512 Pixels

Yummy.

iPhone and Mac developer Craig Hockenberry:

I’ll pass on a small reminder that an Apple employee gave me during Macworld: the App Store has only been live for a little over six months. Last month’s 25 year anniversary of the Mac should also remind us that this new market for our products is still in its infancy. Yes, it’s a wild ride at the moment, but if you think about your costs, customers and revenue streams, I think you’ll enjoy a very long journey.

Facebook’s new Terms of Agreement include this little jewel:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

These lines are no longer there:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Meaning they can keep anything anyone posts on Facebook and use it for anything they want. Awesome.

[ via the Consumerist]

Apple’s MobileMe service has several limitations, but one got removed this week: iDisk file sharing:

We’re pleased to announce that you can now use your MobileMe iDisk to share files with others simply and easily. Instead of attaching a large document to an email and hoping it’s not too big to be received, you can place the file in your iDisk and use the new Share File command in the iDisk web app. It lets you send your friends, family, or colleagues a link they can click to download the file directly. You can password protect the link if you choose to and even set how long it will be available.

The limitation that makes something like Dropbox a more useful option:

The process is a simple matter of going to iDisk on me.com, selecting the file you want to share, and clicking the Share File button.

You can’t setup a share from Finder.

Safari140 - a Safari plugin that adds simple tweeting to Apple’s browser - was released last night. It’s activated using Control+T and automatically fills in the title of the current page and a shortened URL, using the is.gd service.

After using it this morning, I do like how much smoother SAfari140 makess sharing a link, but I don’t see this replacing Twitterrific on my Macs. Go check it out - the price is right, at least - $0.

New York Times:

The vote was 246 to 183, reflecting the Democrats’ considerable majority in the House and the Republicans’ deep dissatisfaction with the measure, whose estimated price tag has fluctuated daily and was finally placed at $787 billion on Friday. Not a single Republican voted in favor of the bill.

Macworld looks at what is in store* for Microsoft Store customers:

The store will have six different entrances: Starter, Basic, Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. While all six doors will lead into the same store, the Ultimate door requires a fee of US$100 for no apparent reason.

The whole list had me laughing.

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*Haha. Puns are awesome. Right?

ifoAppleStore:

According to plans still being rolled out, hardware will become a secondary focus of the stores’ marketing efforts, making way for a spotlight on applications and the digital features of Apple products. The front section of the store will promote, “Why You’ll Love a Mac,” catching visitors when they first enter the store. The section will have signage and brochures pointing out the advantages of a Mac over a Windows PC. The next section of the store will focus on the iLife suite of software applications, and will provide information how they can contribute to a Mac user’s digital lifestyle. And in the third section of the reorganized interior, Apple will highlight the iWork software applications.

This kinda makes sense. What sets the Mac apart is the software - yes, the hardware is pretty and shiny - but OS X and the built-in apps that come on new Macs are what draw people to the platform.

Mac Rumors:

Under Mac OS 9, users had the option to restore any “Trash”ed files (before the Trash is emptied) back to their original locations with a simple “Put Away” command. For some reason, this capability was lost in the transition to Mac OS X. In the latest Snow Leopard builds, it’s back (as “Put Back”). So any accidental disposals can now easily be restored with a simple click. Again, this only works for files that have been moved to the Trash but not yet “emptied” (deleted).

That would rock my world.

Ars Technica on a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study:

Overall, Pew observes that Twitter users engage news and technology at roughly the same rates as everyone else, “but the ways in which they use the technology—to communicate, gather and share information—reveals their affinity for mobile, untethered and social opportunities for interaction.”

No big surprise here.

Apple Insider:

Apple has historically allowed a number of technologies to languish as it focuses on the most promising and profitable products to invest its resources in. That’s good news for anyone wondering if the company’s PNS (push notification services) will ever see the light of day, as the company has so much riding on it. Unlike Apple TV, iCal, and other projects that seem to have taken a long time to develop as back burner hobbies due to the lack of any real revenue stream to justify their development, Apple’s PNS is directly related to immediately profitable, high priority projects from the iPhone to MobileMe to iTunes to Snow Leopard Server.

[…]

In Snow Leopard Sever, iCal Server is paired with a Notification Server to provide push calendar updates using XMPP’s publish-subscribe specification. Also known as pubsub, the service works like a “push RSS feed,” so rather than polling an RSS file on a server to discover new updates, the Notification Server pushes out just what’s changed to all of the clients who have subscribed to the update system (and who have been authenticated to receive updates). In some respects, the Notification Server is like a secured Twitter feed, with iCal server sending tweets to listening iCal clients to keep them abreast of changes.

A little birdie has told me this indeed true… that Apple’s push notification system will arrive with 10.6 Server; that the notification system itself requires Snow Leopard Server.

Anyone want to put some money down on this? I need to buy a car.

Macworld:

MobileMe users have been receiving a new phishing e-mail that informs them that their annual subscription is set to renew automatically on a certain date, but that “attempts to charge your credit card have failed.” It then offers to let you log in to update your information.

Maybe I’m a jerk, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who get suckered into this kind of thing.