One word: Awesome!

A description as taken from MacRumors:

Did you know that if you’ve purchased one or more songs from an eligible album, you may now be able to buy the rest of the album at a reduced price? You have up to six months after first downloading a song from an eligible album to purchase the remainder of the album.

To expound upon, this is really cool. I fall into this category all too often. I buy the latest and hottest singles as soon as they’re on iTunes after hearing them on the radio. Then a few months later, I sometimes find myself purchasing the album. That isn’t my general case, I’ve only purchased around 6 albums or so from iTunes. But still, it counts. I wish I had know about this earlier in the week because I had purchased 4 songs from Three Days Grace’s first album a few months back. This week I decided to buy the rest of the songs. It was basically the same price to just buy the whole album, and I figured I was supporting my band, so I did that anyway. So I really paid 1.99 for 4 of those songs. And I’ve done that before.

The service works really well actually. Once in the iTunes Store, click the “Complete My Album” link. From there you are shown all the albums you have purchased at least one song from. I have 108 albums listed, shockingly enough. Now I know where my money goes! Of those albums, however, the pricing is listed beside that. Most albums I just bought one song from, and the pricing is 9.00 (9.99 for album - .99 one song). Others I purchased more from and the pricing is lower, like 6.00. I’m not sure if age plays a part in the pricing right now or not either.

Hurry if you believe you’ll want to do this, as right now this offer applies to all the songs you’ve every purchased (some were like 2 years ago or more for me). This lasts until late June, when after that, the offer only applies to songs you’ve purchased in the last 6 months.

It took me a good 20 minutes to run down and find this bug in my code and I honestly can’t believe that it hasn’t come up before now. I thought that I would share in case anyone out there is banging their head against the table like I was.

I have a class called MBHand that contains a NSMutableArray as one of the key objects. So, on init, I need to set that array up to use. I thought I had that setup right. The error crept in with the following message:

-[NSCFArray addObject:]: mutating method sent to immutable object

Got to thinking and that leads back to my init method. I looked at my code and I had used the rather normal way of

This method looked good, but I used array = [[NSMubableArray array] retain]; and it works fine. Therefore, it was in the setter method above. Yep, after looking at that, it hit me. I wasn’t making a mutable copy of the array passed it. Needs to have “array = [newArray mutableCopy]; ” and it works like a charm!

Just a tip for all those newbies out there like me!

I haven’t made hardly any posts in the last several weeks and wanted to give some just general news and updates to hold everyone over for awhile.

A lot has happened with the Mac community in the last month or so, I don’t have the time or memory to accurately recall everything that has transpired. Of note, however, is that the AppleTVs have shipped and Leopard should be ready for a release within the next few months. Something worth getting excited over!

School and just life in general has been pretty insane these last few weeks. Everything is starting to die down a bit, but I’m trying to take some more personal time to just enjoy life than I have in the past, and that tends to be very time consuming in itself. I have had some time to tie up a lot of loose ends and get started in a few other areas, and I’d like to share that.

Photos
I’m working through a basic photography book and looking to book a class this summer on photography. I have also been using Aperture for several months now and it has been in the queue for a review. Since it will still be several weeks before I get around to reviewing it, I just thought I would say that it is an incredible piece of software and I especially love the vaults feature. More to come on that topic later. I have posted a gallery of my favorite pictures from my trip to Charleston, SC as well as some other general photos I like online. You can view those here. Paul, I’d especially like any comments as you have a photography blog of your own.

Software
Let me just start out by saying that my current computer class has been a real challenge. Computer Organization is the name of the game and the class focuses on digital logic, processor performance and pipelining, memory management, and the ARM assembly language. Just to say up front, I despise writing in assembly. Read in between the lines. HATE it. However, I have learned a lot and the class has been a real challenge.

Also of note here is that I have stopped development on Viewer and removed it from the site. I put a lot of work into the project, but in the end it was very sloppy and poorly written. Without the time or motivation to rework my previous work and with a lack of general interest, I’ve put it on the back burner and left it to die. On a rainy day with time on my hands and an interest in revising and revisiting past projects, I might take it up again, but I doubt it.

So the good news here, I’ve started a new project! I’ve worked through the general game-play logic and written my base code or a Phase 10-like game. I love the card game and just went through and realized that I could create almost everything needed on my own, except for the interface. So, in a few weeks I should have basic Terminal-based game play down and then I will embark on an adventure of learning all about custom drawing in Cocoa!

I’ve been away all week because of spring break and I’ve enjoyed a bit of sun and an amazing 3 Days Grace concert this week in sunny Charleston, SC. However, I’m taking a more lengthy leave of absence. Family trouble, relationship stuff and school have just taken there toll and until I get my life in some resemblance of order, I’ll be out.

You’re more than welcome to leave comments or send email and I’ll make a valiant effort to respond. Peace out, I hope to start writing more by mid-April if not earlier.

If you have somehow missed all of the noise behind the iTunes and Quicktime updates this week, here is a bit of info for you. Basically, fire up Software Update or download the updates here. There is a lot of technical reasons to upgrade, but besides adding AppleTV support, there is actually a nice new features in iTunes. CoverFlow has an additional full screen mode now, which is very snazzy. It’s easily responsive on my first gen. Macbook and looks beautiful. Will be a lot of fun to use, so be sure to download the latest iTunes and try it out now.

Tubular is an application geared to allow you to easily browse, search, and convert videos from YouTube. Very nice piece of software still under development, but worth looking at now. Music this week is Facedown by The Jumpsuit Apparatus.

(Application Main Window)

Tubular Site

 

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