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Apple’s Big “Let’s Rock” Announcement

September 9, 2008 in Technology & Science

Here’s the main info from the press conference that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) held today (info from the live updates here here here and here). This is a summary of the main announcements with my thoughts on a few.

iTunes
Itunes 8 is being launched. This new version comes with a few new features:
Browse the store in cover flow – You’ll be able to browse the Itunes store in coverflow look, i.e. browse music by album cover, just like being down in HMV flicking through the records on the shelves!
HD TV shows. You can buy them for $1.99 in SD, HD will be $2.99
NBC is coming back, with all it’s best shows (the office, 30 rock etc), but that doesn’t really matter to us in Ireland!

Genius
An interesting concept that has been done before quite successfully by websites such as last fm. What it does is us a social algorithm for recommendations. What this means is that iTunes collects data (anonymously) from all it’s users and pools it together on their servers (in the cloud). They can then gain insights into different music tastes and patterns. For example, they can see that most people who like to listen to Green Day, also like to listen to U2. This allows them to do some pretty neat things:
Generate smart playlists based on “songs that go together”. So if I have a playlist with a few Jack Johnson songs, and I hit the Genius button, iTunes would automatically fill it out some Damien Rice, Fionn Regan etc., because it “knows” that they go well together. This could be great for iTunes picking up on the mood i’m in. So i pick a certain song or artist off the top of my head because that’s the kind of music I want to listen to now, and iTunes keeps playing more like it.
The use demoed was for finding music in the iTunes store to go with a song you have. Nothing new or groundbreaking here. Last.fm, pandora, imeem and many others have been doing this for years, but I guess not on the scale of iTunes. This may give them better accuracy if they have a larger pool of data to draw insights from. This was predicted/the case was made for it in a great readwriteweb post a few weeks back. Well worth a read and very applicable to today’s events.

iPod
A new iPod nano was announced. Looks very nice – a very thin, curved look. You can use Genius on it too (and all the other ipods) to create a clever recommended playlist “on the go”.
It has an accelerometer like the touch and iphone, with the cooles feature being “Shake to shuffle.” Everything else is pretty standard; some slick new colours, 8GB and 16GB models, environmentally friendly – “highly recyclable.”

An updated ipod touch with some welcome new features. Volume control (+/-) on the side like most modern phones. Built in speakers – great for parties! Genius playlist creation just like the nano. Built in support for nike+ – I don’t ever see myself using this, but it got a pretty good reception from the crowd and media in general. €369.99 for a 32GB Touch, not bad at all.

Gaming
This was one of the first things that I thought when I got my iPod Touch and played a few of the games in the app store, that it has the potential to be a neat little gaming device. Steve Jobs seems to have some pretty big hopes for it, saying “It’s the best portable device for playing games…” Wow, I guess Nintendo better be ready for the next round. It beat off Gamegear, PSP and now this. Although I have to admit, I do enjoy playing the odd game on my iPod touch, it combines the brilliance of the DS touch and the wii motion sensing that immerses you in a game. And it has that added advantage of always being in my pocket, unlike my DS.
At the conference they demoed a football game and spore. I’ll let this pic do the talking, looks pretty sweet, and is a great example of how the touch screen lends itself so well to gaming, as the DS has clearly shown:

That’s about it for today. If you’d like to keep up to date with all the newest commentary and reviews like this, you can subscribe to this blog so you don’t have to keep coming back to check for updates!

Irish Blogger Adds to the List of Palin Scandal

September 3, 2008 in Blogging

Of all the Palin stories coming to light as people start finding out who she is (something the McCain campaign decided not to do it would seem ) this story just takes the biscuit!

Congratulations to Suzy Byrne who (I read at the huffington post no less!) pointed out that Sarah Palin’s claim to have travelled abroad to visit “Germany, Kuwait and Ireland” was a bit of half-truth, as it was just a Shannon stop over!

Even if we can’t vote, we can still make a difference… I love the internet.

Ahhh! No Chrome for Mac!

September 3, 2008 in Technology & Science

So I ran straight over to http://www.google.com/chrome to get some of that sweet Google Browsery goodness, only to find that it’s a windows release only (for now). I’ve signed myself up for updates on the mac version but no word as of yet.

For those of you who haven’t heard about Chrome, it’s google’s new browser. RRW have a good introduction to it here and a good review of it here. The news of Google chrome was first revealed by Philipp Lessen on his blog. He scanned and uploaded a comic book style introduction to Chrome that Google sent him in the mail. It’s worth a look in if you’re interested, but here’s one of the parts that I found most interesting:

The Omnibox

Besides the fact that I can’t decide whether it will be very useful or very annoying (I’m still not sure about the search style suggestions in Firefox 3), it’s important to note that this will put whole new layer of importance on Google Pagerank. If your site/blog/application is popular or ranked well, not only will it come up on the first page of search results, but it may also be suggested to users straight from their browser’s url bar! Think of the traffic!!

Steve Jobs’ Obituary

August 30, 2008 in Technology & Science

Oh my. A simple enough mistake, somebody hit ‘publish’ instead of ‘save’ when updating Steve Jobs’ Obituary at Bloomberg. It’s a bit cringeworthy/spooky that they’re writing an obituary for the yet-to-be-deceased 53 year old, and it certainly won’t help Steve and his family with their worries over his health, but I suppose in the world of media today it’s somewhat understandable that they have to be ready with a researched story for an event that may be likely so that they can be first to press, even if that predicted story is someone’s death.

For those who don’t know, Steve Jobs had pancreatic cancer and his health isn’t the best these days as he’s recovering from some operations. Read the full story here.

Update: Found this video of an SNL sketch from 1996, very apt!

Show Off Your Subscribers

August 29, 2008 in Blogging

Blogger announced yesterday that they have a new feature that will allow you to show off your subscribers (if they choose to be shown) on your blog. I suppose it will look a bit like the “currently reading” widgets that some blogs have.

I think this is great news for small blogs like myself. As Darragh Doyle mentions in his award winning post, commenting on other people’s blog is a great way to get to know other bloggers and also a great way to get known and to encourage visits and comments on your own blog. In the same way, this new “followers” widget should providing a win-win for all involved. By becoming a follower, and electing to appear in the widget as such, one gets the exposure as being seen as a follower, and so people reading that blog may decide to check out your blog as you obviously have common interests. On the flip side, the blog you subscribe too gets one extra follower and looks even more popular!

Just one more great step in enriching the blogging community. Go Google!

ReadWriteWeb also noted that this may open up the process of subscription to people who may not have fully understood RSS, but get the gist of following. Their article is well worth the read.

Blogger end the post with this little teaser “We are also in the process of integrating with Google Friend Connect so you can give your readers more engaging social features.” The mind races with possibilities!

Monitter

August 26, 2008 in Technology & Science

I’m sure plenty of people who are heavier twitter users than I have already heard of this site, but I thought monitter was still worth a mention for others, like me, who hadn’t. For those of you familiar with twitter (which I’m assuming is most people by now!), it shouldn’t require much explanation. You can type a word or a phrase into one of three columns, and watch as it updates in real-time with tweets from the twitter-sphere relating to the word(s) you enter.

Some terms just whizz by with tweet after tweet, try Obama as a good example. Others are slow and steady (try McCain for example 😛 ).

It’s still not perfect, some very old and out of date tweets appear, but it’s pretty cool if you have a website/blog and you’d like to see if people are noticing it and tweeting about it.

Through monitter I also discovered the very handy feature of Twitter itself – being able to subscribe to an RSS feed of certain terms as they’re mentioned on Twitter. (http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=typephrasehere). I’ve already added a few rss subscriptions to my reader (e.g. for my website “zulunotes” being mentioned on twitter), very handy indeed. Now if only my Google Alerts picked up comments on twitter…. then we’d be suckin’ deisel!

Quotes of the week

August 25, 2008 in Quotes

As this is just a new blog, I only have two candidates for my favourite quotes I’ve heard this week (i.e. not necessarily said this week!):

“Science works; planes fly. Magic carpets and broomsticks don’t. Gravity isn’t a version of the truth; it is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a tenth floor window. Evolution too, is reality.”
–Richard Dawkins, “The Genius Of Charles Darwin“

“He has the memory of an irresponsible goldfish”
— John Oliver, on “The Bugle” episode 41, in response to John McCain’s statement that “In The 21st Century Nations Don’t Invade Other Nations” (talking about the Russo-Georgian conflict)

Yahoo’s TV Internet Widgets

August 21, 2008 in Technology & Science

I just saw this over on ReadWriteWeb. Basically, what Yahoo are planning to do is give people the chance to have widgets display at the bottom of their TV, kind of like a news ticker on Sky/BBC News, only these will be pulling directly from the internet and will be fully customisable!

Yahoo are also opening this up for anyone to make a widget that people can select to view on their TV’s. Some examples proposed so far have been news tickers, weather updates etc. One interesting comment I read under the ReadWriteWeb article was a from somebody delighted at the thought of the twitter widget being at the bottom of his tv screen, so they could watch tv at the same time as their friends and have a kind of a group chat experience. E.g. “Peter says: ‘what a goal, that was amazing!” coming up at the bottom of your screen when you’re at home watching a football match! I think it’s really clever and could definitely create a new level of interactivity with what has always been a distinctly one-way medium.

I really can’t wait to see what widgets get made for this. What does anyone else hope to see? Or does anyone else plan on having a go at making a widget or two? (I may give it a bash myself!) I think some sort of RSS headline reader could be useful, or maybe an Alarm widget, that reminds you to do stuff, or what TV show’s are on, when you’re watching TV.

Hello world!

August 19, 2008 in Uncategorized

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