Barry John Williams' Blog

I've had Spotify installed ever since Gail Porter reviewed it on the Gadget Show in April. I've used it increasingly since then until right now when I realised I've not used iTunes (in which I have a lot of purchased music) for weeks! Over the past few years I've scrobbled all the music I've played in iTunes and on my iPod to last.fm and now this suggesting new music for me to listen to in Spotify!! I'm loving the combination of Spotify and Last.fm.

I've not used my iPod since my holidays as in the UK I listen to Spotify over a 3G connection on my Dell mini 9 netbook as I'm usually on the train or something!

I'm now considering the monthly subscription to Spotify which gives better quality music and no adverts. Though at £9.99 it is a hard sell over the free version - perhaps at £5 a month I'd jump.

My iTunes collection is looking rather lonely now...

Labels: apple, itunes, last.fm, music, spotify

I read this earlier this weekend and didn't think much of it until I realised that I rely on two of Yahoo!'s products- Flickr! and del.icio.us. I used to have a hotmail account in '97 and found it to be very good, then when Microsoft acquired it, it when progressively downhill to the point today where my hotmail name is different to my original because it expired and I use the account only very rarely to log in to MSN Chat.

I don't want Microsoft to get their hands on either as the first thing they'd do is move it over to Windows based systems which will undoubtedly cause severe trouble - although, perhaps they've improved since Hotmail! del.icio.us works pretty well now, I don't want to have my account tied in to an MSN passport and then have my bookmarks progressively integrated with Windows Live services. I just want it the way it is. I was pretty reluctant to sign up with a Yahoo! account for flickr!, but I decided there wasn't much to lose and the Flickr! staff had announced they wouldn't be making any serious changes - good enough for me so I have one. There hasn't been any mention from the flickr! staff about what could or will happen, perhaps because it's speculative at the moment. I know one thing for sure. I don't want Windows Live Photos!

I did read somewhere that they may sell off Flickr! and del.icio.us. I don't know who'd buy either - perhaps Google would buy both. I've already mentioned a Google takeover of del.icio.us would be cool.

MS could do something very cool with Flickr!, something Apple has yet to do properly. MS could release an IPhoto type application for Windows Vista and tie it in with Flickr! with synchronisation. You alter the photo in "MS Photo", the alteration gets synced with Flickr! similarly you tag a photo in Flickr! it gets synced back to "MS Photo". That would be a great product and if done right, a great iPhoto competitor. Although, maybe, just maybe, Apple will buy Flickr! and add this capability to IPhoto as an extension to it's .mac services. I did notice a Flickr! viewer on screenshots of the new Apple TV take 2...

BBC NEWS | Business | Microsoft wants to purchase Yahoo

Labels: apple, flickr, internet, microsoft, yahoo

Having purchased Leopard a few days after launch, I waited a few days before installation ensuring my existing Tiger setup was completely backed up as I wanted to do a fresh install of Leopard on Monday morning. Once installed, I immediately took a dislike of the 3D dock and the translucent menubar. The dock has been replaced with the 2D one using the standard solution (found in my del.icio.us links) and I've used LeoColorBar to update my background image with a color at the top to simulate a non translucent menubar - whilst a horrible solution, the menu looks better now!! Hopefully Apple will introduce an option to toggle this in a future update.

Initially I found coverflow in the finder to be gimmicky, I haven't really used it that much and when I have it's been more out of curiousity. Although recently I did use it do browse through some documents I had - which I found much quicker than by reading the names or a text search.

I've found the quick look facility to be really useful. I nice touch I discovered is playing a movie file in coverflow, when you move to quick look it seamlessly transfers to the enlarged window without skipping playback and if you've decided that is the file you want to watch - just hit fullscreen and it seamlessly zooms to full screen! Very, very cool. Quick look even supports the new Office XML files - to my surprise Excel spreadsheets are displayed in coverflow and quick look - a very useful facility!

I like the new iCal application, not that there is much difference in terms of my usage of it, it is just more visually appealing. Similarly the todo functionality in mail is great to grab a piece of text in an email and mark it as a todo! This all syncs using the sync services so mobile phones and PDAs will all get updated. With Tiger I synced my Palm Treo 680, but I didn't want to upgrade my Missing Sync application as they hadn't updated the software for Leopard. My Vodafone upgrade is due, so I went for a Nokia E65 which is supported under Leopard directly by Nokia. So I get my calendar, todos and addresses synced to my phone over bluetooth.

There are a couple of hidden features which I never noticed before, if you option-click the wireless menu item, you get detailed information about the wireless you are connected to such as the channel and other radio information which could be quite useful if you have a number of Wifi points around you.

Another is in iTunes when you play a video, rather than playing in a small window, it takes over the "list" view playing in the iTunes window - again offering fullscreen options as usual. Also in Quicktime whilst watching South Park the ability to "stretch" the 4:3 video to fill the widescreen monitor by stretching the sides of the image so as not to distort the centre of the video - my TV does this and so now does my computer!! A feature the old faithful VLCs and MPlayers do not! I haven't confirmed if this is simply an update to iTunes and Quicktime or a unique Leopard thing.

I finally got around to installing Time Machine by clearing out a drive and using that as a dedicated backup. It would be much cooler if I could use the network drive I have upstairs, but I need to install Leopard (currently Tiger) on the attached host to work. The drive I'm using is quite a small 40GB WD passport drive, but my drive is only 25GB full so this should be plenty. Time machine is clever enough to delete older backups when the drive gets full so it should keep me going until I get a larger drive or Apple fixes the bugs in (non Leopard) networked Time Machine. Time machine doesn't work with iCal which seems a bit of an oversight - although you can obviously get an earlier version of the ical database and replace it manually - you just can't recover individual events or tasks using the Time Machine interface. Most of the other applications work using the new interface and I'm sure as more people move to 10.5, more apps will support it. Since I'm using a macbook pro, I was a bit worried about having to carry around the hard drive and leave it plugged in at all times. This isn't the case; Time Machine incrementally backs up your drive every hour and when your backup drive is reconnected again, it updates the backup drive with the incremental backups it made whilst disconnected. A bit of an annoyance was the fact that Spotlight starting indexing my Time Machine drive, I had to manually disable this in the Spotlight Privacy settings - such a function should be automatic as I don't see the point in indexing a backup drive; unless of course they integrate spotlight and say "4 files found in Time Machine" so you can go back and see them...

Spaces was quite fun to use, but now disabled. When you click the application icons in the dock, if the app is in another space, the desktop zooms to that space with a little arrow showing the direction it's going - a nice touch, but not for me. I couldn't find a decent enough use for virtual desktops in all the years of using Linux, however from the look of it, Apple's implementation is great - if you like that sort of thing. Personally, I like a nice clean desktop and Exposé when things get a bit cluttered.

I've tested out iChat and Photobooth and they have a cool feature which allows you to replace the background - so you can video iChat to someone and pretend you're in Paris... Quite useful if you've got a cluttered background and want to screen it out! I tend to use Skype for everything (including Video) so there is no real benefit to me here.

I really like Stacks, but not for storing documents or pictures as Apple would like you to. I'm quite tidy with my desktop, I hate stuff on it and with Leopard I can now remove all the icons from the desktop and use it purely as a workspace, deleting all files once finished doing a specific task. Downloads from Skype, Safari and Firefox all go to the "Downloads" folder which has a default stack and I find that great as I'm quite happy to leave downloads there and out the way. I can install applications and view documents directly from the download stack when I want and I can now delete them much later on than usual because it isn't taken up any of my precious desktop space!!

I've taken a real shine to Safari 3. It's very nice to use, integrated well with Mac OS X. I miss my del.icio.us and stumpleupon toolbars from Firefox, but I've gotten around that with the "Inquisitor" plugin for Safari and delimport which integrates my del.icio.us bookmarks with Spotlight - probably a superior feature. Using Safari and delimport allows me to search my browsing history and bookmarks with a single spotlight lookup!! Posting a link is replaced with a bookmarklet and my del.icio.us favourites has been replaced with a custom google homepage with a del.icio.us gadget viewing my bookmarks tagged "favourite". StumbleUpon has been left as I can't find bookmarklets for it... A shame really, but I now use Digg more! This was a hard decision for me to make as I've been a very long user of Firefox (since it was called Phoenix) and have donated to the Mozilla foundations for their NYT article and merchandise - I have a Firefox mug! Firefox is installed though, as there is the occasional site which doesn't work properly with Safari 3.

I never found a killer "upgrade for this" function since I had backups using Chronosync before and everything else is about the same. However, Leopard feels smoother, faster and above all looks and feels nicer than Tiger. It appears to start up much faster than Tiger did. 100s of minor features have been glued together and Apple seems to have made everything much more integrated than previous versions of Mac OS X. I really like the new Finder, it has a much more optimal use of window space than in Tiger. I also like being able to control remote macs through the Finder. You could do this before in Tiger, but needed "Chicken of the VNC".

I haven't had a need for Time Machine just yet, but it is pretty cool searching through deleted emails and files - it's backing up my gmail (now accessed through imap) - so even if I delete an email on Gmail's web interface, next time I sync Time Machine that message is backed up and searchable!!

Oh and finally, the iCal icon displays the correct date in the dock regardless of whether it is running or not!

In conclusion, I'm now in a situation where I simply wouldn't go back to using Tiger.

Labels: apple, leopard, mac

Labels: apple, humour, microsoft

You can now pre-order Mac OS X Leopard on Amazon UK. It's been on the US Amazon site for a few days now and now number 2 and 4 in the Amazon UK top software sellers. I've preordered and look forward to it's arrival next Friday.

This will be the third Mac OS X operating system I have purchased; Panther; Tiger and now Leopard. Each of which have been worth every penny!

I debated whether I should buy it at Glasgow's new Apple Store or online; I decided to take advantage of Amazon's discounted price instead.

Link to Apple's Leopard site
Pre-order Leopard on Amazon

Labels: amazon, apple, coolstuff, software

Steve Jobs seems to have manage a massive PR bonus by offering $100 to all early iPhone customers. The Joy of Tech has taken his letter out of context and rewritten it as if it was his first!

Brilliant:

Labels: apple, humour

Recently I thought I'd dive into the 'Grapher' program provided free with Mac OS X Tiger in the Application/Utilities folder to simulate an equation I'd been given.

Writing it into the equation bar was surprising because it displays it all very nicely converting a * to a nice dot and bracketing and dividing nicely as you type! Further, I discovered an item in the context menu to export the equation as an image or... A LaTeX equation!!

Labels: apple, computers, coolstuff, software, tricks

I though this was really funny. I read this keynote on Engadget's and MacRumours' live blogs as with the last few keynotes Jobs has performed. All of these apart from the most recent I've watched again online when it was released. I never watched the June 2007 one... When announcing the new features I found myself shouting at my screen 'You said that last year you arse'. Boy am I sad.

So I found this cartoon funny:


(Click it to read it properly)

Labels: apple, humour

I was wondering earlier when and if someone could write a piece of software which makes any mac pretend it was an Apple TV. One of the features I like about the new Apple TV is the ability to 'push' and 'sync' music and video onto the device from any iTunes library, So.... if someone could figure out how to emulate an Apple TV's response to iTunes - you could possibly make any computer pretend to be an Apple TV and sync your music to any computer!

There are programs out there like SyncOTunes and SlingShot, these are all rsync based with some AppleScript to update iTunes' library - no disrespect to their authors, but they are separate applications. The Apple TV emulation would make the whole thing seamless and integrated within iTunes.

Perhaps I should have a look at this, although this may mean purchasing an Apple TV, which, until it supports DivX out of the box (or post installable without warranty voiding) I'm not interested in :)

Labels: apple, computers, music

Something that bugged me since owning an Apple Mighty Mouse since March last year is it's seemingly inability to scroll horizontally and vertically at the same time (diagonal scrolling) - being a ball you'd think it could. This facility is particularly useful in apps like Photoshop...

For some unknown reason I never thought to look in the mouse preferences to discover a 'scrolling options' selector box which offers an option to allow 360 degree scrolling... At last I can scroll in a circle with my mouse 'wheel'!

Whilst writing this I've just discovered another thing which I 'miss' from Windows; to middle click and scroll down a webpage. On my mac, whenever I try this I invoke the Dashboard which is frustrating, if I hold down the control key however, I can drag and scroll down a website in Firefox.

Labels: apple

This is quite an interesting post by Steve Jobs about the state of play with DRM and online music.

With many European companies complaining directly to Apple about the restrictions employed by the iTunes music store, Steve points out that 2.5 of the 4 big music companies are based in European companies so the finger should be pointed in their own backyard. Looks like Jobs' is fed up with getting the flak...

Another concern which I have heard time and time again is 'DRM locks you into a specific device'. Steve counters this by providing the statistics that about 22 in every 1000 songs in each iPod is from their iTunes store - I agree with this - 2% of your music isn't going to stop you from ditching your iPod and picking up a Zune... In fact, looking at my iPod, I have 34 protected items on it - and 3561 of 'normal' music and videos on it. The number of songs purchased from iTunes will be a little higher as before I had an iPod I burned the music to CD and reimported it, but it still well under a few percent. I could easily switch to another device if I wanted to.

It really looks like DRM music is a complete waste of time, especially when the majority of music is being sold on CDs - although contrary to Steve Jobs' argument record companies are trying to inflict 'compatible' copy protected CDs upon us.

I think it is refreshing that the largest retailer of online music is taking the attitude that DRM is bad! You have my support.

I found this in an article on TUAW
Here is the original posting on Apple

Labels: apple, music