greenthinks

Every power user or techie (or nerd or geek) has their pet utilities, without which a computer just does not feel like “home.” For me, the most important of these has, for the past few years, been Objective Development’s LaunchBar.

I’ve tried Quicksilver, that up and coming free youngster, but it just was too much of a mess for this OCD detail nut. LaunchBar knows what it is meant to do, and it does it beautifully. More recently, as LaunchBar seemed to be in a state of languor, and as Apple introduced Spotlight in Tiger, I have tried to do away with my LaunchBar habit.

Today I go to Objective’s site, just for the hell of it, and lo and behold, a new beta version! And they haven’t been sitting around doing nothing, either. 4.1 boasts full spotlight integration, further integration with Address Book and iTunes, support for Automator workflows, and a bunch more features, performance improvements, and bug fixes.

I’m impressed.

Chris Pirillo on Apple and MS:

Don’t underestimate Apple; they’re moving hella quicker than Redmond these days. Front Row isn’t close to an MCE competitor today, but it won’t take much to tweak it to deliciousness. Pretty soon, I expect Apple to start selling computers that are “iPod-compatible.” Watch it happen, folks. This isn’t about surfing the Web anymore – it’s about having a lifestyle that doesn’t require you to think or reprogram. The days of the blinking 12:00 are long gone, but it’s obvious Microsoft and its vendors don’t know that yet.

‘nuff said.

Technorati Tags: flock

Russell Beattie:

Infinite Loop – I caught the West Wing on television for the first time in a long time (since the election, I think, I stopped watching it since then really). It dawned on me how ridiculous it is to focus a television show on such a unique individual as the President of the U.S. And now they’re doing another one with Gina Davis? So wacky. I was thinking after this morning’s Apple keynote that Hollywoood should create a show loosely based on Apple computer, no? It’d have a enigmatic, yet complex leader, various VPs with ranging agendas, crisises would not involve asteroids hitting the earth or Norht Korean terrorists, but blogs leaking confidential product plans and competitors launching similar products, IP theft, etc. You could have cameos by luminaries in tech. You’d have a picture-perfect antagonist in a Gates-like Billionaire of a competing company, etc. Quirky programmers and French-born directors of Engineering would add a light element. How much more drama could you want?

Terrific.

The conventional wisdom about Apple’s announcements tomorrow says that Apple will be introducing some new iPods. Maybe a new set of higher end iPods and perhaps a pink Madonna iPod nano.

Some people have been talking about a video iPod, but most experts have poo-pooed that idea, saying that Apple would need to re-engineer its online store for movies and that bandwidth, and the deals with movie studios necessary for such an undertaking, are not in place.

However, today another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Every week on Tuesday Apple updates the Music Store with new music. This week Tuesday came and went with no new music, no newly released albums, no new additions from older catalogs.

So even if the more conservative prognostications are accurate, it seems that Apple is at least updating the iTunes Music Store as well tomorrow. It may in fact be more than that, however.

MacRumors reports that a new iTunes version may be released sometime soon. They guess it is 5.0.2, but I would put more money on 5.1. iTunes 5 was a typically underwhelming x.0 release (remember v4.0?) and now Apple probably plans to add all sorts of more interesting functionality in point releases over the next year or so.

It might even turn out to be more significant than that. Think Secret is now speculating that Apple will indeed release video iPods tomorrow and that the iTunes video store will debut. My take is that Apple will announce such devices without the vital functionality (vital according to Apple executives) of ripping DVD’s to one’s HD, but with big collaborations (e.g. BBC) and with a big push towards music videos and vlogging. The company will then attempt to use its iPod cache to exert pressure on the government and the industry to make ripping one’s own DVD’s for use on one’s video iPod a legal and feasible reality.

Well, here’s hoping…

Just a quick post to say that I tried using Jotspot Live tonight to help my college-age sister with a paper, and it kept throwing up errors everytime we both tried editing. They weren’t even English errors, just some jibberish about connection lost or something.

Ah well, we switched back to Writeboard and things moved quite well, though she has to learn the Textile system that 37sig uses (a post on that is coming real soon – I promise) and it does not support simultaneous editing, but at least its system does not behave like Alpha software.