Actually, I liked my bread better before it had a privacy policy.
Opera 5 final for Classic Mac OS [via Glish.com]
Apple iPod on Linux. Just some ramblings and notes, but we’re getting closer, including the scariest Python script I’ve ever seen. Apparently it’s more difficult than I originally thought, because iPod uses the HFS+ file system, which has poor support on Linux.
While everyone else was drooling over the iDeskLamp, it went virtually unnoticed that Apple just entered the consumer web services business. I downloaded iPhoto the day it came out, imported all our 300+ images that we’ve accumulated in the past 2 years from Dora’s digital camera, organized them into albums, and we picked about 30 that we really liked. Click, order prints, enter billing info (once), enter quantities and sizes (4×6 prints are $0.49 each; 5×7 are $0.99; larger sizes are available if you have a better camera than I do), click, watch it upload my pictures to some Kodak central server, “thank you for shopping with Apple”, wait 3 days. It was beautiful, completely effortless.
I never thought I would spend money to get my digital pictures printed out, but Apple managed to make it easy enough to get my money. And it was so worth it; the pictures are absolutely gorgeous. Looking at them, I would never know they came from a digital camera. And it’s only an old 1.2 megapixel camera at that!
This is a business model that makes sense to people: spend money, get real stuff. Organizing digital photos is free. (And by “free”, I mean “requires no more than was included with Dora’s iBook”. iPhoto requires the very latest version of Mac OS X; it does not work on any previous version of OS X, and certainly doesn’t work with OS 9. Be that as it may.) Publishing digital photos on the web is free. (iPhoto can create a set of local web pages with thumbnails and so forth, and you can put it anywhere. I would prefer it going a bit further, integrating with my web site by FTP. It integrates more seamlessly with mac.com, Apple’s hosted web site.) Exporting photos to files in other formats is free. Simple photo editing is free. If you want to get real stuff (professionally printed pictures), you pay for it. I paid. they’re gorgeous. I’ll pay again.
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim