News Archive for 03/09/20

Choose an article from the archive listing on this page or refine your selection using the controls in the gray box below.

TIME: iTMS offers legal options for pirates

09/20, 11:00pm

TIME: iTMS offers legal options for pirates

Apple's iTunes Music Store was not only a wake-up call to the rest of the industry, but also to consumers--as a legal download alternative to the hassles of free file sharing. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, however, says "it's not a way to make a lot of money," according to TIME magazine: "With as much as 70% of each sale going to the record label and the rest eaten up by surprisingly high costs for things like infrastructure and credit-card fees, sales volume must but doesn't yet compensate. "It's not a way to make a lot of money," acknowledges Jobs. No, it's a way to help sell iPods," which Apple says almost quadrupled after the launch of iTMS.

Apps: Acquisition, SimpleView, WebBackdrop...

09/20, 4:55pm

Apps: Acquisition, SimpleView, WebBackdrop...

Flash AV Players 2.1 is a skinnable Flash application that broadcasts MP3, SWF (Audio and Video) and JPEG files by loading playlists in XML format. It features navigation and sound controls (across tracks and playlists), preloading according to connection speed, crossfade of movies, adding of backgrounds and comments, etc. [392KB]
The $15 gnutella client, Acquisition 100.2, is the latest version of the peer-to-peer file sharing software. The new release adds the ability to receive artist recommendations based on your searches. It also has protocol improvements to find more files faster. [1.8MB]
Trinity Software's freeware Collage 1.0 searches the Internet for images relating to the artist, track, and album currently playing and displays a collage of these images on your screen (and deletes them after display). [Classic, OSX]
WebBackdrop 1.0 ($5) is a new Mac OS X utility that allows users to display any website as the Mac desktop: "Get updates on stock prices, news, weather, animation, music, and anything else that is on the web without opening a web browser." [124KB]
The $10 shareware MorePhotoLibs 1.01 manages multiple iPhoto with three different modes, including a menubar item (with "tear off" functionality), a resizable floating window, and a single-window UI to display an icon-based list of available libraries, create/rename libraries, and launch iPhoto. [515KB]
Hash has posted the latest update to its $300 3D animation application, Animation:Master v10.5j. It include complete sculpting features, spline-based modeling, OpenGL-based rendering, lip sync key framing, motion libraries, inverse kinematics, and advanced animation tools. [11.8MB]
SimpleView 2.2 is a free slideshow/movie viewer designed for simplicity: "It has no userinterface or menu-items; just launching the application will pop up a folder-requester." Users can customize the background and center/scale fimages to fit on the screen via drag & drop. [732KB]
CopyWrite 1.1 is an application designed for managing writer's projects, offering a note-taking mechanism within a simple, flexible interface for word processing. A limited version of the $20 application. [4.5MB]

Forums: Al PB, Apple Bluetooth devices, DW MX

09/20, 1:50pm

Forums: Al PB, Apple Bluetooth devices, DW MX

Forums Roundup: MacNN readers are discussing the 15" Aluminum PowerBook's PowerPC 7447 processor (instead of the PPC 7457), after detailed photos appeared on the Internet (and unpacking photos here) and confirmed shipment of Apple's new Bluetooth mouse and receipt of the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard; other threads discuss the best DV converters for the Mac, various different screen protectors available for notebooks, the interface of Toast 6 and whether it conforms to Mac UI guidelines, a success story on flashing a PC Radeon 7000 32DDR with a Mac ROM, and notes on Dreamweaver MX 2004, including its speed, UI, and its built-in HTML renderer.