- Rugged Mac mini
Filed under: Hardware, Mac mini
The next time you need to take your Mac mini with you across the Sahara, you may want to give VictorSystems a call for the Rugged Mini Computer System. This "ruggedized" Mini setup has been designed for military and other harsh condition users, encasing a Mac mini in "aircraft grade aluminum alloys" on "an aluminum space frame made from extruded rails and finned heat sinks." In addition to the Mac mini, the keyboard, mouse, display, printer, and speakers also come in special ruggedized versions designed to be dust and moisture resistant.
VictorSystems doesn't actually have any of these in stock as they are "strictly a design and build-to-order supplier," so you'll have to call them for a price quote.
[via MacNN]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
- Ask the TUAW readers: Getting Movie Info
Filed under: Video, How-tos
TUAW reader Jeep wrote in asking us whether we could track down a simple way to find out the details of a video file including the format, resolution, bitrate and so forth--preferably without loading the files into VLC. I did come up with a few solutions, but none of them seem particularly universal. Some work well on AVI files, others on MPEG-4, but none of my solutions provide the one-size-fits-all approach that would help Jeep out. He wants to be able to see whether the results of VisualHub compression are produced by better compression algorithms or by throwing away too much video definition.Continue reading Ask the TUAW readers: Getting Movie Info
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- Nocturne: "night vision mode" for your Mac
Filed under: Productivity, Freeware
When Nicholas Jitkoff (of Quicksilver fame) pops up on twitter and announces a new app, it's probably worth a look. In this case it's called Nocturne and is a simple program to put your Mac in "night vision mode." The main thing it does is invert the colors on your screen (which you can accomplish natively just by hitting cmd-opt-cntl-8), but it also has options for making the display monochrome and tinting it (the default is a kind of sepia) as well as suppressing your Desktop picture and window shadows. I think the idea is simply that white on black is easier to read at night.
Nocturne is a free download from Blacktree.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
- Disney sells 2 million movies, 23.7 million TV shows on iTunes
Filed under: iTS, Video
Forbes reports that Disney's iTunes sales have been doing especially well. Net profits for the quarter ending March 31st this year were up 27%, boosted by strong iTunes sales including about 23.7 million TV episodes and 2 million movies. The article doesn't say but I'm pretty sure that those numbers reflect total historic iTunes sales rather than just sales for this past quarter. If they were, they'd deserve a fully upper case WOOT rather than the modest woot I issue on this news.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
- Partially inside Apple's design process
Filed under: Cult of Mac, Steve Jobs, Apple
Daniel Turner set out to write an article for the MIT Technology Review on the design process that went into the iPhone but, perhaps unsurprisingly, he ran into a wall at Apple. Instead he has penned this nice look at the overall Apple design process, drawing on interviews with former Apple employees as well as folks at Frog Design who have worked with Apple. There are some interesting tidbits comparing the way Apple does things versus other companies. For instance, instead of asking what a factory can do and then designing the product around it, Apple instead tends to make the factories re-tool to meet its requirements. From the beginning Apple has spent more time and money on design leading (as we well know) to superior products. Perhaps most unsurprising of all is Turner's conclusion that this all leads back to one man: Steve Jobs. Turner quotes a former Apple executive Don Norman as saying. "Jobs is a dictator, but with good taste. He is good and driven to the perfect experience. He doesn't want good design; he wants great design."
Though the conclusions are unsurprising there are some good stories here and anybody interested in the Apple design process should head over to Technology Review.
[via MacSlash]
Thanks to everyone who sent this in!Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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