gkefalas

The amazing thing is that they probably could have made a go at it focusing on paying out more to artists (despite the fact that it's not the fault of competing services for negotiating the best rates they could with the labels). Or, maybe making a go at the sound quality argument but priced the same as Spotify Premium. Like you, I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually go 24b/96K, but that will be really difficult since that would drastically limit their catalog.

Thanks! I agree, some things were surprising. I'm really bummed that the null tests were affected by source audio amplitude, plus the frame size causing alignment issues—I feel like it's not as accurate a test as it could have been. I have to revisit the methodology to come up with a baseline of sorts. I was thinking of doing a comparison all the way down to 128kbps next time… sounds like what you're saying!

Hey all, I did a technical breakdown of high-fidelity audio recently for our company and thought that it might be of interest to hackers. I'm especially interested in ideas & criticisms to lead to a more thorough test methodology for when we revisit this topic in the future. I know I simplified or explained away a lot of complex subjects in digital audio, but otherwise this would have been an even more massive post!

Chris, the position: fixed z-index issue is more widespread than you have there; I'm trying to come up with a case for reliable repro, but I just bumped into it a bit ago and had to redo some things to work around it. (full disclosure, I'm one of Chris's coworkers)

There's an "Automatically Add to iTunes" folder that'll do that, but it's still annoying to have to use one special folder instead of just pointing it at my regular download folder. I always forget that Apple added this. More here: http://lifehacker.com/5356619/itunes-finally-adds-watched-fo...

Hm, that's a good point: "warning fatigue" that users get. I hadn't thought about it from that point of view; I guess how fatiguing it is will really depend on how quickly developers in general get aboard the "sign your application" train, so I'd be curious to see the response from the legions of independent Mac software developers that aren't using the App Store for delivery.

Right, which would be rendered pretty ineffective by Gatekeeper, now, at least for people that don't know about the launch-from-disk trick or other workarounds (basically, the same people that would potentially be vulnerable).

Gatekeeper's a small, small step that doesn't add much inconvenience to developers, but it does help a bit and I'm surprised at how long it's taken to arrive at something so basic & logical.

You're misunderstanding. An app can be freely available outside of the App Store but still be signed: http://www.macworld.com/article/165408/2012/02/mountain_lion...

Really? Because I can't, at all, and I'd rather not be proven wrong as I'd loathe it as much as you would (but it sounds like it's not like you'd upgrade anyway).

Nope, you'll be able to run it: "Finally, it’s important to note that because Gatekeeper uses the File Quarantine system, it only works the very first time you try to launch an app, and even then only when it’s been downloaded from an app on your Mac like a web browser or email program. And once an app has been launched once, it’s beyond the reach of Gatekeeper." (http://www.macworld.com/article/165408/2012/02/mountain_lion...)

Yeah, well, until that happens, this is great and I'm all for it. What a simple way to improve dealing with the open attack vector that is "the user being able to install their own software". I wish they had this flexibility on iOS.

Right, I meant they're unusual for Big Fruit. And also, the period between this reveal and release this summer is equally unusual...

I'd say that the lag between announce & release is a little more worrisome and something that I wouldn't want to see become a trend at Apple. I've always felt that a big part of their press was their general tendency to release right at announcement of a product or soon thereafter. Though, now that I think about it, I guess their OS releases have, by necessity, had to have some lead time associated with them.

I had a couple comments on Gruber's posting, but one of the things that really jumped out at me about this hands-on is the Notification Center trigger taking Spotlight's coveted top-right Fitt's Law trigger. Also, while I say "ew" to more skeuomorphism, I could see how things like are enjoyed by some users; not that it makes this type of UI "correct", but, whatever.

Hm.

* The "Gatekeeper" concept is interesting, but I expect we'll hear a lot of grumbling about the default setting. We also all remember the concern about the App Store eventually becoming the only way to get software for your Mac; this will do little to allay that.

* Hopefully Launchpad will have some keyboard-based shortcuts, search-as-you-type (the way a Stack does), perhaps a separate/faster editing view than drap-and-drop, and other usability enhancements to make it more useful. I like it in concept, especially with the trackpad pinch shortcut, but not enough to keep using it once I got all of my programs installed.

* Whither new iWork?

* Some of the tweaks Gruber talks about really make logical sense, and I'm excited to see them. I hope that reliability & clarity hasn't suffered by the time of release; each release of OS X has seemed jam-packed with more "stuff" at the expense of much of that stuff's stability and polish, it seems.

* Gruber didn't mention a new Finder, so we're left to guess and find out in just a few days.

* I wonder who the other journalists are. This format for a press reveal of a product is... interesting, I guess, is the word I'd use right now.

BusyCal is what I'm recommending to all of our Mac-based employees and what I use on my personal machines to handle dozens of calendars across several Google & Google Apps accounts. +1 recommendation for BusyCal; absolutely worth the license.

This is misleading. This quote isn't in a response to the latest discussion about the location database file, but the title and Slashdot link both make it seem that way.

Also, please link to the original source.

You have. For example: http://www.icab.de/mobile.html

Maybe this was a restriction in the past, I'm not sure, but I've been happily running iCab Mobile for quite some time and enjoying it's more grown-up featureset.

Should be quite interesting; here in NYC my wife and I do about 75% of our grocery shopping through FreshDirect which nets us fresher, more local, and all-around better produce & meat than we can get here in Astoria without taking a trip into Manhattan. FreshDirect also has continued to improve their user experience and buying process -- so much so that we trust the site enough to buy new veggies and fruits that we've never tried before just based on their staff ratings.

I'm not saying that Amazon won't be able to get traction here, but rather that I'm curious to see how what different approach they'd bring to solving the problems that FreshDirect has already solved. I should also mention that I love Amazon thanks to Prime, so it should be interesting competition if they expand this way...

This is great. Bought, downloaded, and have some initial impressions. My background is that I do a metric crap load of arranging, primarily for the New York Holiday Singers ( http://newyorkholidaysingers.com ) in Sibelius, using the keyboard and keypad rather than MIDI input.

* First thing I did was export a PDF to see the engraving. Some quirks around that: - No title or composer showed up. - Measures of 8th notes in V2 were beamed all together rather than broken up. Kind of awkward looking. - I had four staves, all with treble clef, even though I'd kept the default piano layout with bass & treble.

* When adjusting an existing note's pitch, it would be nice to get the targeting lines that you get when adding a new note. Also, consider adding a zoom reticle off to the side of the finger location, please! :)

* I love the d-pad; what a great approach. I love the UI. I love the drag-area eraser. Great work. The UI is very concise, discoverable, and intuitive. I loved the text tool, and wish it could follow notes so I could do lyrics. I don't love that there was no obviously discoverable way to delete or add bars, though like i said it was only a brief run-through and i may have missed it.

* I wish there was a two hand mode when in landscape with the keyboard running vertically along the right edge so I could do rapid input with my left thumb choosing note lengths & the like and my right inputting the pitches.

* I also wish I could jump to a location in the score with a tap in the slider at the top instead of having to drag the handle. If it's possible, the hit targets may need adjustment.

These initial, few issues aside, I would /already/ use this app nearly full-time in a heartbeat if it had lyrics support. I'm sure you'll get a thousand feature requests! I always had a sneaking suspicion that editing sheet music on the iPad would be fantastic, and in the few minutes I used this app the incredible tactile connection to the music was already established. This far exceeds a MVP release, and was already worth my money. I can't wait to see where you take it next. Congrats!

A lot of "may," "potentially," "considering," and other weasel words in that article, no?

Sure; there are a couple out there. Lifehacker's was the most straightforward and detailed. The process is much the same as jailbreaking. http://lifehacker.com/5572003/how-to-downgrade-your-iphone-3...

I had some shenanigans with it being an older backup and so had to re-transfer my email accounts from my compy to the phone, but that was just a couple checkboxes in iTunes and setting up MobileMe.

Same, with both the upgrade and a full restore, and my phone is stock (no jailbreak.) A good friend had great success with his after iOS4, so it's not affecting everyone. I followed a guide online and manually rolled back to 3.1.3 and haven't looked back, and soon I'll pick up the 4G. It's not like most of the compelling features were compatible with the 3G anyway.

DNN is a heap. My God, is it a codebase trainwreck. Apologies to any DNN devs that may be HNers, but holy cow is that an example of how serpentine code gets when you try to be all things to all people without a strong planning phase.

I haven't found a single .NET CMS that doesn't drive me completely batty. I think most CMS tools, including non-.NET ones, break down when they start trying to be able to do all things for all people. It's debatable if any are able to pull this off (though admittedly I'm not up on current CMS tools to know if that world has improved.)

Because of that, I've been rolling my own basic backend for my own personal use on projects for myself, friends & family for about a half-year now; the ultimate goal being dead-simple templating using standard HTML pages, fast & secure data & code, and ease of extensibility. It does what it needs to. But, because it's domain-specific, I'm not trying to make it a general-purpose "CMS," so I currently don't have to worry about stuff like registration/authentication, comments, etc. I would never release it in its current state, though, and likewise I'd probably never plug a bunch of other junky code into it, expose a ton of dubiously-designed interfaces & reflection as "extensibility," require master pages (ew) or some custom markup language (ew x 2) to make templates, and call it a full CMS.

Wrong, unless you mean on computers; Netflix released an iPad app that streams video on day 1, and Hulu is rumored to have one in the works as well.

If it looks like a duck[1], and quacks like a duck, why would I go looking for a cow[2]?

Without explicitly knowing this was a test, I would think this company's developers were just sloppy. Sorry, but I don't think this will go to prove anything about a developer's abilities. Sure, maybe some quality web developers might "pass the test," but I'd wager just as many—if not more—would roll their eyes and go elsewhere.

[1] server-side error [2] client-side error

Seems he's come out swinging, as he usually does with App Store shenanigans: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/04/16/app-store-reject...

His old band, Ben Folds Five, also were an early adopter of cybercasting some of their concerts back 'round the turn of the millennium or so. I can see why Bam's where he is in this video-I would probably crap myself as well if this is what I was greeted with while using Chatroulette...

The difference being that Unity for iPhone requires Mac OS X (and builds an XCode project for deployment), and MonoTouch requires Mac OS X (though it handles the signing in its own IDE, if memory serves me right). This is more about Adobe potentially reverse-engineering the signing process to run on Windows, if I'm reading it correctly.

When it comes to ads online, though, isn't the right cliché "the cat's out of the bag?" For years before ad-blocking became widespread, the more tech-savvy users complained and warned that the more aggressive ads became, what with popups/unders, talking ads, etc., the more likely they would be blocked. (I seem to remember we were poo-pooed by the marketers saying that "real users don't care," though this may be a nerd-chip-on-shoulder revisionist memory.) But, here we are.

It's unfortunate that there's the collateral damage that affects non-obnoxious sites; and, while I whitelist the sites I frequent, and many here may as well, I'm sure we're the minority.

That being said, here's about as close to a real-world analogue for my thoughts as I can get: in NYC, I'm sure there are people in Times Square trying to gain signups for Greenpeace and other "ethical" purposes mixed in with the other people hustling CDs, comedy club tickets, and the like, but I just ignore everyone as I walk by, wholesale, because stopping and seeing what everyone's about will turn a brief walk into a pain in the ass.

I'm not sure what the answer is; perhaps the various adblocking technologies could make whitelisting a site even more obvious? With AdBlock Plus, you hit the drop-down and choose Disable on foobar.com, but it requires an active interaction to seek that out. GlimmerBlocker for the Mac is even more buried (as it's a proxy, it's in System Preferences.) Maybe switching to putting placeholders where the ads would be with a short message and a single click to whitelist would make it a little easier for users to both see how many ads a site's pushing as well as whitelist the site with the minimum amount of effort? I donno.