Apple dreams update…

Today Apple introduced iTunes 4.9 and the new iPod lineup discarding the non-color versions of the full sized iPod. It is unlikely that they will introduce new iPods next week (since they would have just waited and introduced the new lineup then instead of today). This does make you wonder what next week’s announcement might be. The only other suggestion I’ve heard is some kind of an alliance with Sirus or XM, but I honestly I don’t think that’s something Apple is interested in doing.

It does make me think, however, now that all of Apple’s higher end iPods support color, what’s to keep them from playing video as well? Not that I think the iPod should be a video machine, it would be a nice extra.

On another note, Sony is really pushing the PSP as a video playback device with their UMD format. It’s gaining a little bit of power (a number of movies are available, with more on their way), however I don’t really think that it will ever become any kind of a standard (the UMD movies are not DVD quality, and they are more expensive than DVDs).

I reiterate my opinion that now is the time to strike. Even if Apple can only align with a few key production houses (like Disney and Fox) with a few hundred films in HD at something like a $9.99 price point I think they could have a winner.

Supreme Court, Grockster and my dreams

Maybe you’ve read about the Supreme Court handing down the unanimous ruling against Grockster. If you haven’t heard about this the short and the sweet version is that the Supreme Court believes that since Grockster came up with an “open” version of Napster, and that Napster was shown as being created specifically for trading copyrighted material, that Grockster also was illegal. More importantly, the creator of the software was libel for what the users did with their software.

Batman and the Smiths

While out visiting Cara in MA over the weekend I caught showings of both Batman Begins and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Serenity viewing

Last night a group of us were lucky enough to see one of the showings of Serenity (shown on Thursday in 35 cities). This would be considered a super “pre-release” since the film isn’t supposed to open until September 30.

There’s been a lot of talk in various movie sites about this movie. I’ve read a number of reviews of other test screening and after actually seeing the movie, I thought I’d offer my two cents.

I’m a geek, I admit it, but going to an even like this shows me that there are many many people out there who are far geekier than I. It’s a strange pity I feel for others and myself. For others because they are so excited about something like this that they dress up, sing songs and completely geek out. Pity for myself because I haven’t ever felt that way about a anything even remotely similar.

After a couple (not so rousing) sing-a-longs of the Firefly theme the lights finally dim and the projector starts. Joss Whedon appears and explains the only reason the movie got made (because they don’t make movies of TV shows that were canceled after a couple episodes), was because of the fan base and the DVD sales. He goes further to say that it is our responsibility to tell the world about the movie and urge others to see it.

Just a warning, there are minor spoilers (nothing that will ruin the film) ahead:

FireFox bug?

I found an interesting bug when attempting to add elements to a selection element. The function allows for an optional second argument which defines which element you want to insert before (if you leave it out, the element will be placed at the end of the select list). FireFox kindly throws an exception in this case though:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Not enough arguments [nsIDOMHTMLSelectElement.add]" nsresult: "0x80570001 (NS_ERROR_XPC_NOT_ENOUGH_ARGS)" location: "JS frame :: https://localhost/index.html :: setJobMenu :: line 178" data: no]

The solution is to simply add “null” as the second argument.

What the F***

You know… sometimes something just pisses you off and you feel like you have to say something to someone to vent. That’s probably why I blog, because I’m pissed often enough that I need an outlet.

Lately that something has been Apple. I have to say that in general Tiger, Quicktime 7, iTunes and generally everything has been a bit of a disappointment. Sure there are great new features, but I’m seeing more and more things slip through the cracks. My latest two annoyances?

Bachelors, Beer and B….

Yesterday was my bachelor party. Brian planned things well and I think fun was had by all. My only complaint is my fault, which is that summers tend to be pretty busy for everyone (for instance, all of my weekends between now and the wedding are “spoken for”). We kicked things off playing paintball, which was a first time for most of us. We played for almost four hours before heading home to clean up. I think everyone agreed that we need to play again in the future.

I warn people not to read anything further if you’re easy offended by what may be considered and almost logical progression of this story…

Finally

Okay… the coolest feature of OS X yet. You can copy the contents of a text clipping! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to use the contents of a text clipping in an area that you couldn’t “drag and drop” into. So you would have to drag it into something like BBEdit, then copy it into the clipboard. Now you can just double click the clipping, command-C it, and go.

Sometimes it’s the small things that make us happy…

Usability

I’ve been reading a lot about usability lately. I’ve written a few web based applications in the past (and one particular larger one about six months ago), which were built with very little thought to the usability. That’s not to say that they weren’t usable, but that they were designed concurrently with the programming, so usability was secondary (or even lower) on the list of concerns.

Tiger's PDF options

Today I reserved a U-haul for Cara’s move in July. I’m not one to usually print out receipts from web pages, but instead I use the “save as PDF” option Mac OS X’s print dialog. Tiger ups the ante by creating “Printing Workflows” that allow you (I assume) run an Applescript using the PDF (so you could upload it to an ftp server or just about anything else you might want to do). I personally like the built in “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder” which creates a folder in your user/documents and puts the PDF in there. How thoughtful and convenient.

On a side note, there is also now a “supplies…” button which goes to the Apple’s shopping site and lists any consumables available that can be used with your printer (it listed all colors of ink and about 10 paper choices for my Epson Stylus Photo R300). This is cool on one front, but a little invasive too (it borders on ad-ware).