Rui CarmoFollowing all the excitement yesterday, there's an amazing amount of press about the iPod nano and a lot of confusion concerning the ROKR/iPhone, from which a general theme soon emerges - the nano is the new geek lust magnet, and the ROKR is completely sidelined.
Which, all things considered, is as it should be. The hard-coded 100-song limit, however, is pretty dumb.
In the meantime, people with decent phones (at least those with an USB interface or some sort of removable memory card) might want to look at SyncTunes, which did the job for my K750i (it works with iTunes 5.0, and might even work on the ROKR itself - just use a card reader...).
NeXTStep Rising?
After Michael's round-up of comments on the new iTunes look and my own jab that Apple might be coming up with black PowerBooks next (due to the nano's "dark side" edition), up comes drunkenbatman's "Burnt Aqua" post (a must read, as always) and Brent Simmons, who points out that the new iTunes interface wouldn't look that much out of place in the old NeXT desktop environment:
Well, Mac OS X is NeXTStep (in more ways than one), and Apple is re-enacting some of the, er... "steps" that NeXT took - like porting their OS to Intel, for instance.
Plus if you switch on "White on Black" in the Universal Access preference pane (just press Cmd+Option+Ctrl+8, again to toggle), you'll be amazed at how good Mac OS X can look in "black".
Now that I think of it, I can't wait to have a black PowerBook. It would be a much better rumor to keep track of than the iPhone, too. :)
Gnome 2.12
I nearly missed this, but Jamin's screenshot was a nice wake-up call. Gnome is looking better and better, and the scary bit is that it is actually more visually consistent than Mac OS X these days...
Whoa, 10.3Mpixels?
Much to the chagrin of pfig (who steadfastly refuses to acknowledge anything coming from a former VCR manufacturer as being worthy of the title "digital camera"), the DSC-R1 was announced today, and despite my leanings towards a D-SLR such as the 20D (or the 350D plus a better lens, for the same amount of cash), the new Sony image sensor and extra doodads give me reason to wait a bit more and see what DPReview has to say regarding the production version.
vCard Sharing, Cross-Platform Style
Today, while testing a new Ethereal build, I had the opportunity to do some traffic dumps of Address Book LDAP queries to an Exchange directory - to my surprise, somewhere along the 10.4.x update chain it started working much better, which means vcard2ldap might be getting an update soon.
Any pointers to Python LDAP libraries that can act as simple servers are most welcome, since despite liking the Perl modules I'm using, I'd much rather have a go at this in Python.
Objective Modula-2
When I was back in college, I was put through a lot of the usual (and some very unusual) programming languages, and Modula-2 was one of the few that actually left a good impression - clean, lean, fast, etc. It was about that time that I started fiddling around with Object Pascal in MPW, and it often struck me that some sort of mix would be nice for Mac development.
Well, Benjamin Kowarsch has just dropped me a line saying that there is an Objective Modula-2 project kicking off, and that it will be implemented into the GNU Modula-2 compiler (which, in itself, is a gcc front-end).
Looks like another nice alternative for Cocoa development, although a lot of people will complain about the Pascal-like syntax until they realize it cuts down on a lot of potential mistakes.
Watch this space for further news, since there will be a public website soon (set up by Rick Sutcliffe, the maintainer of the Modula-2 FAQ).