It appears that Microsoft has decided to distribute Flip4Mac in place of their own Windows Media Player for Macintosh. Flip4Mac has been superior to WMP for Mac in most ways anyway, so it is nice that Microsoft is now giving it away for free through an agreement with the developer. It seems that it does have trouble with the internet radio stations I have tried though (RadioU, Cross Rhythms).
Tomorrow marks this year’s MacWorld Expo Keynote, where Steve will introduce the latest Apple products from underneath the secretive shroud that surrounds 1 Infinite Loop. This year one of the major predictions is a media center Mac Mini. That doesn’t make sense to me. The Mac Mini is positioned to be an inexpensive Mac to entice possible switchers. I think Apple might introduce a separate media center mac. It could be slightly larger than a Mac Mini, containing a desktop hardrive with more space and performance than the laptop drive present in the Mini. It could also have room for audio/video connections (not just the basic VGA/DVI and 1/8 inch stereo jack). Will it happen? Probably not, but it seems more logical than the Mini media center to me…
Look at all of the innovative new features in Windows Vista! It looks vaguely familiar…
For the second time this week, basketball is in the technology news. This time it is the NBA putting every minute of every game into a searchable archive online. So, how long until free (ad supported) live game coverage and full archives are available for all of the major sports? I hope the other jump on the NBA and NCAA’s recent ideas.
As I was looking at WordPress plugins I encountered one of the best 404 pages I have seen… Read the rest of this entry »
The new Google Transit is pretty cool. It will be great once they have data for the rest of the country (and beyond). What will really be awesome is when they begin to provide mass transit, driving directions, airline flights, and local info all in one place. And maybe they can add traffic data (like Yahoo Maps), too. In other Google news, AppleInsider is reporting that they are developing Google Earth for Mac OS X. I would like that.
CBS will be offering free NCAA basketball coverage over the internet. It will be supported by advertising, just like normal TV. This is a good step in the right direction, but they really need to offer hockey this way. Too bad Comcast has the rights to the NHL and won’t let non-subscribers stream games. If only Altitude would do this, then I could see my Avalanche play.
Back in the days of Mac OS X 10.0, setting up a dynamic webserver was an ordeal. I was new to Unix at the time and installing PHP and MySQL required compiling both from source and recompiling Apache as well. Not only that, but MySQL’s build kept failing until I fdiscovered (thank you Google) that two lines of code had to be changed in one of the source files. Since that time things have gotten much simpler. I have installed PHP/MySQL numerous times and it gets easier every time.
Entropy.ch has PHP in a Mac OS X package - just download it and run the installer. MySQL also has packages for Mac OS X (also linked to from entropy.ch). MySQL now has a Preference Pane for System Preferences included in the Mac download! Don’t forget to download the ImageMagick package if you want to manipulate images in PHP (or use things like Typo3 or Gallery). Last night I set up a dynamic webserver in about 10 minutes.
Not too long ago the big debate among web designers was whether splash pages were good or bad. Of course the answer is that it depends on the website. Lately though, I have been noticing an increasing number of sites showing a large ad before letting you enter their site. I don’t mind ads within a webpage - they help keep the content free, but do they really want me to leave before I even get to their content?
I played around with an installation of Gallery 2.0 today. Back when I was designing the current version of my site Singapore seemed to fit my needs perfectly. Now Gallery 2 is out and Singapore’s development is progressing slowly. The amount of control available over the galleries is far better than anything else I have seen. I haven’t messed with themes yet, but if it isn’t too much work I will be replacing Singapore pretty soon.