The Author – Bart Busschots
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Mar
10
A Twist in the Tale of DRM
Filed Under Computers & Tech on March 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment
It can certainly be argued that Steve Jobs kicked off a flurry of anti-DRM sentiment with his open letter on music last year. Since then we’ve seen a sharp rise in the availability of DRM free music. All four major labels are now selling music without DRM in some form. However, the letter is not the real reason for the demise of DRM, it was just a catalyst. Steve Jobs is still responsible though, just for two very different reasons. It’s these reasons that have ensured that the last company to benefit from the demise of DRM will be Apple, the very company responsible for causing it!
[tags]Apple, Music, DRM[/tags]
Mar
7
iPhone – the Successful Newton
Filed Under Computers & Tech on March 7, 2008 | 3 Comments
It’s been over a decade since Apple released the last of it’s Newton message pads. The Newton was revolutionary, technically advanced and a head of its time. Technologically it was a marvel, commercially it was a flop. The world simply wasn’t ready. What has changed? I’d suggest that the most important change is not the advent of the iPhone’s amazing touch screen, or it’s fancy graphics capabilities. There are all great but they are not the crucial difference that will make the iPhone a success. That big difference is wireless connectivity. A Newton was a dead-end. The only way to get things in or out of your Newton was by tethering it to your computer. With the iPhone you are permanently connected.
What we’ve seen of the iPhone so far has been fantastic. It’s little brother the iPod Touch is also a fabulous machine. But we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. With the unbelievably full and open SDK released yesterday we’ve seen the birth of the second phase of the iPhone (and the iPod Touch), the point where it becomes more than a cellphone, PDA, mobile internet device & music player. The iPhone has become a real computer you can carry in your pocket. Remember, the iPhone has more computing power than the desktop you were using only a decade ago. The demos during yesterday’s Apple event really brought that home to me, particularly the one by EA Games and SEGA. I hadn’t dared to hope for such an open SDK. I’m so glad my predictions were wrong.
Keep an eye on the iPhone/iPod Touch, we haven’t seen the half of what this great platform can do yet!
[tags]Apple, iPhone, Newton, SDK[/tags]
Mar
5
Nice Update to SoundSource
Filed Under Computers & Tech on March 5, 2008 | 1 Comment
Rogue Amoeba have updated their freebie menubar app SoundSource. I reviewed the previous version a few months back and this new version is very similar. The big difference is the addition of volume sliders for input, output and system sound sources right in the menubar. This cool new feature is Leopard-only but the new version is still Tiger compatible. All-in-all I think this is a nice update to a free app I use a lot.
[tags]Rogue Amoeba, Sound Source, Freeware[/tags]
Mar
5
Fluid – Turning WebApps into Desktop Apps
Filed Under Computers & Tech on | 3 Comments
I tend to avoid web apps because I don’t like having my apps stuck in a tab in a web browser. This makes it hard to command+tab to the app and impossible to assign that app to a particular space. I don’t use GMail but if I did I’m pretty sure I’d be using Mailplane to access it. Fluid is not as advanced as Mailplane but it does allow most webapps to be liberated from your browser.
[tags]Fluid, web applications[/tags]
Feb
29
O2 – The Irish iPhone Rip-off
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 29, 2008 | 15 Comments
I posted my initial comments on the Irish iPhone introduction yesterday and the more I think about it and the more I read about it the angrier I get with O2 and the less likely I am to buy an official Irish iPhone. Judging by the iPod Touch the iPhone must be a spectacular phone but I’m not prepared to be taken to the cleaners by O2 for it. The rip-off culture here in Ireland is so well established that we often don’t even notice quite how much over the odds we pay for stuff but O2 is going too far with this one. O2 Ireland obviously don’t think they need to learn from their colleagues in the UK who already have the iPhone.
[tags]Ireland, iPhone, rip-off[/tags]
Feb
28
iPhone Comes to Ireland in March
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 28, 2008 | 8 Comments
Well, it’s official, Ireland is getting the iPhone on the 14th of March 2008 exclusively from O2. You can get all the details on this page on the O2 site. That pretty much settles it, my next cellphone will be an iPhone. However, I’m not going to be rushing to buy one on the 14th. I have a perfectly functional cellphone and until that changes I won’t be getting and iPhone. Mind you, if I was less broke I might be more inclined to go out and grab one sooner.
The prices are as I’d expected. The Dollar prices with a Euro sign instead, in other words, standard Apple prices. I’m not impressed by the available contracts though. The lack of an unlimited data plan really stands out as a shortcoming in my book. Mind you, our cell networks are rather poor once you leave the confines of Dublin city so it will probably be a non-issue for quite some time to come. One nice thing is that it’s ‘only’ an 18 month contract, longer than the average here, but shorter than the two years in America.
[tags]iPhone, Ireland, O2[/tags]
Feb
12
OS X 10.5.2 Arrives at Last – A Worthy Update
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 12, 2008 | 7 Comments
Well wha’ d’ ya know, Apple DO listen to us when we complain. They’ve removed the excessive transparency in menus, they’ve made the translucent MenuBar optional, and they’ve added some nice options to Stacks. If, like me, you thought that having a pile of icons super-imposed upon each other was a terrible way to represent a Stack, then you’ll be happy to hear that there’s now an option to have a stack be represented by the icon for its folder. If you used to like the way Tiger let you navigate a folder in the Dock then you’ll love the newly added ‘List’ view for Stacks, it basically lets you do things the way you used to. Another nice usability improvement is that addition of a MenuBar icon for TimeMachine. This means you can it out of your Dock where it wastes way too much room IMO and just work off the MenuBar. You can now see when TimeMachine is working its magic at a glance and also easily stop an on-going backup or trigger one at any time. Needless to say there are also a myriad of bug fixes, security updates, and a few other tweaks. You can get more details in the uncharacteristically detailed release notes from Apple. 10.5.2 is like a Microsoft Service Pack, it gives the OS a really significant update.
Oh, BTW, if, like me, you were too impatient to wait on Apple to fix the stupid MenuBar transparency and applied the fix I suggested a few months ago you’ll notice that toggling the new checkbox for MenuBar transparency doesn’t work. To roll back that change just issue the following command in the Terminal and then reboot (courtesy of John Gruber on Twitter):
sudo defaults delete /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables'
[tags]Apple, OS X 10.5.2, Leopard[/tags]
Feb
9
Twittering on the Mac Revisited
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 9, 2008 | 1 Comment
It’s only been a week since I posted my first thoughts on Twittering on the Mac but already I need to make a correction and two additions. First to the correction, Twitterific is free, the website is just very confusing. You can use it for free but you get ads, and if you pay you don’t get ads. I gave Twitterific another go because I was quite hard on it last time. Turns out I was right the first time though, it’s not a particularly good client and it’s certainly not an inspirational piece of software. There are better clients out there for free.
Feb
6
My Predictions for the iPhone SDK
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on February 6, 2008 | 1 Comment
As February goes on we get closer and closer to the promised iPhone SDK. Before that happens I want to get my predictions down, just in case I’m right 🙂 For a start I expect we’ll get the announcement very late in the month, probably the week of the 28th. When that announcement comes it will not be what I think most people are expecting, a single SDK, it will be two. A very free and open API for developing Widget-like apps, and a very tightly controlled API for truly native apps. I also expect the apps to be distributed through the iTunes store, in the same way the software update for the iPod Touch was last month.
Feb
5
Why I Love MarsEdit
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I had been planning to write a detailed review of MardEdit but since reading Sean Blank’s excellent review I don’t see the point, he’s done a better job of it than I ever could! So, instead I just want to link to his review and explain why I love Mars Edit.
For me it comes down to four things. Firstly, I want to manage my blog posts in a stand-alone app. I want to be able to command+tab from what ever I’m doing to the blog post I’m working on and I certainly don’t want to have to go searching through my sea of browser tabs and windows to find a post I’m working on. I also want to be dependent on an internet connection to work on my posts. Secondly, the reality is that a text area does not make a good text editor. Another reality is that I have never yet come across a good WYSIWYG HTML editor. MarsEdit does exactly what I want in this regard, it provides a proper text editor with syntax highlighting, spell checking, shortcut keys, and good contextual menus. Not only do I have no issue writing my own markup, I WANT to write my own markup, and the editor provided by MarsEdit is a much nicer place to do it than a text area on a web page. Finally, I like being able to manage multiple blogs from a single place.
Having said that, MarsEdit is not perfect, yet. It’s under active development and the recent 2.1 release already addressed some of the minor issues I had with 2.0. At this stage the biggest issue I have is that MarsEdit doesn’t show the hierarchical relationships between my categories, it just presents me with a flat list. Other than that the only issue I have is that I’d like to be able to control the default markup MarsEdit uses when inserting an image into a post.
All in all I really enjoy using MarsEdit to manage my blog. $29.95 well spent as far as I’m concerned.
[tags]MarsEdit, Blogging[/tags]