SearchTurns out the Michael Jackson’s death has skyrocketed his music into the top 10 downloads on iTunes. But not only that, he has become the first artist to sell one million singles in a week. It’s just sad that he isn’t here to witness it.
Found via | http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/07/michael-jackson-first-to-sell-over-1-million-downloads-in-a-single-week/
MecuryNews reports that Adobe has asked employees to take paid vacation days this week as it is closing its North America operations for the week. This comes as the second week the offices has closed this year, with a third week looming sometime later in the year. This is in addition to the normal time the offices are closed for holidays.
The closing comes as a way to save Adobe money in the global recession. Adobe also announced it would lay off roughly 600 workers in December.
I’m a little shaken as it’s the first real news I’ve heard of software engineers being hit by the poor economy.
While I love Safari 4, Firefox is certainly a great browser and a significant upgrade is available today.
Features include:
Just to hit on a few of these, the new rendering engines will bring much faster page loads and apps that use a lot of javascript, like MobileMe, Google Docs or GMail, will see huge performance increases. HTML 5 support will bring native offline data storage, similar to GoogleGears, allowing web applications to work in “offline mode”, as well as native support for video and audio so websites can embed video/audio files and they will play without a plugin. Geo-awareness means websites can ask the browser for your location and get an accurate reading, which will actually be a HUGE deal. And of course everyone loves new search features and privacy controls.
Just launch Firefox to get the update, or head to getfirefox.com for a disk image when it’s released in a few hours.
Found via | WebMonkey
According to FoxNews, the US has finally started the long process of removing troops from Iraq and returned control of the country back to its people. The Status of Forces agreement signed in November 2008 began the withdrawal and nearly 7 months later, the people of Iraq have control of their country. The US has said all troops will be home from Iraq by December 31, 2001. That’s 30 months from now folks.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki declared Tuesday to be “National Sovereignty Day,” complete with a military parade to display to Iraqis — and a still stubborn insurgency — its ability to maintain order in a nation ravaged by six years of war.
I hope that the Iraqi people and government are able to show the world and the insurgence that they mean business, bringing peace to their country. Sovereignty is such a beautiful thing and I’m sure they will cherish it.
Found via | FoxNews
If you have ever used Mint for your site statistics, you have a pretty good idea of the high quality software coming from Shaun Inman. However, Shaun has outdone himself this time with a completely different take on RSS feeds and news management.
Shaun’s motivation for developing Fever:
What if, instead of mentally processing hundreds of headlines your feed reader did that heavy—we’re talking pre-coffee—lifting and just told you what everyone was collectively talking about? And what if it weighted those “hot” topics and aggregated the ensuing discussions in your feeds together?
Fever is very different from any other RSS readers out there for several reasons. The most interesting (and yet useful) feature of Fever is where the application lives. To throw a buzz word around, Fever lives in the “Cloud”. There is a relatively painless install that gets a copy of Fever on your web server. And because Fever lives in the cloud, it can always be up to date and stay in sync no matter what device you view it on. I could end my review there, but I’ll continue.
Installation couldn’t be simpler (unless Shaun could somehow setup a database on your server for you, which he can’t). You register for an account on http://feedafever.com/, download a couple files and then throw them up on your server. Then, let Fever connect to your MySQL database and make sure all is good to go before directing you through paypal and installing itself on your server. Then you’re ready to import feeds in OPML format from your current news reader. Seamless install for a web app. 30 USD gets you 1.x upgrades, which happen automatically I might add. Point to take home, Shaun has set a new standard here. I was impressed by the installation process alone.
I have tons and tons of RSS feeds. And frankly, I don’t get that much out of them anymore because there is just so much to look at and I don’t have enough time in my day. Shaun’s innovation hit home here. First, your feeds are essentially organized into two classes, kindling and sparks. Kindling are the feeds that you are hot about and don’t want to miss any action. You can easily get unread counts and organize by group if you wish. Sparks are feeds that essentially throw in duplicate data.
For my Mac news, I subscribe to several sites, which pretty much post the same thing over and over. Before, this was a huge pain, but with Fever, it’s actually a plus. If there are 5 sites that have posted almost the same thing, then obviously it’s important. So it’s “hot”, maybe around 101F. I’ll see a grouping of those 5 related articles under one heading, and I can view whatever ones I wish for further reading. Taking that concept, I want to place feeds that “add fire” to my Kindling in Sparks, reinforcing what I really want to see. So when I look at the “Hot” area, I see related articles grouped by temperature. The more buzz on the internet over whatever, the hotter it will be and it will be higher on my list. Truly remarkable thinking.
Shaun took the time to make a truly stellar iPhone interface for the Fever app as well. For me, this was just icing on the cake. I have tried so many RSS readers on my iPhone and was disappointed time after time. I mainly wanted something that would keep my read items in sync between my Mac and iPhone. Since Fever is a hosted application online in the “cloud”, it can just keep chugging away checking for updates and when I launch my bookmarked Fever on my iPhone, I get a nice interface and get the syncing for free.
Shaun provides a nice bookmarklet that sets in your browser’s bookmarks bar so when visiting a page you want to subscribe to in Fever, just click the bookmarklet and choose a group to add it to (or to your sparks) and off you go. Clean and simple.
There is also a beautiful icon to go with Fluid.app (now free), an application that basically creates a super simple Safari window with it’s own menu bar and icon that sits in your dock. Nice thing about this is you get the gorgeous icon in your dock, including amazingly enough, a dock unread count. Crazy.
And to make sure that Fever is more up to date than you are, Shaun even provides you with a short snippet to add to your server’s cron manager, so you can have your feeds update every 15 minutes with ease. Fever will keep checking even if you’re not around and when you load the page, you’re all ready to go. That is the last piece of the puzzle for me, I love it.
I highly encourage you to check out http://feedafever.com/ for more information. There is a lot of great information along with a quick demo video to get you running. This was an exceptional 30 bucks spent on my part and I hope that the web gets wind of this soon. Shaun has a great product on his hands.
Finally, you can have subscription calendars sync with your iPhone/iTouch using OS 3.0 and MobileMe.
For more information, visit the knowledge base article from Apple.
Seems like I have seen quite a few posts about fonts used for programming in the last few days. Part of that simply might be in response to Apple’s announcement of Menlo, a replacement for the Mac’s defacto monospaced font dating all the way back to System 6, Monaco.
Taking that one step further, Hive Logic has a couple great posts showing off some truly gorgeous monospaced fonts. Personally, I’m in love with Monofur, Droid Sans Mono, Inconsolata, and Anonymous Pro.
Check out the two related posts here for a total of 11 great monospaced fonts.
For all those out there thinking of upgrading to WordPress 2.8, you definitely should. The built in upgrade process introduced in 2.7 makes upgrading a breeze, and with the speed improvements, rewritten widget engine and management, and the theme browser, 2.8 is a nice upgrade indeed.
As always, make sure to make a backup of everything first just in case your upgrade doesn’t go as smooth.
For MobileMe users out there, Apple has announced a nice addition to your iPhone available with the iPhone OS 3.0 update as a free app from the App Store.
You will have access to all the files on your iDisk on the go. Features such as sharing are available, and you’ll even be able to view others public iDisk, which is a nice touch.
I updated to the final version of Safari 4 released during yesterday’s WWDC 2009 Keynote and came to a shocking discovery: turns out that the tabs that were controversially placed on top in the window’s titlebar have now moved back to their previous location below the toolbar.
I’m slightly upset about this for two reasons. First off, the updated design had grown on me and I was used to it. Moving it back down to where it was in Safari 3.x ( and most other browsers, besides Google Chrome ) is time I have to retrain myself. Second, I was convinced by the initial argument. The controls ( refresh, home, stop, even the progress indicator and the URL itself ) are tab specific. They change based on what tab you are in. Therefore, it makes sense to have the tab be the top-level container element with the controls placed inside it.
All that said maybe Apple’s market research gave it good information and it was able to make the right informed decision. Personally, I would like the hidden preference setting to have my tabs back up top again, but that option was removed in the final shipping version.
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