Plazes has released a mobile version of their locator application. It allows to find places and access point nearby:
Read more on the Plazes blog.
Monthly Archive for August, 2006
Last.fm has released a new player for Windows and MacOS X. The new player features scrobbling (notifying Last.fm servers of recent songs played by you) and streaming audio. It shows song and artist information about the current song played.
This way you can learn things about the bands and artists you have in your iTunes library. It gives some background information which is normally hidden and discovered only by fans.
Keynote presentations from the WWDC are always very entertaining to watch – even though the author of this Wired article thinks the presentation was uninspiring. I don’t think so.
The business numbers were impressive. Apple sales and market share is growing. That is a change. Apple always had a small market share. The machines were said to be unstable, expensive and slow. Gimmicks for design geeks and fashion victims. I think this image changes. The hardware is top notch, capable of runing Windows if needed and comes with a very robust operating system and pre-installed software. The other applications of Apple are offered at fair prices. The new machines are priced very aggressiveley. Apple is now offering the best price/performance ratio for those that want to run Windows (see this blog post). The Mac Pro is a bargain.
The only thing I found pretty low during the Keynote was the Vista bashing. I takes more to compete with the market leader than picking few screenshots and claim Microsoft is ripping off MacOS X. This kind of “comparative marketing” is lousy.
But in any case people have to admit that Apple does in fact innovate. If Time Machine is as easy to use as it seems, this really a breakthrough to fight loss of data on your drives.
The new feature I personally like most is iChat 4. It now allows lecturers to give live presentations to remote audiences with Keynote. Lecturers could be invited to give presentations without the need to travel to remote places. This is very attractive for higher education.
How wonderful it would be if a presenter could stream this video to a QuickTime Streaming Server for viewing by a large audience?
The Aptana IDE is an add-on that turns the Eclipse IDE into a comfortable HTML Editor. The screencasts indeed look very promising. See yourself.
