greenthinks

It seems everyone and their mother is talking about Google’s supposed big announcement tomorrow. Noone really has any hard info about what it will be, but the one certainty is that it will be Windows-only.

Every other desktop product Google has released (let’s say at least in the last year) has been developed for Windows only. Even Google Video (where they are using the cross-platform VLC) is still Windows-only. Yes, Google worked hard to make Maps and Gmail and other web-based products work on Mac, and yes, they have committed to bringing products like Video and Earth over to the Mac platform, but the question is when?

As many have been saying for a while now, the movers and the shakers of Web 2.0 care about or even use the Mac platform. Companies are missing out on a big PR opportunity by not releasing Mac versions first.

Let’s just say I’m not holding my breath for Google Talk for Mac.

Another article, this one from Business 2.0’s September issue.

Many, if not most, pages now have more than one syndication feed. It is not uncommon to find RSS 0.91 next to RSS 2.0 next to ATOM 0.3 (and now ATOM 1.0 as well)—all on the same page! The idea is that the publisher is platform agnostic and therefore maximizes his audience. Sounds good, and in practice it works well, or at least it has worked well up until now. When the audience for Syndication feeds was entirely made up of techies and devs, the sea of acronyms wasn’t a problem—if anything it was even more inviting. Now however, as browser manufacturers build feed detection into the browsers, and more and more normal users are pushed towards the syndicated future, the breadth of format options only makes things more complicated, and therefore less attractive. For this reason Apple (and now Microsoft as well) has chosen to pick a single format out of the site the user is visting and use that when the user clicks on the Syndicate or RSS button.

How does Apple decide? It seems that they take the first the browser finds when reading the markup from top down. The odd, seemingly unintended consequence of this is that since ATOM starts with an A and RSS and RDF start with R’s, Safari almost always chooses the ATOM feed to use on pages that have multiple options. This situation is especially odd seeing as how Apple chose the decidely unpolitic “RSS” as the overall term they use for syndication over the web. Why snub ATOM only to support them with the browser’s feed autodetect scheme (my guess is that this is all unintended).

...has been around since before podcasting. It’s Acts of Volition Radio, produced by Stephen Garrity from Charlottetown, PE, Canada.

Garrity does what radio DJ’s used to do – he plays tracks he’s discovered or has loved for years and talks about the bands and the music. Simple enough, but it really works and his taste is impeccable. I’m always excited when he includes something I’ve already found, but that’s rare – usually it’s an occassion to break out the ‘ole Amex and order some CD’s on Half.

Since he’s Canadian, he leans towards bands from north of the border, which is great, as there’s even less of a chance that I’ll be familiar with them already. His location also plays into the reason for his remaining uniqueness even now as podcasting is exploding. Garrity plays commercial music, and plays the songs in full. While this is not only illegal in the U.S. but is also being actively targeted by the authorities and their impish cohorts, the lawyers, it seems to still be gray area in Canada. It’s a good thing too, ‘cause it will be a sad day down here in NYC when Stephen Garrity stops doing Acts of Volition Radio.

Check it out.

Update: Subscribe in iTunes!

Back towards the beginnging of July, Jon Udell wrote a piece on the dominance, nowadays, of typing into a text field on the web. He discussed the reasons why TEXTAREA is not optimal, and put forth some potential successors to the web typing mantle.

Yesterday I was reminded how much we really do need something better. A friend of mine was typing something up on Yahoo! Mail for over an hour, and by just accidentally hitting the wrong button, entire pages worth of work was gone. What about undo, I said—but alas, Internet Explorer 6 on Windows does not support Undo or Redo in TEXTAREA (or any other kind of text field). I decided to investigate what happens on the Mac…

Click here to see what happens in Safari or Firefox (sorry for the crappy quality of the video).

I have yet to check to make sure that this works on Firefox on Windows as well, though I think that’s a safe assumption.

Update: I checked, and it does indeed work fine on Firefox running on Windows.

I love Netflix. I also love Gamefly. They both use the U.S. Postal Service to deliver their wares to us customers. They even use similarly sized envelopes (Red and Orange, respectively). How come, then, I get Netflix (even from California) in a day or two or three and Gamefly games take a week or longer to arrive?!

Anybody have any thougts?

Update: I contacted Gamefly about the latest long wait for a game, and they apologized and sent out my next game right away. Good customer service, but let’s see how long this one takes to arrive, huh?

Update: NBA Street 3 was shipped on July 22 according to Gamefly and arrived yesterday afternoon, July 25. Three days is not bad at all, especially considering that the 22nd was a Friday and the 25th is a Monday. Good job, Gamefly!

According to a story on Appleinsider,

If reports are accurate, Mac users have a lot to look forward to in regards to web browsing under Mac OS X for Intel. According to sources, web browsing in general is much faster under Mac OS X for Intel than it is under the shipping version of Mac OS X for PowerPC. Web pages snap to the screen, the same way they do in Internet Explorer running on a new Pentium system, they say.

It was only a few months ago—Steve stood onstage at D:All Things Digital, and showed off podcasting in iTunes. One of the podcasts he showed, in fact the last one he highlighted, was a “test” that Apple was doing. It was a podcast version of the New Music Tuesdays email newsletters that Apple has been sending out since the Music Store launched.

Steve totally blew it off at the time, but only a few months later iTunes 4.9 with podcasting is here and what?

It’s #1! Guess this wasn’t just the mild-mannered test Steve said it was…

All this would be fine, since the podcast is actually quite good, if only it would be available on Tuesdays! For the last few Tuesdays, the podcast listing does not even update until late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, and even then it gets an error when it tries to download. By the time it’s actually available, it’s Wednesday afternoon. So much for New Music Tuesdays…