Disco has now been released to the public. I downloaded it this morning and it looks pretty cool. I havn’t burned anything because I don’t need to right now but I had a play with dragging files into the app and moving through the menu’s. It’s really easy to use and looks great.
You get 3 test burns (same as AppZapper with 3 test zaps) before you have to buy. I would have bought straight away but I’m not sure what’s happening with upgrades. With AppZapper you buy and get free upgrades for life. In a recent Disco blog post they wrote something about free upgrades until the next major release. I guess that means it will probably last for a while before I would need to pay again if I wanted new features.
Either way, get your hands on the beta now, download it here.
Update: After finding out about the MacZOT! offer and testing out the CD-RW erasing and writing features I decided to purchase it. Partly motivated by the surprise MacZot are offering with the purchase of Disco, along with the chance to win a DVD burner which has the ability to etch a label in the disk while it’s burning. If you have a mac and either have toast and don’t like it, or don’t have any burning app, I urge you to make use of this offer.
According to engadget, Apple are working on a new Mac Pro with 8 Cores. The new Core 2 Quad comes out soon so I guess that would be a nice addition to Apple’s top of the line model.
Apple might be considering 15.4 inch macbooks for 2007. I can’t say I really approve of this. It would confuse the differences between the macbooks and the macbook pros too much and make purchasing a system more complicated. I think simplicity is one of the things that makes Apple so desirable, and something they should hold onto as much as possible.
Apple have also extended their patent on a multi-featured multimedia device with a touch screen to include more details and an image depicting a device (supposedly that iPod widescreen touch) with touch sensitive areas around the bezel of the screen that do various things. This looks very interesting.
Thirdly, Microsoft has been heavily criticised by Acer who say that the new Vista Basic is a way for Microsoft to make more money by releasing a product no one wants, forcing a lot of people to instead reach for the premium offering which costs more. I’m not sure if Microsoft are trying to deliberatly screw people out of their money because of the fact that a lot of people will want to run vista on their current pc that may not be able to handle the premium versions’s graphics. I’ll give microsoft the benefit of the doubt on that one. I don’t understand however why they didn’t just offer one version for one price and just install the windows components that the pc in question can handle and leave out Aero.
Finally, the question is asked about whether or not Microsoft Office is doomed. I have to say a definitive yes to that question, but that is only dependant on the growth of Open Office. This article seems to focus on Google’s attempt to dethrone MS with Google Docs (Writely) and Spreadsheets. These are both great tools but the privacy issue is always going to be at the forefront with a non-desktop productivity tool like that. Open Office is definitely the way forward however as I don’t think normal families who want to do simple word processing things will want to pay for an Office License. In fact, people like this (anyone but business users) could just use the Google Docs service, as privacy isn’t likely to be an issue.
I hope to see the rise and rise of open source and free web-apps in the future.
Wow. We’ve had some pretty successful blog posts and news announcements in the past but I don’t think anything can possibly compare to the last few days. In 48 hours we have received and responded to nearly 2,000 emails and talked with countless journalists and tech media personalities. Likewise, MediaTemple might never forgive us for the complete reaming of their servers you guys gave them.
“The best viral marketing ever. Ever.”
-Leo Laporte on Macbreak Weekly
So, what’s next? Well, we’ve been taking into account the great feedback and bug reports and are readying up the next beta. At this point we think it’s clear that the demand is high enough to go ahead and make it public. That’s right, on Monday everyone will be able to download, try, and (if they want) purchase Disco for the introductory price.
Disco - The Fallout
The first few days of the beta for only people who have purchased Disco through MacZot! have been a great success for the guys at Disco. Therefore we can all look forward to the beta on Monday. I probably will buy it because it’s a really easy way to burn data and manage it once it’s been burnt. Mac at this time doesn’t have a very good built in Disk burning utility. Then again neither does Windows.
The new MacBook pro models look great. The same on the outside to the last ones but include those nice new Core 2 Duo chips in them. They’re now 64 bit, faster speeds and have more memory as standard (1gb up from 512) for the same prices.
It looks like 64 bit, the small speed upgrade combined with the extra standard RAM make a big impact on these systems when they are now 39% faster in one simple upgrade.
It is slightly dissapointing to not see the new MacBooks launch at the same time as it’s Pro siblings but I guess this is how Apple launched the first generation of these two machines earlier this year. There was a substantial gap between the MacBook Pro and the MacBook replacing the iBook and the Powerbook 12″. I’m sure we will see them before Christmas though.
This is Google’s answer to the rollyourown search tool for the firefox search box.
Google, as part of it’s co-op project is offering the chance to create your own search engine. It’s very customisable and can range from the basic to much more complex.
You can embed a search box in your own site, or link to a homepage created for you by Google which doesn’t offer much in the way of customisation. If you do decide to be more creative you can embed the code on your site and also host the search too. You place the code in the page you want the results to appear in and set the options in the “look and feel” section of the control panel.
Ok, so that’s quite cool, but the coolest feature I think is the ability to set the sites you want to search. This is the real point to this tool and allows you to filter out however much you like. You can set to search the whole web but place any results from the sites you choose at the top, or you can choose to block out anything other than pages from the sites in your list.
You can allow people to contribute to your engine by adding sites to the list and also by blocking certain sites. Alternitively you could create one just for your private usage, setting it to only search through the sites you use the most.
For example, I set up my own customised search, named 3DGalaxy GO! which searches my favourite sites. These include my own blog, youtube, flickr, myspace, last.fm, odeo and probably the most useful site on the net, Wikipedia.
According to BBC, the iTunes DRM Fairplay used to prevent people from playing their music on music players other than iPods and other computers / music software other than iTunes has been cracked.
I’ve lost the post I made several months ago regarding how to get around this problem so here goes.
iTunes music can be backed up to cd pretty easily. You create a playlist and drag an album downloaded off iTunes to it, then click burn disk. Once you have a burned disk of an album, that music is in audio cd format, not .aac files with DRM. Therefore you could delete the album with the DRM from from iTunes and then just import the CD you burnt. Now you will have the album you bought with no DRM whatsoever, the ability to play the music in other players like songbird or windows media player. Plus of course other mp3 players just by dragging them to the player once you plug it in. This will certainly work with windows explorer and probably with the finder too although I havn’t tried it.
I’m not sure exactly why Apple keeps maintaining that iTunes music only works on iPods when that isn’t the truth exactly. Steve Jobs has said in a recent interview that he thought the decision to block other players out was a good one. I’m not sure if they would be able to sell less iPods this way or not but I would have to guess that they would be selling well if the music was compatible with other players without ripping cd’s. People buy iPods because they are good, easy to use and look nice, not because they can listen to iTunes music on them.
Songbird has reached 0.2 and although it seems a long way from 1.0 don’t be fooled. The current release is a pretty big step from where it was when I last used it. Everything looks so much more polished and complete now. The library import seems to be smoother and the homepage looks nice. You can search a load of content sites including singingfish among others. You can search music stores such as eMusic easily and there are links to some of the more major stores (except iTunes) in a dedicated folder in the left nav / bookmarks section. There are other folders for links such as networking sites like last.fm, radio stations and more.
I think the main selling point for Songbird right now though is the ability to view a web playlist. This is a collection of files that appear at the bottom of the window. Every media embeded or linked to in the page you’re viewing is available to download. You can double click an item to download and view it instantly or drag it to your library to save it. This works with audio and video files. To test it I went to apple.com/getamac to see what would appear in the playlist. All the .mov files of the mac ads appeared. I downloaded one to the desktop and it played perfectly in quicktime.
It’s good and it even has feathers! (you can have a white skin instead of black) which is a nice touch. There are still some things this needs. Most notably support for MP3 players (iPod and others) and some other things I havn’t thought of yet.
Either way go and download it now (it’s cross platform and universal on Mac so there’s no reason not to try it).
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The other day I looked at both PageFlakes and NetVibes. They looked so similar it had me searching for any differences between them. Although there are some, they do the same thing and are suppost to be used as a homepage.
This got me thinking about what is the best site to use as a homepage. This isn’t really a question that can be answered because there is no real answer since everyone has their own taste (and a faster or slower connection). However, my thoughts on a good homepage are that it should be simplistic and not overload you with information in a cluttered environment (eg. Yahoo! and MSN) while also providing good content but not right in your face as soon as you open your browser. For example Google News is accessible easily from the front page whereas Yahoo news is displayed directly on the front page (along with even more clutter in the form flash ads).
Therefore my homepage for the last few years has for the most part been Google although I have experimented with others a couple of times. Google seems to be invincible to me as a homepage because of the fact that they have introduced personalised homepage via Google accounts (GMail).
Personlised home (which I usually turn off after using it to not clutter up the page next time I open firefox is like PageFlakes or NetVibes but with that added option of not having to use it all the time.
I guess if I didn’t use Google as my home the other alternatives would be Wikipedia, Yahoo search or Microsoft’s Live.com (both Google-esque simple pages). Or of course NetVibes or pageflakes which both offer some cool fast content adding features and also the ability to add tabs within browser tabs with even more content. Google.com does this but for some reason Google.co.uk doesn’t. So in conclusion, I’ll always be drawn to the minimalistic style over anything else.
Finally though after hearing about Scrybe, a personal productivity tool incorporating loads of AJAX to create calendars, todo lists and much more. All this plus the fact that it seamlessly works offline and uploads any changes when you get connected again. You don’t even have to download anything to enable this feature which is unheard of for me at least. It promices to be a great tool so go and apply for access to the beta now.
I’ve been spending some time testing out some new stuff and it’s pretty impressive.
Being an open source fan I was impressed when I started to use Seashore, a GIMP based image editing software for Mac only. It has been modified to look and act more like photoshop which is nice, and although doesn’t have the same tools as the gimp in some areas it still feels like a solid app. The best bit for me is not having to worry about losing the floating tools behind other windows because if you maximise the image window you’re working on, the tools stay in front whatever happens.
Another plus point of Seashore is that it is built in cocoa and doesn’t need X11 like GIMP does. This makes the app so much easier to use and understand for people who don’t know what X11 is (like me when I first tried running GIMP and hopefully can save them the time).
I’m really looking forward to seeing how Seashore develops. It was also nice to see that it was universal which is I guess not even an issue now seing as eveyone but a few (adobe) are publishing universal bineries. If either Seashore got a better magic wand and other tools that GIMP currently has or GIMP gets a better interface then that would be great but I’m pretty happy with the great stuff the open source community is producing right now.
Aside from Seashore, Tangerine caught my eye unexpectedly when I was heading to potion factory’s site to look at their other apps, Voice candy which I really like, and Podcast Maker which I like but personally can’t think of anything to do with it (though I can see why others would).
Tangerine is an app which scans your iTunes music library and finds out what the bit rates of each track are. Then you can create playlists to fit your mood. If you want to listen to some slow relaxing music you can, whereas if you’re feeling more pumped up and are up for something more full of life you can raise the slider and put on maybe some slipknot or sevendust.
I think this is a cool app and after using the beta I wouldn’t be surprised if this proves to be a winner for the guys at Potion Factory.
Finally as if that wasn’t enough, Disco comes out on Monday and I definitely think its an app that will also be a hit just like their last project AppZapper. These guys have a habit of making software that has a real use and that has to be respected. Maybe Apple should work with them more closely. More on Disco when the beta is out and I can have a play. Earlier today though they showed the icon for Disco. I like it but take a look for yourself.
