Asphalt 6

I quite like Asphalt 6, nice graphics and some tricky challenges plus you can get add ons for your car too which is nice. It does tend to drain the battery quite quickly though as do most graphic intensive games.

If there was no Steve Jobs

A friend and I just had an album for our band Lulubelle III released on iTunes last week. We recorded and produced the music in Garageband, Used desktop publishing tools from Adobe to make the CD artwork, used iWeb to make a band website. Without Steve Jobs there would still be a closed monopoly for releasing music owned by the big labels, you'd pay thousands to go into a studio, pay hundreds to print companies using Linotype machines to make your album artwork and have no easy way to make a website. We have also used iMovie to make a few band videos. The core tools we use came as standard on a Mac. If Apple had not invested in Adobe there would be no computer based graphic design. By attending classes in calligraphy at Reed University he decided fonts were important to have on a computer. Too many focus on the last few years and forget that Apple from day one has been about forging liberal arts and technology to make creating something easy.

I got the pop up yesterday

Looking through images of houses on Google I clicked on a picture of a house I liked and the browser turned into a bad facsimile of the Finder showing all sorts of infections overtaking the machine. I was asked to install MacProtector and it had downloaded the zip file file and asked for Admin password. Quick Cancel and in to the trash and problem sorted.

Garageband was very good in the podcast

I watched the keynote and the version of Garageband demoed was very impressive, they had smart instruments and used the accelerometer to change the sound of instruments, some very smart programming. It is an 8 track recording studio for £3. I dare say the improved A5 chip and video processing will make it run very smoothly. IMovie looked pretty good too.

How about

Pan Galactic PARIS Blaster

Apple HIG

Neither Kai's software nor Poser broke the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, Apple-S still saved files, Apple-O still opened files. Both had main interfaces different from the usual software at the time such as Adobe or Macromedia but it is not a breach of HIG. Apple bundled Soap with Macs at the time so cannot have been that upset. Furthermore Meta produced an OEM version of Soap 2 for Apple for OS 9 which had an interface complete with drop shadowed candy coloured buttons and the grey lines in the background dialogs that were just like the Aqua look that later appeared in OS X, though that version of Soap was the work of Little Kai, not Kai Krause.

Another Sun fake

The 2007 report in the Sun was a fake:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1559791/Cornwall-Great-White-Shark-photo-a-hoax.html

Is it possible that a Great White might be in Cornwall?

http://www.wildlifeonline.me.uk/british_carcharodon.html

blast radius

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/why-was-pakistan-drone-strike-so-deadly/

This article suggests a 200 ft (60 m) blast radius for a Mk82 bomb launched from a drone, I don't think being out by 42 ft (13 m) is going to make much difference.

Government interference

Had a look at the UK transparency report and the government has interfered with freedom by making 1343 data request and 48 removal requests. The government even used the courts to force Goggle to remove blogs and videos from YouTube! Or maybe it was people libeled or who had copyright material posted on YouTube who went to court because Google didn't want to act responsibly. Googles transparency might be more transparent if they gave the reasons why these items were removed.

Misquote

"the long list of Christian evangelicals whose spirit proved to be all too willing"

This simile is wrong, it is whose flesh proved to be all too weak. If the spirit was all too willing he wouldn't have looked at the pr0n.

Another useful link

http://www.gedds.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/Default.asp?Date=20100805

PC World

I imagine PC World will have the iPad switched off, or password protected so you can't use it and if you ask to have a go with it will be told that it doesn't run Windows and there is no software for. That is what my local store does with all the iMacs. I tried to buy Snow Leopard there and they said they didn't stock it, although I was the third person who had asked for it. When I asked when it would be in stock they said they didn't know.

Freedom to Price Gouge

Adobe forgot to mention the Freedom to charge twice as much for the Creative Suite here compared to the US. I think Adobe made their exchange rate calculations using a Flash app.

Freedom to Innovate

Reminds me of Microsoft's Freedom To Innovate campaign which saw their employees wandering around wearing t-shirts with an American flag with the stars replaced by a PC. Same whinging mentality.

For a company who loves all platforms funny how Adobe killed FrameMaker on the Mac in 2004, a few years later made a Linux beta which they then refused to release. Apple still uses FrameMaker 6.0 for their technical documentation, have a look at the document properties in a recent user guide PDF.

Adobe are the lovely company who decided to only allow upgrades from the three previous versions of a product, used to be practically any previous product. Try getting a cross grade between platforms too.

APIs

Is there not also the issue that as APIs are introduced one size fits all Flash apps will just not know about them and make the experience of these fast code apps less than ideal? Does CS5 produce apps that use the new multi-tasking APIs properly for instance?

Learning Irish

For those of you looking to learn Irish the BBC have some good free resources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/irish/features/8/english/

Woz

Woz helped launch the PC industry, that's a big achievement, how many people can claim to have done something that has had such a big change on society? HP rejected the Apple I design when Woz tried to sell it to them, IBM didn't think there was a future in personal computers and neither company was exactly short of bright people. Very few people ever come up with two ideas that create such big changes. Furthermore his designs were elegant.

As for Woz going around and being happy, well more power to him, there are enough bad tempered miserable people in this world. Perhaps he should spend his time throwing chairs around rooms to make himself someone worthy of your admiration Rik? Not one of your better articles.

@Steve 6 OSes and HDD sizes

Snow Leopard uses the new fangled HDD measurements when calculating the size of the disk.

Keynote is worth a look

Just watched the keynote on the iPhone 3.0 OS, you can see how cut and paste is implemented as well as some interesting ideas of what the new OS can do, the uses as a medical device were interesting. http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/0903lajkszg/event/index.html is the link.

BTW background apps on other phones reduced the standby battery life by 80% whereas the push model on the iPhone decreases standby battery life by 23%.

Adamo is great value

Adamo Macbook Air

1.81 kg 1.3kg

1.2 C2D 1.6 C2D

£1645 £1271 with normal HD, £1614 with 128 MB SSD

Oh I forgot you get the squiggles of a bored 14 year old on the silver Adamo and a teak effect look on the black model. Tasteful.

O2 PAYG prices

I saw the O2 PAYG web page last week during the limited time it was available, they looked to have launched a new look website and must have accidently updated the 'wrong' iPhone pages. £299 for 8GB and £359 for 16G phones were the price, plus Wi-Fi data plan free for first six months then £10 a month bolt on to any PAYG voice tariff, so effectively £20 a month for a fully functioning PAYG iPhone.

Charges for features

Apple have started to charge for all updates which introduce features as opposed to bug fixes. They say that this is due to generally accepted accounting principles for revenue recognition. The 802.11n $1.99 update for the computers was the first to do this in January 2007. Blame the accountants.

PC World

PC World "value" the Apple brand - is that why at my local store they have password protected screensavers running on their iMacs (the Mac minis are usually switched off along with the laptops). It is certainly a novel way to help sell products.

programme/program

So the TV companies "would allow legal broadband viewing from one programme" I think you'll find that is one program unless Emmerdale is how we are all going to access the Internet from now on.