greenthinks

So I was going to comment on the lack of Applescriptability in iTunes for Windows (not that I would expect it to be included since its underlying structure, the System Events system, is a pretty low level part of the Mac OS). This was in response to some blogger’s list of 5 improvements he’d like to see in the next version of iTunes. He was clearly talking about the Windows version, because multiple items on his list have been solved for me for a long time with scripts (he also said he was running it on Windows). Unfortunately, try as I might, I cannot for the life of me locate said article.

Oh well, I just wanted to recognize the fact that the grass is still a little greener for us Mac users here in terms of iTunes functionality.

Dave Winer is now using LemkeSoft’s GraphicConverter on his mac instead of Adobe ImageReady, which he had been using on Windows:

Anita Wilhelm, illustrating the spirit of TagCamp in Palo Alto on October 29. Notable because it’s the first graphic I produced on the Mac. Took about an hour, but I figured out how to use Graphic Converter Pro, which is pretty nice, but not quite as easy as ImageReady. The good news is now I should be able to do new little graphics in the margin. Ever since switching to the Mac, I’ve just been snarfing old ones from the archives.

Why not use ImageReady on the Mac, Dave?

Yesterday Microsoft made some pretty big announcements, and while much of the web does not seem to understand their significance, at least some of the stuff they showed off yesterday is getting some real buzz. Only problem, there is no stream of the announcement available from Microsoft’s web site. We know that one exists, since Scoble was watching it internally. Microsoft, please open it up to the rest of us?

Maybe it has something to do with Dave Winer’s comments on the presentation…

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…

From Boing Boing...

FEMA to Mac, Linux users: drop dead: A stupid usability flaw in the FEMA website is causing frustration for some of the Hurricane Katrina survivors fortunate enough to have computer and internet access. Bottom line: if you’re not using Windows + IE, it appears that you won’t be able to file a disaster assistance claim on Fema.gov.

Absolutely unbelievable.

No matter what Microsoft ends up doing or not doing with Windows LonghornVista, the biggest change people will notice when they boot Redmond’s new operating system will be the clarity of the fonts. Why? Because for the first time since the technology debuted back in the Windows 2000 days, Windows will ship with ClearType ON by default.

I had not realized how much of a big deal this is until I noticed that many of my colleagues at work and many of the machines in the labs that we administer have it off. The next time I installed XP on my own machine, I looked, and in fact it is off by default!

So please, everyone, take a deep breath and open your Display Control Panel, go into the Appearance tab and the Effects button, and where it says “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts,” make sure it says “ClearType.” Then, if you really want to have it look great to you, go to Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner with Internet Explorer (it does not work in Firefox as it is ActiveX-based).

There, now doesn’t this post look so much better?

So I went back looking over the last 20 or so posts here and realized that this blog has become really quite mac heavy. That was never my intention, but I’ve been spending much of my time at my girlfriend’s apartment and since my macs are laptops and my PC is a desktop, the macs have been getting much more use lately.

I do have a bunch of things I’d like to write about that are Windows or PC-related. I’m working on getting the new IE 7 beta installed on my XP box. I’ve got notes on my comparative experiences with the different PC-based music services. Lastly, there’s a post I’m working on about what we really want to see in the next version of Windows, including comments on an article in the latest (not even on newsstands yet!) issue of MaximumPC magazine.