23 September 2006

Long live the radio

My thoughts have been pointing that way for a while (ever since I started thinking of the name for the upcoming-maybe #ff00aa podcast radio), but this time it’s really official: the word ‘podcast’ is out.

Maybe that makes as much sense, and they have as much reason for it, as Google’s lawyers asking people not to use ‘google’ as a verb, but even if that were the case (and I’m not convinced at all it is) — ‘podcasts’ no more.

I, Cringely on the iTV:

I’m quite certain we won’t see any Blu-ray drives in Apple computers until the iTunes Store has a deal to sell Sony films. There is a simple quid pro quo here, not just in the lack of Blu-ray drives, but also in the on-again, off-again nature of Sony camcorder sales in the Apple stores.

That’s an interesting idea. I don’t know it that’s true, but if it isn’t Steve Jobs ought to take an interest in that suggestion.

Okay, clearly, that’s something he’s quite capable of having thought out for himself.

The USB port is clearly intended for an Apple iSight camera, a webcam to go with your HDTV. It’s iChat for Grandma.

Nevermind that there is no external USB iSight yet (I remember reading that internal iSight uses USB); there are lots of better reasons for a USB port on the iTV — starting with iPod docks.

He does have a point, though, that the iTV should have videochat functionality: what reason is there not to have it? TV-based videochat has been the way of the future for fifty years now, and I’m sure Apple wouldn’t mind being the one to bring it to the masses.

In tandem with an “iChat mobile” phone that does video conferencing over wifi.

Stoplight [via] (not Spotlight) lets you change the way OS X handles the zoom and close buttons, system-wide or per application: you can choose to have applications quit or not when the last window is closed (as you can see above, I’ve decided that I liked consistent pre-OS X behavior better — although I wager that most Stoplight users will go the exact opposite and make their system work like Windows, until they realize it’s highly inconvenient to have Photoshop quit whenever you close the last image, and relaunch when you want to open the next), and you can choose to force the zoom button to fill the whole screen (which is kind of heretic if you ask me).

While I had no doubt that hacking zoomed window sizes would be relatively easy, I’m quite surprised they managed to keep certain applications open when you close their last window. (Seems like Stoplight just intercepts the closing, and replaces it with application hiding.)

On second thought, maybe I’ll leave most of the settings alone, and just set Activity Monitor to close when I close the window — because I always close the window, then remember I should have quit the app, and when I launch it again it opens without a window because it stupidly remembers its last state.

Oh, crappit, bad surprise when I try the layout in Camino:

There is no way of making PNG images that match CSS colors in all PNG-supporting browsers. This reduces the usefulness of the otherwise excellent image format. If the image colors and the colors defined in a style sheet need to match, it is safer to use GIF or JPEG. If you want to use PNG and don’t care about older browser versions (pre-Tiger Safari in particular), the best course of action is removing all the color space information from the PNG files [with pngcrush]. If you only want a match with the background color, you could make the background a PNG image as well.

Thank goodness the last hint is applicable to #ff00aa. (Although that does pose a problem, because the body background image was originally used for the header.)

I have no idea what this blog looks like in Internet Explorer, and don’t give a damn except for morbid curiosity.