“Allume, the people who make the Stuffit archiver have created a new compression algorithm that will losslessly compress JPEG files by an average of 30% (they claim). This algorithm will be part of the Stuffit 9 software.”
This is huge!
I think this is going to be really beautiful. There’s lots of good info here, including the schedule:
Apple announced a few new products today.
Some of them are interesting.
The Mac mini is a $500 sub-mac, no monitor, mouse, or keyboard. This, actually, is sort of exactly what I’ve been waiting for to tempt someone like me who has absolutely no use for a Mac as a general computer, but would like some of the benefits that the Mac has for dealing with, say, digital pictures. I think these will sell astonishingly well. This seems like a really smart thing in providing a gradual upgrade path from the iPod (or nothing) to this, to eventually one or more Macs.
Finally, I think they’re starting to get the producer/consumer nature of digital products and services.
The iPod Shuffle is a small (512MB or 1GB), low-cost iPod with no screen. You plug it in, and iTunes autofills it with a random assortment of songs (from your Mac mini, maybe). Then you can skip back and forth. That’s it. No choice. Simple. It’s tiny, it’s easy, it’s brainless. It’s missing something – you should be able to rate songs on it (even just a yes/no), so it learns (actually, so iTunes learns) over time what you want and don’t want on it. If you want to keep this really simple, have it register a “no” if you immediately skip past the song once it starts playing, or in the middle. That could even be rolled out with a firmware upgrade. I have a LOT of random crap on my music server. In its favor, it does include a warning right on the product page not to eat it.
I had a Sidekick for a short while when they were initially released. I sent it back immediately when I realized that all of my data would be stored on the server, and there was no way to use even rudimentary encryption (SSL) to access it. They actually had the balls to tell me that it was secure, even though it was unencrypted.
And yesterday, there was a story about how they were pentrated by an attacker who had access to their systems for over a year. It was inevitable. I’m not the least bit surprised.
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Dec | Feb » | |||||
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 31 | ||||||
Powered by WordPress
