Newton’s Lore

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.

Incorporating some iPhone categories this year (because hey, they’re cooler than those boring old Macs), we have

• Best iPhone Web Application - Remember The Milk for iPhone and iPod touch 1.0 You’ll never forget the milk again! (runner up was AP Mobile News Network 1.0)
• Best Mac OS X Leopard Application - ScreenFlow 1.1.1 from Vara Software Limited for capturing and producing screencasts. (Runner up was the cool Bee Docs Timeline 3D Edition 2.1 for producing 3D timelines, strangely enough)
• Best New Mac OS X Leopard Game - Guitar Hero: III Legends of Rock 1.1 (Runner up Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars 1.09)
• Best Mac OS X Leopard User Experience Macnification from Orbicule BVBA (Runner up, Checkout 2.1 point of sale system from Werck BV)
• Best Mac OS X Leopard Graphics and Media Application - Screenflow 1.1.1 (Runner Up FotoMagico 2.2 from Boinx Software Ltd.
• Best Mac OS X Leopard Student Product - Squirrel (alpha), a financial management application from Axel Péju (runner up Flow 1.0.1, an FTP client with editor and QuickLook from Brian Amerige)

• Optical drives aren’t recognised in Vista after installing iTunes 7. But it’s ok, you can fix it by editing the registry!
• The call it “Time Machine” because when you run Time Machine off your install DVD it thinks it’s on Pacific Standard Time
• Big list of keyboard shortcuts. I had forgotten you could hit the control key whilst using command-shift-4 to get the screengrab on the clipboard. Also didn’t know you could command-click the window toolbar button to get different views.
• Troubleshooting procedure for your mac not starting up in 10.3.9
• How to use your iPod as a storage drive. Remember, if you use FAT32 you won’t be able to put files larger than 4Gb onto it!
• How to troubleshoot locked files
• The New User’s Guide to the iPod shuffle (put your right foot in, take your right foot out…)
• You need to use shift-control-option to reset the SMC on your MacBook Air
• You can get the MacBook Air DVD or CD sharing software here
• A diagram of the MacBook Pro’s ports. Omitting the Firewire 800 port?
• To change your default Mail or Web Browser you need to use Safari or Mail, even if you’re not using them. Because since InternetConfig went away Apple doesn’t know where to put these things.

If you want to use your Nintendo Wii remote (Wiimote) with your Mac (via Bluetooth) (perhaps because you liked Tony Stark’s movie UI and a Wii is a cheaper way to get accelerometer gear check out

• DarwiinRemote
• The Wiinstrument for use with MIDI and/or Garageband.
• Remote Buddy

For the more programmatically inclined there’s

• WiiremoteJ
• Wiimote Simple (an open source Java library)
• WiiJuce

Over at the MacinTalk forums there are somCocoa Coding Calisthenics by chrome for you to try your hand at. Chrome is using 10.5, which is good as things were a bit different in 10.4.

Nominations for the 2008 Apple Design Awards are now open. Categories include:

• iPhone Developer Showcase
• Best iPhone Web Application
• Best Mac OS X Leopard Application
• Best New Mac OS X Leopard Game
• Best Mac OS X Leopard User Experience
• Best Mac OS X Leopard Graphics and Media Application
• Best Mac OS X Leopard Student Product

Entries close 5pm PDT May 12th 2008.

The Apple University Consortium has announced innovation Seeding Grants, primarily aimed at students. Participants are provided with a mentor, equipment and resources to complete the project and must share progress via a blog with the ultimate outcome being licensed via open source, creative commons or similar licensing.

Picked up a 500Gb Time Capsule. Got home and was somewhat in a hurry. Power cable was a bit hard to get pushed in properly, although there was no visible evidence of why this would have been the case in either the plug or the socket.
Ignored the “Install this first” CDs, as usual, and fired up Airport Admin utility under Leopard on the wired LAN and it found the existing Airport Express. Did a “Save As…” to save the config of the existing Airport Express (including passwords). Then unplugged the Airport Express and plugged in the Time Capsule, attached to the network cable that used to be plugged into the airport express. Interestingly the assistant offered me the chance to use the Time Capsule to replace an existing wireless access point, but it wanted me to find it (and I’d just unplugged it :). So I plugged it back in to power and the LAN, but the Assistant couldn’t seem to find it. I gave up at this point, hit the Manual button and just imported the settings from the Airport Express (seemed like a safe bet) into the Time Capsule’s settings. This seemed to work. Changed security to WPA Personal and restarted the Time Capsule.
So, now turn on Time Machine on the Leopard box and get it started. That was at 18:30, and it’s now done 47.3 of 69.44Gb (1,396,130 items from my 80Gb drive) after some 5.75hrs (over Gigabit).
Meanwhile, every other machine had to have its Airport connection changed to WPA Personal, and even though I’m pretty sure I typed the password in several times, it took a while to register and stick (at least I hope it’s stuck now!).
Are network speeds faster? Hard to tell. I haven’t maxed out the speed as currently we need backward compatibility with 802.11g until the next round of upgrades. It offers 802.11n on 2.4 or 5GHz, and 802.11a compatibility as well as 802.11n/b/g.
Other noteworthy things are that the Airport Admin utility displays a set of warnings about the current Time Capsule configuration (ie no DNS, multiple DHCP, etc.).
The Time Capsule also offers to sync with a timeserver, and also flash its light if there’s a software update available. This is much less useful as it’s going to be stuck in a separate room where I’m unlikely to see its flashing light.
There’s also support to “Advertise configuration globally” via Bonjour, or so it seems to make it available globally over the internet. I don’t enable this.
I’d heard rumours of it running hot. Sure, it’s warm, but not really any warmer than my ADSL router, and it’s been doing a lot more work for the past 5 hours. Plus it’s got an internal power supply, so it’ll be warmer from that alone.
The other thing is now there’s an extra shared volume appearing in the Finder. Logging into it reveals a shared disk onto which I can put stuff. Cool. Checking in the Airport Admin shows it’s a guest read-writable volume, which is probably not good by default. Now locked down
So far, it seems to be behaving pretty much as expected. I could do setup in a hurry without too much pain. It claims to be backing up at a reasonable speed.
Now I just need to test recovery

From the mac-dev-jobs list on 27th March:

Looking for an experienced OSX developer to build a native OSX versionof the ZoomFoot application (www.zoomfoot.com). ZoomFoot is a sharedphotograph screen saver and the project is sponsored by a verysuccessful Internet entrepreneur. We’re looking for more than simply acontract developer; we’re looking for a new team member to bringeverything we do in the years to come to world of Apple. This is anopportunity to embark on an entrepreneurial adventure, not just writea new OSX client. 

Mail zoomfootguy a t gmail.com if you’re interested

Before there was the Nike+iPod there were the Puma RS computer tennis shoes with inbuilt pedometers that plugged into your Apple ][