VersionTracker's new UI

VersionTracker sports a revamped user interface, with the detailed page completely reorganised.

You can access previous versions of the software through a pop-up menu. The main content is organised in two tabbed layers: info and feedback (unavailable). The download link is clearly visible at the top of the section, under a global navigation bar. The overall rating can be decomposed in sub-categories (Ease of Use, Support, Features, Quality / Stability, Price). is The left hand sidebar lists a jump pad, a list of recently viewed pages (à la Amazon), your current installed version (if you use VT Desktop I guess) and a list of MacFixIt late-breakers.

The overall impression is that of a neater product, with more space to breathe. I could do without the ads on the right side, but at least they are all gathered there (except the banner at the top of the page). The line spacing could be tweaked a little, it feels a bit cramped to me.

iTunes for Windows

It's coming. After announcing that the iTunes Music Store shall be available to Windows users by the end of the year, I fell on the following via Slashdot. Apple posted a job opening for a senior software engineer with the following description:

Title: Sr. Software Engineer
Req. ID :1949938
Location: Santa Clara Valley, California
Country: United States

Looking for a Senior Software Engineer to desing and build Apple's newest Consumer Application, iTunes for Windows. [snip]

Add Cover Art to iTunes 4

MacOSXHints posted cool hints to add cover art to your existing iTunes tracks:

If you want to fill out your iTunes4 library with cover art, the easy way, just do this ... go to allmusic.com (or Amazon NdL) and find the album. Just use the Search feature there to find and navigate to your album. Then just drag the image of the cover art directly into itunes4. Be sure to pop open your cover art 'pane' first (the fourth button at the lower left of the window). Voila! Cover art is imported.

Another easy way would be to use the small app named Clutter by Sprote Research at Clutter. As iTunes plays the music, Clutter looks automatically for the cover on amazon.com and saves it on your HD ~home/Library/Images/com.sprote/clutter/. After that, all you have to do is click'n drag in iTunes 4.

iTunes Music Store

Steve Jobs launched Apple's new music service the "iTunes Music Store" which will allow you to download music for USD 0.99 a song (128Kbps AAC format). The store is accessed through iTunes 4 in the same way you browse your own Library. 30 seconds free preview, cover art are among the features. The store holds some 200K songs, with unlimited CD burning for personal use.

As an effort to prevent piracy, you must change your playlist every 10 burns (?) and you may share your music with a maximum of 3 other Macs (at one time). Not a word on the software used to monitor all this.

Share your playlists, stream your music from one Mac to another (remember iCommune ?), although copying is not supported.

This service not available if your billing address is non-US

Jobs also introduced a bunch of new cool iPods (10 to 30Gb, revamped UI, FW port underneath, cradle and direct access buttons) - available as from Friday.

Apple's Hot News RSS feed

While debugging a font problem and looking at Apple's Hot News source code, I discovered the link to two RSS feeds: Hot News an Press Release.

http://www.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss
http://www.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/pr.rss

Watson 1.7 released

Remember the days before Sherlock 3? There was this little app called Watson (Karelia Software) that offered a desktop interface to web in a single window.

The release of Sherlock 3 overshadowed Watson by providing most of its functionalities. Now, Watson is back with version 1.7 adding Sherlock's 2 search functionality in the name of "SiteSearch". It also knows how to use the old Sherlock 2 plugins.

I must admit that I never really gave it fair trial - by lack of time I guess. This time, I intend to use it on a daily basis, it will complements nicely my RSS tool (NetNewsWire Lite). The Karelia weblog RSS feed is available for those who wish to follow Watson's development.

Beyond the Browser Bundle offers Watson, Spring and NetNewsWire for USD 68 (25% off).

iTrip is shipping!

Griffin Technology has started to ship the iTrip announced at the January MWSF.

From: Doug
Date: Thu Apr 24, 2003 5:55:56 PM Europe/Zurich
Subject: Re: Griffin Technology Order Problem

David,

Thank you for your email. After a slight delay, the iTrip is finally coming!! Look for the iTrip to hit the street on or around April 25th. The units are in production as we speak and between the manufacturing process, batch testing, and shipment receipt, we are establishing a two week lead time for completion. According to the production schedule, product should be shipping in every day. As fast as they can make them, they are supposed to ship them. that should mean a minimal inconvenience to tackling latter pre-orders. We apologize for the delay and look forward to bringing you the iTrip.

Doug Sadtler
Griffin Technology

This was confirmed by MacNN.

Apple Music Service details

MacNN reports that Billboard has published details on Apple's Music Service to be anounced on Monday April 28th(live broadcast details).

Label sources tell Bulletin that the service is an a la carte download store -- not unlike that of rival Liquid Audio -- that is built into Apple's iTunes player. No subscription is required for the service, and tracks are expected to retail for an average of 99 cents. Once purchased, tracks are transferred to the consumer's iTunes music library and are automatically synched to the user's iPod portable player.

Content can also be burned to CD. Credit-card information is stored on file in the store's shopping-cart system so the consumer does not have to re-enter the information for each purchase. The offering is expected to be made available initially only to users of Apple computers.

AppleWorks update

AppleWorks 6.2.7 for Mac OS X is available for download from Apple.

This free update to AppleWorks for Mac OS X provides improvements to the presentation module, AppleScript, web content searching, printing, label printing, table support, and spell checking with user added words. The update provides better recognition and handling of Office 97 and Office 2000 files, improved support for multimedia files in database documents, improved web template downloading over slow internet connections, improved spreadsheet module--including Auto-Calculation, as well as enhanced support for documents which contain links. This version also supports web based templates and clipart on networks using proxy servers.

But beware, this update requires the US version of AppleWorks (eh .. reminds me of Mac OS 7, 8, 9 days ..)

Guess we'll still have to wait a little for iWorks ;)

Mosaic turns 10

Mosaic was released by a small group of students 10 years ago on April 22, 1993.

C|net News is running a four part article to celebrate the anniversary. Slashdot marked the occasion last Friday.

Easter Egg (head)

Make your own EggHeads! Put Jobs, Woz, Gates or Linus head on your Easter eggs! Nitrozac and Snaggy have posted an Easter egg tutorial (each tutorial includes a downloadable graphic you can print out to transfer on your eggs.
Easter will never be the same again ..

Mac OS 10.2.5 USB bug confirmed

Apple has confirmed the USB bug that causes a kernel panic on some systems a few minutes after startup.

A kernel panic occurs a few minutes after starting up and you are prompted to restart.
[..]
Disconnect any USB hub, if one is connected. If disconnecting the USB hub resolves the issue, leave the hub disconnected as a temporary workaround. Note : Not all USB hubs are affected by this issue. If disconnecting the USB Hub does not resolve the issue, or if there is no USB hub, remove other USB devices, including Apple displays and keyboards. If the issue is resolved, use isolation troubleshooting to determine which device seems to contribute to the issue.

Apple posts Q2 earnings and denies Universal bid

Steve Jobs denies Vivendi's rumours according to which Apple placed a bid to acquire Universal Music, and posts USD 14 million net profit Q2 2003 earnings.

Virex 7.2.1 released

This new version of Virex apparently corrects the Fink installation related bug.
Free download for all .Mac members.

Photoshop 8, Illustrator 11 and InDesign 3

An article in eWeek presents Adobe's road map of it's core products, namely Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. All three are scheduled to be updated before the end of the year.

Photoshop 8 will offer non-destructive filtering, layer palette presets that will enable multiple palette sets, multiple layer selection, and will let you apply a single change to several layers. JPEG 2000 support and various UI enhancements.

Illustrator 11 will offer amongst other things significantly improved performance, a PDF export system and support the PDF 1.5 standard.

InDesign 3 will include performance boost and numerous bug fixes and interface tweaks, a new PDF workflow derived from Acrobat 6, including embedded video and audio in a PDF file. A story editor for text frames, javascript and XML support for export to the web.

iCommune 2 is on its way

The current development code of iCommune 2 is available at SourceForge (CVS). It's a complete rewrite of the previous version that was pull off the net by Apple mid January.

iCommune is now a standalone application that communicates with iTunes via open interfaces, and is free of any Apple licensing restrictions.

Microsoft to buy Universal Music

Apparently Apple's got some competition in its move to acquire Universal Music: Microsoft.

Accessible Biometric ID for Mac OS X

Sony offers a USB fingerprint identification unit for Mac OS X based on Sony's imaging technology.

Puppy Suite for Mac OS X (FIK-600) Fingerprint Identification Unit (FIU-600) and authentication software (FIS-600) bundle replaces a password with something so unique it can't be duplicated, lost, or forgotten - a fingerprint. Lightweight and small in size, the Puppy unit offers the ultimate in convenience with a new level of safekeeping. This ID unit is equipped with the intelligence to recognize and store your fingerprints on-board the device, for the utmost security and privacy.

Thanks enrique.

Apple to buy Universal Music ?

Whoosh. Ars Technica reports an article in the LA Times in which Apple would be in talks to buy Universal Music from Vivendi for up to USD 6 billion.

People close to Jobs say he is convinced that the music industry is about to turn a corner in the copyright war. With the government shutting down pirate Web sites and the record industry now going after individuals for alleged piracy, the Apple chief believes digital theft will become increasingly more complicated, prompting fans to migrate to legitimate services, sources said.

Analysts believe that the 48-year-old Jobs will have to do more than make legal downloading easy. They say he also will have to slash prices, possibly to as little as 10 cents per song, to persuade consumers, many of whom have grown accustomed to free downloads, to buy music from Apple.

The launch version of Jobs' new service was developed by Apple specifically for users of its computers and iPod MP3 device. Given its minuscule market share, Apple is likely to develop a version of the service to run on computers using Microsoft Corp.'s dominant Windows software.

Jobs already has secured deals with four of the world's five largest music corporations to allow their catalogs to appear on the service, sources said.

How about that ? Go ahead Steve!

Bag of updates

It's another one of these days when VersionTracker came up with a bag of interesting updates

• Mac OS 10.2.5
  Lots of fixes and enhanced functionality and improved reliability for several apps (and the 'date' bug is fixed - Apple KnowledgeBase article)
• Kung-Log 1.4
  Indispensable blogging tool - gets better all the time
• StuffIt Deluxe 7.0.3
  Everyone uses this one (of the freeware version)
• OmniWeb 4.2
  This was a favourite of mine before Camino/Chimera ..and I love Omni's products
• Small Screen 2.1
  Useful when you design screen layouts

Assign new shortcut keys

Unsanity have come out with a new haxie: MenuMaster.

It allows you to redefine any menu shortcut key or set new ones.

About the Finder

Ars Technica has an interesting and thorough article on the state of the Finder by John Siracusa.

"Okay Mister Smartypants, how should the Mac OS X Finder work?"