512 Pixels

iTools, of course, being Apple’s first online service, offered to all Mac customer free of charge.

Two more sections of my interview by Cornfedtech have been posted:

Part 2: How ForkBombr got its name and why I write.

Part 3: All about Project 365.

This is from iLounge’s review of the new Shuffle:

There is, however, something that many users will care about: the new shuffle doesn’t fully work with any headphones except Apple’s. Because of what Apple has done here—something sneaky and arguably terrible for consumers, especially if it continues with other iPod and iPhone products in 2009—if you plug your old third-party headphones of any sort into the new shuffle, you’ll find that you can’t do anything with the device other than have it continuously play music, without volume controls or interruption, unless of course of you turn it off. Surprise: the only third-party headphones that will work are ones that haven’t even entered manufacturing yet, because they’ll need to contain yet another new Apple authentication chip, which will add to their price. Your only alternatives will be third-party remote control adapters—also not yet available, as Apple’s not even making one—and using Apple’s earphones. The prices for the third-party adapters will be no less than $19, and quite possibly more like $29; compatible headphones announced thus far start at $49.

For the time being, what this means is that one or more pairs of earphones that you’d like to use for other purposes—running, indoor workouts, or just casual listening—will be generally useless with the shuffle. All you can do is turn on the shuffle and hope that the volume and song that play through the headphone port are acceptable to you.

This is, in short, a nightmare scenario for long-time iPod fans: are we entering a world in which Apple controls and taxes literally every piece of the iPod purchase from headphones to chargers, jacking up their prices, forcing customers to re-purchase things they already own, while making only marginal improvements in their functionality? It’s a shame, and one that consumers should feel empowered to fight.

Horrible. Just horrible.

And laced with hypocrisy: as Apple is stripping DRM from the music it sells in the iTunes Store, the company continues to add it to its hardware - and for the same reason the labels had DRM on their tracks for so long: control and income.

I recently wrote about putting OS X on the HP Mini 1000. It was a fun project, but the thing had a few fundamental problems:

1. The OS X install wasn’t a true OS X install. It was a cracked version of Leopard that has been customized for the hardware 2. Updates were impossible to run because of this. 3. It was unstable.

So I put the HP (which I still regard as the nicest netbook out there) up for sale, sold it, and bought a Dell Mini 9. The Dell Mini 9 is super easy to install OS X on. Gizmodo and others have great guides on how to get it done. The process uses a retail 10.5 install disc, which I purchased outright. Since it is a retail copy, updates are no issue.

The Mini 9 may have been designed to be a hackintosh. Almost everything - sound, wifi, Ethernet, even the Fn keys - work out of the box. The 3rd party drivers really just tweak a few minor things.

The Mini 9 feels more like an Eee PC than a Mac, though. The keyboard isn’t nearly as nice as on the HP, but I can live with that. The system is stable and fast.

Big-time tech writer Andy Ihnatko recently installed Leopard on one, and here is what he had to say about it:

Good grief. iFixit has pulled apart the new iPod Shuffle:

Is this the future? A single IC, a battery, and some user interface components. Amazingly, at least on our scale, both halves weighed 5 grams. That means the entire functional half of the iPod weighs only about 10% more than a single sheet of letter size paper.

Hit the link for some photos. Spoiler: Most of the parts are dime-sized.

Ars Technica:

The mother of a kid living in Cincinnati, Ohio is suing Apple and 10 unnamed retail employees from the Apple Store in Kenwood over an iPod touch that allegedly exploded in the child’s pocket. According to the complaint filed yesterday in the Southern District of Ohio, the plaintiff had the “iTouch” (as the lawsuit refers to it) in his pocket during school when the unfortunate accident happened, resulting in hospital bills and other monetary losses thanks to the disintegration of the iPod touch and, well, the kid’s clothes.

As horrible as this is, it highlights one of my major pet peeves: People calling the iPod Touch the “iTouch.”

It is the iPod Touch. Two words. “iTouch” just sounds creepy.

When I worked at the Apple Store, there was a lady on the sales floor that said “iTouch” several times a day. And several times a day, I had to restrain myself from clubbing her in the face with an iPod Touch.

Sigh.

Also, I’m interested to see how that case turns out. If an iPod Touch did catch his pants on fire, it’d be pretty exciting. I mean, sad.

Adium has been a long-time favorite of many Mac users. While the free program started as a basic AIM client several years ago, the program now can connect you to not only your AIM buddies, but Google Talk contacts, MSN and Yahoo! chat buddies, and Facebook friends. Add all that to an interface that allows endless customization, and you get one slick app.

But there has been one hole in Adium for a long time: Twitter support. That’s changing:

Fear not! Using Matt Gemmell’s MGTwitterEngine, a library used to communicate with the Twitter API, I’ve managed to make what I consider to be a very good Twitter client into Adium. Your friends (people you follow) are displayed in a group on the Contact List: adding or removing will follow or unfollow them, and chatting with them will send (or receive) direct messages.

[…]

A group chat named “Timeline (username)” (you can rename it like I have above) will appear alongside your Twitter contacts. When new tweets arrive, this group chat will open; you can close it to help keep your place in the tweets, or leave it open and watch them arrive. Of course, the check interval is customizable (between never checking and checking every hour), and you can force an update through the chat’s context menu. There’s also an option to automatically update tweets when you send one.

There’s no release date for this feature (to be part of their 1.4 release), but this is going to kill a lot of smaller Twitter applications out there. And become the hub for many social media users on the Mac.

iLounge has posted some photos of the new iPod Shuffle - in the box, out of the box, and out in the real world. My first impression: the new Shuffle is tiny. The photo with it side-by-side with Apple’s Bluetooth headset shows just how small it really is.

Apple Insider:

CBS Sports announced Thursday plans to stream NCAA March Madness basketball games live to Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch through a new application, but with a WiFi-only requirement and price tag of $4.99, many fans may choose to watch tournament for free on their Mac, PC, or big TV.

The app will feature a real-time graphical bracket with game match-ups, regions, and scores. Upon the completion of each game, video highlights will be available available on demand. Meanwhile, stat junkies might enjoy the CBSSports.com Edge Matchup game previews with full team-by-team analysis and matchup comparisons. Breaking tournament news will also be available through the app along with the standard box scores, game recaps, and team stats.

This makes me very, very happy.

Engadget:

We just got the announcement, iPhone OS 3.0 is coming. Set your clocks, mark your calendars. It’s going down March 17th. Apparently, we’ll get a sneak peak at the new OS, as well as a look at a brand new version of the SDK. Exciting stuff indeed, and we’ll be there live at 10am PST (1pm EST) with the liveblog. Apple’s calling this an “advance preview of what we’re building,” so we’re not expecting anything ready to go as of the 17th, but hopefully this will allow developers to start building toward future functionality (hey, how about some push notifications?), and presumably users won’t have too many months to wait after that for the real deal.

Exciting stuff. I still hold to the notion that push notifications are tied to Snow Leopard Server, I’m all for new stuff… er, rather, the chance to look at new stuff and drool.

Apple has updated the iPod Shuffle this morning, and boy, is it tiny. And it has no buttons for navigation. And it can talk. And clocks in at 4GB. Here’s some Apple PR to go with your coffee this morning:

iPod shuffle is based on Apple’s incredibly popular shuffle feature, which randomly selects songs from your music library. And now, when you can’t remember the name of a song or an artist playing, with the press of a button iPod shuffle tells you the name of the song and artist. iPod shuffle can even tell you status information, such as battery life. With the ability to hold up to 1,000 songs and the VoiceOver feature, you can now easily switch between multiple playlists on your iPod shuffle. iPod shuffle can speak 14 languages including English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

As popular as netbooks are, they have some fundamental flaws (small keyboards, etc), but one of the biggest problems is their operating system.

Most netbooks come with Windows XP, which is fine for most users, but there are not a lot of good alternatives. Of course, Microsoft requires XP-powered netbooks to be limited to 1GB of RAM, which irks many users, Vista is pretty much out of the question due to the under-powered nature of netbooks - even with 2GB of RAM. Windows 7 looks promising, but is still in beta.

To avoid this all together (and save some money), some manufactures ship netbooks with Ubuntu (like Dell, with the Mini 9 series), but some, like Asus, have rolled their own, custom Linux builds onto their products. (Note: Xandros is a stand-alone distro, but Asus puts their own “simplified” GUI on top of it.) Other companies offer different builds. It’s confusing to most users, so XP is just the simple, default answer.

There is nothing wrong with Ubuntu, or Linux. In fact, Ubuntu is my 2nd favorite OS on the market. (Guess which one is first.) But for the average Windows user, even Ubuntu can be overwhelming.

But there may be a new option around the corner. The guys over at Xavia360 explain:

I put it to you: If you were in charge of a computer company in a lousy market, and one of your choices was to invest more in the one product line that’s showing signs of life, would you do it? If you had a choice between paying a considerable chunk of cash for Windows and a lesser sum for Android, what would you do? Before answering those questions, you’d have to decide whether people would be willing to buy something other than Windows. Most haven’t been, but when the alternative is from Google, which is now as well known as Microsoft, there’s a real chance things could be different.

It makes perfect sense. Most netbooks users take advantage of online services, such as Gmail, Google Calendar and more, so why not let Google build the OS, too?

Not only could a Android-based netbook be easy to use for Windows users, it could offer a unified OS for all Linux-based netbooks that would be affordable - and more importantly - be easy to use.