Coverflow in iTunes
Posted on September 12, 2006
Boy am I behind the times. Not only is Coverflow not a new application, Apple released iTunes 7 today with Coverflow integrated. The author of Coverflow has said on IRC that he can't say more and the Coverflow site is down. I imagine he must have gotten a pretty sweet deal from Apple for it to be integrated. My complaint about the iTunes integration? It doesn't have the letter based slider that Coverflow originally had.
Apple, what have you done?
Posted on January 11, 2006
I’m excited about the MacBook, I’m in love with the iMac. But why did you add this annoying little bar to the bottom of iTunes? It is obtrusive. It is obnoxious. If I want to deal with music store content, I’ll go to the music store. If it’s true that 850 Million songs have been sold at a rate of over 3 million a day, is this not just a bit obnoxious. How about having it off by default and telling us it’s there? Most people will leave it on because they don’t know you can turn it off. I’m sure you’ve been counting on that. Don’t get me wrong, I still love you, but you’ve gone one step too far and should go stand in the corner and be ashamed of yourself.
Mac Mini, a good way to go, with some caveats
Posted on June 24, 2005
I've been using a Mac Mini with Tiger for about the last month at work. Tired of dealing with video related lockups on my AMD64 in Ubuntu, I decided to give a spare Mini a try. Out of the box, the base Mini is not usable for a power user. It's at best sluggish, and at worst, like rush hour traffic on the 405 before the Sepulveda Pass. The primary culprit? The Harddrive. The slow speed (4200 rpm) of the drive is enough to make the box unusable. For the average computer hacker (not cracker) this isn't much of an issue. A couple of putty knives and a 7200 rpm 2.5" drive, and bam you're off. I got the Hitachi 7K60 for around $175 at Fry's, if I recall the price correctly. Fast forward a few weeks of use, and I'm able to use the box, but it still lags at times. The reason? 512MB of memory for a power user on OS/X is not do-able. The max is 1GB of ram in the Mini, and for $99 I just got new PC2700 ram, and let me tell you, it makes all the difference. No more lag when typing, opening applications, or tabs in Firefox. Give me another month of this and I'll let you know if I'm still as happy with the choice as I am now.
