LOST Reveals a New Character: The Ad Monster
ABC sales execs indulged themselves last night knowing they had a throng of LOST addicts who wouldn’t dare miss the show or turn the channel. And so the “two hour LOST season premiere event” really was 80 minutes of programming and 40 minutes of commercials — 33% of the time slot was ads. The longest commercial break was 4 mins 43 secs (at the 60:24 mark into the show). Compare this to the average 8 minutes of commercials during a 30 minute show (27% ads).
LOST Season 6 Premiere Leak Analyzed – Are they even on Oceanic 815?
[Update 01/31 6:13 PM Pacific]
Some new clips released — be sure to check them out: http://riactant.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/more-lost-season-6-episode-1-clips-released-sun-131/
Judge for yourself… there is no wing outside Jack’s window in S6 and the plane’s interior looks different (windows are different height, seats are different).
Watch “The Pilot” here: http://www.hulu.com/watch/86566/lost-pilot-part-1
Watch the Season 6 Episode 1 leak here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQZcMQWTAZU
UPDATE: Different passengers sitting next to Rose (S1 on Left, S6 on right):
How to get Myriad Pro (the Apple / Mac font) for Free on Windows
Windows users interested in installing the Myriad Pro font on Windows can do so legitamely by simply downloading and installed Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended trial (http://www.adobe.com/downloads/). Myriad Pro is best known as the typeface which Apple uses on its website and in Mac OS X.
The OpenType font is installed as part of Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended — the best part is that even after your Photoshop trial has expired the font is still installed and available for you to use in your favorite apps.
Enjoy!
Software Fix for Weak Toshiba T135 Speakers
I recently bought a Toshiba T135-S1309 and, much as the reviews warned me, was very disappointed with the extremely low speaker volume, despite the laptop overall being a tremendous machine for the value. So I did some troubleshooting and found a software-only fix for the problem that will increase the volume of the speakers of the T135 (any model) significantly. Here’s how:
1. Download SRS Audio Sandbox — you can install the trial and for $24.99 upgrade to the full version. After using the trial and noticing the difference I consider $24.99 a cheap fix and gladly paid it. Trust me, you’ll be blown away by the improvement in volume from the speakers.
2. Once SRS Audio Sandbox is installed configure it to the following settings (see screenshot):
I’ll post a side-by-side audio comparison video when I get a chance, but you’ll be surprised and pleased with the improvement.
Apple’s Excuse Making for Nanny State Behavior of App Store Approvers
In an article today, Apple’s Senior VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, compares Apple’s role to that of a retailer determining which products line store shelves. ‘There have been applications submitted for approval that…help the user break the law’, he says.
By this rationale, Wal-Mart should take matches and lighter fluid off the shelves because some folks might use them to commit arson.
I’m sure Apple and Chinese government will get along just fine.
One way to resolve ADFS error “The web server has been unable to contact the Federation server”
If you’re running ADFS and, after doing some maintenance such as taking an app server off and then re-joining the domain, find that you’re getting the “The web server has been unable to contact the Federation server” do an “iisreset” from the command prompt. It seems that the app server will not make new calls to the Federation server defined in web.config until you do an “iisreset”, so even though you may have resolved the root issue of the failure (undoubtedly a DNS or other networking issue), the app server will report a false error until you “iisreset.”
More Dev-friendly Tools for iPhone Emerge Pointing to Apple’s Achilles’ Heel
This morning came news, via InfoWorld writer Paul Krill, that Novell is releasing MonoTouch, a development toolkit which will enable developers to program an iPhone app in .NET and cross-compile to a native iPhone SDK-based binary. Opinions as to whether this is good or bad are already emerging. Setting technology biases aside, I think, on the whole, this is a good development and indicative of the weakness which has plagued Apple since its inception — Apple doesn’t know how to embrace and empower developers — they should adopt as their mission statement towards developers the tagline of Apple co-found Steve Wozniak’s blog: “Everyone is welcome.”
This failure to truly embrace developers is playing out with the iPhone as well. Let’s recap:
- When the iPhone was first announced in 2007, the word from Apple was that if you want to develop for the iPhone, web based apps are the way to go — no SDK nor Flash support will exist.
- In 2008 Apple announced the iPhone SDK and App Store — woo hoo! BTW, to code for the iPhone you needed to learn an arcane language (Objective-C) and remember long-lost memory management skills you learned way back in high school/college. Unless you’re a real-time/embedded systems programmer memory management is a menial task that the OS vendor should handle for you — there’s no time to deal with this non-sense when you’re a line-of-business app developer.
Naturally, tools started to emerge to make iPhone development more approachable. Tools like Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile (which is very popular and received a lot of recognition), and now MonoTouch, represent hope for those who don’t have the time to explore learning a new language but who have to just get an app done using their existing skillset — these are the modern day 3GL/4GL frameworks for iPhone development and shine a spotlight on the fact that the experience for iPhone users and iPhone developers couldn’t be further apart. Apple has a long way to go to make developers feel welcome and, moreover, productive.
Titanium Mobile Web Service Sample App
If you’re an aspiring iPhone Developer, have a web development skill set, but don’t want to learn Objective-C in order to develop a native iPhone app, then Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile is for you. In a nutshell, using HTML and JavaScript you can develop full-fledged iPhone SDK-based native apps (which compile down to native code, not just HTML/JS hosted in a Web View Controller like PhoneGap).
Using TitaniumMobile, I’ve created a small sample app which demonstrates taking user input, passing that data to a web service, then displaying the results to the user, with a little bit of error trapping too. You can check it out on the Titanium Mobile SampleApplications page — it’s called “Web Service Call Tutorial.” Enjoy.
P.S. — An added benefit of Titanium Mobile is that it support cross-deployment currently to iPhone and to Google Android.
Long-standing Mouse Acceleration Problem Seems Fixed in Snow Leopard
Those who have used Mac OS X with a third-party mouse know all too well the terrible mouse performance — the most fitting description I’ve heard describing the issue comes from the author of PlasticBugs.com: “…OS X’s mouse tracking feel like you’re mousing through mud.”
Well, after installing Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard last week I encountered a pleasant surprise — the mouse acceleration problem seems to be gone. The only way that could have happened is if Apple finally fixed it. Has anyone else noticed this?
