Coverbuddy is a program that lets you navigate your iTunes library via album artwork rather than lists of songs or artists. It’s nice, but pretty useless.
But now a new version of the software allows iTunes to be accessed via any web browser, including the browser on the Sony PSP, which turns the little game machine into a remote for iTunes.
Microsoft’s MSN site suggests websurfers using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for the Mac switch to another browser!
Fire up that dusty old copy of Explorer and — if you haven’t changed the default homepage — you’ll be greeted by a message at MSN that says:
“If you are using Internet Explorer for Mac, we recommend that you use another browser to have an optimal experience of MSN.”
Of course, Microsoft stopped updating Explorer in 2003, shortly after Apple released Safari.
It looks like Microsoft’s done an Apple with the XBox 360. Of all things, the standout feature in early reviews is not the graphics, but the user interface.
That’s surprising, given Microsoft’s reputation for astonishingly crappy interfaces.
In a discussion of the UI, BusinessWeek concluded: “Microsoft certainly seems to have done just about everything right.”
Wired News said: “What’s impressed me most thus far about the 360 is how it streamlines and refines the user interface.”
And Columnist John Dvorak said: “The Xbox 360 explores new menu structures with a unique and pleasant GUI… I have not seen a hardware/software system this well thought out for a decade or more.”
According to a press release, the UI was developed by a UK consultancy, Akqa, and was perfected using good-old usability testing:
To arrive at the new Xbox 360 player interface, Microsoft and AKQA formed a multidisciplinary team of user experience, interaction design, user insight and behavior specialists, who built several functioning prototypes, working hand-in-hand with the Xbox 360 industrial design team. In-depth testing of the prototypes followed, with immersive workshops, usability sessions and interviews with customers taking place worldwide. The prototypes were then refined and re-tested.
BetaNews has a bunch of screenshots, and it does look surprisingly clean and uncluttered.
There’s a lot of criticism of Apple’s copy-protection scheme, Fairplay, in the news today.
Tidbits Adam Engst describes the headaches he encountered trying to make an audio book, which had been split into four chunks, into one easy-to-use file — a perfectly legal and reasonable thing to do.
Newsweek columnist Steven Levy chastises Apple for refusing to license Fairplay and allow consumers to play iTunes songs on other devices.
Ex-Wired News columnist Adam Penenberg, now writing for Slate, wraps it up with a cogent explanantion of why we, the consumers, have to put up with limiting copy-protection schemes. It has little to do with protecting content, and everything to do with protecting business models:
While Apple stands alone and Sony self-destructs, Microsoft is practically giving away its digital-rights-management tool in an effort to pick up market share against Apple (so far with little success). We may even see a replay of the Apple-Microsoft battle over the desktop, which ended with Apple holding on to a tiny sliver of the computer market. There is, however, a big difference between then and now. Steve Jobs has a hefty market share and a massive content library made up of millions of songs at a price that people like. As long as the record companies license their content to Apple and consumers flock to the iPod, Apple is in a powerful — some might say Gatesian — position.
What’s hardest for the consumer to swallow, then, is that anti-piracy schemes like DRM look like the subtle tactic of the monopolist. Neither Apple nor Microsoft is hurt by music piracy. Instead, they use it as a marketing ploy to force people to use their products. It doesn’t have to be this way. The companies could agree on one standard that allows people to play the music they lawfully purchase on whichever player they choose. The music industry is supposed to sell music, not the medium it comes in, right?
Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab was offfered Mac OS X for free for his $100 laptop project, the WSJ reports.
Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc.’s chief executive, offered to provide free copies of the company’s operating system, OS X, for the machine, according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative’s founders. “We declined because it’s not open source,” says Dr. Papert, noting the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
Under present plans, the first production version of the laptop will be powered by an AMD microprocessor and use an open-source Linux-based operating system supplied by Red Hat.
Although it’s verboten, ZDNet UK installed the x86 version of OS X on a Toshiba Portégé M300 notebook.
It’s the first test by a respected testing lab I’m aware of. All went smoothly and ZDNet was impressed.
Mac OS X looks in amazingly good early form on the x86 platform. As far as power consumption and OS performance are concerned, it can already keep up with Windows XP. Application performance clearly lags behind, though, and still needs to improve.
…
So far, mainly because of performance and price issues, the Apple platform has failed to tempt many Windows users. This could change soon: from the middle of next year, a Mac OS X x86 platform will be available, which will offer more performance to the Windows world.
The Camino project has released the first full version of its highly-regarded “Firefox-for-Mac” web browser.
Though still a beta, the Camino 1.0 browser boasts a giant laundry list of improvements and additions, including vastly improved tabs; Spotlight search through bookmarks; and support for Midas, an inline, rich text editor.
Based on the recently-updated 1.5 version of Firefox 1.8 version of the Gecko rendering engine, Camino always had a reputation for speed. I used the previous alpha version but it never really grabbed me. It seemed incomplete compared to Firefox. I shall, however, definitely give the new version a test drive. After all, Camino claims to blend the best of the Mac and Mozilla:
Camino combines the awesome visual and behavioral experience that has been central to the Macintosh philosophy with powerful web-browsing capabilities such as the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine.
Update: Chris Lawson writes: “Camino is no more based on Firefox 1.5 than Netscape 7 is. Both Camino and Firefox use the 1.8 version of the Gecko rendering engine for their core HTML rendering. (At least you didn’t make the mistake of saying it’s based on WebKit, which I’ve also seen out there.)
On the Applenova forums:
“Apple expected to release new product “Dashcode” for making widgets, unknown when.
Has javascript debugging (breakpoints), WYSIWYG editor, plus a heck of a lot more!”
(Via MacFeber)
Over in the comments section of my other blog, reader Lone Star kindly posted the five steps needed to configure your illegally pirated copy of FrontRow, including a keyboard shortcut to launch it.
Click the link for Lone Star’s tutorial. Be warned, I haven’t tested it.
Apple’s FrontRow and PhotoBooth software are both available on BitTorrent, even though they’re supposed to be restricted to the new iMac.
It took about two minutes to find and download PhotoBooth. Thirty seconds later I was snapping fun pics with the kids using a PowerBook and an iSight camera.
FrontRow, which allows you to control your music, photos, and DVDs from the couch, has been hacked so that it doesn’t look for the iMac remote control it is supposed to ship with. Instead, the hacked version works with any keyboard. I got it running on the PowerBook and a Power Mac G5.
In fact, FrontRow is pretty useless without a remote, but I hooked it to an old Keyspan external USB remote-control, and it works perfectly, though it is slow to load the music and video libraries.
There are also reports of it working with bluetooth keyboards and the free Romeo remote-control software (which is compatible with a limited selection of Sony Ericsson phones and the Nokia 3650).
Update: The DVD player in the hacked FrontRow doesn’t work — at least not for me. Too bad.
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Apple’s at it again. New pro lineup:
Power Mac: Dual-core PowerPC chips across line. Two models: Dual and Quad, which features two dual-core processors, up to 2.5GHz per core. Four PCI Express slots, and “wicked-fast workstation graphics” that can power up to eight Cinema Displasy! Eight! Starts at $2,000; top-of-the-line starts at $3,200.
PowerBooks: Higher res displays (1440-by-960 on the 15″), longer battery life and SuperDrives as standard. $1,400-$2,500.
Aperture: Pro touch-up and archive photo tool. Supports RAW. $500. Not really a Photoshop killer; more like iPhoto on steroids. Get this — it requires Dual 2GHz G5 or faster, 2GB of RAM, 5GB of HD space for ap and tutorials (not counting giant RAW files), and ATI Radeon X800 XT card or better! No worries about it getting pirated: who has the hardware to run such a beast?
I actually don’t like product announcements like this. It makes my 18-month-old PowerBook and G5 look feeble and decrepit. Damn Apple!
Finally, a free demo version of DOOM 3 is available from Aspyr. Weighing 463-MBytes, the demo allows a single-player to move through three levels of the first chapter.
A bittorrent version is also available.
SafariStand is a free plug-in for Safari that adds a tabs sidebar for displaying thumbnails of open tabs in a left-hand sidebar.
Developed in Japan, the programmer says:
“English documentation is not available yet. But User Interface is almost English.”
A trial version of the CherryOS Mac emulator is once again available for download from the Maui X-Stream website.
The $50 Windows software purportedly emulates a G4 processor, allowing a Windows XP machine to run Mac OS X.
The CherryOS was a source of some controversy last year.
It’s initial release last October was greeted with a mixture of excitement and skepticism, given the claims of its supposed developer, programmer Arben Kryeziu.
Kryeziu claimed to have written the complex application from scratch in just four months, and that it performed almost as fast as the host processor — two pretty unlikely claims.
Then programmers discovered CherryOS contained unacknowledged code from a similar open source project, PearPC. Under the rules of PearPC’s license, any borrowed code should be acknowledged.
Kryeziu denied using PearPC code and promised the software would be rereleased in Q1 2005. It seems he kept his promise — at least part of it.
The CherryOS still contains PearPC code, according to a report at BetaNews:
“CherryOS boots up in the exact same manner as PearPC, and its error messages and source files are nearly identical. The emulator also includes MacOnLinuxVideo, which is the same driver used by PearPC to speed up graphics. The CherryOS configuration file also closely mirrors that used by PearPC.
According to tests by BetaNews, CherryOS launches a second process and covers the window within its own display. Thus, when CherryOS is running, a second taskbar entry appears without icon.”
Nanaca Crash is the oddest Flash game I’ve seen in a long while.
Created in Flash, the object is to smash as many human ninepins as possible with a human bowling ball — all set in motion by a girl riding a mountain bike.
The game seems to have originated in Japan (some details here) but is currently being hosted by Roland Saekow on his .Mac site. Roland is asking players to e-mail him screenshots of high scores, which is judged in distance.
Current high score: 13169.43m by alex3305.
(Via Ffwd Linklog)
