Friday, May 2, 2003

Apple's Music Store Wow! I am certainly proving to be an addict of Apple's new music store. I downloaded the new iTunes4, installed Quicktime 6.2 and by the afternoon had scored a cut by Gaelic storm. Poking around led to a Tito Puentes album and some tracks from Dave Brubeck. The next day I turned on the shopping cart in prefs and bought Chick Corea/Herbie Hancock and the album "Jazz Samba" by Charlie Parker and Stan Getz. Last night, while listening to the Tito Puentes, they called out Mongo SantaMaria on congas which led me to pull down a couple of HIS tracks. Then I saw the staff suggestion for Freddie Hubbard, and, well - you get the idea I have been looking for a way to buy the music I want. This satisfies my desires both in convenience and price. I don't share the view that the prices are out of line. 8:37:52 AM

Sunday, March 16, 2003

Organizing with NoteTaker My bias toward software increasingly goes like this: If it's not blatantly obvious in its user interaction, forget it. One thing is obvious, after spending a day with it: I haven't begun to get very deep into this tool, and there's a fairly serious learning curve to get the most from it. But after spending some time with NoteTaker, I've tentatively decided to use the software to help organize a book I'm writing, and probably everything else, too. A perfect product? Far from it. The user interface is fairly intuitive, but some of the menus aren't, for example, and I get confused moving around inside the various notebooks, tabs and outlines. But the company, according to a well-informed friend who's been using NoteTaker, is responsive to suggestions. I've started to play around with this tool also. It took a little bit to figure out how to add a new page but it seems like a real good tool for a "pile" guy like I am. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 6:42:37 PM

Friday, February 28, 2003

Email Address Enkoder Hiveware[base ']s Email Address Enkoder 2.0.4 is a free application for Mac OS X 10.2+ (Jaguar) that does a better job of protecting your email address from spam than any other product we know. Instead of merely breaking up and printing out a standard mailto: tag, the Enkoder generates a unique and random key and ties [it] to an encrypted array containing your address. [Zeldman.com] 11:58:34 AM

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

BusinessWeek: An open-source opening for Apple In BusinessWeek's latest "Byte of the Apple" column, Alex Salkever writes about Microsoft's recent purchase of Virtual PC, and how Apple could gain independence from the software giant by helping to develop Bochs, open-source software that functions as a Windows emulator on Unix machines... [MacMinute] 8:14:38 PM     Controlling Your Mac with AppleScript and Java AppleScript, while a fantastic language for running scripts locally, has minimal support for doing anything else, like sockets or serving Web pages. This is where AppleScript and Java form a powerful team. Scott D.W. Rankin shows you how to put this dynamic duo to work to control your Mac from remote locations. [MacDevCenter] 8:11:51 PM

Thursday, February 20, 2003

Why Microsoft bought Virtual PC Mac users are a teensy bit concerned about Microsoft acquiring the most interesting assets of one of the last great [PlaybackTime] 9:41:52 AM

Friday, February 14, 2003

Developing Visualization Applications with Cocoa and VTK You can turn your garden variety iBook into a powerful scientific ally by creating visualization apps using Cocoa and VTK. Drew McCormack shows you how to set this up and get started. [MacDevCenter] 8:42:56 PM     Inside WebCore Dave Hyatt of the Safari team has posted docs on the new WebCore libraries. "I've begun writing some documentation on WebCore, so that people interested in contributing patches to WebCore can start learning how KHTML and KWQ work. You can find rough drafts of what I've written so far here". [Surfin' Safari] 7:47:10 PM

Friday, January 10, 2003

No card update for older Apple AirPort users to Extreme: The head of Apple's hardware products confirmed for me yesterday that there will be no possibility of an AirPort "Classic" update to the new 802.11g draft compatible AirPort Extreme standard. He said that the bus through which the older AirPort cards work -- practically identical to the older PC Card bus -- does not have the capacity to handle much more than the 11 Mbps of 802.11b, and thus an update would have no improvement on performance. [80211b News] 8:19:46 AM

© Copyright 2003 Peter Loats. Last update: 5/2/03; 8:39:36 AM.