Popped in Twitter while encoding a video and saw Steve Rubel’slink to Times, an RSS feed reader like no other. I downloaded the 14 day demo and exported my OPML from Vienna, my default reader to Times.
First impressions - IT’S PRETTY! Times is an RSS reader by Acrylic that allows you to read your feeds like you would a newspaper. All your feeds are prettified into a NY Times like layout with thumbnails and scroll bars. it’s actually sort of like a combination between your feed reader and the Wordpress Revolution theme.
The application costs USD $30.00. Not sure if I’d be willing to shell out that much money for a feed reader when I can more or less get the same experience with something that’s free. So yeah, $30.00 for ambiance.
Thanks to Noemi and Butch, we were able to grab hold of Palanca award winner Butch Dalisay for an afternoon of coffee and expostulations on creative writing. Talks like these usually have an open ended flow for words and ideas thus by the end of the session we were all having photo opportunities not just with the writer, but with his tablet - the new ultra light MacBook Air. Continue reading →
A short 3 minute video I created on how to make use of Mail to resize huge photos. This isn’t really a trick - a lot of Apple Mail users know about the resize option but don’t necessarily use it for resizing photos back to the desktop.
It was expected to happen. So it is no surprise that the iPhone and iPod touch have gotten memory upgrades. The iPhone is now up to 16GB in anticipation for the SDK boom and the iPod touch is up to 32GB for the same reason as well as to keep more media.
What’s more interesting is how Apple didn’t announce the new upgrade to hardware during MacWorld 2008. In the past year and a half, Steve’s keynotes have been rather segmented - not delivering everything in one big bang. Though this is just a minor announcement, I don’t see reason why he could have announced this during MacWorld ‘08. The closest I could think of would be that it might derail focus on the new Apple iTunes rentals. But that also doesn’t make sense as well since the new announcements do affect the iPods and the iPhone as media storage hubs alongside Apple TV.
To iPod touch owners - do you feel cheated out of this deal, or does the USD $499.00 price tag turn you off?
Oh well. Steve does it because … he can.
FYI Digital Walker will start to have stocks of the 32GB iPod touch starting next week.
So her guesses were right on the spot - the pink iPod nano’s actual color is really hot pink. The stock images from Apple are actually inaccurate. Take a look at the ecstatic photo above
We saw stocks of pink iPod nanos being sold at the Digital Walker store in Greenhills. The 8GB model costs PHP 8,3xx.00 which is already at 10% discount. Continue reading →
GarageBand is a neat application for podcasting. It was made in such a way that it can interface with iChat for as many as 10 simultaneous people in one room, recording each person as a seperate track. This is pretty neat as you will definitely find it useful to edit the levels of each guest.
Gabe Mercado was stuck in Quezon City so we had to do our podcast project over the air. Both of us being Mac users allowed us to fire up GarageBand and record via iChat. As it turns out however, we had to redo several segments of the podcast due to GarageBand crashing 10 minutes into the recording. We’ve figured out two solutions (UNluckily only after recording three separate sessions which we would stitch to one long episode) - the first is to repair your disk permissions using Disk Utility. The second would be to delete your GarageBand preferences and let the GB redo the file when you relaunch.
Ugh. Utter hassle. I highly doubt this is a Leopard issue as the support forums say this is more of a GarageBand glitch. With online voice recording, I’ve come to believe that the two most stable applications would be Skype and Gizmo Project, the latter having a default recording feature. Anyone would like to share their VoIP solution?
P.S. The Photo Booth video on top has really nothing to do with this post.
I’m going to try something different this year. Using Photo Booth, I’m going to freeze my facial reaction whenever Steve Jobs announces something new. This is a live blogging of my facial expression at Steve Jobs’ keynote for Macworld 2008. Click on the refresh button for my facial commentary.
Have any of you encountered this problem? I’ve had a ghost draft mail sitting on my mailbox for several days and it just wouldn’t want to go away. Here are two ways to solve the issue:
The first is to simply highlight the email and click on the REBUILD option. The mail will disappear. If this still does not happen, you can check out this post of onkeljonas from Ars Technica that shows you how to do it:
Poking around ~/Library/Mail/ showed that while Mail still showed the 1 unread message, it didn’t actually exist – it turns out that Mail needs a file to delete to be able to properly update the messagecounts and lists, and for some reason a mail file had disappeared by itself.
Here is a fix:
1) Navigate to ~/Library/Mail/
2) Open BackupTOC.plist, and figure out which of the entries under Root/messages is the borked one
3) Look at the kMDItemPath and make a note of the last part (xxx.emlx)
4) Open Mail, make a new draft, quit Mail
5) Navigate to ~/Library/Mail/[account]/Drafts.mbox/Messages/, make a copy of the draft you just created (don’t just rename it, or you’ll have to redo the process). Make sure the copy is in the correct mbox (in my case that was Drafts, so I didn’t have to move it) and name the copy using the note from step 3.
6) Open Mail, delete the offending email, profit!
The real problem here is how a mailfile went missing in the first place, but I’ll attribute it to some rare Mail bug involving empty messages.
Ho-hum. These are Leopard blues. I must admit, in terms of stability Leopard isn’t what Tiger used to be.
For those of you who have speculated on what Apple is releasing this coming Macworld 2008, here is the complete list of items that was leaked from the Keynote draft. This leak was found through several sources including blogs and forums. The highlights for the keynote include a MacTouch, a dual 9″ touch screen portable (think of a huge Nintendo DS but the screens are side by side), 3G iPhone and SDK, the MacBook nano, and mobile Penryn chipsets for the other portables. Nothing is of course confirmed, but the list is a bit fishy as there is no announcement for Microsoft Office 2008.
As an added bonus, the MacRumors site includes the entire stage direction transcript as well:
Steve enters from backstage and welcomes the audience to MacWorld 2008. He says that there are big plans for the day, but first he wants to provide numbers. His focus topics are the adoption rates for iPhone and Leopard, as well as quick notes on iTunes, iPod, and Mac sales.
Steve then apologizes, saying that there is nothing as big as the iPhone this year, but he thinks a lot of smaller “revolutionary” changes are happening that will hopefully make this year exciting as well.
