A note regarding Apple’s new iTunes video content (original): It’s cool to be able to download a TV episode for $1.99. Might even be the magic price point. However, what Apple has for some reason not promoted is the cost of old seasons — e.g., season one of Lost will run you around thirty-five bucks. This is somewhat cheaper than the DVDs, although quality is also lower. But from reports so far, they look just fine on — say — the new media center-oriented iMac.
Real quick notes, here; I may write more about this later, but then again I may not. However: The new Mac OS X rocks. The Spotlight search functionality is pretty good, but what’s important to me is that it shipped with command line tools so I can do metadata searches in my scripts. Dashboard provides a paradigm for desktop widgets that I can use, namely that they stay out of the way until I go looking for them. The Safari RSS functionality looks pretty slick; I might not use it, but it’s comforting to know it understands Atom.
Wow (original). See, if you mix Google Maps and Craigslist, there’s a lot of data out there, see. Also: wow.
The great thing about weblogs is that sometimes people will write down the things you were thinking about in such a clear and cogent fashion that any need for you to write about them is utterly eliminated. Thus, I give you Maciej’s essay “ Dabblers and Blowhards.” In theory, there’s an entire class of annoying bloggers I’ll never have to write about again. In practice, I’ll get frustrated every four months or so and post something irritated and someone will say “Dude, what did you expect?” But it’s nice to have dreams.
If del.icio.us (original) was a calendar, it might look like Upcoming.org. Intriguing stuff. I keep thinking about writing a script to screenscrape movie showtimes and turn ‘em into an RSS feed; if I did that, I could also feed (say) the Brattle and the Coolidge schedules into Upcoming. Hm.
Random technology comment: Dave Winer asks, “And consider what heat would be generated if what Google is doing to us were done to Google. Can I put up a Web app that scrapes Google and replaces their ads with mine, or adds mine to theirs?” Dave answers himself, “When you search Scripting News with the Weblog Search page, it sends your search request to Google, and gets back the top 50 matches.”
Although Ulysses has flaws, CopyWrite has a very similar interface and provides a slightly better editing pane (paragraph spacing) plus in-line formatting. It looks like I can coerce InDesign into handling formatting codes for me, which means named styles are less important. And CopyWrite is about a quarter the price of Ulysses. I’m doing my latest game (The Kiss of God) in CopyWrite; after I’m done I’ll post about the experience.
I held a Playstation Portable in my hands today. Nothing about the experience made me any less impatient for the day when I will own my own. It is somewhat larger than the Nintendo DS, but the space is put to good use with the incredibly gorgeous and vivid screen, rather than being wasted with a (so far) useless touchscreen. The controls feel good. I did not experience the problem with the square button that many have reported. The analog stick is amazing. It’s a marvelous piece of technology. ...
You’ve probably seen it, but if you haven’t, check out Google Maps. I would not want to be working at MapQuest right now.
Some notes on Apple’s new word processor/page layout software, Pages: It is a decent enough word processor for pumping out text; it is a consumer-class page layout program that won’t fit the needs of anyone doing serious layout work. It’s been driving me nuts, trying to get stuff done in it. You can’t put borders around an in-line paragraph. You can put borders around a text box, but it’s all or nothing: you have four borders or none. You can’t shrink table row heights to an arbitrary size; there’s a fairly widely spaced point beyond which it will not go. You can’t delete a single page in the middle of, say, a newsletter. You can’t shuffle pages around. ...