hexstatik

Last Friday, Apple released iTunes 8.0.2 and let me tell you how happy I am! With the previous version of iTunes on my MacBook, I had to suffer through what felt like an eternity of spinning beach ball of death every time I opened iTunes. At first, I thought it was because I had moved my music collection to a network drive, but after speaking to Zameer and googling, I soon realized that I wasn’t the only one experiencing this pain.

After the update, iTunes loads instantly and is ready to perform any command I tell it. It is also much faster when scrolling my (medium sized => ~2000 songs, 14GB) music collection, switching tasks, downloading podcasts, etc…

If you are experiencing any slow downs in iTunes, you would probably benefit a great deal by updating.

last week, apple took the wraps off it’s newest line of ipods with updates to the classic, nano and touch. the updates were more or less small incremental changes, with no major changes… with one exception - Genius, which is also a part of the new iTunes 8.

Genius has two parts - playlists and sidebar.

Genius playlists allows you to create awesome playlists instantaneously. once you enable Genius, your library information is sent to apple (anonymously) and analzed. once the analysis is completed, you simply select a song in your library, click on the genius button (in the lower right hand side) and Genius makes a new playlist of 25, 50 or 100 songs. it’s perfect for when you’re in a certain mood and what an entire playlist of similar music, or people who have tons of music and want to rediscover some of the hidden gems in their library, all within literally seconds.

Genius sidebar integrates with the iTunes music store and allows it make recommendations, preview and buy them. i haven’t tried this feature out, but I have recently been looking for more ways to find new music, so i’m also quite excited about this feature as well.

finally, also released last friday was iphone/ipod touch firmware 2.1, which adds support for making genius playlists right on your iphone or ipod touch when you’re on the go - shaweet! a little gem included in the update which hasn’t been widely mentioned, is the new ability to go to the previous song on your iphone by clicking the switch on the included earbuds 3 times. nice touch, apple!

today steve jobs unveiled the 3G iphone at WWDC ‘08 and made it official that the iphone will be arriving in canada on july 11th through rogers or fido. the last piece of the puzzle left to be revealed are the plans that rogers and fido will offer for the phone. I have high hopes that a decent data plan will be available so that i can take full advantage of the data features, but then again, this is canada and we seem to like to pay more for everything here.

while i am happy that the new iphone has better battery life (up to 300 hrs on standby, 5 hrs talk on 3G, 10  talk on 2G), GPS, automatic geotagging of photos and 3rd party apps, i was disappointed to find out that they neglected to upgrade the camera and instead stuck with the current 2MP still camera. granted, the photos from the iphone’s camera aren’t that bad, especially when you compare them to other camera phone pics.

either way, i am very excited to be finally getting my own iphone, especially after my experience in washington state this weekend with my bell prepaid phone.

quicksilver is a cool application for the mac like no other. it’s an application launcher… and so much more. it’s philosophy is “wei wu wei”, or act without doing, and allows you to use your keyboard to do… well, just about anything.

for the longest time, i’d been only using it for the most basic of things, usually launching apps. recently however, i started using twitter, and then also heard from rjtaylor that you can tweet right from quicksilver. my beef with twitter before was that i always needed to open up twitterific to send my tweets, which was kind of tiresome. now, with the new quicksilver action, hooked up to a trigger, a tweet is just a ctrl-opt-cmd-t away!

having this new trigger has opened a whole a new world, and i’ve now created two more:

1. search google (i’m using ctrl-opt-cmd-G)
2. shortened URLs using qurl (ctrl-opt-cmd-L)

you can learn more at the quicksilver tutorial page.

if you use a mac, and you don’t use quicksilver, you are seriously missing out.

today, rogers announced that they had reached an agreement with apple to bring the iphone to canada. while details were scarce, and the 3G iphone just around the corner (rumour is june) it’s nice to finally have it officially confirmed. i for one cannot wait!