WorldPress.com releases Retro Mac blog theme in homage to Steve Jobs

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AppId is over the quota
Summary: The blog service WorldPress.com on Friday released its Retro Mac theme, which offers the black-and-white look of the Finder interface that came with the first-generation Macs.

The blog service WorldPress.com on Friday released its Retro Mac theme, which offers the black-and-white look of the Finder interface that came with the first-generation Macs.

The Just Another WordPress Weblog said that it will evoke some serious computer nostalgia.” Still, the theme is filled with customization options.

For all the memories it brings — and its throwback design — this theme has modern functionality under the hood. Create your own custom menu to replace the first set of icons in the sidebar, upload a custom header image to display below the blog title, or set a custom background. Also included are two footer widget areas and a full-width page template that drops the sidebar.

The original 128K Mac interface used 32-by-32-pixel icons. For Lion and the Leopards, developers must create versions of program icons from 512-by-512 down to 16-by-16 pixels.

In a post from a few years back, I mentioned Marcin Wichary’s amusing (and useful) interface resource called the Graphical User Interface Gallery GUIde. It has many different interface elements from many OSes from the past and present, including Mac, Windows and Gnome and BeOS. It also traces standard file type icons, sounds, splash screens. Check it out.

And by the way, the Mac icons were better than their Windows counterparts in the olden days and still are today.

David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years.

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Growl goes paid and why I upgraded

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AppId is over the quota
By Jason D. O'Grady | November 14, 2011, 12:01am PST

Summary: Growl was previously free, but version 1.3 now costs $1.99 from the Mac App Store. Here’s why it’s worth it.

If you use a Mac, odds are you have Growl installed.

Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X that allows applications to display on-screen alerts.

Growl was previously free but version 1.3, released November 3, now costs $1.99 from the Mac App Store.

Growl team leads Christopher Forsythe and Rudy Richter outlined the major changes in a blog post:

Growl is no longer free to download - Growl as a paid application allows for good changes. We now have people working on Growl full time. Money earned through purchases in the App Store go directly to benefiting Growl. Growl is now available in the App Store at a cost of $1.99 US (different in other regions). Without changing to this paid Growl model, Growl would have died off and would no longer be around to use at all. Growl is however still Open Source, there is more on that later in this post.…but you don’t need Growl installed to get notifications. - When developers update their application to support Growl 1.3, Growl will no longer be required for them to display a notification to you. Think of these updated applications as Growl, and the Growl application as Growl Pro. The Growl 1.3 SDK includes a framework which can display a notification, even if Growl is not available. Developers use the same API. Please see our documentation in the SDK regarding Mist.Growl 1.2 and older will not work with Sandboxed applications - Sandboxing is meant to protect users from bad things happening (which is a good thing!), but it has consequences for applications which are doing good things too (like Growl). Apple announced this summer that Sandboxing is a requirement for all applications in the Mac App Store. As our developers who went to WWDC this year quickly realized, the impending Sandboxing requirement would have broken Growl entirely for applications in the App Store, for everyone, without a large amount of changes. Growl 1.3 introduces support for Sandboxed applications.Out-of-date applications don’t work with Growl 1.3 - Due to the changes in Growl 1.3 in order to get Growl into the App Store, some applications currently do not work with Growl and will need to be updated. Some applications have already updated to address this problem. If you are a developer who requires assistance with these changes, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help. Users can use Growl Version Detective to help mitigate this problem, but long term changes need to come from developers.Growl has always been, and will always be, open source - Growl has always been Open Source, and will remain Open Source for as long as people want to be able to modify the code. The source for Growl is available at our our Google Code Hosting project, under the BSD license.

My favorite feature in Growl 1.3 is its in-app whitelist.

Previously, when an app was annoying me with too many Growl notifications, I had to hunt down the right setting in the offending application. But now, you can easily toggle an apps ability to Growl in Settings > Applications.

So, are you buying?

Jason O'Grady+ is a journalist and author specializing in mobile technology. He has published six books on Apple and mobile gadgets and his PowerPage blog has been publishing for over 15 years.

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Users, developers react to Apple iOS 5's new Music app on iPad. Hate it!

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AppId is over the quota
Summary: While the Music app on smaller iOS devices may be acceptable, users of the new player software on the iPad say it’s more than several big steps backward, especially when listening to large files such as audiobooks.

While the Music app on smaller iOS devices may be acceptable, users of the new player software on the iPad say it’s more than several big steps backward, especially when listening to large files such as audiobooks.

Reader Andrew Morton called the software on the iPad “iPod Lite.”

The new OS has moved us from the iPod.app to the Music.app. As a consequence, we no longer have the pop-over panel for music files that had the 30-second rewind button or chapter list. The only controls left for us poor(er) users is the forward/reverse buttons and the short progress slider. Using the buttons is worse than having to go back to the wheel iPod; at least it had a wheel. And making small time adjustments to a 10-hour file is quite a challenge.

I received a series of thoughtful posts from longtime developer Chris Tomlinson, who is now working in Kathmandu at the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center Digital Library preserving texts and developing cataloging and search software.

He said with no display of the Chapter Title for a selection, there’s no useful way to know where one is in an audiobook. Of course, audiobooks often have several dozen chapters in a segment that usually comprises about 100MB.

The iPhone (and I presume iPod Touch) version of the Music.app retains the chapter viewing and selection functionality from previous iOS 4.3. Only the iPad version of the app has lost the functionality. Without viewing of chapters and their titles and direct selection of chapters, Audiobooks in the Music.app are basically unusable on the iPad.

I routinely record and assemble lectures and seminars for various groups and deliver them as *.m4b audiobooks — with chapter marks, titles and so on. The users that I distribute these audiobooks to have a variety of devices: iPods, iPhones and iPads and so on. Now the ones with iPads won’t be able to listen to the audiobooks effectively.

The Audible player and the Bookmark app player are not solutions because the interface provided from the iPod/Music shared library area does not provide access to chapter information. Audible I suppose has no incentive to support non-DRM’d audiobooks and Bookmark uses whatever interface is provided by Apple to the shared area.

Essentially, the only app that can be used to access chapterized non-DRM’d audiobooks is the Music.app, which is no longer functional on the iPad.

Tomlinson doubted that the Apple developers were experienced with the demands of audiobook listening when designing the controls. He said he was aware of this issue before the GA of iOS 5 but said he could only file warnings into Apple’s Developer Bug Reporter database.

I suggested to Tomlinson that this might be an “opportunity” for a third-party developer. He said it was unlikely that any developer outside Apple would have the juice to do it properly for audiobooks.

The iOS 5 SDK does not make available any access to chapter information in decrypted streams which is why only Audible and Apple have players with chapter access for DRM’d audio. Audible can do it because they control the DRM of their streams.

A third-party will have to make arrangements with Audible for example - and that would have to be a large third-party (like Apple) - in order to develop a full featured player. A small third-party could develop an app that plays non-DRM’d audiobooks complete with chapter information but I expect that without access to decrypted DRM’d streams they can do no better than the Bookmarks app.

Tomlinson said that he hoped that an update to the Music app would be forthcoming, without having to wait for an “entire iOS 5.x monolithic update.”

I suggest that users post a message about this issue at Apple’s feedback page for the iPad.

David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years.

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Spreaker: podcasting at the intersection of social and mobile

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AppId is over the quota
Jason D. O'Grady+ developed an affinity for Apple computers after using the original Lisa, and this affinity turned into a bona-fide obsession when he got the original 128 KB Macintosh in 1984.

He started writing one of the first Web sites about Apple (O'Grady's PowerPage) in 1995 and is considered to be one of the fathers of blogging. He has been a frequent speaker at the Macworld Expo conference and a member of the conference faculty. He also co-founded the first dedicated PowerBook User Group (PPUG) in the United States.

After winning a major legal battle with Apple in 2006, he set the precedent that independent journalists are entitled to the same protections under the First Amendment as members of the mainstream media.

O'Grady is the author of The Nexus One Pocket Guide, The Droid Pocket Guide, The Google Phone Pocket Guide, and The Garmin nuvi Pocket Guide (Peachpit Press), the author of Corporations That Changed the World: Apple Inc. (Greenwood Press), and a contributor to The Mac Bible (Peachpit Press). In addition, he has contributed to numerous Mac publications over the years, including MacWEEK, Macworld, and MacPower (Japan).

When he's not writing about Apple for ZDNet at The Apple Core, he enjoys spending time with his family in New Jersey.

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Five reasons why I won't be buying an iPhone 4S

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AppId is over the quota
@toddybottom The iPhone 3GS isn't a very good phone?

I love mine! Bog standard 16Gb model, handset replaced once under AppleCare due to dust ingress - no quibble, they just did it. I've never dropped a call (to be fair, ymmv on that count) and it has been rock solid. It will take iOS5 (although I expect some slowdown possibly).

I'm probably going to upgrade to the 4S at some point, but when the new handset didn't appear in the summer, I spent the money instead on an iPad 2. Which I also love.

But who knows? I like the style - new hardware platform (3G, 4) and then a performance boosted version with a sprinkling of extra features (3GS, 4S) as the next handset.

What is incredible is that the 3GS is still being updated with the newest OS for the device, whereas my wife's SE Xperia X10 Mini Pro, purchased a few months after my 3GS, received one update to an already outdated Android release and then nothing more. THAT is planned obsolescence - hackers have proved that you can fit up to 2.3 on it, but SE refuse to update past 2.1, and if you want the SE software that makes the small form factor screen possible to work with, you can't root and update the phone.

Whereas my lovely 3GS is going to get a feature bump when I get home tonight

Oh, btw, I do hope Siri crops up on the iPad 2 at some point. I know it won't, but it would make sense to have it "iClouded".

"Siri, please reschedule that meeting and send to my iPhone."

"I'm afraid I can't do that Dave..."

"Uh-oh..."

Actually, maybe not...

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TigerDirect selling HP TouchPads tomorrow; but only in $280 bundles

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Jason D. O'Grady+ developed an affinity for Apple computers after using the original Lisa, and this affinity turned into a bona-fide obsession when he got the original 128 KB Macintosh in 1984.

He started writing one of the first Web sites about Apple (O'Grady's PowerPage) in 1995 and is considered to be one of the fathers of blogging. He has been a frequent speaker at the Macworld Expo conference and a member of the conference faculty. He also co-founded the first dedicated PowerBook User Group (PPUG) in the United States.

After winning a major legal battle with Apple in 2006, he set the precedent that independent journalists are entitled to the same protections under the First Amendment as members of the mainstream media.

O'Grady is the author of The Nexus One Pocket Guide, The Droid Pocket Guide, The Google Phone Pocket Guide, and The Garmin nuvi Pocket Guide (Peachpit Press), the author of Corporations That Changed the World: Apple Inc. (Greenwood Press), and a contributor to The Mac Bible (Peachpit Press). In addition, he has contributed to numerous Mac publications over the years, including MacWEEK, Macworld, and MacPower (Japan).

When he's not writing about Apple for ZDNet at The Apple Core, he enjoys spending time with his family in New Jersey.

View the original article here

iOS 5.0.1 available over-the-air; fixes battery bugs (Gallery)

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Jason D. O'Grady+ developed an affinity for Apple computers after using the original Lisa, and this affinity turned into a bona-fide obsession when he got the original 128 KB Macintosh in 1984.

He started writing one of the first Web sites about Apple (O'Grady's PowerPage) in 1995 and is considered to be one of the fathers of blogging. He has been a frequent speaker at the Macworld Expo conference and a member of the conference faculty. He also co-founded the first dedicated PowerBook User Group (PPUG) in the United States.

After winning a major legal battle with Apple in 2006, he set the precedent that independent journalists are entitled to the same protections under the First Amendment as members of the mainstream media.

O'Grady is the author of The Nexus One Pocket Guide, The Droid Pocket Guide, The Google Phone Pocket Guide, and The Garmin nuvi Pocket Guide (Peachpit Press), the author of Corporations That Changed the World: Apple Inc. (Greenwood Press), and a contributor to The Mac Bible (Peachpit Press). In addition, he has contributed to numerous Mac publications over the years, including MacWEEK, Macworld, and MacPower (Japan).

When he's not writing about Apple for ZDNet at The Apple Core, he enjoys spending time with his family in New Jersey.

View the original article here