Any living room “solution” that doesn’t offer a way to view that hot serial drama on the night it airs or a favorite soap opera or that obscure cooking reality show your dad is obsessed with will never be a comprehensive solution. Instead, it just adds to the giant mess hanging off the back of the TV: another expense, another device, another remote, another headache.

There’s far too little content compared with cable/satellite or Netflix, and the video quality is 720p, and then only nominally. None of this is necessarily Apple’s fault, but it’s Apple TV’s problem. I think they’re on the right track with streaming rentals, though. I never wanted to “buy” large DRM-encoded files and then worry about backing them up and syncing them.

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -int -1

Garrett Murray:

A year ago, I compared the then-brand-new iTunes 9 against its predecessor. New year, new version of iTunes, so here’s an updated comparison. It’s amazing to see just how much visual tweaking Apple does with each new major version of the application.

He’s got a nice rollover comparison. I prefer the tighter vertical spacing and the color icons, although I like the move to making some of them more symbolic.

Shawn Blanc has screenshots of the new capacity indicator, now reflection-free.

It’s nice to see the funny tabs gone from the iPhone screen. The new recessed tabs are at least consistent with the iTunes Store, if not other Mac applications.

Jesper has some interesting comments:

It looks like the balance of power continues tipping. Info.plist now enlists an NSPrincipalClass, ITNSApplication, meaning that it uses the Cocoa startup path. (Very curiously, I can’t find that class by dumping iTunes.) Still chock full of Carbon, but it seems they’re going to do this over several versions.

I’m also following the MacInTouch reader report.

• Cover
• Sponsors
• Welcome
• E-Mail
• MacMuser: A Fine Pair of Dragons
• MacMuser: Two Sides
• Interview: Heather Sitarzewski, Graphic Designer
• Segments: Slices from the Macintosh Life: Life With an EeePC and Ubuntu Linux
• Segments: Slices from the Macintosh Life: My $1,000 iPad Purchase Odyssey
• Desktop Pictures: Flowers
• Out at Five
• Software Review: AccountEdge and FirstEdge
• Accessory Review: Loop
• FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

Go back to the board. Symptom: the object was allocated as an NSPathStore2. Symptom: the object’s isa pointer is now 0xa0050000, which is not NSPathStore2. What should the isa pointer’s value have been? otool and objc_getClass() agreed: the correct isa pointer should have been 0xa005f198. 0xa0050000 is suspiciously similar. Theory: something had cleared two bytes of this object, leaving a nonsense isa pointer. @"tzm-Latn" was a red herring.

Great post.

To summarize the spec: a client retrieves a playlist (an .m3u8, which is basically a UTF-8′ed version of the old WinAmp playlist format) that lists segments of the stream as flat files (often .m4a’s for audio, and .ts for video, which is an MPEG-2 transport stream, though Apple’s payload is presumably H.264/AAC). The client downloads these flat files and sends them to its local media player, and refreshes the playlist periodically to see if there are new files to fetch. The sizing and timing is configurable, but I think the defaults are like a 60-second refresh cycle on the playlist, and segments of about 10 seconds each.

I was willing to try out iAd because it did one thing that no other platform can offer—a seamless purchase experience. The user never leaves the current app to complete the purchase, so the user experience is about as good as you get. However, I think that Apple has found itself falling foul of exactly the same problems they called out when the unveiled iAd.

It cost him $15 for each download of his $0.99 app. Part of the problem may have been the app’s 3-start rating, though. Interestingly, he got a much higher click-through rate with AdMob.

…in that time, the app review team has allowed other prototyping applications onto the app store: applications that do the same basic tasks that Briefs.app was created to do. Interface was approved several weeks after Briefs.app was submitted to the App Store. LiveView and Dapp were both updated just yesterday. iMockups was approved about a week ago.

But Briefs still sits in the queue and nobody can be bothered to even say what the exact holdup is or what needs to happen before a decision will get made.

I made the same choice because there are some interesting applications of the modulo operation where the sign of a is uninteresting. Consider taking a POSIX timestamp (seconds since the start of 1970) and turning it into the time of day. Since there are 24*3600 = 86400 seconds in a day, this calculation is simply t % 86400. But if we were to express times before 1970 using negative numbers, the "truncate towards zero" rule would give a meaningless result! Using the floor rule it all works out fine.