In just over one week, on March 27th at 3:30 p.m. EST, Adobe will be hosting their special Creative Suite 3 launch event in New York City, and the entire event will be webcast from their website for all the world to see.
Alls you got to do is tune into their website at the prescribed time, and then you too will witness firsthand the launch of "the largest software release in Adobe's 25-year history". Their words, not mine, but this is indeed a much-anticipated event, seeing that specific details regarding CS3 have been on the down low, for the most part. So, tune in!
Ever want to see MySpace crash and burn? Or, are you at least a little tired of the horrific design/coding/everything nightmare that is MySpace? A couple of hackers plan to introduce security vulnerabilities in MySpace next month, revealing one a day as part of the "Month of Bugs" tradition. However, Mondo Armando and Müstaschio, in a kind of satirical, cynical, and humorous fashion, will attempt to subvert both the popular social networking website and the "Month of Bugs" trend simultaneously. From their website, their reasons for this endeavor are as follows:
Myspace is important, in that there are a bazillion users and a kajillion dollars involved.
"Months of Bugs" are whiny, attention-seeking ploys for acceptance. Myspace's design use is to enable whiny, attention-seeking ploys for acceptance.
"Months of Bugs" are annoying, so rather than suffering through another, we figured it'd be better to just create our own where we could at least direct the content a little.
MySpace haters, hackers, coders, and everyone else in-between should look forward to this experiment. What will be the result of spreading word of the Emperor's many vulnerabilities? Only time will tell. Godspeed.
What's in a name? Lots of things, including the difference between confusing and creating potential users of your application, apparently. That's why the Participatory Culture Foundation is renaming Democracy Player, its internet television surfing program, despite sticking with the original for over a year.
"In all our debates about whether you could call something 'Democracy' and how people would react to the name, we hadn't realized that so many people would simply assume that the software was for politicians and videos about politics."
The new name will be Miro, which means, well... we don't know. But anyway, there's a lesson to be learned here. If you've got a potentially creative, but ultimately too specific and image-burdened name for your software, think twice about it. You can't always expect casual users to look beyond the name of an application to see its real use. So, lose the cool symbolism at the expense of losing users. Check out the official word from the folks themselves to get the full lowdown.
Flickr has seen incredible progress since its inception only three short years ago, and IDG News Service sat down with co-founder and general manager Stewart Butterfield to talk about the website's growth and history, and future plans.
The photo sharing service has never strayed too far from its original purpose, even after entering the Yahoo! fold and through its explosion in popularity, with 7.2 million registered users and 23 million monthly unique visitors. Nevertheless, Butterfield chimes in with some thoughts on what we might expect (or not expect) down the line, including possibilities of news components, photo syndication opportunities, competition, and other relevant bits. But, I think the real question remains: when will Flickr transcend the Gamma phase?
WikiCharts is a simple tool that lists the top 100 most-viewed pages on Wikipedia, with other relevant traffic stats. It's been around since last year, but it's a fun (and expectedly humorous) way to waste time and see what kind of scholarly research is being conducted through the website, and how it reflects current news, if at all.
This month, 'List of Pokémon' breaches the top then, while 'Sex' stands at a strong #13, and 'Canada', 'Family Guy', 'List of sex positions', 'Ungdomshuset', and good ol' 'Abraham Lincoln' round out some popular entries in the top 50. Interestingly, 'Battle of Thermopylae' is all the way up at position three, undoubtedly due to the recent release of the film, 300. Anyway, worth checking out if you haven't already seen it, and the tool has a few tweak-able settings on the bottom of the page.
When the complete Adobe Creative Suite 3 package is revealed on March 27, Adobe will announce not one, but two distinct flavors of Photoshop, including a standard Photoshop CS3 and the new Photoshop CS3 Extended.
Photoshop CS3 Extended includes the same tools as Photoshop CS3, but also contains a brand new set of features for the integration of 3D and motion graphics, and image measurement and analysis functions. This marks the first occasion (since Photoshop 5.0 Limited Edition?) in which more than one version of Photoshop will be made available, with the new version targeted at individuals in the fields of video, architecture, engineering, medicine, and science.
Back in January, Netflix announced their new "Watch Now" video streaming feature, which allows customers to stream anywhere between six to 48 hours of full-length movie content per month.
As of now, only a limited number of customers have been given access to the service, due to handling capacity concerns, and the rollout is not expected to be complete until June. But... why should that stop you?
Dan of Uneasy Silence has posted a very handy trick that allows current members to bypass the wait and immediately access the video streaming feature. Unfortunately, it is still limited to Windows users, but this is a very sweet and simple little trick! Get streaming.
Listal is a social website for listing "the stuff you love", or categorizing your DVDs, CDs, books, video games, and listing the movies you've seen and TV shows you watch. In the traditional social networking fashion, you can tag, rate, and review items, see everyone else who has the same stuff, and locate similar member based on your ratings. The site launched back in August of 2005, but since then it has become quite robust, with a consistent stream of updates to enhance the versatility of the website. I haven't visited it in a few months, so I checked out some of the new features. Here's a brief rundown of some recent highlights:
A new completely customizable profile feature, so you can change the layout, colors, background image, and style of your personal page
Users can now add videos to any item page, either from a video sharing website or directly from their computer
Enhanced list views, including options for two or three column layouts for viewing your items
New quick recommendations included in profile pages, an easy way to get recommendations for items not on your own list from the person you are viewing
Listal has proven to not only be a decent way to waste time, but it is actually quite useful for organizing your stacks of movies, CDs, and books lying around.
While Mac users have iMovie, Windows folks have a less straightforward choice when it comes to novice video editing software. That's the gap Movavi hopes to fill, with its promise of an all-in-one video post-production suite for capturing, converting, editing, and distributing video over the web or for your iPod. Broken up into six miniature applications for each step of the post-production process, Movavi's list of touted features are pretty simplistic and no-frills, but for users looking for the most basic video editing solution, Movavi might fulfill that need for a price of $59. Intermediate or advanced editors need not bother. Check out the full list of features here, and give the demo a quick spin.
Google has recently introduced the option to search through all the world's collection of Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files within Google Earth, which makes all the gazillions of layers immediately accessible for your geobrowsing pleasure. In order to use this new search function, all you need to do is navigate to your area of interest and enter a search query, and a list of appropriate KML files will be displayed within your results. Click on one of the KML links, and information about that file will be displayed in a bubble. Finally, you can then click on the link within the bubble to display the KML layer over Google Earth. This nicely streamlines the process of using layers within the application, to say the least. Spiffy.
Democracy Player version 0.9.5 has been officially released, introducing a host of new improvements and enhancements since the 0.9.2 release back in November of 2006. Here's a brief highlight of what to look for:
Simpler, more minimal interface
New 'Share' menu on each item allows user to email a video or post to VideoBomb, del.icio.us, Digg, or Reddit
VLC 0.8.6 on Windows version that powers Democracy has been upgraded with improved Flash video support
Video downloads are now stored in folders by channel for better organization
New pause and resume download functions
Improved BitTorrent performace
Drop-down menu feature for auto-download for individual channels
Automatic thumbnail generation on OS X for videos lacking thumbnails
The application is immediately available in all PC, Mac, and Linux flavors. Of course, the team still urges users to keep an eye open for any potential bugs that might be lurking about and fill out a bug report where necessary. Anyway, the program is looking great thus far and this upgrade will be worth the download. Check out the full list of improvements at the Democracy blog.
Although VodPod has been around since at least December of last year, I have not stumbled upon the video sharing site until today, after they recently launched a brand new widget that allows users to embed multiple videos in a single player. Quite frankly, this is pretty awesome. Using VodPod's service, not only can you leech videos from other websites such as YouTube, Google Video, blip.tv, and others, you can host these videos under custom collections, or 'pods', on the Vodpod website.
Using their new blog badge feature, you can then create a totally separate, self-contained video player including these same videos from multiple sources. Meta craziness! So, you know those folks who love to post a billion YouTube videos to a single webpage, essentially making navigation of said site something of a chore? Well, forget about that now. These multi-video embeddable players automatically update when users add new videos to their pod. In addition to the multi-video player, Vodpod introduced a similarly useful customizable sidebar widget and bookmarklet for instant video adding. Anyway, I'm very satisfied with what I see at VodPod so far, to say the least. To get an idea of what these "pods" and multi-video widgets look like, check out my own personal pod, which I whipped up this morning. And here's a sample of the embeddable widget in action, posted on a Wordpress blog.
EDIT: Vodpod doesn't 100% officially support Revver as of right now, so errors do pop up from time to time using Revver videos in conjunction with the service, as you might encounter... (Though that problem should be corrected in a few days, I've been told.)
Public domain is a beautiful thing. The king of all things public domain, Archive.org is a great resource for downloading copyright-free music, video, texts, etc., but actually searching for specifics can be a chore. For all movie fans and filmmakers alike, OpenFlix presents a very useful solution to hunting down and classifying public domain films. The website is a directory containing all types of information regarding a vast history of movies that have entered the public domain. Although they do not host any of the movies themselves, there are links to purchase the films and a decent chunk of background info. and credits for each entry is available. So, if you were itching to start that Americana mashup epic but needed a place to start collecting possible sources for footage, OpenFlix might be one solution to discovering those hidden gems. Other than that, the website is pretty interesting to simply browse through to see what kind of quirkiness is lurking.
So, you've upgraded to Vista but the songs you purchased from the iTunes Store have decided to stop working. Thankfully, Apple has made an iTunes Repair Tool available that should alleviate any problems you might have after the upgrade. They recommend that folks delay upgrading Windows until the next version of iTunes is made available, which should be within the next couple of weeks. Additional compatibility issues with iTunes 7.0.2. may include:
iTunes Store purchases may not play when upgrading to Windows Vista from Windows 2000 or XP.
iPod models with the "Enable Disk Use" option turned off may be unable to update or restore iPod software, and make changes to iPod settings.
iPod models configured to Auto Sync and have the "Enable Disk Use" option turned off may require being ejected and reconnected to resync.
Ejecting an iPod from the Windows System Tray using the "Safely Remove Hardware" feature may corrupt your iPod. To always safely eject an iPod, choose Eject iPod from the Controls menu within iTunes.
Cover Flow animation may be slower than expected.
Contacts and calendars will not sync with iPod.
Check out Apple's complete Vista upgrade recommendations here, or grab the iTunes Repair Tool utility here.
After three short months, sales of Disney movies through the iTunes Store have hit 1.3 million downloads, in addition to 20 million television show downloads. However, Paramount has been the only other movie studio that has joined Apple since October of 2006. Why? No one wants to upset colossal retailers like Wal-Mart and Target, which are responsible for the majority of DVD sales. But will these latest sales figures help convince other companies in joining the digital download game? Finanicial Times reports that Disney CEO Bob Iger said digital distribution is "creating more consumption of media....The message that we deliver to our traditional [retail] partners is that the pie is getting bigger." Part of the retailer argument against digital downloads is the lower pricing. Because, you know, $12.99 is apparently a good deal for a lower quality (than DVD) movie download without any extras and limited viewing capabilities. However, Apple has previously expressed its unwillingness to change its current pricing structure. Ultimately, it seems almost guaranteed that digital downloads will continue to gain market prominence, but only time will tell to see if and when other companies will hop onboard with Apple.
In just over one week, on March 27th at 3:30 p.m. EST, Adobe will be hosting their special Creative Suite 3 launch event in New York City, and the entire event will be webcast from their website for all the world to see. 
Ever want to see MySpace crash and burn? Or, are you at least a little tired of the horrific design/coding/everything nightmare that is MySpace? A couple of hackers plan to introduce security vulnerabilities in MySpace next month, revealing one a day as part of the "Month of Bugs" tradition. However, Mondo Armando and Müstaschio, in a kind of satirical, cynical, and humorous fashion, will attempt to subvert both the popular social networking website and the "Month of Bugs" trend simultaneously. From 
What's in a name? Lots of things, including the difference between confusing and creating potential users of your application, apparently. That's why the 
Flickr has seen incredible progress since its inception only three short years ago, and IDG News Service 
When the complete Adobe Creative Suite 3 package is revealed on March 27, Adobe will announce not one, but 
While Mac users have iMovie, Windows folks have a less straightforward choice when it comes to novice video editing software. That's the gap Movavi hopes to fill, with its promise of an all-in-one video post-production suite for capturing, converting, editing, and distributing video over the web or for your iPod. Broken up into six miniature applications for each step of the post-production process, Movavi's list of touted features are pretty simplistic and no-frills, but for users looking for the most basic video editing solution, Movavi might fulfill that need for a price of $59. Intermediate or advanced editors need not bother. Check out the full list of features 
Democracy Player version 0.9.5 has been officially 
Although 
Public domain is a beautiful thing. The king of all things public domain, 
So, you've upgraded to Vista but the songs you purchased from the iTunes Store have decided to stop working. Thankfully, Apple has made an 
After three short months, sales of Disney movies through the iTunes Store have hit 1.3 million downloads, in addition to 20 million television show downloads. However, Paramount has been the only other movie studio that has joined Apple since October of 2006. Why? No one wants to upset colossal retailers like Wal-Mart and Target, which are responsible for the majority of DVD sales. But will these latest sales figures help convince other companies in joining the digital download game? Finanicial Times 
