Got the press release that CodeWeavers have released Crossover 9.0 (Snow Mallard), the first ground up revamp of their software since version 1.0. Crossover, if you don't know, is a commercial wrapper around Wine to allow you easily run windows software on Linux.
From Ayrk - Inbox2 Desktop Combines and Task-ifies Your Email and Social Networks. Looks very interesting.
If you're a photo geek, you probably have heard of, and most likely use, either Aperture or Lightroom. You've also probably heard that Apple released Aperture 3.0 recently. Lightroom killer tips has taken a stab at starting some good discussion with 5 Reasons To Stay with Lightroom (and not switch to Aperture). The author is biased (duh) and is responding to this article on switching the other way (Lightroom 2 to Aperture 3). From the LR Killer Tips article:
Obviously there's been a lot of buzz around lately about Apple's Aperture 3. I read an article yesterday titled "Five Reasons For Switching from Lightroom 2 to Aperture 3" by a gentleman named Marco. So I figured I'd take a stab at my own rendition of the "5 things" article (no offense to Marco) and write about 5 reasons to stay with Lightroom.
Personally I think it's not a cut and dry thing. Both programs have their good sides and downsides, and quite frankly, I'd love some features from AP3 in LR and vice versa. In reality though, use what works best for you (as always), but don't go flip flopping every time there's a new software release, cause (most likely) your time and effort is worth way more than that :)
Nice little tutorial for windows users out there who want to Run Windows Desktop Search 3 (and 2) Queries From Launchy (Launchy being the excellent keystroke launcher. Note: You'll need windows desktop search installed before it will work properly (oops) :)
The Apple Blog has some details on Adobe Creative Suite 5. A couple of goodies:
- Rewritten from the ground up using the native Mac APIs and in 64bit
- Nicer/better/awesomer flash development, including the ability to compile a flash app into an iPhone app that's acceptable by the iTunes App store
Another bit of mobile news is that Adobe introed Flash 10.1, AIR for mobile. Not for the iPhone of course, but coming to Android sometime this year. More info over at the Adobe Developer Connection.
I honestly don't know what "WooNav" is just yet, but apparently it is cool enough to be Integrated in WordPress 3.0, along with (I hear) the multi-user fork of WP.
Seems that Opera has created Opera Mini for iPhone.
[...] plans to reveal Opera Mini for iPhone in an exclusive press and partner preview during the 2010 Mobile World Congress [...]While Opera Mini for iPhone is not publicly available, visitors without a press pass will not leave Opera's stand disappointed. Opera will unveil a host of other Opera-powered devices at its exhibit.
Sadly I'm not going to be anywhere near MWC, but it'll be interesting to see a few things:
- Will it be better than the built in safari
- Will Applet let it on the iPhone (if Opera has gotten this far you'd think they have some sort of agreement
- Will it be good enough to bother? Safari gives you desktop-like rendering as it's claim to fame, Opera is known for fast compression and re-flowing web pages so they look good on smaller devices.
- Are you going to either switch between browsers or dump safari completely in favor of Opera Mini?
Opera, please send me a copy of Opera Mini so I can answer these questions ;)
Navigon has updated their Flickr Photostream with some shots of the upcoming 1.5 release. New features appear to be a connection to twitter and facebook (meh), a cool looking 3D terrain view (in app purchase sadly), and a "my routes" feature. Additionally you can now zoom in the 3D birds eye view, there's a new "SOS" feature that shows you a bunch of information about where you are and what's close (sorry, that was in 1.4 it looks like). Of all the features the 3D terrain looks sexiest, but hard to say if I'll get it as it's more $$ and lets face it, I'm a cheap bastard.
So looking through the What's new in Aperture 3 page, it looks like some people's dreams will come true, with "Faces" and "Places" from iPhoto appearing, brushes for retouching (echoing the local adjustment brushes from Lightroom), presets (they didn't have those before?), and what looks like a gorgeous full scren browser for browsing and viewing. Rounding out the major features is new slideshows with advanced affects, ability to combine video and audio with your photos, etc (sounds like they mixed in some Final Cut/iMovie in there as well).
All I can say is I kinda wish I a) wasn't already invested in Lightroom (come on Adobe, bring us Lightroom 3!!!) and that my main and most powerful computer wasn't a windows machine.
Know how sometimes if you use one type of computer at home, and another at work, you end up using some behaviors from one and find they don't work on the other? If you are a mac person you might want to check out MaComfort which brings some things like quicklook and spaces to the windows world.
Well, on the heels of the Github downtime last night, and perhaps related (* twirls mustache*), Rails 3.0 beta has been committed.
There's also a new app on edge rails post up for people who want to give it a shot.
uTorrent Reaches Milestone With 2.0 Release.
Today, uTorrent version 2.0 was officially released. This new release is built to be more network friendly thanks to the Micro Transport Protocol (uTP) which aims to mitigate network congestion caused by poorly configured BitTorrent clients.
Slashdot story about some researchers who Claim "Effectively Perfect" Spam Blocking Discovery.
A team of computer scientists from the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA are claiming to have found an "effectively perfect" method for blocking spam. The new system deciphers the templates a botnet is using to create spam and then teaches filters what to look for.
Basically it relies on the fact that spammers use templates to send out their emails, and reverse engineers them. All I can say is "oh please please make this work".
TUAW notes that iTunes 9.0.3 was released, and hopefully based on the release notes, it'll fix the current bug I have where podcasts aren't properly synced to the iPhone if you manage them by hand.
Some new hotness in Banshee 1.5.3 the fantastic Linux media player written in Mono. Among the new stuff is something I'd love for iTunes on my Mac to have, folder watching:
A long requested feature - already present in Rhythmbox - has been the ability for Banshee to watch your libraries' folders for added, renamed, or deleted files and updating Banshee accordingly. Well - it's here! (Although you have to enable it via the Extensions menu).
Evernote has released a brand new windows client rewritten and optimized from the ground up. It feels a bit funky for me under Windows XP, mostly because of it's shared code with the Mac version, but it is faster, more stable, and better designed to be sure. Good job guys, keep up the good work!
Today Seesmic released Seesmic Look into their arsenal. This is a new style of app to immerse yourself in the twitterverse. Hit their features page for more details. Basically it gives you a more "floaty" view of your subscriptions, lists, things like trends, and other categories of items.
Looks very nice, though a bit slow, on Windows XP. Not unsurprising as it's optimized for the Aero experience in Windows 7, but doesn't allow some standard things like right click to copy a link. Ah well, a neat new view of twitter for sure. Wonder if this will make it's way into an iPhone (or other mobile) app. There was one for the iPhone that used a 3D paradigm, which was ok, but didn't catch on that well.
Announcement blog post as well.
Well, this morning Mozilla Delivered Firefox 3.6. Among the new hotness is:
- Themes using "Personas"
- Better plugin management
- Magic form completion magic
- HTML5 (still doesn't work with the new Youtube HTML5 experiment though)
- Blah blah security blah stability blah blah
More on the what's new page too.
No issues for me so far, Google gears and a couple of other extensions aren't compatible, but I'm sure they'll be updated soon enough :)
Remember the Electric Sheep screensaver? Well, now there's a 1080p HD Version for your enjoyment. Cost of entry is a 2.2G download :)
NERROT is about as low frills as you can get. Put in a title, get a torrent file. There is no step 3.
The Opera Desktop Team have released a pre-alpha of their next Opera Browser, 10.5. Their opinion is that this is fast, really fast, with a completely re-written JavaScript engine 7x faster than the previous one, CSS3 support, new graphics rendering, and some sexy new dialog handling. More here along with download links.
I really really wish I was more of an Opera fan. It's a great browser, has pioneered a lot of the technologies we take for granted now (such as tabbed browsing) and has a bunch of new technologies that I see becoming integral in web surfing life in the future (ie: the Opera Unite feature which I've used a couple of times), but I just can't seem to get into it. Maybe one of these days I'll do a week of Opera only to force myself to use it.
Evernote for Mac got a nice upgrade. Mostly performance and tweaking, but nice to see that 1.6.0 is out the door. Good job @evernote guys!
The firefox UI team has posted some mockup ideas for the Windows Theme/UI for 4.0. Some interesting stuff in there such as putting the menu in a button, a la the MS Office button, moving tabs to the top, sexy toolbars, and a bunch of other tweaks. Screenshots in the link for you to check out.
TechCrunch notes that the most awesome Evernote is now officially released for Android.
FYI I'm not associated with Appigo in any way. Just gotta pimp out the recent update to their iPhone TODO app. The 3.2 update adds a bunch of nice features and while there are many other todo lists on the iPhone, for some reason I'm drawn to this one. Not completely because it's the only one I've got either :) However, other apps like Things or Omnifocus seem to require fairly expensive desktop software to go with it to get the "full" experience.
There are a couple of downsides to TODO though.
- No desktop software to compliment it (the up or downside of this is debatable of course)
- While it will sync with online services, you're limited to Remember the Milk (requires a pro account), Toodledo (lesser known site IMHO) and local sync to your computer (awesome, but requires the iPhone and computer to be on the same network). A sync to something like google Calendar or Mobile Me would be awesome.
- Not strictly Getting Things Done oriented, which again, could be either an up or a downside depending on if you want a TODO list or a GTD application.
- A wishlist item would be I would love love love this to integrate with the awesome Evernote so I could attach a note to/from evernote or a due date for notes to/from TODO.
Keep up the good work Appigo guys!
Again, no association, just showing some love for an app I use.
If you're familiar with the excellent CameraBag iPhone App, you'll be happy to know that it's now available as a desktop app for Mac and Windows. There's a 15 day trial (no saving, images are watermarked) or you can purchase the app for $19 USD.
Sun Releases VirtualBox 3.1 with "Teleportation", which lets you:
[...] move running VMs between machines - servers or clients, different architectures, different host operating systems, it doesn't matter to VirtualBox.
In case you were wondering, yes, that sounds a lot like a multi-thousand dollar option called VMotion.
Looking forward to trying this out!
The Mac based password form saver/filling known as 1Password has released 1Password 3.0. If you own it already it should be a free upgrade (depending on when you purchased it of course). They are also have put their 1Password Pro iPhone app (link goes to iTunes store) on for the low low price of free.
Speaking of interesting PDC news, it seems that Seesmic is Moving to Windows Platform. Seesmic is a twitter/facebook client similar to tweetdeck and they announced on the blog that they're moving to the Windows platform.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, are they abandoning the cross platform goodness of Adobe AIR (which incidentally announced AIR 2.0 beta this morning) and abandoning their Mac and Linux users? True, native apps are better than AIR/Java/etc apps, but both Seesmic and Tweetdeck were actually excellent apps for being non-native. Also I wonder what prompted the move. Being touted at PDC is a pretty big deal, I'm wondering if MS is looking to jump into the "social network" world and is going to use Seesmic as their champion?
Either way, it'll be interesting to see how this pans out, and if the move is beneficial to them.
For those of you who do your Ruby on Rails coding in an IDE, you'll be no doubt excited that JetBrains RubyMine is 2.0. Rubymine is a very cool app which I've been experimenting with for some of my projects. Very reasonably priced, and very complete if you read through the docs and check out the screencasts.
My favorite cross platform note taking system, Evernote, just announced that they raised $10 million in investment. Congrats to the guys at Evernote! Now you can afford to hire me! :)
After a long time in Beta, MythTV version 0.22 is now available. I presume it's only a matter of time before MythBuntu and friends update to the latest version.
Personally my Mythtv is working great, and I'm terrified to touch it :)
The MacHeist nanoBundle is in the process of a live announcement. The following apps are part of this years MacHeist:
Sadly I must say that other than the cool live announcement, the software is fairly "meh" to me, as I either have no use for the software or already use something equal or better.
Parallels joins the VMware crowd in Integrating Windows 7 with Aero Support into the VMs under Mac.
SkyDrive Explorer is in Beta and will let you access your 25G of SkyDrive storage from the explorer. There are some limitations, but it's still a cool idea.
A very special day as VMware ships Fusion 3.0, many performance and integration improvements, the most interesting are some Windows 7 updates that allow Aero effects. Looking forward to trying this one out.
The MusicBrainz Blog tells us that Picard 0.12 has been (finally) released. Looks like some great updates in there, with new tags supported and other fixes. Looking forward to seeing exactly what some of the items in the changelog means!
Saw ditaa, which lets you create diagrams through ASCII art., so those cheesy text boxes you type into email can turn into nice graphics.
LinuxCrunch has A sneak preview of the new OpenOffice 3.2.
I hadn't heard about SkipScreen before this article on how it is almost banned as MediaFire puts pressure on Mozilla. FYI SkipScreen info:
SkipScreen is a Firefox plugin that automates clicking and waiting on sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload. The goal of the plugin is to make clicking a link to one of these file-hosting services just as convenient as downloading something directly.
OSNews has a great Look at Adobe Premiere Elements 8. One thing I didn't know was it would manage Video as well, which looks like it has great potential for the little bits and pieces of video I've accumulated. Windows Movie Maker and iMovie both seem to be "project" based, not something where you can throw all of your video clips in and pick and choose them for a compilation or project.
Note that this is not Photoshop Elements 8, the consumer version of Photoshop, but Premier Elements, the consumer version of their video management tool, which explains the video management element (duh).
Tweetie 2.0 for iPhone has arrived, and while it's not a free upgrade for 1.x users (it's $2.99), it is a complete rewrite that we had some details on a week or so ago. Maddox has put up a quick look at what he likes and doesn't like and I agree on most points. The UI is fairly intuitive, smooth and silky, and some things (the nearby view and new way of reloading) are awesome. I have no problem dropping the cost of a mocha on this. Hit the main site for a feature list and pictures of all the new features.
Adobe publishes video sneak peek at future Photoshop, via 9-5 mac.
My favorite note taking app, Evernote got a new client application, and now Evernote Beta for Android has emerged.
Flickroom is a cross platform (via Adobe AIR) desktop app to browse and explore through Flickr. Looks a lot like lightroom too.
Evernote has releasd their Windows beta for version 3.5. If you've been playing with the Alpha when you restart it will ask you if you want to update.
Adobe Releases Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows and Mac. 'Nuff said.
Lifehacker has the details of Thunderbird 3 Beta 4 which just popped up as available.
Picasa 3.5 is out and the desktop software now brings, among other things, the same facial recognition software available in the web version. Looks very cool! I just wish some of the features were in/integrated with my current image management solution, Lightroom.
Lifehacker has a nice overview and preview of Opera Mini 5. I gotta say I love browsing on the iPhone, but the new Opera Mini 5 does look pretty damn nice, especially the tabbed browsing.
A new version of Camera Raw and Lightroom are out. Nothing particularly exciting in either, more camera support, blah blah.
Google Earth 5.1 has been released, now faster, better memory management, etc.
The Chromium Blog notes that extensions are ready to go and are on by default in the dev channel now. They also have some sample extensions. So far they are just little UI details I miss from Firefox, and no, sadly no adblock (yet).
Opera 10 has escaped from it's bonds in Norway and now touts some nifty new features. Turbo charge mode (basically proxied image de-rezzing), a very sexy thumbnail bar, and overall beautified UI.
The note taking software that I love, Evernote has posted Evernote (Alpha) Version 3.5 for Windows, which is the start of the much needed upgrade for their windows version, which (IIRC) will start to be tied into the same codebase as their Mac version.
Note: The software is very alpha and fairly crashy :) So be warned.
Pretty fascinating look at the design evolution of the Convertbot Tap Tap Tap Convert iPhone app.
Pretty amazing video from SIGGRAPH on 3D modelling using real video, in which you basically trace over an object in the video and it's now a fully usable 3D object. Easies to watch the video though :)
Anyone heard of Plex Media Center for OS X before? Looks pretty sexy... the only thing that these are all missing are support for decoder cards (a la MythTV) or something to auto-torrent download to give the impression of recording TV. MythTV is kinda old and busted looking and in terms of some of the features (especially compared to the new sexiness that these media center apps have), but it will record TV which none of the other systems do (for the most part).
I want it all dammit! In the form factor of a mac mini. And a pony!
The Windows Experience Blog posted that there's a New Windows Live Movie Maker today.
Anyone use movie maker? I have a few random movies (and by movies I mean 10 second to 3 minute clips) that I'd like to have organized similarly to how I have my images in Lightroom (ie: always there and available, editable, exportable). I've played with iMovie on my Mac, but that seems more project oriented, not library + project. Since I do my photography stuff on a windows system, I have no problem doing the minor movie stuff on there too, if only to have it there and in one place so those incredibly interesting 10 second clips of SCA fighting from 5 years ago don't go missing forever :)
Pidgin 2.6.0 is out the door for all platforms, and addition of video and voice support.
I don't know if this was the fault, but my home-brew Time Capsule setup has been failing lately, and this weekend I probably put in 5+ hours of mucking around to try to get it working, and then it'd work, go for a few (1-20) Gb, and then fail. Looks like this might have been caused by the Mozy backup, which has been fixed. Fingers crossed that I can get this set up and working tonight with the updated Mozy software!
If you're a digsby user, you may want to re-consider after reading this where lifehacker details some of what Digsby has done lately in terms of bundled crapware. Bummer.
Update: Digsby has posted a response.
The very cool mono-based image management tool F-Spot has released version 0.6.0. Link has all the changelog goodness.
TorrentFreak pointed out that the much-used uTorrent has hit 2.0 Beta with some interesting changes for resource use on public trackers.
People still burn CDs and DVDs? Huh. If you are one of these oddities, you might be interested to know that you can Download Nero 9 Essentials Free Edition (No Activation License or Serial Key Number Required). No idea how many.... "helpful" popups this comes with to tell you about the non-free version, but if you want to be legal, and need features in the nero suite of software, this might be a good get for you.
Looks like (after actually reading the article) the software only allows you to copy a CD or DVD, and burn data CD and DVDs... so basically really minimal functionality, the sort provided by free tools out there already....
Just as a note from someone who is going to the my digital life site for the first time, this is definitely somewhere that you need to run adblock plus on your browser when visiting....
MovableType 4.3 has been released, looks like a lot of interesting new features (pagination, better search, better docs, more performance). Good work six-apart team!
Seems this should be the time to upgrade as well, currently I'm running on MT 3.2, which is way out of date. Just need to find someone to do some design work to update the look of the site :) Any volunteers out there?
Mozilla has released a long-awaited Thunderbird 3 Beta 3. Improvements include tabbable email messages (not just folders), a cool summary view if multiple emails are selected, smart folders, and more.
Google LatLong blog notes a new Google Maps Feature: Just keep searching. Basically maps will keep previous searches you do and you can selectively turn previous searches on and off through a blue bar at the bottom of the left-hand pane. Very neat feature, should make trip planning a easier.
I'm back working at a place where they use windows on the desktop, so to feel more at home I'm running Cygwin of course. However, the biggest fail with Cygwin (IMHO) is the actual console, which, lets be honest, pretty much sucks. Luckily I happened across a nifty article on LifeHacker which pointed me to MinTTY, a terminal app for Cygwin which feels far more like Konsole or Gnome-Terminal (ie: a console that doesn't suck) that is native to windows. Yay!
It's been a while since the E-Text Editor was released as open source code. The blog, Being the Change, has some updates as to how the linux building is progressing, with the top (current) entry being a link to a guide on building E on Fedora 10.
E, for those who don't know, is basically TextMate in windows.
@loic emailed me this morning to share a video for the Launch of Seesmic Web and Seesmic Desktop 0.4. The desktop (AIR) version seems to be fleshing out nicely, with some good new features. Also Seesmic web is basically the same product, but on the web. Very very cool. A sexy update, good job Seesmic team!
That said, a couple of requests: trends, syncing, adding users to user lists is still clunky, and there is some confusion when looking up a users profile in the "home" tab seems confusion as I'm not sue what some of the operations will work on. Still, minor niggles :)
Well now this is interesting.... Google just Introduced the Google Chrome OS, an open source OS targetted at netbooks. They say it's different from Android, though there are areas where it overlaps.
Very cool, interested to hear what other people think about this.
Tombunto points that you can Download and Install BitDefender antivirus on Ubuntu with 1 year free license. Big question is, do you need it.
OMFG, from the official Google Blog comes word that Google Apps are out of beta. It's true too, if you go to gmail.com you'll find that there is indeed no "beta" on the icon anymore. Not bad for a webapp that was released over 5 years ago.
VLC, or VideoLAN has released version 1.0. VLC is a free and open, cross platform, video player that plays, well, anything.
Appstorm has some details and screenshots of Postbox, The New Mail Client on the Block. While it looks like it is a solid mail client (and it'd have to be to fight Mail.app, Outlook, Thunderbird and friends) it seems to have some of the "social" stuff built in as well. Appstorm has a nice writeup though, so just hit the link.
Check out the Flickr Twitter Beta which lets you twitter images from flickr pages, or send them to twitter by email.
A major upgrade for virtualization software Virtual box has been released. More changes than I'd list here, hit the link for all the details.
Via TorrentFreak: The Pirate Bay Sold To Software Company. Hoax? Brilliant business move? Great way to avoid prosecution? Bad news used for a pump and dump stock scheme?
Guess we'll see what happens....
As TPB blog confirms the sale, guess it's not a hoax. Sadly it really seems like they just sold out, though right in the blog post they say that if they mess with the site no one will keep using it. Just like suprnova of ages ago (anyone remember that one) maybe the age of The Pirate Bay will pass and a new main site will appear.
Needless to say, the comments on the blog entry are fairly, shall we say, "unsupportive" of the decision :)
HP Brings Classic Calculators to iPhone and Windows. It looks cool, that's for sure, but not sure if I would pay $15 or $30 just to have the same look as you had back in the day.... Course, if you're an accountant and your fingers only know how to work on the 12c Platinum financial calculator....
In addition to the new Lightroom 2.4 update that just came out, there is also a new Video-Asset Management plugin to let you manage you videos from within the Lightroom interface.
TweetTabs : Realtime Twitter trends and Twitter search. Fast, slick, cool. Via forgetfoo.
Lifehacker points to a free Mac/Windows BPM Analyzer for calculating the BPM of Your Music, and will add in the metadata so you can create that perfect workout mix.
Songbird, the Open Source Music Player for Mac/Windows/Linux has released version 1.20. New features include auto-organizing your library, itunes import/export, last.fm integration, and a new 10 band equalizer.
TweetDeck has recently released a .26.1 version, which includes, among other things, syncing your setup with the server, which also facilitates their new iPhone version, which you can sync your desktop setup down to the iphone. A neat card like (like the Palm Pre's UI) interface, which you can flip through nicely.
The only downside is a) I just bought Twittelator Pro and b) some of the input and message functions are different that I'm used to. Still a great app though.
Seems that Opera’s newest invention is coming on June 16th. The URL is /freedom (open sourcing the browser maybe?) and there are some nuggets buried in the comments of the HTML. Guess we'll have to wait almost a week to find out...
mir.aculo.us has some interesting thoughts on the browser wars, considering the final release of Apple's Safari 4.0 yesterday.
Mac Rumors notes that Developer Builds of Google Chrome for OS X and Linux are now available. These are "official" developer builds as well, not the 'some guy got it to compile' that we've seen before. Of course, the warning on the Chrome Blog says to NOT DOWNLOAD THEM (unless you like crashy and incomplete and unpredictable software).
I, of course, am downloading them :)
Opera 10 beta has arrived. Some new stuff, some even maybe... innovative stuff (visual tabs) and the "turbo" feature from opera labs is in there. Check it out.
I heard about InstallPad on Windows Weekly.
Basically the ideas is that instead of restoring a system after a crash with a copy of what was installed before, it allows you to create a list of applications and it will download and install them in the background. So instead of having to either a) deal with installing old versions of software again or having to go out and re-install the same apps over and over again (assuming that when you install a new system or re-install a system for restore you're installing the same applications over and over again).
Sadly it looks like the pre-baked lists are pretty out of date, but the app appears to have huge potential...
Heard about this one on the excellent Camera Dojo podcast. OnOne software has created PhotoTools 2 Lite as a free plugin. The standard edition is $159, and this is obviously a loss leader (or is it lost leader?) to pull you in. Still, it's free stuff, and if you're into photography and photoshop, it's worth a look.
The New York Times Reader released version 2.0 of their app, this time it's an AIR app, and compatible with Linux, Mac and Windows. Nice and sleek, simple, no registration required (it seems anyway). Very nice!
Evernote announced today that they now have Evernote for BlackBerry, for all your "remember anything" needs for all you BB users. As with the iPhone version, it's got images, files attachments, voice memos, and of course, text. Currently the Storm, Curve and 8900 series are supported, with other device support coming soon.
Opera celebrates its 15th birthday! You can also head to this link for a special page :)
While I'm not an opera fanatic, or even a constant user, I'm impressed with how they keep on coming out with things ahead of the curve, and it's always a browser that I have on my system as a "second" for testing or use an an alternate lightweight platform.
Good job opera guys!
MacAppStorm has a good selection of 34 Stunning & Free Mac Screensavers for OS X (lots have windows versions as well though).
The Chrome Blog announced that they've taken the "3D Browser" idea they put out for april fools, and made it real. Google, is there anything you can't do? Anyway, the 3D graphics in the browser is here, along with demo plugins and a samples page.
Chris Blizzard weighs in as well.
I've been getting to be more and more of an Evernote fan lately, and have started to grok what twitter is really all about (other than twitter spam of course), so I was pretty interested to see how Evernote Twitter integration had been implemented over on the Evernote Blog.
Basically you do a dance following the @myen user on twitter (click link for instructions), and when you're set up you can simply mention @myen in a "tweet" and that note will automatically show up in your evernote inbox. Very cool!
As an aside, you can search for #EvernoteCrazy in the twitter to see what other folks are using it for.
Via someone on Twitter is a nice page of 22 Firefox Extensions to Turn Gmail into a Powerhouse of Productivity and Manageability. Some look useful, some look really useful, and some are just kinda "meh".
Just tried this out here at work. Works very well. Lifehacker - AutoBrake Automates DVD Ripping - dvd ripping
Looks like a release candidate that is appears to be the near final is out! Lifehacker - Likely Windows 7 Release Candidate (7077) Lands on BitTorrent - Windows 7 Beta
Nice post on the google chrome blog about how the Google Chrome 3D april fools joke came about and was brought to fruition :) Those google guys have a lot of fun, that's for sure.
Chrome for Mac Sees Progress, according to OSNews. Still very alpha from the looks of it though.
Interesting development on ThePirateBay.org noted by TorrentFreak. You can Download Torrents Remotely With Pirate Bay’s Personal RSS. Basically you add a torrent to your personal RSS feed from anywhere on the web, and have your home system watching the RSS feed for new torrents to download, and does so. Very neat!
How to Delete Accounts from Any Website - Features by PC Magazine
World of Warcraft no longer legally for sale in Australia - WoW Insider
VMware Releases Open Source Virtualization Client. Not sure I actually know what it is, but it's cool to see VMware releasing some OSS. Via Slashdot.
El Goog has let Google Earth 5.0 out into the wild. The beta has new features in the form of historical imagery and timeline mechanics, ocean floor/surface data (see this story from digg for some more on that) and a new simplified touring system.
Looks like some of the 3D city imagery has caught up to MS Virtual earth too! I've always preferred GE to MS VE, but the MS system has had far more realistic looking city 3D views in the past. Check out this placemark in Vancouver as an example (ensure you have 3D buildings and and give it time to load all the textures).
Official Gmail Blog has the details, include typical cool and cute video.
Google Announced Picasa for Mac. Plays nice with iPhoto, native Mac app, edits are non-destructive, lots of easy editing tools, seamless web album integration.
What's not to love?
Now, where's that Chrome for mac? :)
Image Editing: SUMO Paint Puts Photoshop-Style Editing in Your Browser
Free, high-end image editor
The google has spoken.... Square is the new round. That and they have updated the google reader to be faster/better/less calories. Not sure I like it just yet, but I'm sure I'll get used to it fast enough. They have discussion forums if you need help. If you're not seeing the new interface just logout/login or hit the refresh button to see it.
BetaNews | Novell and Microsoft sanction Silverlight work-alike for Linux
In the next stage of what has turned out to be a more successful project than even its creators envisioned, the public beta of Moonlight -- a runtime library for Linux supporting sites that expect Silverlight -- is expected within days.
Looks like the embargo is off, and you can head over to the Adobe CS4 Learning Center to see videos and features from CS4. Lots in other photoshop and photographer blogs as well.
633k has a nice little program that appears to be what I've been looking for, that is, something that will go through my iTunes library and fix all my genre tags from a trusted source (ie: Last.fm).
Anyone have anything else that might do the same?
(Turns out this isn't all that great, bugs in the program (redraw stuff) and it doesn't seem to do all-at-once, you have to tag each artist or each song :( ).
Google Chrome is up and ready for download. Anyone have any thoughts on it yet?
Update: Couple of quick thoughts after a couple of minutes of use in a Windows XP VMware session (so not full speed or "normal" use):
- Overall pleasant to use, minimalistic look and feel without missing anything huge for day to day browsing.
- Some sexy effects, ie: notice the find dropdown when you hit ctrl-f
- Nice and fast, though some people are saying that images are a bit slow. JS speed reported as uber-fast, but I don't see anything massive here myself in the sites I normally use.
- Right click -> inspect element is nifty, as is about:memory (notice it'll show memory use from other running browsers.
- Text entry fields are resizable.
- Some common plugins are supported (flash, quicktime, silverlight, etc).
- Flash plugin install happened "in browser" and didn't require any sort of restart.
- Any page can be turned into an "application" (runs in it's own window without url bar or browser controls) and have shortcuts added to the desktop/quicklaunch bar. This isn't like the mozilla solution for this which lets you run web apps offline.
- Browser tab dragging, removing, adding, etc all work nicely and niftily.
- Some obvious deficiencies:
- Windows only
- Missing some useful plugins that will prevent me from using it, most noticeable of all is missing Adblock-plus
- Support for more plugins would be awesome.
- Smooth scroll would be nice as well.
- In the minor tweaks department:
- I'd like to be able to tab down into the awesomebar.
- If you're really fast typing in a URL and hitting enter you could get the google search option if the "just load the damn url" option hasn't popped to the top of the awesomebar.
- Windows only
I've seen a few of these type programs before, but I'd never had a laptop before. Seeing How to Track A Stolen Laptop (via reddit) has re-ignited my interest and I'm thinking something like this is might be good to have setup in case I ever go traveling (assuming the first thing the thief does isn't simply to wipe the drive without powering it on of course).
Nice post on John Beardsworth Photography News/Blog about how to make Lightroom 2.0 a bit more "workflow" friendly with smart collections. Non-photogeeks can safely ignore this one I think.
TorrentFreak has some notes on getting your torrents better/faster/less calories: uTorrent Developer Shares BitTorrent Speed Tips. Nothing hugely new here, still good tips for people less in the know about torrents than my audience of 4 probably already is :)
So you've heard about the iPhone app store and how people can make insane amounts of money (I heard about someone with a crossword game that is making $2k a day) and you want to get in on it, but have never written a line of Objective-C or coded for the Mac before, much less the iPhone. Never fear, the Apple Blog has a nice iPhone SDK Tutorial: Build a Simple RSS reader for the iPhone. Great resource to get your toe in the door.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 has been released. Great job Adobe, looking forward to seeing the final result!
rails.vim is an interesting looking project I found via a list of ruby on rails editor choices. Basically it takes some of the nicities that programs like TextMate provides to the Mac users out there and brings it to Vim in a fairly unobtrusive way. I'd like there to be a bit more documentation out there, and the screencast, while nice and long, is of horrible quality for text :( Anyone whose learned vim though should be able to figure out the commands from the rails.vim file :)
So in other release news, Wine HQ has the news that Wine 1.0 has been released.
The Wine team is proud to announce that Wine 1.0 is now available. This is the first stable release of Wine after 15 years of development and beta testing. Many thanks to everybody who helped us along that long road!
Of course, as with much open source software, the 1.0 moniker doesn't mean this is the first usable version, I've been using wine for years. Glad that the team has tagged and released this 1.0 version.
Saw first on OSNews that Opera 9.5 was released. Here's the press release from Opera themselves. Sexy new look, the new sync feature called Opera Link, malware protection, and more speed, along with all the other bits that make opera good. Sadly I haven't really been able to switch, Firefox is far too engrained in me in terms of my fingers knowing all the sortcuts, plugins, etc. Opera (at least the previous 9.x version) also still feels a lot like the old original opera 4 or 5 that I first tried with just a bunch of new paint thrown on, which hits me basically as soon as I go into the preferences or sub-menus. I'll give it another go with the 9.5 version and see what it's like now though.
Regardless of that, good work and congrats to the opera team (doubtful they'll ever see these kudos though :).
With the Banshee 1.0 announcement yesterday, here's a quick wrapup of Banshee stuff (mostly via banshee planet).
- The new Banshee webpage, looks good!
- Feature wrapup from Aaron Bockover.
- More features on the main banshee site.
For the mac people out there, the Adium Blog notes that beta 1.3 is out, with a revamped UI and some new stuff, such as facebook chat as an account option.
Following up on the release of the new Thunderbird 3 Alpha, lifehacker has a screenshot tour.
Still not convinced about tabs though.
Saw that Thunderbird 3 has an alpha released.... check out the Shredder a1 Release Notes. Oooh! Tabs!
WorldWide Telescope was released today from Microsoft. If anyone remembers, this is what made Scoble cry.
It makes me cry becuase it is, of course, Windows only (the requirements for Mac are "Microsoft XP SP2 or Vista", ha!). Guess I'll stick with Google Sky for now.
The Google Reader Blog announces that they have a Brand new Google Reader for iPhone. Looking forward to playing with this.
Saw via my RSS this evening that VMware Fusion 2.0 Public Beta 1 Now Available. Highlights are multi-display support (for real), running apps from your boot camp partition, and 3D acceleration. Woot!
When I first saw the post about Microsoft Pro Photo Tools V1 I immediately dismissed it as more MS marketing crap, selling "meh" software as the 3rd coming. However, when looking into it a bit more, their Geotagging system looks.... "interesting". I'm a metadata freak, I figure if I can metadata the hell out of something I can always go back later and re-organize or find whatever I need to find. The idea of dropping a photo on a map (a la Flickr's tools) and have it's location/city/state/country/etc data in the IPTC fields really excites me. Looking forward to seeing this when I'm back around a windows machine.
Microsoft Pro Photo Tools also allows photographers to use geotagging for their photos. Geotagging is the ability to "tag" something with location information - and in the case of photos the location of where your photo was taken. You can quickly add location data from a GPS device or Live Search Maps to a photo's metadata.
From LifeHacker comes a good list of Superior Alternatives to Crappy Windows Software.
Nice, AVG, the best (I've found) free anti-virus program out there has announced that AVG Antivirus 8.0 is now available in a free edition.
Buddy pointed me to the uTorrent 1.8 beta thread. Looks like lots of goodies including an encryption protocol to get around that pesky ISP filtering of P2P packets.
The Official Google Blog says they have A whole new world to explore. Google Earth 4.3 was released last night with a bunch of new features, including better 3D buildings, a sunrise mode, integrated street view, and various other goodies.
The 3D buildings are not all as good as Microsoft's Virtual Earth, which, while I'm no MS fan, I have to say their 3D cities are much more complete than Google Earth. GE 4.3 closes this gap somewhat. Of the two cities I quickly explored Seattle had only a few photo-realistic buildings, and lots of grey boxes, but San Francisco was f-n gorgeous. I'm sure there are other areas. See the link for downloads and more details.
Via slashdot is the softpedia First Look: The GIMP 2.5.0 - Introduces cool new features and redesigned interface!
Unfortunately some of the article is a bit thin.... IE: the new GEGL interface I'm sure is awesome, but what is GEGL again? Ah, some sort of generic graphical library.... Some new tool improvements are cool, but I don't see a "redesigned interface", or at least not radically so. The Gimp layout and "odd" window interface (which is pretty easy to get used to truth be told) still looks like it's there.
Anyway, it's great to see development continuing, much as I have turned into a Photoshop-guy, the GIMP definitely has it's place and is definitely needed to be out there!
Computer-Darkroom has a nice and fairly comprehensive look at the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 Public Beta. Lots of yummy screenshots!
VMWare just announced their Workstation 6.5 Beta Program. The short news:
- Use Unity to integrate your guest apps with your host (This is a great feature from VMWare Fusion and I'm very excited to see this come to windows/linux)
- More Powerful VM Record and Replay
- Support for Smart Cards & Smart Card Readers
- Enhanced ACE Authoring
- Link State Propagation Networking (network can pop from one network to another without having to release/renew on the guest)
- Improved 3D graphics Support
Adobe Labs - Adobe Lightroom 2.0 Beta. Can't say more, must.... download.... now....!!!
Some highlights are:
* Localized corrections -- Enhance specific areas of an image for unsurpassed nondestructive flexibility and control reminiscent of the traditional darkroom dodge and burn experience.
* Improved organizational tools -- Find the images you need quickly and easily.
* Multiple monitor support -- Add an additional monitor to efficiently manage photographic workflow and presentation.
* Flexible print package functionality -- Create custom layouts containing multiple sizes of a photograph on a single page.
* 64-bit support -- Lightroom 2.0 now takes advantage of the latest hardware architectures with improved memory handling and performance.
Full release notes here (pdf). Can't wait to play with this!
Slashdot pointed to OpenOffice.org 3.0's new features, an early look. Highlights - some visual improvements, notes in margin (looks cool), office 2007 compatibility (wonder if MS opening up the API documentation helped with this), charts and tables improvements, and more.
Timothy Armes Photography has released a plugin for Lightroom called LR/Enfuse, a lightroom plugin for the Enfuse program, which is HDR (kinda).
Aperture 2 was released earlier today, and Fraser Speirs has his Aperture 2 First Impressions. I downloaded and played with it a bit, and wasn't all that impressed... course, Aperture is pretty foreign to me as I've been a lightroom guy for a while (due to the cross platformness and my lack of a Mac till recently). The list of improvements is impressive though. Check the article for more details.
XXCLONE, A New Way of Cloning the Windows System Disk is a bit old (2007-02 was the last update) but it promises a fast and easy disk clone (with lots of extras) for windows.
Opera Mobile 9.5 was announced over at Opera Watch... lots of funky new stuff, speed improvements, widgets, etc, etc. A preview will be available Feb 11.
VentureCake has some OpenOffice 3.0 details that make it sound like a very sexy beast of a program. Well, hopefully not too much of a beast... OO.o is still a bit heavyweight for me sometimes :) Not scheduled till September though, so still lots of time to wait (and play with alphas and betas).
Note for myself.... TestDisk appears to be a good winner for doing computer partition recovery.
Along with the previous note about NetNewswire being free, I see that the Windows RSS reader from NewsGator (though I knew it long before it was bought) is also a free download. Wonder what the NewsGator plan is? Right now syncing accounts with the NewsGator service is free... maybe they are seeing erosion by Google Reader and friends? NNW and FD do have the advantage of easy offline operation, which Google Reader does have with Google Gears, but (from my experience) this isn't as slick as a desktop app caching pages to the computer.
Oh, FeedDemon also has the "Panic Button" which is something I could use a lot (detects when you have lots of unread feeds).
Very cool to see NewsGator doing this though.
A cool interview by scoble on Fav.or.it RSS reader. Anyone got an invite they can throw my way? I love my google reader, but this does look pretty cool....
Picasa Web Export Plugin for Lightroom... nifty stuff, hoping for a Facebook and Flickr exporter as well!
An Easy Web-Based IDE for iPhones is called "Jiggy", which looks... well.... supercool, even for someone such as myself who has put no thought into iPhone development (outside of using it as a user). Check out the video in the link for the niftyness.
Jon Patch of the great Vancouver+ and Victoria+ addon packs points that FSX SP2 is available for download.
Lifehacker has an app I've been searching for... the MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter. (From this list of 20 iPod utils.)
Google Maps has released a new update for it's mobile application which uses Cell towers to figure out your location instead of relying on GPS... very cool, and it works on my blackberry for work! Great way to not have to zoom into wherever you are from a view of the entire world! :)
Darren pointed out that PuTTY just got a big update. New icon, tray icon, url hyperlinking, transparency, optional portability, reconnect on wakeup from stand-by are just a few of them. Go get it!
The Google Reader blog has notes on some improvements on my favorite RSS reader. Recommendations and drag-and-drop are the two big new features, one interesting, one useful. Looking forward to see how they are all working!
I downloaded the latest episode of something today only to find it wasn't (apparently) playable without a spyware laden POS software. Luckily I found a blog with good info on a Domplayer 3Wplayer Fix that fixes this. Hopefully others who have been bitten by this will find this (or the linked blog) to get around it. Then send a nuke to the domplayer headquarters, okthanksbai.
Darren pointed me to the Engaget early look at the Android SDK. I had originally ignored this story because I figured it was just saying that the SDK was available. However the screenshots and videos look very cool (and somewhat iPhone like for the full screen device). TIght integration with google apps of course, IM, Maps, etc. The second phone demoed looks very iPhone like, though it's a bit confusing if it's a touch screen or button controlled. The demo shows the user touching and moving pages and globes with a finger, but looking at the web browsing almost looks like it's done with button nav.
Course, it's all an SDK demo anyway..... :)
Looks very cool though!
Interesting... forgetfoo points to the first Firefox3 Beta. I'm adventourous so I'll install it and see how it is. I'm looking forward to see if the new "visual refresh" is in there.
Update: No visual refresh, basically first glance is that it's pretty much the same as firefox2. I'll wait until something more drastic happens.
Update: Not an official beta.
Engaget has the Leopard vs. Vista: feature chart showdown. Some interesting stuff in there, and some (of course) stuff that's subject to your own interpretation.
Now that GIMP 2.4 is out the GIMP 2.4 Release Notes have some nice demos and screenshots of the new functionality and features.
Yay, Gmail gets IMAP. Apparently it'll be rolling out in to everyone in the next few days.
Found a "How I Learned to Love Testing" presentation via RailsEnvy. Interesting talk, rails focused, but easy enough to bring the philosophy to perl, java, .net, etc etc etc. It's a 30 minute .mov BTW.
Demonoid Aftermath: An Open Letter to the CRIA.
The record labels cry about downloading cutting into the profits of the sales of albums. They put out “greatest hits” albums by 20-year olds with 2 or 3 albums under their belts, released with one new track to try and sucker the fans that already have both albums into spending another $20 for one new song, or re-releasing a 3-month old album with a “previously unreleased bonus track”. Then they can’t understand why people aren’t buying them, and cry foul that people are downloading the one new song instead.
An Aperture User Looks At Adobe Lightroom is an interesting look at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom from the point of view of an Apple Aperture user. I've never used Aperture (it's Mac only) and am quite a dedicated Lightroom user for my photo organizing need. Some of the points noted are fairly "getting used to" based. I'm personally used to some of the UI bitches he has, but everyone will have their own interpretation.
Noted deficiencies are ability to upload to flickr (meh) and lack of dual monitor support (agreed).
Definitely a good look and review though.
Remember the content aware image resizing thing that I linked to a while back? Happy happy joy joy, here's the Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin which implements this technology in The GIMP on both Linux and Windows. Wh00t! Can't wait to check it out.
Steven Hodson talks about why he'd use a bloated email client. Xobni certainly does look interesting.... check it out. They have a blog as well....
Anyone got any invites? :)
How to extract songs off your iPod using iTunes. Though it probably won't work with the latest gen of players.
Another great article from Joel on Software on the death of GMail. Basically he looks at the current state of webapps, and how things are looking a bit like they were with the "write once, run anywhere" portable C programming language and the even more run-anywhere-y Java with javascript and CSS. The suckage of developing for the 4+ major browsers for webapps is looking a lot like having to develop your app for the 80286, 80386, powerPC and RISC chipsets... (sounds a bit like my own rant about the various states of support that IE has :)
Best quote from it:
You could six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
Microsoft selling Office 2007 Ultimate for $60 (for students) via Forever Geek. If you go to the site it says it's only for students, which means:
You must hold a valid email address at a U.S. educational institution ending in .edu (for example, leina@contoso.univeristy.edu) AND be actively enrolled with at least 0.5 course load. Also, you must be able to provide proof of enrollment status (ie, student card) upon request by Microsoft. If you are unable to provide proof of enrollment, you will be required to pay the full retail price of Office Ultimate 2007 (approximate ERP $679USD).
$700 USD for an office suite!?!?!?!?! Holy crap!
LiveSlick.com has a half decent list of the Top 10 Freeware Software Nobody Knows About. I've heard of some of them, but others(like imgburn) I haven't heard of and would make a nice addition to the list of software I "need" on a windows install.
Via my buddy Fozbaca comes DisplayFusion, windows software that appears to make life with dual monitors, especially disproportionately sized dual monitors, much, much easier (for wallpaper anyway). Will have to test this when I get to work tomorrow.
Yay! They finally added it! The Official Google Reader Blog has the details of the new search box in The Google Reader. Wh00t!
Opera 9.5 alpha is out. That is all. Download and enjoy.
Update: Sadly a no-go for me... you can't click to change your status on Facebook :(
For the photographers out there, looks like there is a Capture One 4 beta out. Also some good videos displaying the new user interface and some of the new features.
Cybernet news has a look at Opera 9.5 Features. Opera is a very cool browser, don't get me wrong, but right now it just doesn't give me anything right now that Firefox doesn't give me, though some of it's features (like keyboard navigation with the 1, 2, x and z keys is very cool).
The new Opera 9.5 alpha will be available to the public tomorrow apparently, so everyone can have a look at it.
Suprnova.org – The Universal Bittorrent Source, is back. I'm not sure if it's as relevant today as it was Back In The Day(tm), with the advent of the age of TPB, Torrentz, mininova, etc, but it is nice to see it back. Torrentfreak has an article on what is old and what is new.
Content Aware Image Resizing is a super slick and super cool technology which allows you to resize images in a (duh) content aware way, allowing you to expand or contract an image not by simply throwing away columns of pixels, but by figuring out which parts of the image are more or less important, and then inserting or removing averages. It's kinda hard to explain, the video shows it really well though.
Darren let me know this morning that Movable Type 4.0 was released. Lots of new stuff. I played a bit with one of the betas and it had some nice stuff in there. Might be finally time to update the UFies.org install to something a bit more modern.
Lifehacker has a good list of Power replacements for built-in Windows utilities. Most I think I knew about, but there are a few others I didn't. Also nice to know that some of my choices for replacement apps are the same as other peoples :)
Andrew writes up a bit about Version control that doesn’t make your eyes bleed, in this case, the bzr system.
Techdo brings a good look at a Preview of the User Interface for Firefox 3. I'm looking forward to a version that's in beta that I can give a whirl.
Chris Pirillo pointed out some software from BananaSecurity which uses a webcam to recognize your face, lock your computer when you're not there, and unlock it only when it recognizes your face again. Obviously there are some questions about this, like what if I'm wearing a hat, what if it's darker/lighter, how secure is the lock it puts on your computer, and what if I want to use the webcam? Course, it still interest me greatly as the laptop that work got for me has a built in webcam on it...
Wired points that a firefox 3 beta should be coming really soon.
The final alpha of Firefox 3 was released to developers today. After this Mozilla’s roadmap calls for the release of beta 1 on July 31st which will be the first feature complete version of the next generation Firefox browser.
Congrats to Jon Patch for the release of Vancouver +for FSX, of which I am a proud beta tester, and was very impressed with the rendering(s) of my hometown(s).
An apple weblog pointed to a new GUI subversion client called Versions. Unfortunately it's in a private beta at the moment, but sign up and maybe you'll get a chance to check it out (if you're on a mac of course).
Mark Phippard talks about one of the new features in Subversion 1.5, merge tracking, which allow you to: "Record and use merge history to avoid the repeated merge problem and allow for cherry-picking."
Bryce 5.5 is available as a free download for those happy fun people who like 3D modeling.
So this one is pretty specific... if you use lightroom and want to find out what your most used focal length(s) are, this post on schussman.com has some perl + RRDTool magic to create a graph from your LR library file.
Craig discovered what he describes as Windows Vista Media Center Killer App. Glad that MCE has finally caught up with MythTV in 2003 :)
Just kidding guys, glad you can realize the power of setting up your soaps to record from work!
Perfect timing for a flame war.... here's Laptop Magazine's article on Mac OS X Tiger vs. Windows Vista. Of course, in a week this will be almost out of date with the new OS/X release that's expected at WWDC. Of course as with everything, this is completely subjective... Vista's advances with it's pictures folder will mean nothing to say, pro photogs (who will use something like Lightroom or Aperture anyway), while to mom and dad wanting to organize snapshots, it might count for a lot. Gamers will probably still pass OS/X by due to the far greater availability of games on Windows (course, based on the benchmarks I've seen they'll pass by Vista for XP as well). However, it's an interesting view of 10 separate areas of each OS compared against each other.
One item I do disagree with is the networking discussion. My experience with Vista has been that copying and moving files around, even on the local system, but especially copying files to and from a fileserver (maybe this is MS trying to mess with Samba setups?) is d-o-g s-l-o-w. Unreasonably so. I'm pretty sure you don't need 10-20 seconds of "calculating time remaining" to copy a 100kb file from one folder to another. Also setting a folder to be shared seems to take forever as well... over a minute on a dual core 2.4 G machine.... f*king unacceptable IMHO. That said, I haven't had a mac for years and don't recall how their network setup is compared to the new "network and sharing center". I do remember things generally "just working" though.
Another item I disagree with is backups.... backing up a few files online with .mac is fine, but in this day and age of mass media, having a disk based backup is a huge advantage. That said, I haven't actually used Vista's backup, and would probably go with a 3rd party solution (trueimage or ghost or the like) anyway. Having online backup only isn't a winning position IMHO (assuming that OS/X only has .Mac as a solution of course).
Flame on!
Darren (again) pointed me to the Movable Type 4 Beta that was released. It's got some nice features, a new interface, supporting OpenID, a dashboard overview, etc. Eric has only this to say about it, and while I'm not that uninterested, I'm not hugely excited. One thing that was a nice little feature was the ability to reply to a post from within the admin UI. Since generally a blog owner will be replying to other people, this makes far more sense to me.
I threw MT 4 on a test server and imported my current blog into it to play a bit. The UI is nice and new, but a bit slow in parts, and there are a bunch of perl errors that are thrown out doing fairly simple and one would assume, well tested, operations (ie: approving a comment).
I'm going to keep my eye on this, but probably won't get too involved until beta2 comes out at least.
This is interesting..... Lifehacker points to how to Speed up file copying with TeraCopy. I never thought you'd need a special program for file copying, but I guess when you're copying large media files around (I moved 60G of data from one disk to another the other day.... took over an hour with Vista), it might come in handy.
The software optimizes buffer settings to do fancy things.... now if only windows/linux/whatever would/could do that natively! Well, assuming it actually does anything of course :)
Inside Lightroom has details of Adobe Photoshop Camera RAW 4.1 and the next update of Lightroom. Sounds like some nice little enhancements coming for the photogs around. Some other details and links can be found here.
Nice list of 20 Free Applications to Increase Your Productivity via lifehack.org.
Upside-Down-Ternet has some great recipes for screwing with people stealing your wireless (or anyone else for that matter!)
For all you photo buffs out there, LightZone released version 3.0.. looks funky and cool, I'll be checking this out tonight when I get home.
This is cool... I use Lightroom for my photography organization and asset management, and have wondered if it'd be possible to give it a view on the web. Well, nothing for Lightroom yet, but PHPture does just this for Aperture (sadly still Mac only). Looks pretty cool. Anyone know if anyone is working on this for Lightroom?
I heard about AutoRate: iTunes rating done right and wish I had a mac to run it on. Basically it lets you auto-rate (imagine that) your iTunes library and bases it on play frequency, skips and a funky formula. It avoids the need to rate things by hand and is apparently pretty accurate.
Anyone got a spare mac for me? :)
Nice article Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi? which explores some of the misconceptions about the much beloved Vim and some of the cool stuff you can do with it.
Lifehack.org has 15 Coolest Firefox Tricks Ever. Some that I've never seen before, like shift-space will pageup!
Ars has a Pidgin 2.0 review online. Pidgin (how the heck do you pronounce that?) is the newly rebranded version of GAIM, which had to change it's name for legal reasons (AOL are bastards apparently). This is a multi-im client a-la Trillian, except it's cross platform.
Ars Technica has a very nice review of Adobe Photoshop CS3 complete with lots of screeshots and example movies.
Wow, Firestorm looks mucho cool. Well integrated bittorrent support in Firefox. Doesn't appear to be released yet though :(
If you're interested in the latest release of photoshop, you'll probably find this a pdf of what's new from Martin Evening enlightening. It's 21 pages with lots of screenshots and images with lots of great info.
According to PopPhoto Photoshop CS3 Now Available.
Adobe has shipped the new regular and Extended versions of its Photoshop CS3 image-editing software.
Hmm... I thought it wasn't due out till September or so. Hmm.... wonder how long till it appears on the less-than-reputable sites?
Very cool download for Win, Linux and Mac is Packet Garden, which captures your network traffic and then grows a virtual world based on that. Wonder what your world looks like after visiting alt.binaries.hot.naked.sheep.pics? Hmm...
Very cool little hack for OS/X, Sticky Windows allows you to (go figure) stick your windows to the sides of the screen for easy access. Not 100% sure why this is easier / better than using the dock, but hey, it's a neat idea for sure.
O'Reilly Digital Media blog has a good look at Photoshop Bridge in CS3 from dekebytes. Wait a minute, I didn't think that CS3 had been released yet? What's going on?
Found via a scoble show are the labs at thirteen23, which have some cool .net 3.0 and/or Vista apps which do various interesting things.
Postfix 2.4.0 stable release released. Features include:
- Enhanced performance if you have BSD kqueue, Solaris /dev/poll, or Linux epoll support.
- TLS cache improvements.
- Reduce memory footprint.
Question is, can I drop it in over the 2.2 install I currently have?
Evolution, the Open Source Mail client is now available for windows.
Evolution features virtual folders, advanced filtering, spam filtering, security, calendar, todo list and contact management, Exchange support, signing mail with S/MIME / GPG / PGP, and syncing with palm pilots.
This should be very exciting for people who are stuck having to use Exchange / Outlook (through either choice or decree from The Bo$$tm) and are looking for an alternative to some of the less-than-perfectness that is MS Outlook.
A quick test here shows it's far from perfect. Default window layouts are odd (you have to turn on status bars, sidebars, and toolbars), and it took a bit of finagelling to just get to my exchange mail, which then wouldn't load. A bit disappointing, but there is definate promise there, and there's still a decent pop/imap client there. Anyone else played with Exchange with this new Evolution?
Saw a note (via digg) about an article on Linux MCE. Uhmm.... Why hasn't someone told me about this? Where did it come from? Auto-dims your lights (if you have a home automation system of course), can send a control application to bluetooth mobile phones, turns on your TV and receiver and sets the right inputs? Scans all networked computers for shared media? Cover-flow like browsing? Where the hell did this come from?
And is it free? Huh? Really? From Linuxmce.com:
LinuxMCE is a free, open source add-on to Ubuntu including a 10' UI, complete whole-house media solution with pvr + distributed media, and the most advanced smarthome solution available. It is stable, easy to use, and requires no knowledge of Linux and only basic computer skills.
The video is a bit smarmy in it's comparison of LinuxMCE to Windows MCE though, something that the Linux Community has to work on. However, if the features they advertise work as... uhm.... advertised. I've had discussions with a buddy of mine on MythTV vs Windows MCE and MCE definately came out on top. I use MythTV and prefer it, but it's setup vs WinMCE make it far more usable to normal people (and even geeks). However, if LinuxMCE (which integrates MythTV) this works like they say, I'll be replacing my MythTV Box with this ASAP.
Anyone else know about this of have any experience in it?
Oh, and LinuxMCE also integrates Asterisk (the free phone system), provides network boot to easily put up other LinuxMCE systems in the home, and it seems like the list goes on and on...
Sorry for the rambling, but this is really exciting!
Update: OK, a bit more digging through the website has enlightened me a bit more. LinuxMCE is a project where the software is given away for free, but the commercial side of it is selling you consulting and a $1,000-$7,000 setup with varying levels complete home automation. So basically you can put it together yourself, get the right hardware, get the right bluetooth module yourself, etc etc, or pay someone to give you an out of the box plug and play solution. Looks like the software given away is 100% complete though, so if you can set it up and get the right hardware, you can make it work as advertised. I'm not 100% sure, but it looks like you might need two computers, a "core" and a "orbiter", where the latter is a non-hard drive, network boot device only that is what is connected to your AV equipment and is controlled by the core. Maybe, I'm not sure exactly if the "hybrid" setup is everything on one computer or everything on two...
The project is a fork of pluto home apparently.
Lifehacker has a niced list of the Top 10 Greasemonkey scripts to improve your productivity. Some good stuff in there, especially number 10, a feature I'd love to see moved to all email clients :)
Nice (and quick) wrap up of the Top 10 best Linux DVD ripping and encoding software.
Photo / graphics geeks take note.... PopPhoto has confirmed that Adobe Adobe has Confirmed March 27 CS3 Release.
Nice collection of Analytics packages on the Cheap for web devs.
In my continued quest to flood UFies with Lightroom stories, I bring you the review from Ars which is a nice in depth look at the software, including a comparison with Aperture. Until I have a mac I'm sort of stuck with Lightroom (not that that's a bad thing).
The Lightroom Blog was the first one I saw to break where to download the trial version of Lightroom: Lightroom that is available. Wh00t!
Cool article on How much control should our users have? Hehee.... "canyon of pain". A nice relation (with pretty graphs) to demonstrate the cost/payoff of things from iMovie to hotel faucets.
Slashdot reports that a NASA World Wind 1.4 Released With Trailer. World Wide Wind is a application similar to Google Earth, but it's fully free and have different goals to GE. Also includes the ability to explore the moon, mars, jupiter and venus. Some sexy new effects and addons, check out the what's new page for full details.
Found this one on LifeHacker.... a nifty portable app for your ipod (works fine on a USB key though) called DemocraKey.
Imagine carrying a portable security suite with you wherever you go. Walk up to any computer, quickly scan it for viruses, and then defeat any internet access blocks to view any website you want anonymously. It’s here, and the DemocraKey 2.0 Lite let’s you have it on your iPod.
You can use it either to access the freedoms and justices you deserve from inside a repressive state, or surf porn from school, whichever one floats your boat :)
Lifehacker has a nice article on how to get good with Google Reader. Some nice stuff there that I didn't know about (hint: hit 'g' then 'u' then type in the feed name you want to find). Wh00t!
First of all a new site for lightroom news has appeared and it comes to you with a nice list of changes in Adobe Lightroom from Beta 4.1 to version 1.0. Lightroom is an Aperture-like professional photo management software solution from Adobe (released to the wild on Feb 19th).
If you are a student and interested in photography, you'll qualify for the super-super discounted price of $95.95 in the Photoshop Lightroom student pricing page.
After many months of beta, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 has been released into the wild for a fairly reasonable price (assuming performance issues from beta4 have been fixed) of $199. Or maybe it'll be released Feb 19... one of the two :)
A short list of changes from here are:
- Clone/Healing/Redeye tools
- Virtual copies (allows multiple adjustments/crops/etc for the same image)
- Image stacks
- Two new ways to rate photos besides the current 0-5 star system: flags (“picked”, “rejected”, “no flag”) and colors (an image can have one of five color tags associated with it).
- Lots of keyword-related tools, including a keyword stamper and keyword browser
- Intuitive folder-oriented layout replaces the “shoots” layout.
- Export presets (yeah!)
- Many editable presets (for filenames, metadata, export settings...)
- Can import/export Photoshop PSD files
- A "watched folder" - images showing up in the folder are automatically imported.
Some pretty exciting stuff in there, at least for me :)
Another page with some details is here.
Paint.NET, a free graphics program written in .NET has been released. Here's the Paint.NET - Roadmap and Change Log. I'm actually a big fan of this program. When it first came out I basically said "meh", and since then I've changed my mind. My original complaint was that it was a really lame version of photoshop, with funky (but useless) transparency resulting in basically a glorified Microsoft Paint.
However, MS Paint is far too lame to do some things, and Photoshop is far too big and complicated for simple tasks. For what I do at work most of the time (taking screenshots, minor editing, cropping, etc) this program works just fine. It also updates itself nicely and is fairly fast. I'm sure that there are other alternatives out there, but this one is free and decent. Hey, the default save format is PNG, which out to tell you something :) (well, if you're geeky anyway). Maybe someday Microsoft will replace the aging MS Paint with something like this in it's Windows releases.
Oh, and there's a mono port in progress, which means that this could be a contender to replace (or augment) The GIMP for graphics work on Linux. Honestly I think that the functionality of Paint.NET is pretty close to the GIMP (from the user perspective anyway, it has layers and effects and whatnot) and it's a more familiar environment UI wise.
Darren threw me a link to Humanized.com, a company who has a product called "Enso", which claims to deal with the fiddly little things that you are always having to do without getting in the way of your productivity.
It's a bit like quicksilver. You select something, hit a hotkey (capslock), type what you want to do (calculate, upper case, open, google, etc etc (not having to type everything of course)) and it does it. Looks like it's got a lot of potential as far as helping people work with their computers in a more logical way.... ie: you just tell it what you want to do (ie: upper case) instead of going to the right click -> properties -> characters -> upper case, or hitting a menu option, etc. Extensible with python (in the future) for doing potentially any interesting things.
They have two products currently, a launcher for $24.95 and a universal spellcheck and dictionary for $39.95.
Interesting screen shot comparison of Mythtv vs windows. Mostly they look the same, one is easy to install, one has more features and works on lowerend hardware. Depends on your level of geekness I suppose.
For those interested in what's been released recently in the Microsoft and Apple worlds, well, I can give you a bit of half of that. The keynote from CES is here. I am only about 10 minutes in and can't say I have heard anything yet, lots of "blah blah digital decade blah blah" so far. Dana's Blog has a note on how he's switching to Windows Home Server.
Anyone got any other info from Microsoft at the CES show?
On the Apple side, well, their keynote is tomorrow, January 9th, so we'll have to wait until then. As to what's coming from them? Well, the rumor mill has been going crazy lately, everything from something HDTV related (dimensions of the graphic on the Apple main page has a 16:9 ratio), the much talked about iPhone, the much waited for (by me) full screen video iPod, the release of iTV, and the thought that maybe Apple will trump MS by releasing the new Leopard. For the rumor mill going full steam hit macrumors or thinksecret.
More updates on the apple stuff tomorrow.
Update: If you are interested in the windows home server stuff, I'm told you should watch the on10 video, as the one at the microsoft site blanks out at the good part with a note about "intellectual property". Grrr.... stupid stupid stupid.
This is more for me for later, but it looks like this guy has already figured out the solution to an issue I have with my router, and has documented all about bittorrent and the Linksys WRT54GL Router.
Oh, and happy new year everyone!
Someone discovered Ask X, a new web 2.0ish interface for Ask.com. Looks ok, the one interesting thing in there is the 'add to my stuff' button that appears when you mouseover search results. Haven't seen where to recover these though, potentially very useful feature though. Oh, and it suddenly decided that my browser wasn't new enough, or didn't have the settings it needed, even though I just completed a couple of test searches.
Oh well, it is still a testbed. Interesting to see what comes of it, and if it has any chance of gaining ground against google. I have a feeling not though, simply because of the google mindshare. I'm probably more interested in seeing google integrate some of the nice touches that ask.com has put in the new interface, which is a bad thought I know!
Well Adobe Labs has the new Photoshop CS3 Beta available for download. If you don't have a valid CS2 key you get two days with it.
I've played briefly with it and saw some new stuff.
- New look (similar to the dark theme of lightroom
- Much improved black and white converter (control individual channels)
- Apparently much improved photo merge functionality (have not used it yet myself)
- Smart select
- Automatic layer alignment and blending,
- Much more....
Dr. Brown has some CS3 video tutorials online for your watching pleasure as well.
DPReview confirms that there will be a Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta tomorrow. You'll need CS2 or the beta expires in 2 days. Adobe claims that CS3 is "packed with new features"... interesting to see what's new.
Cerulean Studios (makers of trillian) are now taking alpha signups for their next gen client that I wrote about a few days ago.
Trillian Astra is the next gen version of my favorite multi-im client. Notable improvements involve a whole new UI (not sure if I'll trade it as I like the minimalistic look), integration into all sorts of "social software", spotlight search, performance improvements, easy guest login, and much else. Check out the feature tour after the movie. Wonder if there's a way to get in on the Beta testing?
Joel of Joel on Software has a good read on choices = headaches as he examines the new Vista shutdown options which give you 9 different menu options to choose from as you walk away from your computer. He also goes into how choices suck and actually restrict you more (ie: notice how in the open source world there are probably 50 different distros out there, and only maybe 5 of them are "real" choices; and while there are probably 10 different window manager / desktop environments, you really only ever choose between GNOME and KDE). I also like how he takes those 9 choices for shutdown and manages to combine them down to.... well, I'll let you read the article yourself.
Sean Mccormack has some details of Lightroom: Beta 5 which he saw demoed at Photo Plus Expo in New York. Among the gems in there are a spot healing brush, abillity to apply spot healing to other photos with the same pattern, and having real time display of how printing/printers would affect a given image.
If you're a Folding @ Home user, you may want to check out this review of the GPU client. Long story short, doing the calculations in your graphics card's processor looks to be way more efficient (though a bit more power hungry).
The downside? Only the ATI Radeon X1900 is supported :(
The boys over at Songbirdsnest have released Songbird 0.2 onto the world. This is not the 0.02 release from last month.... nope, we dropped a whole zero! Songbird is a Firefox based music player/library/everything. From their page:
"It’s like taking iTunes, ripping out the music store, and replacing it with the rest of the internet."
Some would of course argue that the iTunes store is the best part of iTunes, and taking it out would be like saying "it's like a car, but you take out the engine and put in the whole rainforest!" (ok, so coming up with analogies on the fly isn't one of my strong suits :) Hit their screencast for a nice explanation of what's going on.
Speaking of the iTunes store, if the GNOME Music player Banshee has a plugin to allow you to access the iTunes music store, I'm sure that can be plugged into this app.
One thing that I'd like to know is can I sync podcasts to an iPod (or other music player) with it? I presume something like that will show up before release though, this is version 0.2 only of course. As far as the idea it's pretty cool, scraping for media, etc etc. Anyone using this yet?
This is kinda cool, the Songbird Media Player, an XUL/Firefox based itunes/windows media player/rhythmbox/everything clone has released version 0.02. This version actually runs and doesn't crash as soon as it starts! Nice interface as far as integrating web other web services. Only used it quickly, but will play with it more tonight.
I wonder if this is possibly the new open source, cross platform media player to compete with everything else...
One of the nice new features of yesterday's released iTunes is the ability to backup your music to CD/DVD. The Unofficial Apple Weblog has the detail. Nice it just backs up the directory structure too, not some funky apple-format.
Any potential 3D modellers can download Bryce 5.0 for free until Sept 6. They are getting ready to release a new version I believe, so you just need to sign up for a free account to get a serial number. Pretty cool stuff.
I know I rag on Microsoft, and Windows security, but at least there are those out there doing something about it. My ex-boss, ex-coworker and good friend Dana has just released version 1.1 of Firewall Dashboard. New features include:
- Import/export of config for deployment to multiple machines
- A new plugin to aid in remote monitoring for managed service providers
- New reports and the usual array of bugfixes and tweaks
For those of you who don't know what Firewall Dashboard is, it's a firewall log report creation tool for Windows firewalls. Probably pictures speak louder than words, so just hit the screenshots.
There is a good review of the latest iteration of Windows Media Player (version 11) over at Paul Thurrott's site. Looks a lot cleaner than the abomination that was version 9 and 10, I'll give this an install later today and see if it's usable.
I might be the last person to hear/talk about this, but I've found that the spam blocking plugin built into Movable Type 3.2 has been sucking lately. This morning I got about 100 blackjack spams, which confused me because I figured after I marked the first 50 as Junk, the system would be smart enough to know. Guess the new system isn't that smart. Anyway, I recently found the Wordpress Akismet spam blocker is available for MT. Seems to work very well. You need a wordpress account to get an API key, other than that though, there's nothing you see in the interface other than a huge lack of spam comments/trackbacks.
<sarcasm>I can understand that you have to reboot when you upgrade your mp3 player, but not your web browser.... </sarcasm>
Huge thanks to Jari and Mika, the authors.
And another link. Hey, why not another. I wonder if anyone can guess what I'm trying to do right now :)
Another hint for issues I've had. Now to find out how to do it with a remote tomcat.
Read the link for more....
- iTunes works, and can do everything we thought was important; play music, access the store, and sync with an iPod. It can't burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it's usable.
- FrameMaker and JInitiator seem to work well, but they have not been tested by a wide range of users, so your mileage may vary.
- The CrossOver Office Setup tool continues to improve; it now supports a 'Control Panel' which will let you manage certain facilities for Outlook and specific programs that were difficult to assess before.
- We have made many major improvements to CrossOver for this release. We think you will find that your applications run more quickly and more robustly.
(Link now fixed)
Good question, and it looks like f-spot has gotten a lot of work lately, so pass on your ideas!
Xdmx is proxy X server that provides multi-head support for multiple displays attached to different machines (each of which is running a typical X server). When Xinerama is used with Xdmx, the multiple displays on multiple machines are presented to the user as a single unified screen.So basically you can hook up other computers and have their displays used as if they were attached via another video card to your computer.
Personally I like my dual monitor + (dual) KVM so I can have two monitors and use them both in both windows and linux, but hey, this lets you use your spare laptop (or two) as an extra part of a screen :) From the slashdot article about dual monitors.
Basically ipodder will grab RSS feeds of podcasts (with possible bittorrent enclosures) and throw them into your media player (currently itunes). There is apple and windows support, with linux support coming soon. Very nifty!
Works great under OS/X as well, just download the zip file, unpack and click on the .jar file... gotta love it!
Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all. Learn more about how it works.
The SpamAssassin project is holding a logo contest to replace our old venerable logo with a new one for our upcoming 3.0 release which has both major improvements and will be our first release as an official ASF top-level project. Fame and fortune await the winner. Well, okay, maybe not, but we'll give you credit and like you very much. See http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/LogoContest for more information and to make an entry.This is also mentioned on taint.org.
Sounds like fun. Bring out The GIMP and get to it!
Course, from a quick look it looks like I'm the only one on the server who uses this spam filter, so no worries :) If you are interested though, check the documentation on the bogofilter homepage.
I was kinda wondering why I was getting no mail :)
folderblog is a ~15kb PHP script that automatically displays the images placed in a given subdirectory. It can be used as either as a blog or as a gallery and just about anything in between.
It'd be nice to see some of these features (or even just the obvious and non-patented ones) implemented in some of the newer email clients (ie: Evolution).
Update: Yea, that'd be IBM, not IMB.. thanks Keth :)
These guidelines are, by necessity, broad. Software creation and distribution are complex and the technology is continuously evolving. As a result, some useful applications may not comply entirely with these principles and some deceptive practices may not be addressed here. This document is only a start, and focuses on the areas of Internet software and advertising. These guidelines need to be continually updated to keep pace with ever-changing technology.
Hopefully my quoting hasn't mangled his point too much. Just go and read the link :)Open Source software is regularly criticized, often fairly, for lacking in ease-of-use and polish. When a developer wants a new feature - he can add it to the software, and if it gets checked-in by the project owners, it will be there for all to use.
[...]
[But, Firefox] provides a better browsing experience than it’s ancestor, Mozilla Navigator, despite having far fewer features and functions. Smart default settings and an overall better understanding of the experience of using the application by the developers helped make it better for everyone.
Teatime is an applet for the GNOME panel, that reminds you if your teais ready. You can select from prediffened and user configurable teas anddrawing times, different tea cups and the kind of alarm (visual and/orsound) if drawingtime is reached.
(Site seems to be down now, I'm sure it'll be back RSN though... until then hit the wayback machine's version).
Update: As BB notes (where I originally got the link) this may or may not be completely legit, and apparently gives your AV software a fit. I'm not using windows right now, so I neither can vouch for this. Anyone try it yet?
There are some other good ones in there. Pardon the page link, the original is this page but for some reason no browsers want to display it. Thanks for "view as html" google!
Here is another, page with some more mutt configuration hints. Heck, just head over to this page of configuration files for everything from vim to X. Probably out of date a bit, but hey, it's got pretty colors!
Anyway, if you're interested in trying out FreeBSD without worrying about all that scary installing stuff, check out FreeSBIE.
He also has a gentoo migration guide as well, for moving to gentoo with minimul downtime.
Interestingly enough, the main pages for winamp.com and www.winamp.com are different....
NeoOffice is a mildly functional prototype office suite used for exploring technologies for use in OpenOffice.org. It is a free software distribution intended for Mac OS X developers. It is a sandbox for testing out potentially unstable and ugly technologies that are not appropriate for a maintainable source base.Cool!
Personally I have all my CDs ripped to .ogg, so I needed to do a bit of fiddling to get ogg support working, but it seems to work fine now. Wish I could rip to .ogg though. It would be nice if there was a WMA codec for it I have to agree for those who do have songs encoded in that format. Support for other devices would be nice too, but that's taking the company line.
Don't forget that iTunes is a loss leader for Apple to sell iPods, and I don't see them having a lot of financial incentive to go out and support every other portable player in the market, when they are doing fine with their iPod sales (or so I assume). Apple producing windows software period should be hailed as the coming of the end of the world anyway, as they are used to having full control over everything, and selling "the whole widget".
As an aside, my buddy silverstr is having trouble getting iTunes to recognize CDs inserted. They play fine in WMP, the GEAR service is running (as suggested here, but no luck. Apple tech support also refused to help him until he bought an iPod (not a good thing if you're testing to make sure something works while considering buying an iPod).
Can anyone help him?
It's closed source, but there is a release candidate for download. I haven't tried it out yet, but it certainly looks and sounds interesting.
This page describes, in Unix manual page style, a Perl program available for downloading from this site which corrects numerous errors and incompatibilities in HTML generated by, or edited with, Microsoft applications. The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform.Sounds nifty, I will have to try this out. Via vsbabu.org
Changes ------- New in 0.8.7: - Multiple Jabber logins at once - Much improved Jabber resource handling - New contact tooltip shows information about all resources logged in - "Self" contact, so that you can access your other resources - Groupchat - Server account unregister capability - Contact list now reports presence errors - New auth/ask icons instead of "need authorization" psuedogroup - Events from hidden contacts cause only those contacts to appear - Ability to use proxy when registering - Connecting animation - New "busy" animation - Normal message dialog now has JID auto-completion support - Optional feature to send URLs detected in the clipboard (like Licq) - Finding messages in history now locates instead of filtering - "What's This" information available to many dialogs - bugfix: crash when changing status - bugfix: proxy port reset to 8080 when modifying account - bugfix: can't close register dialog - bugfix: can't ignore SSL warnings during register - Quite a few other things..
- There is a security update for OS X that is available from Apple. The following packages are updated: OpenSSH v3.1p1, rsync v2.5.2, groff v1.17.2, PHP v4.1.2, sudo v1.6.5p2, mod_ssl v2.8.7, mail_cmds
- Sounds like there is a first service pack for Windows XP in the works.