Feeling creative? Need a way to express your iPod love? iLounge, the iPod enthusiast site, is there for you. The website's latest contest, which goes by the name of "Wallpaper Yourself an iPhone, Apple TV, or iPods", invites you create a wallpaper based on one of Cupertino's shiny music players.
The gallery is growing fast and already has a number of slick and creative entries. How about an iPod shuffle flower (pictured here)? Or the psychedelic "My Music, My Life"? Maybe you prefer this very polished Product Red iPod nano wallpaper bursting with light? Of course, the real fun is firing up Photoshop and making your own, so get your creativity juices flowing to win some pretty impressive prizes. First place gets you an iPhone when it's released, though you'll need to pay the phone plan yourself, understandably. If you're only good enough for second place, you get to watch those many Disney movies you bought on iTunes with a brand new Apple TV. Finally, if you win third place, you receive a 4GB iPod nano and a shuffle.
So what are you waiting for? Go express your iPod love with a cool desktop picture, and submit it to iLounge before March 25th (and don't forget to read the rules!).
Yesterday I submitted a feature request to Brent Simmons via this blog. I asked for the option to export my open NetNewsWire tabs so that I could save them for later. Like a true gentleman, he responded in the comments, and like a truly good developer, he had already thought of this feature, and was just trying to figure out what format the export should yield. I figured that you, the MacUser reader may have some interesting input, so allow me to re-pose the question.
Personally, I think it would be great to see a few formats supported. I'd like to see the option to export a regular Bookmark file, just like you'd find after exporting your bookmarks from Firefox or Safari. XML would be cool too. It'd be nice to be able to have a small feed that contains your own tabs. It'd be even cooler to be able to publish your open tabs as an RSS feed to your website, so they could be viewable anywhere. These are just my personal thoughts though.
What do you think? What format(s) would you like to see supported by a NetNewsWire "Export Tabs" feature?
PS: Brent, if you're ever in the mood for another beta tester, just say the word.
When Steve announced in January that the iPhone wouldn't be shipping for another six months, my heart sank instantly to the bottom of my stomach; I would have to wait six more months for something I'd already been waiting for well over two years. But then, things got a lot better. No, it wasn't because I discovered the free food in the Macworld pressroom, it was something even more delicious: an iPhone thong.
No your eyes are not deceiving you. You are indeed starting at the world's one and only iPhone thong, built especially for ladies (and gents alike) with a tasteful combination of fashion and technology. Unfortunately the one thong which was available on eBay (size medium) has already been sold for $10. Don't give up hope though, I'm sure these will soon be available at a department store near you.
[via Gizmodo]
Okay: seriously, dude: where's my Leopard?
Yes, I'm that befluxed and kerstrummelled. Not only am I forced to just make up brand-new words to describe my present state of agitation, to the almost certain perhormulance of this column's hard-working copy editors...but I'm also reduced to quoting the title of an Ashton Kutcher movie, for the love of God.
To recap: Steve Jobs demonstrated some key new features of Mac OS X 10.5 (aka "Leopard") last August at Apple's annual worldwide developers' conference. We got our first look at Time Machine, a new automatic backup system that makes retrieving a long-deleted Word document as simple as evading a Kr'Nolian Singularity Field in the original series of "Star Trek." Meaning: there's some technical mumbo-jumbo that you don't need to get into, but it involves staring into a starfield on your main viewer and saying "Engage, Mr. Sulu."
(Actually, you don't have to say that. But you've got this awesome animated starfield with a whirling nebula in the distance and your past Finder windows are floating around on top of it. Under the circumstances, you might get carried away and add an "Engage, Mr. Crusher" and a "Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dustin' crops, boy..." while you're at it.)
Safari will be able to "clip" live information from any website, and turn it into a desktop widget. A "spaces" feature lets you have multiple virtual monitors. A developer-level resource known as "Core Animation."
And I enjoyed all of that. Truly, I did. But what caught my ear was one of Steve's opening lines: that there was much, much more to come. He just didn't want to give Microsoft any more ideas to copy.
Steve's Macworld Expo keynote was the tree that me and my two good friends, Vladimir and Estragon, had been waiting near. We knew that the final, complete list of features was coming. Surely, this was the place. And yet, of our antelope-masticating friend there was not a single mention. Instead, we got two hours about some sort of cordless phone that Steve was all excited about for some reason. Who wanted to know about the iPhone?
Apparently, everybody. All right. I'll grant you that. Still, why no mention of Leopard, due to ship by the end of the Spring? Why did I have to sit through a half-hour-long public demo on the convention floor to learn that Apple had nothing new to show that hadn't already been up forever?
Continue reading "Waiting for Leopard"
Infinite Loop has got the latest word on Forum Snowboards--one of two independent film producers granted permission to sell their films in the iTunes Store. This is a breakthrough event in the indy film world, as up until now only the major television networks and motion picture companies have been able to sell their video content, although anyone could post a free video podcast.
According to entertainment news site Variety, both independent film producers engaged in talks with Apple directly to get their content up. Negotiations took 10 months, but the films now sell for $1.99. Could this be the first step of many in opening the door to independent filmmakers? I sure hope so, as the iTunes Store is one of the best online avenues for distributing content in today's iPod-driven digital media market, and there's no reason why indy studios should have to sit this one out.
To be honest, I'm surprised it took this long. The Mac Mini is just too perfect a design not to copy: it's small, sleek, quiet, and pretty much a full-fledged desktop (save that it uses laptop hard drives). Shuttle has been manufacturing small form factor PCs for quite some time, but this is the first Mac Mini PC I've seen.
The device is called the AOpen mini PC, and it's being manufactured in China. As you can see, everything right down to the packaging is a less attractive version of the Mac Mini (not all versions of the device are this ugly, however). Even its power supply is similar to the Mac Mini. Check out macminicolo.net's page to see more pictures comparing the two computers.
It was a mere year ago today that Scott, Aaron, and I joined MacUser—a triple threat of blogging. In that time we've authored over 2000 posts combined and had a metric boatload of fun doing it.
So it seems only fitting that on this one-year us-iversary that we add two new bloggers to our ranks. You attentive readers have already seen a couple of their posts, but they've yet to have their formal coming out party.
Kate Marshall comes to us from the depths of Philadelphia, where she daily dodges the attacks of cheesesteaks, Liberty Bells, and Ben Franklin impersonators. City of brotherly love—yeah, right; there're few places more dangerous than the cradle of independence.
We may not be able to pronounce the name of MacUser's first international blogger, Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen, but rest assured that he can school us bilingual-style from his hometown of Montréal, Québec (I totally had to drag out the high school French for the right accents there).
So be as nice to our new writers as you would be to us—strike that, be way nicer. At least for a week or so; then you can give it to 'em with both barrels.
I loves keyboard shortcuts; it must come with the whole "knowing how to touch-type properly." What I don"t like is having to remember all of them so I resort to scribbling things like "Cmd+Shift+3=screen capture" on sticky notes and affixing them to every conceivable surface. Not a cool way to go about your day, even for someone who loves having any excuse to break out her fountain pens.
Enter the xCuts Dashboard Widget in all its widget-y goodness. For instance, that "screen capture" shortcut I mentioned before? I looked it up on xCuts. It even gave me the Windows equivalent of "Alt+Print Screen" because it is awesome like that.
Thank you, LifeHacker, for bumping my Geekiness Quota up by several points today.
The hype surrounding the paperless office has even spread as far as MIT Press on that there Internet. Others, though, are more optimistic about banishing pesky paper: DEVONtechnologies has updated two flavors of DEVONthink Pro so you can find electronic homes for all those dead-tree bits you might otherwise print during your day.
As someone whose cubicle walls are lined with paper, I've been using the plain-Jane version of DEVONthink for a few months now, to plan work-related things: Important Meetings, Vital Documents, and General Miscellaneous Items to name a few. Seeing a typical day's tasks compressed into a few color-coded folders helps make my work more manageable but I wouldn't go so far as to call DEVONthink my "second brain" if only because I just like having a hard copy for better editing. And my original brain's very sensitive about being upstaged.
Safari, for better or worse, is still my browser of choice. I've fiddled with Camino and Firefox, and I keep them around for backup, but something about Safari just feels like home. Still, that doesn't mean I don't have my complaints.
Some users have complained loudly about Safari eating up a ton of CPU cycles, especially with multiple tabs open. WebKit developer Dave Hyatt responded on the Surfin' Safari blog with a detailed explanation of several reasons why that might be, everything from Animated GIFs to Plugins to Marquee elements. That's right: marquee elements. Man, I'd hoped those had died out last century.
While it's nice to know that some of these issues have been resolved in the nightly builds, Hyatt makes no mention of what, in my experience, is a far bigger problem: WebKit leaks memory like a sieve. If I have NetNewsWire and Safari open, each with a bunch of tabs, my MacBook and its piddling 1GB of RAM slows to a crawl. I have to quit and relaunch Safari every few days, just to get my computer going again. Please, for the love of Mike, look into that one.
If I'm having so much trouble, why don't I just switch? Because it hurts so good.
[via Infinite Loop]
