Sunday, December 30, 2007

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) (7 сообщений)

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  • Reminder: Last talkcast of 2007, Sunday night at 10 pm

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    It's your last chance this year to join the conversation on the TUAW talkcast, as we return live Sunday night at 10 pm ET for a roundup of the year's top stories and the introduction of our newest blogger. As always, you can listen in on Talkshoe (even from the widget in this post, if you like -- also downloadable as a Clearspring OS X dashboard widget) or call in on regular or VOIP lines; if you want to join in the chat, you'll need a Talkshoe account and the client app.

    Last week's rough-cut show has been in the Talkshoe feed for a while, but the cleaned and pressed version of Christina, Erica and me reviewing our gift lists and the week's news can also be downloaded direct or via iTunes. As mentioned last week, we're leaving the enclosures out of our normal feed for now to work around the issue some Leopard Mail.app users are having with RSS attachments; the regular podcast feed is a subset of the main feed, so for now it will remain quiet pending a Mail.app fix.
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  • Cocoa developer time-saver: SparkleZip 1.1

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    Sparkle is an open-source module for Cocoa that allows developers to add that cool "Check for Updates" and auto-install feature with relative ease; it's used by some of our favorite applications. If you already knew that, then you might be part of the small but important group of people who would be interested in SparkleZip.

    SparkleZip is a free utility with a very self-explanatory name. Drag your application onto its icon and it will read your CFBundleVersion and generate a properly named zip file, ready for appcasting. It's a few seconds shaved off of release time and a great way to prevent mishaps, given that the current version of Sparkle is not overly forgiving once an appcast is published. Meanwhile, those seconds you just saved can go towards working on your next release which, by the way, we heard was going to be awesome.

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  • Liven up Address Book with Avatars

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    Is your Address Book full of web-savvy friends who know what a Gravatar (or a Pavatar) is? Avatars is a freeware plugin for Address Book that searches for, displays, and adds your contacts' avatars to their cards. It installs with a package installer as a SIMBL plugin, and it looks to me like SIMBL is in the package, too, just in case you need it.

    It's simple, useful and has the right amount of eye candy to be visually interesting without being intrusive. Now I just need more friends with avatars.
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  • Beta Beat: Screenium

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    Screencasting is becoming a standard method of conveying software-related information. I'm fairly certain that even my mom knows the word, which is my typical buzz-guage. And here you were, thinking "I wish there was yet another contender in the screencast recording arena", right? Lucky you.

    Synium's Screenium, which is currently in beta preview, is a new arrival in an already teeming category of software. It has standard features like fullscreen, fixed area and mouse-follow capture, hotkey integration and adjustable quality/frame rate with capture presets. It also boasts a single window capture mode and frame rates up to 60fps. I don't know why you'd need to capture a screen at 60fps, but it can't hurt to know it's available.

    In my testing, Screenium performed exceptionally well in the area of small filesize, high quality captures and its default presets were simple and useful. It also gets high marks for ease of use. And it didn't max out my CPU and turn my fans into Harrier jets after 2 minutes, which is kind of nice when you're recording microphone audio. It's got some distance to cover before the official release in February, but Screenium is looking like a strong contender.
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  • Girl opens iPod, finds wacky note instead

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    A Washington, DC area father gave his daughter a gift of an iPod classic this Christmas, surely thinking she would be thrilled. Sadly, when his daughter opened the iPod she didn't find everyone's favorite MP3 player waiting for her. Instead she found a note which read, 'Reclaim your mind from the media shackles. Read a book and resurrect yourself. To claim your capitalistic garbage go to your nearest Apple Store,' and a few books about leading a more enlightened life.

    The father returned the iPod to WalMart, where he purchased it, for a full refund. WalMart explains that this had happened to another person,and that Apple is responsible for it (though it seems much more likely to me that someone bought a few iPods, replaced the devices with these letters, and returned them).

    First rocks, now letters, what is next to show up in an iPod box?

    [via Fake Steve]
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  • iPhone v1.1.3 screenshots leaked?

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    Fire up that chunk of your brain known as the Macworld Rumourbuster, readers! With just a little over two weeks before Macworld kicks off, let's officially call the crowd to order, and let the rumour-mongering, blurry 'leaked' pictures, and Photoshop-ing begin.

    Gearlive kicks off the "fortnight of faux" with a gallery of screen shots appearing to be from iPhone firmware v1.1.3. Among the highlights: rearranging icons on the home screen, and pseudo-GPS (based on cell tower proximity) for Google Maps. Are they authentic? Macrumors points out that Gearlive is new to the Apple rumor game, and "Eagle-Eye" Scott McNulty suggests that the iTunes icon on the pictures is in the wrong spot (although that could be part of the app-moving magic).

    Whilst all the features shown in the gallery are certainly welcome, we can't help but feel that if this is the only feature-update to the iPhone at Macworld (barring the SDK in February), folks will be a little underwhelmed.

    Update: Whilst MacRumors may say that Gearlive is the new kind on the block, that isn't necessarily true - they brought us news of the iPod nano a few years back. On the topic of Photoshop-ing - and undoubtedly we'll see plenty of that in the coming weeks - talking with the folks at Gearlive, this does indeed appear to genuine 1.1.3 goodness. Thanks, Andru!

    Thanks to all those who sent this in! The Gear Live servers seem to be having difficulty so you might have to be patient to feast your eyes on the shots.
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  • iPod's victims: first CDs, now DVDs?

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    Forbes' Brian Caulfield suggests that Blockbuster and Netflix should be very concerned about Apple's rumored move into digital movie rentals. He suggests that history has proven the iPod to be a very disruptive device. Just look at CD sales, says Mr. Cauflied, their decline over the last several years certainly proves that people want their media in a digital form and they are willing to turn to Apple for it.

    While I agree that Blockbuster and Netflix should be worried, I don't think Apple will be driving physical DVD rental stores out of business anytime soon. The one advantage that Blockbuster has is bandwidth. Movies, if you want them to look good on large screens, take up a lot of space. That means whether you're streaming them or downloading them you need a pretty fat pipe to have an enjoyable experiences. Compare this with the rather small files that most songs, in MP3 format, create and you can see how the music business was greatly impacted by digital distribution whether it be legally via iTunes, or when the floodgates really opened during the freewheeling days of Napster (I was an undergrad during that time, and I can tell you that I saw many a computer running Napster. I, of course, never downloaded anything because I didn't actually own a computer in college). Theoretically it could take less time to drive to a Blockbuster and rent a DVD than it would to download the movie. This will become less of a problem, and digital rentals more popular, when broadband speeds make downloading multi-gigabyte files take a matter of moments (in some areas this is already true).

    Clearly digital movie distribution, both rental and for purchasing, is the future, but sadly I think this future is still a few years off from supplanting those shiny disks we all know and love.
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