Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
I’ve been a Mac user since 1991, so it’s inevitable that I’d have this as a category.
Apparently, over on MacRumors.com, the first person to take notice of the G4 iBook was someone who lives in the Netherlands. They sent in this screenshot of the Netherlands Apple Store showing the new machines.
I, however, should not be allowed to see such things right after getting up in the morning.
All I can picture in my head now is the Swedish Chef onstage, introducing the new machines.
Deer gee-füür ist der BØRK BØRK BØRK! Heer chickiee! Chickeeeeee!
Wow. Apparently without any kind of fanfare whatsoever, Apple just updated their iBook line across the board — to use the G4 chip!
The world’s best-loved consumer portable gets an impressive makeover with a superfast PowerPC G4 processor, a new architecture, a slot-loading optical drive and enhanced wireless networking capabilities. Plus Mac OS X v10.3 Panther, the world’s most advanced operating system. Starting at just \$1099.
It looks like the extra code that Apple supplies when creating links with the iTMS Link Maker is causing pop-ups to appear in some browsers. This is the text of an e-mail I got tonight, and the response I gave. Has anyone else seen this happening, or are there any other ideas of what might be going on? Are new updated versions of IE that have been patched due to the Eolas lawsuit already in the wild?
On Saturday, Oct 18, 2003, at 19:14 US/Pacific, Owen van Dijk wrote:
Hello Michael,
Through a link I stumbled on your weblog. Suddenly I got a popup saying if wanted to install the “iTunes detector” from Apple. I have never heard of such a plugin, not on a PC ( I use windows xp, ie6 ) and not on a mac ( I am also the lucky owner of a powerbook 12\” :) ) could you please explain what this plugin does or why it is embedded in your site?
Wow. Good question.
First off — I’m really sorry about a pop-up showing up! I had no idea that would happen (and, to be entirely honest, I’m not entirely sure why it happened…but I can guess).
With Apple’s release of iTunes for the PC and the revamping of the iTunes Music Store, they’ve made it easier to link directly to items inside the iTunes Music Store. There are two ways of doing this — either with a simple link (like INXS Need You Tonight), or with a more complex link that’s generated using their iTunes Link Maker.
When you create a link with the iTunes Link Maker, it generates two snippets of code — one for the link itself, and one to put in the head of your html page. According to Apple, “The first text box on this page contains code to include in the HEAD section of your HTML (once per page) to detect if iTunes is present or not. This will cause your links to behave intelligently if iTunes is not installed on the user’s computer.” Since I added a link to the iTMS at the bottom of my page (down with the Amazon links), I also added that snippet to the page.
My guess is that that’s what causing the popup to show up on your browser. I’m not entirely sure why you’re getting a popup asking for confirmation, unless it is related to the recent changes being made in IE due to the Eolas patent suit against Microsoft (though I wasn’t aware that they’d actually started distributing changed versions of IE yet).
In either case, that’s something that I don’t want my visitors to have to deal with, so I’ll be taking that code out of there. Thanks much for letting me know about it!
The offending code has been removed from my pages, along with the iTMS link that I had in the ad box at the bottom of the pages. Bummer, but as long as the simple style of linking works, I’ll be able to play with it whenever I want to.
Well, the rumors were true — and then some! Here’s some quick highlights of today’s Apple Event:
: http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/books/ “Apple – iTunes – Audiobooks”
And those are all the key points. Pretty damn impressive! I’ll be playing with iTunes on Windows as soon as I get to work today…
(Much thanks to MacRumors live coverage of the event!)
More and more, Apple is making a huge push into the music industry — and if the rumor mills are right, this week just may be their biggest foray yet.
Already having made a name for themselves over the past couple years with the one-two punch of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, recently Apple has been exploring various exclusive promotions, such as live performances by bands at Apple Store locations that are later released exclusively through the iTMS.
Latest case in point: Thursday and Thrice, a pair of new rock acts from Island Records, are hyping an upcoming tour Wednesday (Oct. 15) with Apple in-stores on two coasts.
Thursday will take the stage at the Apple Store SoHo in New York. On the West Coast, Thrice will play at the Apple Store Third Street Promenade, located in Santa Monica, Calif. Each performance will be at 7 p.m. in their respective time zones.
The shows kick off a highly anticipated double bill — presented by Alternative Press magazine and MTV2 — which begins Oct. 17 in Pennsylvania.
The music performed at the events will be available exclusively for purchase at the iTunes Music Store.
Already, Apple Store performances can be found at the iTMS from Less Than Jake (iTMS link) and The Rising (iTMS link). I think this is a fascinating way to co-promote both the bands and Apple’s brand.
While it’s been known that Apple has a major event this Thursday that has a 90% or better chance of featuring the introduction of iTunes (and the iTMS) for Windows, according to both MacRumors and AppleInsider, there may be some nice surprises in store for Mac users, too. Possibilities include iTunes 5 (released for both Windows and Macintosh) featuring more encoding options, .wma support, and the ability to “borrow” tracks and albums from the iTMS before purchasing them; and iPod peripherals, perhaps featuring an add-on to allow recording directly to the iPod (touted as being aimed at students for recording classroom lectures).
Lots of fun toys coming down the pike, from the looks of it…
A minor but amusing goof on Apple’s site right now: in the Top New Panther Features sidebar on many of the pages, iChat’s one-line summary is “Send and receive faxes.”
A friend filled me in that you can now fax directly from any print panel in Panther, which I could definitely see as being extremely convenient. It doesn’t really have anything to do with iChat, however.
Still. It amused me.
Mac OS X 10.3, a.k.a. Panther, has finally had its official release date announced — October 24th, just a little over two weeks from now. I qualify for the Mac OS X Up-To-Date program, too, as a new G5 owner, so I get to upgrade for \$20. Go me!
Not having a digital video camera to play with video bits, and hot having any multi-megabyte Photoshop files to play with, I have to admit that I haven’t exactly been taxing my G5 since I got it. I’m loving the speed, to be sure — but I also know I haven’t even begun to push the limits of what this machine can do.
I stumbled across a post by someone who does do video rendering work, though, and they posted a comparison of video render times for whatever project they’re working on. The clip that they were working on took 6 hours and 46 minutes to render on a dual 500Mhz processor G4 — but only 42 minutes to render on the dual 2Ghz processor G5.
That’s fast. Time for me to upgrade my projects! ;)
Another meme that Kottke pointed out — iTunes usage methods.
How you organize your music can be as important to someone as what music they listen to. For me, with a personal CD collection currently somewhere around 1,200 discs, organization becomes extremely important. Luckly, iTunes has everything I need in order to keep track of what I have, find things easily, and discover music I hadn’t heard in a while (and at times, didn’t remember that I even had).
One of the godsends of iTunes is the “smart playlists” feature — I use smart playlists almost exclusively (they’re the purple-colored icons in the screenshot). Essentially, a smart playlist allows you to set certain criteria that determine what songs are in the playlist, which is then automatically updated by iTunes. For instance, I keep three smart playlists synced to my iPod at all times: “new additions”, “random unplayed”, and “random 1gb”.
Random Unplayed: this playlist grabs one gigabyte’s worth of music that I’ve never listened to. This comes in handy when I’m importing a lot of music (like now, as I re-import all 1200 CDs to AAC rather than .mp3) — as long as there’s something in this playlist, then I know that there’s songs that I haven’t listened to yet (either just to listen, or to check to ensure that the rip was completed successfully).
New Additions: this is, quite simply, any songs that have been added to my library within the last two weeks. Great for being able to explore a new album right after buying it.
Other smart playlists that come in handy: “recently played” (anything I’ve listened to in the past two weeks, handy for tracking down something I know I heard recently), “top 25 played” (a pesudo-best-of list), “top rated” (any songs rated four or five stars), and the various by-year playlists (listening by era can be quite interesting sometimes).
The only two “normal” playlists I have at the moment are one for Poems for Laila (from when I was making CDs for Prairie last weekend), and one for Sony’s excellent Soundtrack for a Century collection. Other than those two, it’s all smart playlists for me.
There’s a meme propagating around the OS X corner of the ‘net right now, started by this O’Reilly article, propagated by Jason Kottke, and since picked up by many others, looking at how different people keep their dock arranged. Bottom, left, or right? Hidden or visible? Magnifying or not? And so on.
So, not being one to let a silly pointless meme pass by, I give you my current dock! I’m sure you’re all thrilled. It’s actually fairly boring at the moment, but that’s partly because I don’t use the dock as a launcher at all, instead preferring to use it only to show currently running applications. As I’ve had this machine for all of five days now, and there were a few restarts as I got things installed and configured, my list of running applications hasn’t grown terribly much yet.
I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping my dock on the right hand side of the screen. I’m right handed, so it’s a very natural movement for me to swing over that way to switch from app to app when I’m mousing around (which is actually a little odd, as on my Windows box at work, I keep the taskbar anchored to the left hand side of the screen — one of them is backwards). Keeping it on the bottom never really worked for me, as it takes up screen real estate that I’d rather have useable for windows — I’m far more likely to want as much vertical space as possible for reading pages than horizontal space.
Here’s what I’ve got running right now, top to bottom: The Mac OS X finder, Pathfinder (a finder replacement), Mail (email), iPulse (system monitoring), iTunes (music), iChat AV (.mac/AIM IMing), System Preferences (not usually open, but I’m still tweaking things), GraphicConverter (excellent graphic manipulation program), Safari (web browsing), NetNewsWire (news aggregator), QuickTime Player (had to watch the Return of the King trailer a couple times last night), and iCal (calendar/secheduling).
Exciting, huh? ;)