDTV is as easy as the proverbial pie.
“It just works, seriously you plug in the DVI cable and OSX does the rest. It sets the appropriate resolution for your TV, how it knows I don’t know, but let me tell you it does.”
Now I’m not one of the early adopters of HDTV, but I have been following the various aspects of it closely, particularly the whole Blu-ray vs HD DVD debate, and this is music to my ears.
23/03/2006
I was playing around in iTunes today, adding album artwork to my songs, when I accidentally added the full-sized scan of a CD cover to an album (a 4MB JPEG) instead of the resized version. Now I wasn’t 100% sure where iTunes kept the images, a quick investigation showed no sign of them anywhere within ~/Music/iTunes nor anywhere in ~/Pictures, a quick google left me somewhat shocked.
It turns out iTunes doesn’t store the images seperately at all, rather it embeds it in the song itself, this is a valid part of the ID3 standard apparently, but it leads to huge songs, slow access and more importantly a WORLD of duplication. I would have expected it to store the images in the album’s directory, at least for albums that have been organised by iTunes itself, and maybe the option to scan a directory for images to use in the same directory as files being added from outside the iTunes music folder structure. This is the system used by most other music players, and avoids issues of duplication, saves space and is faster to use!