Henry's blog

I recently re-discovered a gem of an app for Mac that I believe to have downloaded several months ago called Quinn.

For as much as people tend to rag on Mac OS for its small selection of games, Quinn is, surprisingly, a free, bang-up rendition of Tetris (or the “popular falling-blocks game which, according to the Tetris Company, must not be named here,” according to the site). I can honestly say that its being a game aside, Quinn’s interface ranks as one of the best I’ve encountered on Mac. With its multi-player functionality, and ability to host games, I know that I’ve spent countless hours trying to top others’ scores as well as my own.

If you’re not a serious gamer, but are interested in a largely mindless and simple, classic game to occupy those few spare moments you might have in your day — which may be far too little time once you become as obsessed with it as I! — I highly recommend Quinn.

Quite a bug indeed — it won’t show any of my album art!

I’ve restarted iTunes several time, but to no avail. Perhaps a reboot is in order.

Anyone else had this happen to them? If so, how did you fix it?

Update: Looks like a reboot did the trick — problem resolved. Some other programs were acting kind of wonky, crashing when opened, but it seems as though the reboot fixed this, too. Strange while it lasted.

I was a guest writer for a column called Friday Night Links at The Mac Mind, a site run by Anthony Cole, an acquaintance of mine from Random Shapes. In it, I provide some commentary on five links I dug up related to happenings in the world of Apple this week. Check it out

Well it seems that Steve Jobs meant business after his press release a few months ago regarding his negative feelings towards DRM.

Today, Apple and EMI entered into agreements allowing people to download DRM-free music with a doubled sound quality for a premium and music videos with no added cost on Apple’s iTunes Store. Costing thirty cents more than iTunes’ normal offering of 99 cents-a-song, users now really own their music; DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management, is technology embedded in media that lets content providers restrict uses of it. For iTunes songs, this means that users previously could only listen to their songs on five computers, and burn their songs onto CD a maximum of 7 times. With this landmark deal, users are now free to do as they please with their media.

Steve Jobs seems to have a bright future in mind for DRM-free media on iTunes. When asked about his projection of 2.5 million unrestricted songs on iTunes by year’s end, said Jobs, “Yes… that is our projection for other labels coming on board as well.”

Addendum: Typed in haste, I forgot to mention in this post that users who’ve downloaded music from EMI artists in the past may convert these purchases to DRM-free, higher quality versions for 30 cents extra. It’d be nice if they didn’t charge a fee, but oh well, I’m more than happy to be able to have DRM-free iTunes content at all!

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

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.

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.

I feel bad for them, those icons on my dock. Never again will they have as much fun as they used to, bouncing around before going to work. ‘Twas a gig and a half more RAM that did the whole bouncing thing in, and honestly I can’t say I regret it.