It’s really a fantastic read. check it out.

Early reports are saying that these are the change notes for the software:

-Genius Playlist Creation
- Dramatically reduced backup time to iTunes
- Improved email reliability
- Faster installation of 3rd party apps
- Bug fixes involving hangs or crashes of 3rd party apps
- Faster loading and searching of contacts

I’m still having issues with GPS and reliability / slowness and that’s not mentioned in the change notes.

Check out The Web Life and add it to your RSS reader.

The first couple days of the challenge were naturally difficult. Switching from the tunes I normally listen to, to songs randomly picked due to their similarity to the artists I love to hear. By the middle of the second day, though, I was completely adjusted.

Sad to say, though, one thing that I wasn’t able to adjust to was the fact that I was on EDGE. Surprisingly enough, though, everywhere I was during the week I was able to get good enough signal (at least 3 bars) so that Pandora didn’t need to buffer during a song. The sound quality was great no matter what.

All in all, it would be smart to only put one or two hours of your absolute favorite songs (or what I call “emergency songs”). Then you’ll be able to use all the free space for apps, pictures, and videos. With 8 or 16 GB, that’ll end up being a lot of media. You’d definitely want to have the space whenever a good video recording app is released.

Kolin Toney is a resident of Florida and blogs about tech over at his blog.

“Twitter is currently down for Unplanned maintenance. We expect to be back in about an hour. Thanks for your patience.” – well, that’s what it reports on there site.

It seems to me of late – that Twitter, has been taking quite a few unplanned maintenance breaks.
As a Twitter user, and follower of many.. many people, I would love to use a ‘free’ service that
doesn’t keep on breaking down! #FAIL

But, Twitter is a fantastic service to use (thanks Adam for introducing it to me last year!),
when it’s back up running, I ask you to sign-up.. and try to micro-blog everyday, and soon
you may get hooked too.

Sign-up here: www.twitter.com

You can follow Adam here: www.twitter.com/adamjackson
You can follow me, here: www.twitter.com/samdownie

Luckily, I caught it early on. Those who are just tuning in; You’ve missed the following items.

Check out Yoono’s blog entry on their latest update.

Well, if you’re wondering or perhaps have this same issue. I updated some plug-ins and started getting an Error 500 as soon as I logged in to the Wordpress dashboard on both sites.

Turns out, after some Google searching, that WP Super Cache was causing the issue with a recent update. I’ve just removed the plug-in for now and I can login just fine.

http://www.visualwebcaster.com/Facebook/50038/event.html

Yet, once again, stocks drop substantially. I don’t follow AAPL on a daily basis but I do take a peek after every quarterly announcement and without fail the stocks drop so far down. I pray that Apple never announces a bad quarter.

Social Networking for those who have a life

Lifecasting… the basics

SAN FRANCISCO Apple store, 9:15 a.m.: Adam Jackson just left the Apple store with two iPhone 3Gs, a white 16GB one for himself, and a black 8GB one for his wife. As he tried to get the two phones activated on his AT&T Family Plan, the plan was somehow separated into two individual plans. Jackson’s phone has not been activated, and he was told by Apple store employees that he could activate it at home with the new version of iTunes. However, he’ll have to go back to the AT&T store to iron out the problems with his Family Plan.

“Apple MacBookPro’s – that in order to qualify, a purchase must be made by Monday February 18.” !

also, supply levels at various Apple resellers and stores are ‘also running dry’, so will we soon see a re-fresh of the Apple Macbook Pro line of laptops, within the coming weeks? – I do hope so, as I’m keen on buying a new Mac laptop anyway to replace my Macbook ‘Black’ which I currently use.. yep! I need more power!

But what do you think, and expect to see and announced from Apple Inc, within the coming weeks?

Click “Full Story” for the rest and PHOTOS

The Basics: FastMac’s codename “iV”, at first glance, is just another iPhone charger. The unit has the capacity to charge an iPhone 2 times. For now, there’s an on/off button to initiate charging of the iPhone. There’s an Apple notebook style battery indicator on the back to show the remaining charge. The pack itself docks on the iPhone and wraps around the back and over the top a bit to hold the iPhone securely. The base of the unit fits perfectly into Apple’s iPhone dock.

The Cool Stuff: I personally hate the iPhone speaker when it comes to chatting on the phone. iV has a chamber that assists in amplifying the speaker volume to make calls and music listening more enjoyable but this feature is still under development. I’m a moblogger and constantly email photos to flickr on a daily basis but nothing bugs me more than not being able to take photos due to low lights. iV includes a flash to make this much easier. There’s a simple on / off switch right next to the audio mute switch that turns on the flash.

The Essentials: I use a Jawbone Bluetooth headset for music enjoyment but most iPhone users have purchased Apple’s headset offering, FastMac saw it fit to include a charger for any USB device because there are many different devices like Bluetooth headsets that charge over USB. This is a fantastic idea because the iPhone and headset can now be charged while on the road and without having to bring the Apple dual iPhone dock or USB cable. The USB port can be used to charge another iPod, camera or any device that charges via USB. There’s a removable swivel clip for the unit. I’m unsure how well iV holds the iPhone in place so the belt clip does make me nervous that iPhone may topple to the ground or get bumped into a wall as you walk past and scratch the unit. This is still a good idea to include. FastMac is still deciding on a belt clip and there are many options they’re pursuing so the photos I’ve included are not final for this accessory.

iV does increase the thickness by nearly double the iPhone width but the unit is still comparable in thickness to the Treo 700. The height is also increased by a bit which you’ll see in the photos. The unit should be out in March and will be only $99 dollars. I love this concept and can’t wait to get my hands on their prototypes while at Macworld.

A 2007 rumor that the company was in talks with executives at Volkswagen had some people yearning for a Mac-integrated Jetta or Passat. More likely than a branded “iCar” is a continued effort from Apple to get iPod docks integrated into as many luxury vehicles as possible.

LOL
The Rest viaTUAW

The BBC has today introduced Mac support for its streaming catch-up TV service in beta form.
Mac users can visit the iPlayer beta site now to immediately begin streaming shows broadcast across the last seven days.

Click FULL STORY for details…

The service has until now been available in beta format for Windows systems only. The facility to download shows within a seven-day window of transmission will remain Windows-only, but support for streamed content for Mac and Linux systems will appear in full effect on Christmas Day, following a recent deal between the broadcaster and Adobe for the use of Flash technology for streaming shows, Broadband TV News reports.

It’s understood that the facility to download shows will be made available for Mac and Linux users during 2008. BBC Radio Player, which already offers a library of BBC Radio content on demand, will in future be integrated into iPlayer.

Click here for the Mac Beta > [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer]http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer[/url]

Sit back… and enjoy some top TV programming from the BBC.

Justine is planning a BIG event where we want 1,000s of people to join in live.

When: Sunday, December 16, 2007, 8:45 p.m. on TalkShoe.

log-in and visit here > http://talkshoe.com

Info: Talkcast name “ijustine.tv“, phone number “724-444-7444“, Talkcast ID “46121“

So how do YOU participate? Click FULL STORY to find out more, and join iJustine on Sunday, December 16th 2007, from 8.45pm (PST – i think!?)

So What should you do?

1. Become a TalkShoe member and download TalkShoe live NOW, not right before the show when things will be crazy.

2. Go to Justine’s Talkcast page and Join In a bit before 8:45 pm

You can also just listen only (stream), or just call in with your mobile phone or ShoePhone

It’s going to be a great show! – further info online at: [url=http://tastyblocksnack.com]http://tastyblocksnack.com[/url]

Buzz is the guy behind a great app called ‘Podworks’, do check it out here: http://www.scifihifi.com/podworks

Recently Buzz has been talking about his Apple day’s again, on his blog – and now, I’ve found a great story from him, talking about Apple Inc recent OS release.. Leopard 10.5. Buzz dives right into how the developers behind Leopard struggled with the release. Click ‘FULL STORY’ to read the full article from Buzz’s web-log…

READ THE FULL STORY ONLINE AT: [url=http://buzz.vox.com]http://buzz.vox.com[/url]

One of the hardest things for me as a blogging Apple employee always had to be watching the public misapprehend the company’s intentions while remaining prudently silent. Apple is slowly opening the lines of communication to its stakeholders these days (witness the recent series of letters from Steve to Apple customers–a veritable deluge of communication by Apple standards!), but in general I think it has traditionally done a far worse job of managing its relationship with its loyalists than many ostensibly less enlightened companies. As a result its reputation has often suffered unnecessarily.

The latest example I’ve seen of this is the consternation over Apple’s failure to seed the Leopard GM build to developers. A lot of the negative reaction toward this that I saw on Twitter was probably, at its root, based on an assumption that is frequently fed by Apple’s poor standards of communication: that Apple as a whole disdains (or at least disregards) third party developers, and therefore as a matter of policy the company had decided to deny developers the GM (perhaps to extract more money from them?).

Well, I may not work there now, but I did work in the OS division of Apple for several years (I even briefly worked as the liason to a major third party developer, Adobe), I’m pretty familiar with how things work there, and I’m still in touch with a lot of people who worked on Leopard. And I don’t believe for a minute that this was true. I’m convinced that the key fallacy behind this, and a lot of other mistaken ideas about Apple, is the idea that the company always operates as a homogenous entity, and that everything it does is as a result of some company-wide, top-down animus. The reality is usually a lot more mundane.

I have known this to be true in cases where people give Apple too much credit as well as not enough. One of my favorite examples was a post of Dave Winer’s some time ago in which he saw Apple’s addition of a certain feature to a certain Apple app as evidence of a brilliant, fully-meditated stratagem of Apple’s to dominate a certain market. I had been privy to some of the discussions about adding the feature in question, and my perception was very different. Rather than coming from on high as part of some master plan, the initial feature request Radar had originated with an enthusiastic low-level employee from an entirely different team, and it was initially denied because the right people didn’t see the value in it. It wasn’t that Apple as a whole decided that it wanted to dominate a new market–it was, at least initially, the idea of just one person operating independently.

By the same token, on the negative side, I suspect that the explanation for the missing seed (pure speculation on my part, to be fair) has nothing to do with any malicious or greedy organizational intent (or even plain old indifference) on the part of Apple, but rather with the fact that the time between the GM build and the Leopard ship date was likely too short to make an advance seed practical. I would guess that the OS people were quite motivated to get the product in the hands of the consumer as quickly as possible (and meet the difficult October deadline) without introducing any unnecessary delays. If the particular Apple employees in charge of seeding were out of line in this situation, I would guess it was only in the sense that they understimated the importance of such a seed in many developers’ minds in their hurry to get an already delayed release out the door.

My point in all of this, I suppose, is that when it comes to interpreting Apple’s actions, Ockham’s razor is usually the best guide: the simplest explanation is to be preferred. Apple, like any company, is composed of a large number of pragmatic individuals, most of whom don’t have any sort of agenda beyond trying to do their job and meet what are usually pretty demanding project deadlines. The scary Japanese guy who thinks AppleScript engineer Chris Nebel has an anti-Japanese agenda and is trying to sabotage AppleScript localization would be better off assuming that any perceived sins on Chris’ part are sins of omission. And the people who were haranguing Apple over its disdain for developers would be more fair not to ascribe malice to something that could be easily explained by ignorance.

Of course, this wouldn’t be as much of a problem if Apple could just get better at communicating with its customers and developers. Here’s hoping that things like Steve’s DRM letter and iPhone refund are the start of a move away from Cupertino’s obsession with total secrecy, and that misunderstandings like this can be resolved or avoided altogether through reasonable dialogue in the future.

*Written by Buzz Andersen © 2007

READ THE FULL STORY HERE: [url=http://buzz.vox.com]http://buzz.vox.com[/url]