Last week I convinced myself I should buy iLife '09 which includes a new version of iPhoto. Apple added a new feature to iPhoto called Faces, which auto-detects faces in photos and lets you name them. I have to say, the feature is great, it's easy to add names to faces with keyboard shortcuts and it even auto suggests names for faces. After the first hour and a half, I commented via twitter that "going through the face-detection in iPhoto '09 and naming/confirming faces in photos is actually surprisingly fun and kind of addicting." But now, I am in hour 4 of face tagging and I have to say the joy and novelty is gone. And I'm only half way through my photos. I can see this having been a great tool if I used it from the beginning, but at the moment it feels like a chore. I suppose it will be worth it when I'm done when I can type a name in and see all the pictures that have that person's face in them. In closing, here's the funniest thing that's happened:  Labels: apple, photography, software
So, over the past few months I have been looking for a good way of listening and discovering music on the mac. I said that what I wanted in a service was to:
"Why doesn't Last.fm just charge a few bucks more a month to let you listen to music on-demand? That would be ideal."Well that's what they are going to do, so I couldn't have asked for anything better. The also already have a great personalized radio service, plus a native OS X client (which they say will be updated to support this new service) that doesn't crash if your browser crashes like the other "online services" do. Last.fm also has been keeping track of all the music I have listened to for the past 3 or so years and has an interesting (albeit unexplored by me) social networking aspect to the site. Also, if you didn't read it, they now allow anyone to listen to any song or any album on their website for free up to 3 times. This is awesome. This means you can decide if a new album you are interested in is worth spending the money on by listening to the whole thing first. Not much more to say other than I am extremely excited for what last.fm has in store in the near future, and instead of waiting around for Yahoo's cryptic hints to pan out, I am fully getting behind last.fm, I just hope they get a big enough backlog and low enough price to make it all worth it. Labels: mac, music, musicsearch, software
When I saw this video, I was completely blown away. This is a video of a student who uses a normal Wii remote with some infra red sensors (like on the wii's sensor bar) and hooks them up to a simple 3-D program to create an amazing virtual reality experience on just a normal TV. Watch the video and see how game developer's for the wii could easily implement a mind blowing one player first-persom virtual reality game for the Wii. Labels: software, video, videogames, wii
So in searching for a good music service on OS X, I decided to give Napster a try. Napster just released a new version of their service that includes a full web interface which works cross-browser and cross-platform. I signed up for a 30 day trial and liked it, but not enough to keep and pay for the service. Fist, the interface is actually petty nice. It's well laid out and works pretty much how I would expect it to. The only 2 things that seem strange visually are the status bar at the top (shouldn't it be at the bottom of the app?) and the search box has electric blue text nad looks very strange and out of place. I am torn because while I love that it is a full-fledged web app (something I have wanted for a while), the more I used it, the more I sort of wished it was its own application. One reason this is bad for me especially is because I am a web developer so I clear my cache a couple hundred times a day and crash my browser upwards of a dozen times a day which isn't good for trying to listen to music that plays in the browser. A nice compromise to this might be something like running Npaster in Mozilla's Prism so it can be it's own app. I wish it would handle search a little better. I accidentally had it on "song search" or something but thought I was on "artist search" and searched for a band. All it said was "No Results". It would have been nice had it said "No Results in Songs for 'Mates of State' but there was 1 Artist Match" with a link to the artist or artist search results. What disappointed me most was the lack of a good "Personalized Radio Station" like Yahoo's LaunchCast or Pandora. I tried to use Napster's "Auto Playlists" but they were, for the most part, really bad recommendations for similar artists. The other problem with the "Auto Playlist" Idea is that the kinds of bands I like vary quite a bit which I think that can be said for most people. Ben Folds is nothing like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah who is nothing like The Streets but I love them all. I would try to listen to the auto-playlists but their recommendations were always pretty bad, even in the same genre. Maybe to get the most out of Napster I need to treat it a little differently, like build up my own music library and listen to that on shuffle, but I can already do that with my iPod. What I want is to listen to music I like as well as music that I might like, recommendations mixed in to stuff that I know I like. I can't really get that with Napster, at least, not that I found. Also, I really think Napster needs a better homepage. Napster.com looks like a banner ad. It is way off-putting. Look at some other product pages from around the web: Apple product pages, Firefox, Delicious Library, etc are well done. I would never even want to try Napster just by visiting the homepage. How about screenshots? Also, there are so many old pages lying around the web for old features and out of date features for Napster. Reading these pages I really thought there was a radio player in Napster Online. Took me an hour googling to find out that is is maybe only a feature for the desktop software and even at that, maybe this feature doesn't exist anymore. I wouldn't know. Didn't say anything in the help either. So I might try it again in the future, but for now I will move on and continue my search for a great music program on the mac. I just hope they start a personalized internet radio feature based on user ratings. That would get me to become a paying customer. Overall though like I said, it's not for me. Labels: mac, music, musicsearch, review, software
Quick post that should make life a little easier and bearable if you use Twitterific, TiVo or both. Twitterific is a Mac OSX interface for twitter. Everyone was saying such great things about it but I absolutely hated it for two reasons: 1) It was supposed to be a Heads-Up display for your twitter contacts, but it never went away and got in the way very easily and very quickly. 2) I close and open my laptop a lot which, in turn, kills and re-enables the wireless internet connection frequently, it messes with twitterific's frequent update requests and constantly gives you error messages saying it can't connect to the internet. There is an easy fix for both of these problems but it took me a while to realize they could be changed. When twitterific is open, hit the monkey wrench icon to get to the preferences. In there you can 1) Set "After refresh, hide window [after 30 seconds]" This is great because then when someone updates, the window will pop up, and by the time you're done reading the message (30 seconds), the twitterific window will auto-hide. Very handy. 2) Uncheck "Show error messages". This will suppress the "can't connect to the internet" messages you get every time you open your laptop lid. TiVo has some great UI, very simple and very easy, but one thing I don't like is how long it takes to get to common menu's, like the "Season Pass Manager" screen. Well Sara accidentally but triumphantly discovered something great: remote control shortcuts for the Tivo. In the main menu (the one that you get to when you hit the TiVo button) you can press the numbers 1-9 to get to various menus. They are as follows:
"You're more advanced than a cockroach, have you ever tried explaining yourself to one of them?" Labels: software
Watching videos on the internet is becoming a more common thing these days with YouTube, Google Video and the like, but if you own a laptop like me, it can be frustrating when the screen dims to save energy. Video-playing applications know to keep the screen from dimming, but websites can't do that. So last night, when watching a TV show, we'll call it "34" (the TiVo recorded it, but the audio gets crackly when it is cold in the house), I had to find a solution to the dimming screen. Jiggler is a simple mac application. All it does is jiggle the cursor at any given interval while it's running. The movie keeps playing and the screen doesn't dim. I love simple applications.
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