Rome. Home to the Vatican, the Colosseum, and, of course, fine cuisine. Well, the Eternal City can now add another distinction to the long list that dates back thousands of years: the first Apple Store on the European continent. Rome Italy now joins a small, distinguished roster of other countries around the world featuring stores: Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan.
The store, located at the Roma Est mall, had its grand opening this morning at 9AM local time. To celebrate, 1000 commemorative t-shirts were given away. An estimated 800-1000 fans were on hand for the store opening, some even coming from other countries such as Luxembourg and France. Macity has put up a couple of galleries documenting the opening celebrations.
My question: now that Rome has the Apple Store, how long before Pope Benedict drops by the Genius Bar to get his iPod nano fixed?
Update: So I accidentally referred to Rome as a country. Nitpickers!
My friend Tony dropped me a line last night to ask if I had any idea why Safari on his PowerBook would suddenly refuse to display Google Maps. "Huh," said I. "Just Safari?" Yep, he confirmed. Firefox still worked fine. I had him check JavaScript, which was enabled, and then run repair permissions, which found no problems.
So I turned to Google and—whoa. Google, we have a problem. Tony's not alone it seems: a number of users have had trouble with Google Maps and Safari in the last week or two. The key? All of them are running Panther. Since my desktop is still running Panther, I decided to check it out: sure enough, Safari just displays a big gray block when I call up Google Maps (good lord, I must be encased in a block of cement!). Camino, meanwhile, seems to work with no problem.
There's also an ongoing discussion thread on Apple's board about the issue. From all indications, Google has been notified and is scrambling to fix the problem. In one odd twist, some external sites that rely on Google Maps do still work in Safari (Gmaps Pedometer, for example).
Any readers running into this too? Find any other workarounds?
Turns out you guys are on top of finding out who exactly is jamming away to your iTunes Shared Libraries. We got a number of comments that improved upon the original terminal command that we shared, so we naturally thought we should pass these unprecedented savings back along to you.
Frequent Macworld contributor (and the man whose abode is most likely to induce pangs of jealousy) Kirk McElhearn showed us a way to get the same information without the hassle of having to open up terminal and type in a cryptic command. Launch Activity Monitor and select the listing for iTunes; click the Inspect button; choose the "Open Files and Ports" tab. If you scroll to the bottom of that list, it'll give you the same output as the terminal command.
That's certainly easier for those who prefer not to mess with the terminal. But commenters AC and Axel mentioned an even easier way: a Dashboard widget called iTunes Connection Monitor (pictured above). This handy little program has two sides: the front displays the IP addresses connected to your library, the back tells you which songs are currently being played. I'm not sure if you can tell at a glance who's listening to what, though I presume that the first IP address listed is usually streaming the first song listed, et cetera.
Finally, an anonymous reader sent a link to an AppleScript called "Shared Music Monitor" by Neil Evans. The script updates play counts and last played dates on files that have been streamed over iTunes sharing feature and places all songs that have been shared into a special playlist so you can tell at a glance what people have been listening to.
It's worth taking this opportunity to mention once again just how much we love our readers. You guys complete us.
Some day, every piece of technology around us will work perfectly with iPods, Macs, and all things Apple. Well, at least in my fantasy. But, today another step forward in an iWorld has been made, with the new VW iGolf car (the link is in Spanish, for a translated version, click here).
The VW iGolf is essentially the VW Golf car with an iPod dock in the front armrest, which is, obviously, totally integrated into the car's soundsystem. Oh, and the iGolf comes with an 8GB nano to boot. Nice.
While, the iGolf looks like a nice car, it's still pretty amazing to see an iPod accessory that's a car. Now, all that's left is the iHome, that comes complete with an iPod, iMac, and Apple TV.
[via Gizmodo]
Every time I think about record labels, there's this little flame of loathing and discouragement that burns inside of me. However, once in a while, that flame turns into a flame of hope lighting the end of a dark tunnel. Before this post becomes a poem, let me tell you what this is all about: EMI's chief executive recently spoke at CTIA Wireless, and he said some nice things. Really.
Eric Nicoli's main point is that phone carriers, makers, and content providers should be prioritizing the customer if they want the phone industry to be taken to "the next level". He offers the example of, yes, Apple:
"Apple makes stuff that people love to own," Nicoli said. "They love the simplicity and user-friendliness of the iPod and iTunes. Apple doesn't employ any sorcery or dark magic to achieve this. They listen to what consumers want. And that shouldn't be Apple's unique privilege."
[via Macworld UK]
I must say, I am quite impressed with the Apple TV hacking community. Within only a little more than a week of its release, the Apple TV has been hacked to do everything from function as a SSH server, have an upgraded hard drive, and even boot from an external drive. Well, now two more hacks have come out.
The first hack allows the Apple TV to play video content on its hard drive without having it transcoded or streamed from iTunes. Unfortunately, this hack does require codecs to be installed, from sources such as Perian and A52Codec. Still, this does allow the Apple TV to play "unsupported" video formats, such as .avi files.
The next hack makes use of the Apple TV's "for service and support only" USB port. According to user "Turbo," the Apple TV's USB port can now be used not only for external storage, but also for use with a keyboard and mouse. While his method for enabling this has not yet been posted, a video showing it has.
It's really quite amazing top see how fast Apple TV hacking development has gone. At this rate, who knows how long it'll be before someone is able to install the full version of OS X, or even Linux or Windows, on it.
One only has to Google "iTunes is killing the album" to see how far this idea has permeated the Internet. The theory usually runs that since iTunes has ushered in an era of legitimate à la carte downloading, the album, that masterwork of musical production, will suffer gravely as people flock to buying individual tracks.
I don't see how this could be further from the truth. Especially with the introduction of the Complete My Album feature from earlier in the week, iTunes is among the strongest champions of the album as a format. This isn't to say that the album, as we know it, has not faced some very serious challenges in the past decade or two, but to lay such wholesale destruction at the feet of iTunes is ludicrous.
For one thing, despite the blockbuster success of iTunes in the music download market, it still only makes up a fraction of music sold. That fraction is on the rise, certainly, but the days when digital downloads trump physical CD sales has yet to materialize. There's no denying that the iTunes Store has influence (especially when it comes to integration with the iPod) but the album was becoming an endangered species before digital downloads were a gleam in Apple's eye.
Continue reading "Who killed the album? Not iTunes. "
Okay, actually it's just using another Mac's optical drive when your own is unavailable but it's still a good tip. You may already know that when moving files from one Mac to another, you can turn the "recipient" computer into a large, expensive FireWire drive by stringing a FireWire cable between them, restarting the target computer and holding down its "T" key. However, the optical drives in newer Macs are also accessible using this method, albeit with some caveats:
Now, you probably won't be able to use this drive for burning-I wasn't, at any rate. Nor was I able to use it to watch a DVD movie (in either DVD Player or VLC). But it is a usable CD/DVD drive, meaning you can install that urgently-needed software package, or grab some files off of a burned backup disc.This is definitely getting filed in the "Useful Information in the event of a terrible computer malfunction" category (right alongside "Back up frequently"). Now where'd I put that FireWire cable for the basement iMac?
[Via Macworld]
Back when I was trying to find the perfect writing software, it never occurred to me to use a web-based solution. Possibly it's because a particular web-based word processor still won't work with Safari and I'm too lazy to wait around for Apple or Google or the chicken gods to get off their butts and do something about it.
Anyway, in addition to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, there is also Google Notebook, which also works better in Firefox (whatever). I'd completely forgotten about my own Google Notebook until I saw an official blog posting touting its multi-language features and improved interface. Because I believe in trying new things, I'm going to give Google Notebook another chance for various note-taking duties: URLs to follow up on, To Do's that need doing, comparisons between Blood Ties the TV show and the source novels by Tanya Huff (hey, Heroes is on hiatus until April 23, okay? What else am I supposed to do with my spare time? Interact with the outside world?)
