Here’s to the crazy ones. I missed that. Cute.

Du 25 au 29 septembre se tient Apple Expo, le rendez-vous incontournable des fondus de Mac !

Un accès illimité aux 5 jours du salon, un accès à la salle de presse (pour, entre autre, bloguer en direct du salon !), la possibilité d’intervenir sur la web TV Apple Expo, c’est ce que nous vous proposons grâce aux Pass Presse !

La soirée blogueurs se passe rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie, je peux difficilement trouver une excuse pour sécher. Même si l’accès presse en lui-même, à moins qu’ils me refilent un iPod avec…

Mac OS X 10.5 9A527 Screenshots

The latest iteration of the menu bar does look better than in previous versions, although we still wish it weren’t transparent. I’m surprised that the default new background (which I couldn’t believe was actually the official OS X background until I saw the full Think Secret gallery — even after the introduction of Time Machine, it still looks at odds with Apple design) has a big glowing star right in the middle of the menu bar, but that could actually be a good sign: I recently realized that the transparent menu bar could actually work if they decided to blur the background beneath it (à la Aero, yes). And, if they’re leaving a star there, maybe that’s actually because they know it won’t be so visible when everything’s programmed. Or, yeah, maybe not.

What the hell is up with the fluorescent window controls? There’s something really weird with Leopard so far: on the one hand, they’re pushing everything towards medium grey; on the other, you’ve got the flashy gems and starry background and transparent menu bar that looks so out of place and distracting. All of which makes for a very weird combination.

And Apple’s designers aren’t so good at designing large-scale icons. They look terribly… crude. Plus, Cover Flow doesn’t work so well with traditional OS X icon design. I’m surprised they didn’t think of switching to real 3D icons yet. I guess the next big cat will get on that.

 

Financial Times [via]:

The contract, which was signed by three European mobile operators in recent days, requires that the operators hand over to Apple 10 per cent of the revenues made from calls and data transfers by customers over iPhones.

The deal gives manufacturers of handsets for the first time a direct share of the revenues a mobile phone operator makes from calls and data transfers, marking a shift in the relationship between the parties.

Wow. If that’s true (and we’ll know within a week or two, when the next bit is supposed to be officially announced) it’s no wonder the iPhone is so important to Apple. 10% of all telephone revenue, phew.

The contract was signed by T-Mobile of Germany, Orange of France and O2 in the UK, people familiar with the situation told FT Deutschland.

Orange. Damn. Well, better than nothing, and I like changing phone numbers. Plus, it looks a lot like I won’t be able to afford it anyway.

This is too ludicrous not to be true: Skype crashed for several days because millions of Windows users rebooted at the same time. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Experts have pointed out that Skype generates a lot of traffic between log-in servers and supernodes.

I’d heard about it before, but I didn’t realize it actually had qualities: Mailplane [via] is a dedicated OS X browser for accessing Gmail; the cool thing is, it remembers passwords independently from Safari (if you have several accounts on different Google services, you know what a pain it is that Safari never knows which password you need) and lets you use several Gmail accounts simultaneously.

Untested as of yet (because using the official Gmail notifier circumvents my issue #1 with the service, and I’m not sure I’d actually need several accounts), but sounds pretty cool.

A little reminder that DRM aren’t good, courtesy of Google (if the Video Marketplace hadn’t actually been a failure, you’d have to wonder if it was intentional):

Google ignominiously shut down its video marketplace today via an email to us and everyone else who’s ever tried the service. […] The email to users, which is copied below, also lets them know that any videos they’ve purchased will no longer be viewable. Money spent on videos is not being refunded, either. Users get a sixty day credit on their Google Checkout account instead.

Uh… “Don’t be evil”?

Daring Fireball:

The analogy that comes to mind is to the keyboard on the original Macintosh, which had no arrow keys. The most commonly cited reason for this omission was that Apple wanted to force users to use the mouse, and not allow them to fall back on keyboard-centric habits forged on pre-Mac computers. But another reason was to force developers — including themselves — to design a system and apps that could be accessed entirely by mouse. Pre-Macintosh, how did you move up and down in a list? With arrow keys. How did you move the insertion point in a text editor? With arrow keys. By not even having arrow keys, there was no option but to design software meant to be used with a mouse. […]

By giving users and developers only a mouse for movement, it forced them to learn the Mac way. The lack of cut/copy/paste on the iPhone likewise forces users, along with Apple’s iPhone development team, to do things the iPhone way, rather than the Mac way.

By the way, the point about the original Mac is an interesting reminder just as Apple released the new BlueTooth keyboard — Steve Jobs is indeed a keyphobe. Wanna bet that he uses the new wireless model on his personal iMac?

Infinite Loop:

Apple has a battery page that has some general information about the way lithium batteries are charged and discharged. They stress that you should charge your batteries early and often, rather than let them drain (almost) completely. […]

One recommendation is that you "keep the electrons flowing" by working on the battery from time to time—at least once a month. And you need to run on the battery until the device sleeps once every 30 cycles or so to make sure that the charge indicator stays in sync with the actual battery capacity. […]

[The aging] process is greatly accelerated by two factors: a high temperature and a full charge. This is probably the reason why laptop batteries can be completely worn out after a few years: the battery is completely charged most of the time, and the insides of a computer generate a lot of heat.