Yesterday Apple passed out invites to a March 17 event in Cupertino, CA to roll out the new 3.0 version of the iPhone OS and the new software development kit that will accompany the updated OS.
It was around this time last year that Apple unveiled the original iPhone SDK, and since then the App Store has seen 25,000 applications - so what will this year's surprises bring? Since most folks have been speculating about new iPhone hardware, but what new software features might we see revealed?
Some are guessing at a voice interface that would follow the new Shuffle's introduction of the VoiceOver feature. That seems as likely to me as anything, and it would certainly make sense for Apple to roll out a new format of interface in digestible phases.
We'll find out for sure when Phil Schiller or Scott Forstall gives us the scoop on March 17, since Steve Jobs is on medical leave.
Apple holding iPhone 3.0 special event next week [CNet]
Once while traveling in France I had the luxury of seeing a workers' strike, only it wasn't a workers' strike, it was the homeless. On strike. So that's French domestic politics in a nutshell.
Add to that delightful mix the recent French trend of holding bosses hostage, it makes sense, then, that if angry Sony workers were going to hold an executive hostage overnight, it would happen in France. And so it did: workers at a Sony manufacturing plant slated to close next month held Sony France president Serge Foucher hostage last night. Why? They were unhappy with their severance packages. Microsoft, listen up.
The Pontonx-sur-l'Adour plant workers released Foucher early this morning - sort of. Actually, they escorted him directly to negotiations with trade union bosses. When asked to explain their actions, the Frenchmen responded:
"He won't listen to us, we didn't find any other solution."
So they barricaded the door to the plant with tree trunks. Foucher, for his part, was merely "happy to be free and to see the light of day again."
Meanwhile the police stood by on the sidelines - to make sure all the kidnapping and resulting talks went smoothly. Only in France.
Sacked French Sony workers release boss from captivity [Guardian]
Every once in a while, there are these little utility applications that I use that just make life easier, and I've decided to share one of the ones I use with you today (and it's free!): Disk Inventory X.
Since I use a Mac for daily use, my recommendations are going to be Mac focused. Sorry, PC folks. I'm sure tiny dancer might have something for you, but today it's all about the Macs.
What does Disk Inventory X do? Quite simply, you point it towards a drive or folder, and let it go. When it's done, you'll get a treemap of your hard drive that shows you exactly how much room each file is taking up on your drive in a wonderful, graphical, and easy to identify way.
The reason I was reminded of Disk Inventory X is that yesterday, the 20GB of free space I had on my startup drive had somehow completely vanished. I literally had 0KB of space left and Mac OS X was yelling at me and throwing a tantrum for being a horrible caretaker and stuffing it so much.
The fact that I hadn't stuffed anything into my startup drive meant I was not amused 20GB had disappeared from my drive, so I got to work trying to find the culprit.
My mind immediately jumped to iTunes 8.1, which had installed the night before. Sometimes weird things happen when you update iTunes, and I feared this was one of those times.
Comparing my iTunes data with my backup drive (unfortunately) acquitted iTunes of all wrongdoing. Damn.
I started searching through my hard drive using my Finder, finding nothing out of place, until I remembered I had downloaded Disk Inventory X some time ago. I figured I'd give it a shot.
I started Disk Inventory X up and pointed it towards my startup drive, let it scan the drive and minutes later voilà! A treemap was in front of me, and conspicuously sitting right in the middle was a very large square that represented a huge file sitting on my drive. Ah hah! Found the fraking bastard!
Clicking on it gave me all the info on the file: the output log file for an application had somehow ballooned to over 20GBs in size! Apparently, the application had got stuck in an output loop and just chugged along outputting to its log file continuously all night until it simply ran out of room on the drive. Peachy. A simple right click on the offending box let me reveal the file in the Finder and trash that file right away.
Mission accomplished.
If you've got less room free than you'd like on your Mac's drives, give Disk Inventory X a try. It's a very easy way to identify those large files taking space on your drive, and at the price tag of $0, you can't go wrong!
Product Page [Tjark Derlien]
Really, Hulu? You're adding social networking features? And you're calling it Hulu Friends? Aside from the fact that it sounds like a euphemism for something rhythmic and messy, Hulu's plan to unveil new social networking features is aimed squarely at advertising revenue, hoping that features that failed to generate lots of income on sites like Joost and TV.com will fare better with Hulu's better content library.
Hulu Friends will let viewers create profiles and share videos, while a "Scorecard" feature will track user activity.
If successful, Hulu Friends would pull in more traffic, generating more income - and since Hulu's business model relies on providing a share of ad revenue to its content providers, increased revenue means the potential to snag even more content.
The data Hulu can track won't hurt either, and more options on the site means more detailed reports to help advertisers target Hulu viewers.
Hulu adding social networking functionality [Electronista]
Oh, well hi there kittens! Tiny and Den Den have had me tied up in the Dungeon for some time for some... experiments. Yeah, we'll go with that. They've decided that they'll allow me to write a few things from time to time, but only if I'm a good little gimp I'm a good boy!
I've been noticing a disturbing trend lately. It's a trend that has the potential to ruin the social networking world as we know it. It's something so catastrophically wrong, but for some reason we can't get away from it. What is this horror of social media? I would say that it's the exodus of MySpace account holders to Facebook, but that's not the real issue. After all, I think many of us are those people. No, the real problem lies in one of the simplest trends of social networking, something so evil that it seeps in to your soul (aka your page) and tears you up from the inside out before you even realize it's happening: it's the Facebook MEME!!
*cue dramatic music*
That's right. We've all seen it, perhaps even fallen for it. Maybe you've posted the seemingly innocent 25 Random Things about me as a Note on Facebook. You might have tagged all of your friends on a picture of silly looking cartoon characters that personify static characteristics is an attempt to spark conversation. Or you could have committed the ultimate MEME crime, you posted the "If you don't repost this note, you're not really my friend." And you did all of these with glee, or at least out of passive peer pressure, not even understanding the rot you are pervading into the relatively young, virginal Facebook community.
Please don't do it! Just say no! Don't let this disease get out of control! We can stop it and turn the tide around, but we have to work together. When you receive that notice in your Feed that you've been tagged in a photo that doesn't actually have any real people in it, go remove your tag. Resist the urge to post the top 25 not-so-random-yet-carefully-selected-things-about-yourself-designed-to-make-you-look-insightful-and-deep-but-really-just-makes-you-look-really-patheitcally-emo! And when someone posts a sappy note about how their Facebook friends don't respond to them and they're going to remove everyone doesn't send the a new flower for their Green Patch immediately, do us all a favor and remove the douche bag from your list post haste. I know, it's tough love, but your little sister will never learn to be a responsible member of a social network if you don't change her ways now.
We've seen the devastating impact this type of behavior has had on MySpace, and we all know that MySpace is all but dead because of it. Please, join with me and the rest of your Homotrons in uniting against this egregious affront to Social Network Decency!
Thank heavens - New York Governor and occasional SNL fodder David Patterson said today that the proposed tax on music, movie and ebook downloads won't be necessary, and that the state will rely on federal stimulus money instead.
While the reprieve from luxury taxes may not be permanent, New York state will rely on $1.3 billion in federal stimulus funds this year - although it will still be stuck with a $14 billion deficit. Luxury taxes include clothes that cost more than $100 and non-diet sodas alongside the iTunes and other download taxes (NY had/has its eye on 140 taxable items).
The state's financial straits will be made less dire by the federal aid money, but with a potential $1.3 billion to be mined from luxury taxes, this won't be the last we hear of the notion.
New York State Drops iTunes Tax Plans [DailyTech]
This is going to stray into the territory of slightly gadget related, but it *is* geeky fashion, so I'm going to exercise my power to share it with you here at Homotron: a series of Star Trek licensed fragrances is set to début right before the new Star Trek movie comes out in May.
The fragrances available? There's three:
- Red Shirt, "because tomorrow may never come." (Awesome tag line!) Sporting "top notes of green mandarin, bergamot, and lavender, with base notes of leather and grey musk."
- Tiberius, "boldly go." This cologne has "sweet citron zest, black pepper, and cedar as its top notes and warm vanilla, white musk, and sandalwood as its base notes."
- And for the perfume wearers out there - Pon Farr, which will "drive him wild." They haven't finalised the scent yet, but Genki Wear, who is manufacturing the fragrances says that it "should only be used once every seven years."
That Tiberius cologne seems like my kind of cologne. I love sandalwood and vanilla as base notes! (Hence why I love Calvin Klein's Obsession.)
The fragrances will be available at department stores in April.
Trek Spring Collection Preview: First Look At Genki Star Trek Fragrances [TrekMovie]
New tabs are blank. This has always seemed like an obvious place (since it's blank, after all) to target for some kind of content, whether its as tawdry as an advertisement or as functional as defaulting to the home page. Why tabs open blank makes sense, of course, since waiting for a new tab misses the point, which is an immediate extension of browsing possibilities.
But with Chrome and Safari 4 both moving in on the new-tab real estate, it's no surprise to read that Moxilla's UI genius Ara Raskin has posted a screenshot of Firefox's new approach to the blankness problem and explained his "quick-access strip" which takes into account the human fovea. Gotta love a guy who knows his eyeball anatomy. The new setup stacks thumbnails of your most popular pages along a "quick-access bar" along the right edge of the new tab, and sticks action buttons on the left that perform simple tasks such as searching for text you might have selected on the page from which you opened a new tab.
From the Raskin's mouth:
"From the feedback from the last two rounds of new tab concepts, we know that the page needs to load instantly (even a small wait breaks user experience); that it shouldn't be visually distracting; and that it should be a launch point into your daily activities,"
"It may seem strange that the quick-access strip is along the right of the window. It's there in order to be polite. If you've got your mind on opening a new tab and just entering a url, it's outside your foveal vision."
Polite content? I like it. Gimme.
Firefox, too, revamping new-tab behavior [WebWare]
Apple has released a new iPod Shuffle this morning that is coming dangerously close to being a choking hazard for little children everywhere (if it isn't already!)
Half the size of the previous iPod Shuffle and with twice the standard storage (4GB), what really sets the new iPod Shuffle apart is the addition of text to speech technology to add more control into the screen-less iPod Shuffle.
The new VoiceOver feature will read to you the track and artist you're currently listening to, but it has a bigger benefit: it allows the use of multiple playlists on the iPod Shuffle. When you hold down the centre button on the headphone remote long enough, the iPod Shuffle begins reading a list of playlists synced to your iPod Shuffle, and when you hear the playlist you want, just click the button again to switch to it.
One surprising little difference between Mac and PC users is that if you sync your iPod Shuffle with a Mac, VoiceOver will use a male voice, while if you sync with a PC, it will use a female voice.
The new iPod Shuffle is $79 and comes in silver and black.
Product Page [Apple]
Like Windows Media Player before it, Internet Explorer remains at the heart of the European Commission's current beef with Microsoft: the Commission has accused Microsoft of breaking antitrust laws by shipping Windows with Internet Explorer installed.
But the Commission has extended its original response deadline of March 12, leaving Microsoft until April 21 to answer the charge. Its original goal stays the same however, which is to force Microsoft to offer a choice of browsers in copies of Windows sold in Europe; Google and Mozilla both have argued that IE's pre-installation poses an unfair advantage against the establishment of alternative browsers.
MS gets extension on EU browser charges [Electronista]
Amazon has a huge Blu-ray sale going on, with over 300 Blu-ray discs on sale, from $9.99 and up. (Yes, I know the link says $13.99 and up, but movies like Stargate are priced at $9.99)
Stand outs include Crash, Transformers, WALL*E, Iron Man, Enchanted, Stargate, and many more!
Go check it out, I'm sure there's something for everyone in the very lengthy list, and remember - if you click the link below and buy some Blu-rays, you'll be supporting Homotron so that we can continue bringing you the latest in gadget news with a pink twist!
Blu-ray Sale: Over 300 Blu-ray Discs as Low as $13.99, and up to 54% Off [Amazon]
Alors! The francophones over at Journal Du Geek are sporting yet another iPhone Nano rumor, this one saying that the iPhone Nano will be launched at an event in June by Steve Jobs himself.
Other rumory tidbits: the iPhone Nano will be the size of the screen of the current iPhone 3G, and the home key will be moved to the right edge of the phone. Being the size of the current screen does indeed make it smaller, but more of a "mini" than a "nano" to my literal mind. Elsewise, the iPhone Nano will have the same connectivity features as the iPhone 3G and will come in black, white, and red.
I hope one of these iPhone Nano rumors turns out to be true, I really do. June seems like a nice enough time as any, right?
Enjoy the latest headlines from our other sites!
3D iPhone glasses. Why?
