Not So Far Ahead...

Whilst the Indy looks ahead ten years, French website Nowhereelse.fr points us towards the very near future with these clips of what some take to be a glimpse of the forthcoming Apple tablet device (iSlate, iGuide are amongst the names mooted) which is rumoured to be associated with a 'big' media event in late January.
Not sure about this though - something about it is iffy (or a few things are iffy) - not sure I can put my finger on it exactly. But it's a very nice fake nonetheless if it is indeed a fake.

Helpful Dialog Box Of The Day

Many thanks to Apple's Garageband for flagging up this helpful little gem whilst I was (successfully) installing a Jam Pack.

Green Apple Turns Greener

Not only has Apple been putting more and more effort into improving its green credentials, showcasing its credentials with a dedicated section of its website - but it has now also given up its membership in the the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the Chamber's stance on climate change legislation.
In a letter to Thomas J. Donohue, President and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Apple's Vice President of Worldwide Government Affairs, Catherine A. Novelli, stated Apple's position and submitted Apple's resignation...

Apple is committeed to protecting the environment and the communities in which we operate around the world. We strongly object to the Chamber's recent comments opposing the EPA's effort to limit greenhouse gases.
Apple supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it is frustrating to find the Chamber at odds with us in this effort. We would prefer that the Chamber take a more progressive stance on this critical issue and play a construtive role in addressing the climate crisis. However, because the Chamber's position differs so sharply with Apple's, we have decided to resign our membership effective immediately.

I never need new reasons to love Apple. But what the hell... Awesome.
I'm not naive enough to believe there's no whiff of marketing about something like this - but kudos to Apple for doing it anyway. There's a definite momentum with the company's various efforts that suggests that positive spin and profile is simply part of a virtuous circle of doing the right thing. Will be interesting to see if others follow suit or what waves are made.

Great Awesome Amazing Incredible

Say Hello to the most important bits of last week's Apple Keynote. The adjectives, apparently. ;-)
Er... great!

Apple's App Store Is 1 Year Old

Apple's App Store - part of iTunes, and used for buying applications and games for the iPhone and iPod Touch, turns 1 year old, having put over 56,000 apps on its virtual shelves and had over a billion downloads.
They're celebrating with some special download offers on their most popular apps...

Apple iPhone 3.0 Out Today

All excited. Don't forget that today is the iPhone 3.0 software update - nice review of some top features here at Cult of Mac - and of course for those that have more money than sense (I usually include myself in that bracket, but not this time) then there's the costly upgrades of the iPhone itself also becoming available imminently.
This time though I reckon cost far outweighs worth and will be giving it a miss. Much as I want 32Gb of storage for music and movies, dammit.

iPhone App Download Hyperwall

Hyperwall in WWDC 2009, Live from App Store from Imagebakery on Vimeo.

Yes, it's another utterly unfathomable headline...
Geeky but fun - this is a "hyperwall" (apparently) at this week's Apple Worldwide Developers' Conference (WWDC) showcasing the popularity of iPhone apps, with a selection of around 20,000 of them pulsing and sending out ripples across a matrix of twenty 30" Cinema Displays as they are sold in realtime.
Somewhere in the region of 3,000 apps are downloaded every minute incidentally...

Mac Keyboard Skull Shirt

Okay... Weird headline... Sounds a bit random stream of consciousness I know.
Sorry but couldn't think of a better 'short' way of putting it.

Think I may have to treat myself to one of these for the summer...
A funky t-shirt off the Red Bubble website - by a Brighton designer called Roger - featuring a skull made out of two sets of Mac keyboards.
The white keys come from an extended white Mac keyboard; the black keys were taken from the original iMac.
To check it out in full, or indeed to go buy it, you should click here...

Okay - since I started writing that, I succumbed to temptation and bought it.
Feel much better for doing so. You probably should too...


Spotted on Cult of Mac

Only A Part, Not The Whole

Lovers of fine music everywhere are of course furious that me and my mate Rob have decided to "re-form" our band Smallcreep to try and finish up a project that we worked on for about 6 or 7 years and completely gave up on (BACKLASH).
But in setting up my writing equipment again (basically a keyboard, some MIDI modules and my MacBook Pro) I accidentally wrote something today...
I was familiarising myself with Logic 8, which is the software we'll be using - and just through messing around and getting to know the interface and start seeing how you can play with sounds, MIDI arrangements, software instruments and FX processing etc, in the space of a few hours I wrote what I consider to be a basically "finished" piece of work. It's kind of ambient industrial jazz - very soundscapey and laid back but a bit dark. There's the odd fluffed note here and there but I don't want to lose any of the atmosphere by trying to perfect it.

It's called "Only A Part, Not The Whole" and you can download the MP3 here...
It's about 11Mb as it's almost 5 minutes long, and I've saved it down with the best possible sound quality encoding.

(The band is *the rain dogs* which is the name I give for my 'solo' work... and I've set the ID tags on the song to say it's from an album called "Music For Pictures 09" - which I'll use as a bucket title for any collection of works I build up over the coming months.)
All bodes pretty well for Smallcreep - although the fact that I recovered over *300* song files from the previous session archives suggests we have have our work cut out!

"Yep" - An iPhoto For PDFs. But Better.

Discovered a superb app that'll make a world of difference to me. It's one for Mac OSX, and it's called Yep - a kind of iPhoto for PDF files... Except better than iPhoto.

Fire it up for the first time and it rifles through your machine (well, where you allow it on your machine - that's up to you) and catalogues and tags all the PDFs it can find.
Once it's done that you effectively have your "library" and whilst things like iPhoto can behave like complete tossers over where stuff is stored, Yep doesn't care. It just knows, and it awlays reflects the locations correctly.
The main viewing panel gives preview or list views - and can also be used for actually browsing within PDFs - and you can use the lefthand column for navigating your entire PDF collection either by location on your Mac or by tagging. Oh, and you can add your own tags of course, on top of all the tagging data already existing in the documents.

PDFs have become a hugely prevalent document format of late. Not only are they often used for manuals and guides, they're often how download documents, press releases and much more are handled. Plus of course there's PDF previews from apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. I have oodles of PDFs around, stashed all over the place, so it's a real plus to find something that catalogues and manages them so effectively.

Yep lets you scan documents too; suggesting that you can just keep adding to your PDF stash forever with realworld documents - but I don't even feel the need to go into that area.
Just as a PDF database and 'management' app, it's absolutely superb.
A mere $34 and worth every cent, whatever a cent is worth these days...
Yep can be downloaded from here...

Happy Birthday Apple Computer

Although there's bound to be plenty of April Fools stories out there (many may revolve around Gordon Brown saying that Jacqui Smith is doing "a great job"...) it's always sweet to remember that April 1st is also the birthday of Apple Computer (01_04_76) - although as you can see from their original logo above, they did well to have a new design by Rob Janoff.
Happy birthday, and big snogs to you Apple.
And many more...

Wishlist For iPhone 3.0 Software

With Apple's announcement of an event on March 17th, centring on the next software version for iPhones - 3.0 - the geek and fanboy forums are abuzz with speculation and wishlisting about what v3 may bring...

It goes without saying that whatever Apple finally release, not everybody's going to be happy. They never are. Apple could include World Peace and an end to Global Warming & Poverty but there'd still be someone saying that they'd have preferred a new icon for the Calculator app.

Nonetheless it's becoming ever more clear (in a trend that has evolved over past releases) that there are a couple of key features that very many users would be pretty much universally happy to see (and may be extremely miffed NOT to see...)

• Copy & Paste
• MMS
• Push Notification System
• Video Recording
• Tethering

Personally, I'd be totally behind all of those - copy & paste in particular seeming something of a no-brainer. Beyond that however, there's a couple of other things that I'd rather like to see; things that are of varying importance / triviality and I have no idea how much they might mean to anybody else...

1 - Desktop/Spaces:
Although it'd be hard to imagine Apple opening up the iPhone's "desktop" to the kind of lush and flexible interface you have in the OSX Finder, I think there's more room for simple and efficient icon and app management than at present. A bespoke implementation of something like the "Spaces" concept from OSX might be quite cool, for instance by an icon effectively being a folder that contains whichever apps you choose to store in it - something you could do to reflect categories such as tools, games, fun, music, travel, etc. And maybe 'most used' or daily/frequent...

2 - Removing Apple's apps:
I hate having my various desktop screens hogged by Apple's unremoveable apps. Why can these not behave as your purchased or free downloaded apps; whereby they can be retained within iTunes and chosen to be synced across or not as you wish. I mean "Stocks" FFS!!!
Easy and obvious.

3 - Full Alert / Notification Customisation:
At the moment you can't even allocate your own sound for an SMS alert... Pah!
I'd love to see a complete system of customisable notifications across alerts - not only for which sounds you use, but also individual volume and vibrate controls, and notification repeat options.


So we now just have to wait for the iPhone 3.0 software preview on the 17th to find out what it's *really* all about....

Snow Leopard Set For June 8th Release

Fairly reliable sources are now pointing to June 8th as the release date of Mac OSX 10.6 - "Snow Leopard", the next major upgrade of the Mac OSX and notable most specifically for NOT introducing a bunch of spiffy new interface features (the kind of geeky fun we have come to expect from Apple) but instead putting its primary focus on under-the-hood performance improvements and enhancements.

Snow Leopard is expected to make great advances in processing, to include the new Quicktime shown a few posts back, to deliver huge OpenCL possibilities for developers of all kinds of applications, to continue to expand on multi-touch feature support, and to also have a considerably smaller footprint (or paw-print) than previous versions of the operating system, freeing up room for users like me to fill their hard drives with even more crap than ever before.

In the absence of any cool screenshots, I've just dropped in that cute picture above, plus a link to Apple's main info page about Snow Leopard - and also, for those of you who are so-inclined, a link to SnowLeopard.org - The Snow Leopard Trust, the world's leading authority on the study, conservation and protection of the endangered snow leopard out in the real world.

It's Amazing! No, It's A Beanbag...

Yep, it's a beanbag alright...

Okay; now I'm not saying that this 'gadget' (it's a beanbag) isn't useful... No, only that perhaps the actual trademarking of "Moviewedge" may be a tad unncessary. (Because it's a beanbag).
The Moviewedge (TM) is a $9.95 solution for propping up your iPhone (much as you could prop it up with, say - a beanbag) in order to watch movies on it.

And because it's so well designed to accommodate different shapes (*alternatively read: "because it's a beanbag"...) it works with a wide variety of portable media devices such as Apple's iPod Touch and iPod Nano, the Sony PSP and Microsoft's Zune; mobile phones such as the Apple iPhone, Samsung Instinct, Blackberry Storm and basically any other device.
A pretty nebulous product spec I'm sure you'll agree. You can only imagine that whichever caveman invented the beanbag is kicking themselves they didn't patent it now...

Here's the feature list as spelled out on the Moviewedge website...
• Holds your device in place on uneven and unsteady surfaces
• Variable viewing angle
• Compatible with almost any case or enclosure your device is in
• Soft microsuede covering perfect for wiping screen
(*Each of these points above can be translated as "it's a beanbag" incidentally.)

Is This The New Quicktime?

This is a screengrab image posted by Feber.se purporting to show the new minimalist interface of the forthcoming version of Quicktime, expected out with Mac OSX 10.6 "Snow Leopard" - very much in line with the basic 'play' interfaces of stuff like iTunes videos.
A nice clean interface like this - plus the rumoured integration of currently paid-for "Pro" features could be a real step forward for QT. Nice.

A Couple Of Safari 4 Interface Hacks

Still loving Safari 4 BETA - although despite the blinding speed, Top Sites and overall Coverflow sexiness etc, those UI tweaks of putting the tabs at the very top of the app, and also losing the progress bar in favour of the little twirly device are really still getting on my tits a stupid amount.
Short of actually just getting over it and chilling out - which I think we all know isn’t going to happen - I should thank Gordon for sending on a couple of Terminal hacks to set these right.

I don’t often use the terminal I must admit - but occasionally it’s a very useful last resort; particularly if you’ve got a hack or command passed on or recommended by a reliable source (and these ones I believe come from MacFixit.com which is pretty much as good as it gets).

So, firstly, you can reinstate the tabs where they used to be by typing / copying this into the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

and the progress bar can be reinstated by typing in / copying this:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign -bool NO
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle -bool NO


It’s important to note that the progress bar hack will leave you without the Cancel / Reload button - but if you’re happy to do those with simple keyboard shortcuts (Apple and full-stop for Cancel, Apple and R for Reload) then it’s no great loss.
The progress bar is a very useful piece of UI - it not only indicates activity but shows you what kind of activity is going on (or indeed is NOT going on). If the progress bar is stuck at some point across a web address then this is actually telling you what the problem is. For example if it’s stuck over the http: bit it’s a protocol problem, whilst if it’s over the page name, then it’s a problem with that page or elements on it. Not a lot of people know that.

Hope these are useful and thanks to Gordon and MacFixit for spreading the hacks.

Creativity Is What Should Count On ITunes

Cult of Mac brings news that in an interview with TIME magazine Van Morrison has made clear his intention to withdraw from the iTunes Music Store; giving us the benefit of such dubious bits of wisdom as “I’m not a download artist” (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean...) to explain the curious decision - quite frankly I’d want my offerings everywhere possible in such tough times, especially when it appears that iTMS is operating in a pretty healthy way compared to offline purchasing in general.

What is interesting to me in all this is certainly not Van Morrison himself (who I only really know as a narky old curmudgeon who had the poor judgement to record something with Cliff Richard...) - no, it’s more his general attitude to iTMS in context of his portfolio on the Store.
Go look; he has a bog-standard list of albums.
And that’s it.
That’s his contribution to making iTunes work for him.
Lazy bastard.

If I was a recording artist who was working with iTMS, not only would I work bloody hard to ensure that all albums, singles and any kind of B-sides and bonus-y type stuff was available, I’d also be making sure I used the Store 100% to engage more with fans.
Get all the promo videos out there - and the “making of” videos. Podcasts of course - probably video ones. Why not “digital booklets” (that’s actually just a posh title for PDFs to be honest) of ongoing news and photos, of studio notes and tour diaries? Why not dust off old and rare material and get it out there? Look at digitising old live stuff that’s not worth pressing DVDs of, but which fans would download in a heartbeat? Documentaries, iCals, downloads of the winning entries from special fan-remix challenges? The potential is pretty much as limitless as your imagination.
Which in Van Morrison’s case would appear to be pretty bloody limited indeed.

As far as I can see if you’re not thinking of things like that then you’re a lazy dimwit who doesn’t deserve to succeed on iTMS. It’s a pretty sure sign that Van Morrison certainly should withdraw - I have no idea how far he’d be missed; probably not much so long as “Brown Eyed Girl” is still available on some oldie compilation album somewhere.
He’s as myopic as the record companies still tend to be.
Long live iTunes and all its possibilities for the creative artist.
And while we’re about it, let’s see a few more artists actually getting creative with iTunes...

Safari 4 Beta Is Out And Awesome

Okay - good news for those of you who enjoy surfing the interweb.
There's so much crud out there (and indeed on this very site) and so many sites to follow and organise and look at... well, in its latest version (the BETA release of Safari 4) Apple has delivered its best browser yet to help enrich your web surfing, and to be honest it pisses on pretty much any other browser I've seen too. (yes, that's basically all of them).
Whilst they'd done a couple of things I'm not so keen on - like shifting the tabs to the very top of the navbar, and changing their behaviour a bit - some of the plusses are utterly brilliant.

People will make certain comparisons to Google's Chrome browser with regard to the most obvious new feature; the "Top Sites" screen - but that won't do it justice. Although its starting point is a collection of your most viewed sites (albeit presented in beautiful 3D Aqua-fied glory) the cleverness comes in being able to completely turn this into a beautiful Favourites / Start page by sticking drawing pins into pages you want to keep in a certain place and organising others around them. It also has a nifty little touch of letting you know if pages have been updated by showing them with the top corner folded down and a star showing up.

There's a whole interface lifting going on with "Cover Flow" (Apple's gorgeous way of shoing items by flipping through them, derived from iTunes where the metaphor was flicking through a bunch of album sleeves) being used across so many functions such as searching your History for previously visited sites, bookmarks in general, and also special bookmarks such as a folder of sites associated with people from your address book.

The final thing to recommend it is its speed. This is fast. Really fast. Overall rendering is great and the performance on pages heavy with things like Javascript is nothing short of blistering.
Combine it with Safari Ad Block and you have very probably got the most exquisite browsing experience available.
There's a Windows version too, so give it a try (though given that it will be authored to exploit the structure and processes of Apple's OSX operating system, it's unlikely you'd feel quite the same boost. But it's still a fab browser and deserves a tryout.)

There's a page covering all the features here...
And you can download the Safari 4 Beta here...
*Just bear in mind it IS a beta version. It won't be perfect.

...Although it's pretty bloody close.

2009 Bikesports In iCal

For any of you who may be into motorbike sports (or at least the main world championships in various categories) I've made a bunch of iCals to help keep tabs on all the important dates in 2009. iCal is an application on the Mac, which uses the open .ics calendar format - which means that you can also use these in various Windows and Linux applications such as Microsoft Works (Version 8 or higher), WinDates, Mozilla Calendar, Sunbird and Zimbra.

MotoGP 2009 Calendar
Click here to subscribe in iCal...

CEV Buckler 2009 Calendar
Click here to subscribe in iCal...

SBK: World Superbikes 2009 Calendar
Click here to subscribe in iCal...

BSB: British Superbikes 2009 Calendar
Click here to subscribe in iCal...

World Superstock 1000cc
Click here to subscribe in iCal...


More information about how to use these calendars on Windows PCs here at iCalShare...

Hope they're useful.
Enjoy :-)

gb

Tyrant, Rock Star, Diva, King... & Don't Forget Human Being

There's an excellent piece on Cult of Mac at the moment, reflecting on Steve Jobs' decision to step back from Apple till the summer on account of health issues being "more complex" than previously thought.
I wanted to share it as it's a pared down, non-hysterical look at the present and the future and - without getting ghoulish or mawkish - also attempts to understand the nature of Jobs' legacy, whenever his time may come.
Most chatter on the various Mac forums is a mix of hysteria and cynicism, and some utterly unreal trolling from sickeningly greedy and self-obsessed shareholders (apparently), who deserve nothing short of the mightiest punch in the gob.

There's not really much to do except hope that the stepping back / treatment etc is not a gentle euphemism for the long goodbye but a genuine assessment (and in no way loaded) of what's going on; to wish Steve Jobs all the best, and to hope he's back doing more "insanely great" things when he's good and ready.

Click here for the article...