Newton’s Lore

Humble Daisy are letting you register their Profcast podcast producing software before 16th August 2008 and to get 50% off. If you register on the 14th August (the company’s anniversary) you get a free upgrade to version 3.0 when it’s released

Some friends of mine have written an article for Media Culture called iTunes Is Pretty (Useless) When You’re Blind: Digital Design Is Triggering Disability When It Could Be a Solution.
Check it out!

Although I’m somewhat suspicious that the claim that pod in iPod stands for “Portable on Demand”, seems more like a backronym coined by those wanting to use it to attempt to avoid being sued by Apple’s Lawyers.

Meanwhile some folks find podcasting less than inclusionary (sadly for a lecture series on Disability Inclusion!)

Personally I think the iPhone will suck from the ‘You have to look at it to use it’ point of view. Buttons at least make phones easier to use without looking at them. Perhaps some accelerometer based gesture user interface (although difficult to use in your pocket without looking somewhat suspicious Roll on the haptic iPhone.

According to The Australian’s IT section, Apple Australia have announced the availability of iTunes U in Australia. Content will be provided by some of Australia’s leading universities including

• The University of Western Australia
• The University of New South Wales
• Griffith University
• Swinburne University
• Otago University
• Australian National University
• University of Melbourne

Conveniently these universities are already running automated lecture capture or recording systems.

The Australian Apple University Consortium has announced the 2008 AUC Honours Scholarship recipients who will receive AU$4000 during their honours year. The UWA winner will leveraging FSEvent notifications

Check out the Lego-touch application for building Lego on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Want $10,000 of funding from the Apple University Consortium? The AUC are selecting 3 students and their projects to receive funding over two years. Details of the Student Developer Scholarships are here.

Apple have released their “Find Out How” Mac OS X video tutorial site, currently featuring “Anatomy of a Mac”, “Move to Mac”, “Windows on a Mac”.

You can download the One Laptop Per Child OS and run it under VMWare Fusion if you want to try it out but can’t get your hands on the OLPC XO hardware yet.

• You can make the Finder icon hover above the dock mid bounce
• You can make running applications (The Finder, AppleWorks), not appear in the command-Tab switcher. I have no idea how!
• Faux leopard fur looks weird when viewed as a colour negative (think blue and white)
• Through random clicking you can summon up a web browser and stream audio sports news from Yahoo

Things you might want to lock down include

• The contents of The Dock
• CD Eject
• Renaming the Library Folder
• System Preferences

Lots of useful tips about Apple Software Restore multicast at the site of Mike Bombich (The NetRestore and CarbonCopyCloner guy).