First it was QuickTime for Windows, then iTunes for Windows. Then Apple publicized that OS X would work on special Intel Macs (or Mactels). Apple has finally released a beta of Safari for Windows. The public beta gives you all of the features that the Mac browser has offered on OS X, including tabbed browsing (yawn), Google searching (yawn, again) and inline highlighted searches (yawn, yet again). I am interested to do my own side-by-side comparison of Safari 3 Public Beta and Firefox 2, or even Firefox 3 alpha. I won’t even waste my time with Opera or Internet Explorer. If I have time, which I probably won’t, I’ll write up something short.
Archive for the 'Software' Category
I saw a demo of Microsoft Photosynth last year when my former boss came across it while looking for something else. Hell, for all I know we both came across it at the same time, but I think he sent me a link to it. I had set my knowledge of this software marvel aside in my brain, untill Scott posted a video of the TED demo of Photosynth and Seadragon, its parent technology. You can tell that Blaise Agüera y Arcas, the presenter, is really passionate about the technology and his work.
The Tech Preview of Photosynth is quite impressive, and you should check it out. I just spent the last ten or fifteen minutes going through Piazza San Marco to see if any of my photos were included. Unfortunately, I don’t think I tagged my photos of Venice any more precisely than "Venice." Oh well.
Here is the video from the TED site:
As those of you computer geeks already know, Microsoft announced its Surface product, a computer that allows touch interfaces similar to the technology used by the Pre-Crime Bureau in the movie adaptation of Minority Report. At its core, Surface is nothing more than a high-end computer, a rear projection screen and five near-infrared cameras to detect input, all running Vista with the Surface software on top.
While the input method is innovative, I saw a video of multi-touch interfaces demonstrated last year. It’s great-looking technology, and it can have many useful applications, but are we ready for such an enormous paradigm shift? For example, it’s been more than twenty years since GUIs have been standard on computers, but I still find myself occasionally aching for a command prompt to quickly get things done (thank you, Cygwin) when a point-and-click interface just won’t do. Are you ready to drop the keyboard and mouse to use your fingertips to navigate around a computer?
The title of this post will only be humorous (or frustrating) to those in my school district.
The humor (or frustration) aside, at Folklore.org there is an anecdote about how Apple’s Lisa Applications team came up with the OK button for the original Macintosh operating system. It’s a good technology history geek read that I found on del.icio.us/popular. If you’re interested in Macs or Mac history, there are a lot of other good stories there about the history of the Mac.
My Apple Update software just notified me that iTunes 7.1 is now available. This release is supposed to address some problems with iTunes on Vista. Apple’s support doc lists these specifics:
Compatibility with Windows VistaiTunes 7.1 addresses a number of known compatibility issues with Windows Vista. Apple is actively working with Microsoft to resolve a few remaining known issues, including:
- Ejecting an iPod from Windows Explorer or the Windows notification area (system tray) using the “Safely Remove Hardware” feature may corrupt your iPod. To always safely eject an iPod, choose Eject iPod from the Controls menu within iTunes. If your iPod becomes corrupt, selecting your iPod in iTunes and clicking Restore in the iPod’s Summary panel should return your iPod to a working condition.
- iTunes may display text or graphics incorrectly on your screen. Resizing the iTunes window should correct this issue.
- Contacts from Windows Contacts may not sync with iPod.
- iTunes remains unsupported on 64 bit editions of Windows, including Windows Vista and Windows XP x64.
Luckily, I am running a 32-bit verion of Vista on my AMD64 computer. I’ll try out iTunes 7.1 over the next week and post whether or not my experience with iTunes on Vista is any better than before.
Update: Not even five minutes after I post this, I experience a new redraw problem in iTunes. In the middle of updating my iPod, iTunes started drawing funny. So, I tried to resize the window, per the suggestion in Apple’s support document (see above). Instead of fixing the problem, that made it worse! The iTunes window disappeared, and I can’t call it back up! wtf!?
Update: A week later, iTunes 7.1 has not really solved any of the problems I was experiencing. My window will still screw up its graphics if left open for too long ("too long" being an arbitrary amount of time determined by some as yet undiscovered force elsewhere in the universe). To top it off, I am having trouble adding some tracks to my library. iTunes claims to process the tracks, and then it just doesn’t add them. AAAARGH!
With the recent discovery of hacked files in WordPress 2.1.1, I have been updating the blogs on ask-mark.com so that they are at the latest stable and safe version, version 2.1.2. All of the blogs have been updated, and I did not see any side effects from the upgrade. If you notice something, let me know.
I just finished the upgrade to WordPress 2.1 "Ella." The upgrade was mostly painless, although I did have to weed out any customized files and themes before trashing the "old" version of WP that I just upgraded a couple of days ago. I should have the other ask-mark.com blogs upgraded to 2.1 before the end of the month. More likely than not, they will be upgraded one after the other in one long upgrade session. The database will get backed up before I do it, so you shouldn’t lose anything if something goes wrong.
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