For the spillover
November 30th, 2007 — mac
Uncovered: Evidence that Mac OS X could run Windows apps soon — Once Intel chips landed inside Macs and Boot Camp made its debut, it got a lot harder to blame rumor mongers for making a certain leap: Mac OS X could one day run Windows apps sans-Windows. Indeed, projects like the open source Wine …
Source: Infinite Loop
Author: David Chartier
Link: http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/11/30…
November 30th, 2007 — iPhone
We wouldn't usually call people douchebags lightly (ok we would), but when you complain that deaf people are getting special treatment when they're offered a $27.99 non-voice, data-only plan for their iPhone, you're one huge douchebag. A Colorado AT&T store was offering said plan for the hearing-impaired–since they get very little use out of a voice plan–but got slapped down by AT&T Corporate Marketing because people were complaining. The upshot? No more data-only plan for the deaf community. If you think there's a problem here, call up AT&T tell them you really think there should be a data-only plan. [Deafmac via Deafmac via TUAW via Crunchgear]
Update: AT&T's officially bringing an iPhone data-only plan for the hearing-impaired. see here for details.
November 30th, 2007 — ajax
Using color has been a tried and true method of representing importance or value in a UI. Whether it’s negative balance or indicating a successful process, color helps to convey your message much more effectively then plain old text.
Josh Nathanson came up with an interesting jQuery plugin called HeatColor which assigns colors to elements based on a range of values:
HeatColor is a plugin that allows you to assign colors to elements, based on a value derived from that element. The derived value is compared to a range of values, either determined automatically or passed in, and the element is assigned a “heat” color based on its derived value’s position within the range.
You bind a collection of elements such as table rows, divs or list members to heatcolor and let it do the work.
It can find the min and max values of the desired elements, or you can pass them in manually.
The plugin is very easy to use providing for a callback method to return the value to base the color on as well as several config options that can determine the color scheme, order of colors, and min/max for the range of values. The following snippet of code generated some cool results:
$(\"#ex1\").tablesorter();
function sortwithcolor( column ) {
$(\"#ex1 > tbody > tr\").heatcolor(
function() { return $(\"td:nth-child(\" + column + \")\", this).text(); }
);
};
$(\"th\").click(function() {
$(this).siblings().css(\"background-color\",\"#cccccc\").end().css(\"background-color\",\"#dd0000\");
sortwithcolor( $(this).parent().children().index( this ) + 1 );
});
sortwithcolor(8);
Josh created some other cool demos that are really worth checking out so be sure to hit up his plugin’s page for more details.
November 29th, 2007 — cool
Photographer Holger Pooten is well known in Europe for his work with Nike, but as you can see here, he knows how to shoot gadgets, too. Here he’s frozen an exploded view of a fax machine, right in front of our eyes. Take a look at how he eviscerates a robot cat, and then does his magic on a vase full of orchids:
How does he do that? It’s nearly miraculous. Be sure to visit his site (NSFW) for dozens more of Holger’s unique photos. [Holger Pooten]
November 29th, 2007 — gear
The Nail Cushion is neither a fakir’s beanbag nor an oversized pin cushion. It is, in fact, a rather smart and simple solution to the perennial swollen thumb problem.
The rubber strip has a series of crosses which will grip a nail, keeping your precious and brittle fingers far away. And because the plate sits slightly away from the surface, it acts as a guide to help you nail straight. Neat and simple.
Product page [Yanko]
November 28th, 2007 — music
Music search engines are just one of the many ways to get free music on the Internet (BitTorrent and MP3Sparks, formerly AllofMP3, are other popular ways). But for some users they are a near perfect way to listen to music on demand, and/or round out their music collection.
Three that we’ve been tracking are SeeqPod, Songza and Skreemr.
All three index the web, or parts of the web, looking for music files that people have uploaded to servers. Users search by artist or song. MP3s or other non-DRM sound files with metadata matching the query are served as results.
Unlike sites like LaLa, Imeem and Pandora (and many others), which are all trying to play by various RIAA rules to deliver music to users, music search engines generally don’t pay royalties of any kind. The music itself is never on their servers, so they have significantly less copyright exposure. More on that below.
Of the three, Seeqpod is the most useful. It has an index of 8 million individual songs, auto-spell checks queries to find common misspellings, and allows users to create playlists. Seeqpod also has embeddable players, and will try to find music videos of songs you are playing. Seeqpod, by the way, was originally a project of the Lawrence Berkely National Lab.
SeeqPod Music beta - Playable SearchSongza also allows users to create playlists and provide embeddable players.Skreemr has bare bones functionality and the hit rate is a little iffy. But they have one feature that the others do not - a direct link to the file on the third party server. That means downloading the song to your hard drive is just a right mouse click away.
A fourth company, Deezer, changed its model in the face of litigation in France.
Copyright, Schmopyright
There’s no reason to mince words here - the music these sites are playing is almost always copyright infringing. But it’s distributed on servers unaffiliated with the search engine itself, making it effectively impossible for the RIAA and its international equivalents to do much about it other than try to force the largest infringers to remove the content. That’s because there is little recourse against the search engines themselves.
None of those legalities affect the search engines, though. It’s unlikely that under current U.S. law the RIAA can do anything at all to stop them.
Current case law gives a lot of leeway to search engines. I spoke this evening with Andrew Bridges, counsel for Google in Perfect 10 v. Google. In that case, Google was held not held to be infringing the copyright on images just by displaying a thumbnail of the image in search results.
The same arguments are valid with the music search engines, says Bridges (with the caveat that he’d have to look much more closely at the specific facts of any case).
The services may still be liable for contributory infringement, he says, but there just isn’t any definitive U.S. case law on matter yet. And no statutes cover contributory infringement.
So for now the search engines are free to link to infringing songs, and even stream them on their site. Just so long as the songs themselves are never stored on their servers. That’s good news for Deezer, Seeqpod and Skreemr, and the users who’ve come to rely on them.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
November 28th, 2007 — ajax
Julien Lecomte has written about CrossSafe, a “safe communication mechanism across documents and across domains”.
We already have some solutions such as the URL fragment identifier or the Flash LocalConnection object, so why did Julien see the need for this?
CrossFrame is a variant of the URL fragment identifier mechanism. In the original technique, the containing page sets the URL fragment identifier of an embedded IFrame (usually via its
srcattribute), and the IFrame must poll to detect changes in the value of itslocation.hashproperty. This technique can be further built upon to allow for 2-way communications between an IFrame and its containing page, or between two distinct IFrames.The original URL fragment identifier technique has many limitations, many of which can be worked around except maybe for the following:
- It unnecessarily consumes CPU cycles by requiring the receiver to poll.
- It creates “fake” history entries on Safari and Opera.
How does CrossFrame work?
While CrossFrame also has limitations of its own, I find it to be a much cleaner and simpler approach. Here is how it works:
In order to communicate with the mashup hosted in domain Y, the page, hosted in domain X, dynamically creates a hidden IFrame and points it to a special proxy file hosted in domain Y, using the URL fragment identifier to convey the message (step 1) When the special proxy file is loaded in the hidden IFrame, it reads its URL fragment identifier and passes it to a globally accessible function defined in the IFrame hosting the mashup (step 2) using
parent.frames['mashup']to get to it. The same technique can also be used by the mashup to communicate with the page (the proxy will useparent.parentto get to the page) Finally, when all is said and done, the hidden IFrame is automatically removed from the DOM by the library.
To send and receive messages you use the following JavaScript:
Check out the demo, and they read that Julien doesn’t think that ou should use it :)
November 27th, 2007 — ui
Yossi Vardi, founding investor of ICQ’s Mirabilis, has put an undisclosed amount of money into Tel Aviv startup AllofMe.
The company is developing a product, currently in private beta, with which you can lay out your digital assets (emails, photos, videos, documents, etc.) along a digital timeline. While few details about AllofMe have been revealed, it appears as though you will be able to include media files from online services such as Flickr and YouTube.
Founder Addy Feuerstein has described AllofMe in the following way:
“The idea is that if I or someone else has a picture that includes my son, alone or with friends, I or anyone else will be able to tag the people in the picture and transform these digital assets into part of my sons. When he grows up and takes control over his own timeline, he will have a timeline of tagged material from his childhood…We will also transform the timeline created by each person into a video movie, through a widget on an internet site [and] enable comparison of your timeline with that of your acquaintances, or chronological data files. For instance, you will be able to compare your own timeline with historical events of Time, and see where you were when some important world event occurred.”
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
November 27th, 2007 — ui
If you want to see an interesting set of music-themed mashups, checkout our list of 36 Last.fm mashups all of which in some way utilize the Last.fm API. Many provide unique ways to search for artist data, photos and videos and connect these to Last.fm playlists. Here are three of the most popular entries (note that you can also browse the whole set of these by thumbnail and popularity here):
If you want to see more music-themed mashups you can look through 120 mashups tagged music in our directory.
November 25th, 2007 — web20
If you offer an online storage service, it’s becoming increasingly important to offer an API to it. With this month’s addition of the DigitalBucket API, we now have 10 storage APIs in our listings. Some of these services focus on the API first (or only in the case of Amazon S3), others offer free and “pro” level consumer accounts as well as a developer API. The APIs have been used to integrated with operating system tools (Windows, Mac, Linux), provide direct access to other online services like document and spreadsheet apps, browser extensions, or to provide storage infrastructure for multimedia files like photos and videos. Here’s a summary of these 10 storage APIs:
