I know, I know, it’s been way too long since I last blogged. It’s not that I haven’t felt like it, I’ve just been busy lately, and all of this past week I’ve been really sick. Soon, though, I’ll be returning to a regular update schedule (3 times a week?), and some changes will be made to the blog itself. Currently, as far as that goes, I’m contemplating a switch to WordPress, and a minimal design is in the works.

I’ll keep you posted and will be back soon (I hope).

In case you haven’t been aware of it these past couple weeks, there’s been an awesome “American Idol meets Mac shareware” type contest going on, over at MyDreamApp.com.

To quote the site, My Dream App is “The event where 24 finalists compete for a chance to have their dream app made into reality.” I thing I’ve really liked about this contest is that just like in American Idol where the judges critique the singing, over these past several weeks various celebrities of the Apple and tech worlds have served as guest judges to comment on what in this case are software ideas. This week, among a few other judges (Amber MacArthur included), both Guy Kawasaki and Steve Wozniak are judging, as well as J Allard, creator of the Zune and Xbox! As cool of judges as there may be, the power to decide who wins ultimately lies in the users’ hands, and voting for my different faves has been really fun.

Now, what would a contest be without prizes? As the site description says, the last three remaining contestants, in addition to receiving a bunch of awesome Apple gear, will amazingly get their ideas developed by some of the most well-known Mac shareware developers into actual applications. But, for the winners, the fun doesn’t end here: they’re guaranteed royalties from sales of the apps, which will be shareware, for life.

The ideas submitted have been really creative, and most of them are apps I’d love to use. And even if you’ve missed out on voting so far, the final round isn’t over ’til Wednesday so there’s still plenty of time to sign up. So, what are you waiting for? Get to it

I have something really exciting to announce today: after applying a couple days ago, I just became a member of the awesome teen blogging network, Random Shapes. This is a great opportunity for me to connect with other bloggers my age and of course also have more people read my blog. Thanks so much to all the members who approved me, I look forward to getting to know all of you.

You can definitely expect a more regular update schedule now,

-Henry

If there’s one video blog worth checking out it’s Ze Frank’s The Show. With its tagline of “Thinking So You Don’t Have To”, The Show is almost like hearing someone’s snarky, strange, and sometimes down-right hilarious thoughts and rants that they would otherwise keep to themselves. But beyond this, most of the time Ze’s commentary on the news (though often masked with humor) is almost chillingly dead-on, and he has a way of really grabbing your attention. Then again, the exclusively close-up camera angles (which provide an interesting touch) might attribute to this! If you haven’t already seen it, then I definitely suggest you watch an episode or two.

No, not that kind of 404. I’m talking about the first, much needed update to TextPattern–the content management system that powers this site–since December ‘05, now version 4.04. Usually “point releases” are largely insignificant, but in this case several things were fixed and changed. The only visually noticeable changes are on the admin side with the UI, and those are a refined control panel which has a better-kempt design than the previous. There’s also some other admin-related changes, but I won’t get into that. If any thing this just means the site will run a little more smoothly. For instance, the RSS feed is now version 2.0 and actually works (the previous didn’t insert any timestamps)!

If you’re looking for a great CMS/blogging webapp and aren’t afraid to get your hands a little dirty (though less dirty now with 4.04), then I can now definitely suggest that you download the awesome and free TextPattern.

After singlehandedly circumnavigating the globe in a dinky old sailboat, I’m back and ready for action! As far as anything at all worth noting goes, I’ve changed the site cosmetically a little, modifying the color scheme once again. Also, there’s now a link beneath the header with the extremely specific title of ‘Show/hide crap’ which shows/hides some various site information. Go ahead, I dare you to click it–wait, no–I double-dog dare you!

Edit: I made the link above just a tad more specific (hehe), and also added a sparsely-filled contact section. If you were wondering, I used the awesome script.aculo.us effects library to do the sliding feature for the different sections.

As I’m assuming everyone knows by now, last Tuesday Apple released and announced some really cool products. I won’t go into detail as it’s been plenty covered, but I will say that I broke down and got a “new” 5.5G *80 gig iPod*. Insanely great is really the only phrase that comes to mind when talking about it, strangely enough. And yes, I know, it’s more or less the same iPod With Video, sans a widescreen display with a virtual clickwheel, that’s been on the market since last October, but in my case it’s the brand spankin’ new iPod that’s been sitting on my desk for just over a day!

I really do like the iPod a lot, and having a 80 gigs of storage is mind-boggling, even a little crazy, though I’m sure that once I start dumping videos on it I’ll be thankful for all that hard drive space. Speaking about the hard drive, maybe it’s just because it’s so high-capacity, but when I select say a video, I can actually feel the iPod vibrating slightly and hear the drive quite distinctly. I suppose I’m just picky, and on second thought, you’re going to have earbuds in or headphones on when you’re listening to music or watching a video anyways, which entirely block out the noise (which is somewhat faint to begin with). In any case, my iPod remains a great device and will surely remain so for a long time. Well, at least in this blogger’s eyes…

Woohoo! Yes, I know, this is what you might call quality (rather, not quality) re-blogging material, but I seriously am beyond excited for tomorrow’s Apple event. I think us Apple enthusiasts have really been needing one of these media events, something with mystique, something out of nowhere. Something not like WWDC, as in, something interesting for everyone, not just the pros. Then again, a lot of times because of the massive amount of rumors that circulate before various Apple product releases, peoples’ expectations are inflated and exceed what is plausible much of the time, and especially with WWDC considering the ‘D’ does in fact stand for developers. But enough on that rant.

As far as tomorrow goes, I’d personally love to see a movie store as mentioned in a previous post and also perhaps a 16×9 iPod, and I think at least the movie store is indeed a reality. But honestly, rumors are rumors, and I’m sure that whatever Jobs announces tomorrow will be, he he, insanely awesome.

So far on this blog I don’t think I’ve talked about web development, which is a biggy as far my comp-uuu-tarrr machine related interests go. Now, what I’m about to say everyone will likely scoff at, but I’m a big fan of Perl for making web apps. Now, I’ve never created a web app that’s gotten wildly popular and had to scale, nor have I created one where I’m not the only user, and nothing too complex, so I can’t talk defend Perl in that sense. However, as far as actually accomplishing a task, Perl just seems really logical to me, and what it lacks in free online tutorials (versus PHP with tons) it makes up for in its flexibility for doing things in multiple ways, as its slogan, “There’s more than one way to do it.” suggests.

But enough of this, now on to what I actually intend to start making: ladies and gentleman say hello to scrump.tio.us Hmm, I’m trying to think where I got my inspiration from, though note: I haven’t registered the domain. As you may of guessed, basically it’ll be a cheap, less good, in fact, extremely bad version of Del.icio.us. This means it’ll basically let a user save a link, preferably tag it, and optionally give it a brief description. Then other users can see the stream of links you save, and you can see others’. In addition to this, I may employ a rating feature. So, why create it, you say? Well, to tell you the truth, it’s really more for me than it is for you, in terms of learning different programming techniques, things of that nature. However, if there’s any interest I may indeed let others use it. In the meantime though, use Del.icio.us (and even if I complete it, still, and only use Del.icio.us, I command you!), heh. I might post updates about the project and maybe screenshots if I ever do develop it, so stay tuned.

To all readers out there, I need your feedback. Just a little bit ago I changed the color scheme of the site. Previously I felt it was a little to bland and plain, and I thought some complimentary shades of blue would look pretty nice. What is/are your opinion(s), as you’re the people/person who, I hope, actually read(s) this?

If you haven’t already heard, after rampant speculation about a supposed Apple media event on the 12th of this month, Apple has finally shed some light on the rumors, confirming the event’s existence. And several websites have posted images of the exclusive invitation, which merely reads, ‘It’s Showtime’. This has given way to even more speculation, with the main focus of the rumors being on a potential iTunes Movie Store announcement and the release of the long-awaited “true” video iPod to play such movies. I’m really excited about the notion of this Movie Store, as I already love having access to such a large number of TV shows in the iTMS, and if this were to be a reality, as with the TV shows announcement, after 1 or 2 big names sign on, every other movie studio will follow suit for sure. But the rumor accompanying this was what troubled me — that movies would sell for 9.99, just as the one movie in the iTMS (High School Musical — yuk) does.

Unlike how I feel about music, I personally would prefer a subscription model for this movie store, though Jobs has repeatedly condemned such a strategy at least for music and TV shows, stating that people want to own their content. Well, for music I agree, because you’ll listen to a song more than just once over a long period of time, but with movies I rarely re-watch them, and I’d much rather pay 15 bucks a month to get unlimited access to a library of movies that are good for 30 days or even less time than be ripped off for a mere one title. But that’s just my two cents.