#FF00AA

@games@

Nintendo Wii to have voice-over-IP support? Can you believe just how much cooler the $200 system will be than all others? The PS3 better have videophone functionality with EyeToy, for the price.

(And, yeah, I realize we have reached Apple levels of speculation around the Wii. Goes to show: all you have to do is cover your appliance with shiny white plastic and enjoy the free publicity.)

 

@computer@

Ant Farm [via]. I had no idea that was possible at all, yet judging by the comments it seems almost common — must be a shocker, especially in the middle of a big, expensive Cinema Display.

 

@apple@

Dropped by the Fnac today, to check out the MacBook. You can’t play at all with computers there (keyboards are locked under thick acrylic panes) but (a) gee, that’s too tiny a screen for anything serious, how could people ever really want to use a 12-inch PowerBook, and even complain that the 13-inch MacBook is too big? and (b) compared to a nearby MacBook Pro, screen reflections are insane. I don’t care how much brighter and more saturated images are (incidentally, the vertical viewing angle seemed rather poor), I don’t want that on my computer, ever.

 

@linux@

Google releases Picasa for Linux. (Picasa is the iPhoto clone for Windows that Google acquired a year or two ago. Funny thing that nobody could ever really figure out why they bought it, and their strategy regarding it still evades me. Clearly, it wasn’t so much about using Hello’s technology in a hypothetical Google instant messenger.)

Okay, it’s more like a Wine-compatible edition of the Windows program (plus 200 hundred patches contributed to the Wine codebase), but still — wow, and, also, what the hell? Are they just throwing darts at a spinning wheel nowadays to decide which projects to give time and money to? Or are they really just placing their pawns to launch their great offensive against Microsoft? (If so, they should probably revise their strategy and not base it on Wine.)

 

@windows@

Microsoft plans to take on JPEG with its own Windows Media Photo format. Ungh.

Microsoft and file formats, that’s a bit like… Microsoft and any other technology: scary. They lost the WMA vs. AAC battle because they had no leverage on the music player business (plus I suppose most Windowsians want to use anything but Windows Media Player to listen to their music — from what I’ve seen, the next version will lift enough UI from iTunes to remedy that); they only decided to (let a third-party) release WMV codecs for the Mac when they realized they just weren’t going to win that fight either (maybe because too many webdesigners were on Macs, hence using Quicktime to publish videos, which Apple hadn’t neglected to distribute to Windows users — and pirated videos used DivX, and now everyone uses web-based cross-platform solutions); even though they had not proprietary format to push on that front yet, they managed to block PNG adoption just by being too lazy to implement alpha channels in MSIE. Why aren’t I thrilled that they’re going after a new target now?

On the one hand, WMPhoto has even more reason to fail than WMV did, considering the stronghold Apple has over the webdesign market; but you can expect that format to be used in Windows Vista to save and publish a user’s photographs — not to mention Office documents. Sure, considering the tangled mess of image format patents, having a big player step in and define a new format for the whole world’s sake is nice — if it’s anyone but Microsoft, please!