512 Pixels

Gruber:

Nano Gets Video Camera.

But — contrary to rumors, my own sources, and common sense — the iPod Touch does not.

Interesting to note how the Touch is now billed: “a great iPod, a great pocket computer, a great portable game player”.

The new FM tuner in the Nano has a TiVo-esque live pause feature, and lets you “tag” songs you hear for identification in iTunes when you’re back at your computer.

Rolling Stone:

A crew of engineers at London’s Abbey Road Studios have spent four years working on the remasters using new technology and vintage equipment, the press release says, in an effort to preserve “the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings” and ensure “the highest fidelity the catalog has seen since its original release.”

You can pick the remastered collection up from Amazon. No word on if the Fab Four will end up on iTunes.

Threadless, the awesome t-shirt company, has marked down everything in their catalog to $9 today. Amazing.

Engadget:

Now it looks like we’ve heard it from none other than Yoko Ono herself, who in a now-pulled Sky News article confirmed that the Fab Four’s headed for digital distribution. All that’s left of the piece is a Google cache of the first sentence, so for the full skinny, it looks like we’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

That woman ruins so many things.

Marco Arment is claiming the end is here for the iPod Classic:

It’s very clear that the Classic is a temporary product, stuck in the lineup as a bridge for high-storage-needs users (I’ll get to them in a minute) until flash memory is cheap enough to make a sufficiently high-capacity Touch. But it may not need to meet that capacity, exactly. When the Classic’s largest capacity dropped from 160 to 120 GB in the last refresh, nobody cared.

There’s some good logic here. The Classic is the only iPod left with a hard drive for storage, and feels ancient when compared to its smaller siblings.

But the inevitable objection is this: “I can’t fit my entire library on an iPod touch!” It’s a good objection, but Arment believes that 32GB — the high end iPhone and iPod touch — is enough for most users, and thus, renders the Classic unnecessary.

As someone with a big library, it is nice to be able to carry everything in it everywhere I go, but I’m in the minority, I think.

As flash-based devices catch up in terms of capacity, the hard-drive based iPod classic will die. Will it happen at Apple’s event tomorrow? Maybe, maybe not. But one day, it will go the way of the dodo.

Mongabay.com:

“This is a boon for wild snow leopards,” said Brad Rutherford, Executive Director of the Snow Leopard Trust, “Apple is helping to show the world the beauty and majesty of this rare creature.”

Rutherford says the software launch has made consumers aware that the snow leopard is indeed a real animal and encouraged some of Apple’s partners to support snow leopard conservation, including donating a portion of profits.

More than three dozen Apple Specialist stores from California to New York are helping the Snow Leopard Trust sell cub adoption kits (specially priced for Mac’s new OS release) to raise money for conservation. Tekserve, an Apple Specialist retailer in New York, has decided to donate all the proceeds from the first 100 Mac OS X operating systems they sell. A full list of participating Apple Specialists is available at www.applespecialist.com/adoptions.

That’s pretty cool.

Macworld:

What many have clamored for is the device that has the capabilities of a Mac mini media center, but without the accompanying complications. An Apple TV that plays and digitizes DVDs (and plays Blu-Ray discs), plays and records high-definition TV, streams Web content including Hulu, NetFlix, Rhapsody, Napster, Pandora, and Last.fm; provides access to iTunes libraries local and remote; and allows for rental and purchase from the iTunes Store as well as outlets such as Amazon.com. In short, the one-stop media box.

And, regrettably, that device is never, ever going to come from Apple (or anyone else, for that matter).

Not because Apple wouldn’t be interested in making such a thing, but because the kind of cooperation and good will necessary to pull it off simply doesn’t exist. Gather together the executives necessary to produce this one-stop box and there will be blood.

It’s sad, really. The Apple TV could be awesome, but as it stands right now, it’s really, really lame.

Touch Arcade:

Manomio’s Commodore 64 emulator [$4.99] has finally been approved by Apple. We first reported on the project back in June, after Manomio had received their first rejection from Apple. The rejection was particularly disappointing considering the efforts that Manomio had made in making sure their emulator fully licensed and legal.

[…]

The $4.99 C64 emulator costs $4.99 and includes 5 games: Dragons Den, Le Mans, Jupiter Lander, Arctic Shipwreck, and Jack Attack. Additional separately sold game packs will be coming soon. With the C64 emulator approved, Manomio is also clear to pursue further licensing deals and they have said they are actively working on adding new titles.

It’s very, very cool. I’d totally dig a Apple II emulator, though.

Adobe Principal Scientist Lars Borg:

Macintosh, in 1984, introduced us to desktop publishing and to displays with shades of grays. Publishing at that time meant printing presses, and the dot gain of a typical press (then and now) corresponds to a gamma of 1.8. As color management was non-existent at the time (the first color management solutions did not appear until early 1990s, when color displays became more available), Apple’s pick of a 1.8 display gamma enabled the Macintosh displays to match the press.

In early 1990s, the TV industry developed the High-Definition TV capture standard known as ITU Recommendation 709, using a net gamma of around 2. Later, in 1996, IEC put forth a CRT-based display standard (sRGB) for the Web that would match the HDTV capture standard, having a net gamma of around 2.2. sRGB was slowly adopted first in the PC display market, next in the burgeoning digital camera market, and 2.2 became the dominant display gamma.

In my expeirnce, unless you’re designing newspaper pages, gamma 2.2 is far nicer for most uses.

I found this little Snow Leopard gem today:

Pressing the Shift key has made minimizing items to the dock go into a similar slow motion mode since the introduction of Aqua.

MacInTouch’a Robert Mohns:

Snow Leopard continues Apple’s drive towards the future and break with the past. Millions of PowerPC-based Macs have just been abandoned, and the remarkable library of classic Mac applications has been long forgotten at corporate headquarters. But we understand and accept that as the price of progress.

It seems very obvious that Apple’s goal is to wean its customers off PowerPC hardware. At $29 per copy, Apple’s not trying to get rich from software sales, and a more likely explanation is the desire to cut costs by eliminating support and engineering costs for continuing PowerPC support. Cutting those expenses undoubtably makes business sense, and, no matter how many million they are in number, Apple’s not making much money off those customers still running PowerPC systems and older Mac operating systems for economic reasons, or because they have legacy hardware and software that are not supported by the latest Mac products.

At this point, we’re also struck by the contrast between Mac OS X and the iPhone/Touch platform. Mac OS X has diverged so far from the original Mac OS that the iPhone better echoes the style and scope of original Macintosh in some ways. Snow Leopard, which is orders of magnitude more complex than both Mac OS and the iPhone OS, seems to be aimed with all its bells and whistles, “eye candy” and performance tweaks, directly at Windows, which eventually stole the original Mac’s thunder through Microsoft’s monopolistic business practices. We use both Apple’s platforms — iPhone/Touch and Mac OS X — on a daily basis, wondering how they’ll evolve over the years ahead. It doesn’t seem like they’ll converge, really, and much of the third-party energy we see is in the mobile platform. We’ll be watching very closely, as Apple makes its latest announcements next week, to see if the rumored tablet computer debuts and what it may portend for the future if it does arrive this month.

[…]

For people used to older Mac systems, though, Snow Leopard is a stunning improvement over Tiger in many ways. If you can give up PowerPC hardware and classic Mac applications — and if you don’t have any critical compatibility problems with other software and hardware — then Snow Leopard delivers everything from raw performance to Time Machine to a Finder that actually works. Snow Leopard’s Finder (like Leopard’s) can even view thousands of files in a folder without lurching to a screeching halt, and (unlike Leopard’s) it can eject an iPod or disk volume without posting inane error messages when you happen to disconnect the device after it has disappeared from the desktop.

Andy Ihnatko, in discussing MobileMe’s value makes this excellent point:

Apple — with some justification — has a nasty reputation for wanting and exerting this kind of influence and control. If that’s their reputation, why don’t they leverage it to the consumer’s maximum advantage? An Apple computer on an Apple network using an Apple online service to interact with an Apple mobile phone could be an absolutely glorious totalitarian state in which every app, document, and device you use has a passported conduit to everything else you use.

I have infinite control over my Linux boxes and there, I bow to no earthly King. But I almost never use them for any real work. My Apples are the most restrictive systems on the planet, and they’re my favorites. It’s simple: I cede 80 mass units of personal freedom to Apple and they give me 402 units of power in trade.