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Forbes: Mac sales see major growth

By Nick, June 23, 2005

According to a Forbes article, research firm Credit Suisse First Boston reports that Apple has seen major year-over-year sales growth in the month of May.

Retail PC shipment growth fell to 4% in May, led by desktops, falling 10% year-over-year and 8% month-over-month. Notebooks continued to perform well, growing 23% year-over-year, in line with March figures. Distribution shipments were up as well, increasing 13% year-over-year in May, in-line with seasonality. Again, desktop shipments were down and notebooks up. “From a vendor perspective, Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) was the big winner, growing units 79% year-over-year overall and 94% year-over-year in standalone retail,” the research firm said.

These figures do not represent any possible impact on sales due to Apple’s announcement of switching to Intel processors in 2006.


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FoxTrot features Leopard

By Nick, June 21, 2005

Today’s FoxTrot comic strip by Bill Amend features a little inside joke for Mac users everywhere; a blatant reference to Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”.

Bill Amend is a Mac user, and will slip in the occasional geek reference into the strip. Earlier references include “iFruit” (an iMac parody), OS X’s UNIX underpinnings, the Windows leaked source code incident, and “World of Warquest” (a play off of the game World of Warcraft).

Kudos to Claudia of Mac Rumors Forums for spotting this.


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Widgets: Cheaper than crack and just as addictive

By Nick, June 20, 2005

It is official: I am a Dashboard junkie

It is official: I am a Dashboard junkie. Fortunately for Dashboard junkies like myself, Dashboard widgets are legal and much safer than crack. Aside from Spotlight, Dashboard is the feature I use most in Tiger. I have about fifty widgets installed on my iBook and am constantly looking for more. Here are some of my favorites:

Weather (built-in): Useful, cool-looking; in a nutshell, a model widget.
Jared (Freeverse Software): An old friend is back!I just hope you have a high tolerance for musical ineptitude before using this one.
Reversi (Andrew Collier): A simple reversi game you can play against the computer or a human opponent. A great time-killer.
Yahoo! Traffic (Yahoo!; download page): A must if you live in a large metropolitian area.
Google Maps (David Lindquist; download page): Google Maps is great for finding places and as a fun time-waster. A widget makes this already handy tool even better.
Scoreboard (Ryan Inselmann; download page): I’m a big baseball fan. Scoreboard allows me to keep tabs on a game even when I can’t watch it myself.
JUST ADDED: iClip Lite (inventive): A scrapbook-like widget for storing items on your clipboard.

Keep this page bookmarked; I will update it as I find more cool ones.

Where to find widgets

The most obvious place to go isApple’s Dashboard widget download site, which features over 500 widgets. Other sites to check out include Widget Machine, a widget developer, as well as other widget-dedicated sites such as Dashboard Lineup and dashboardwidgets.com.

Miscellaneous stuff:
I’d like…
(Continue)


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Apple hit with patent lawsuit [UPDATED]

By Nick, June 20, 2005

Word is making its way through the grapevine that Apple is being sued by a small company who claims iTunes’ interface is violating patents it own. AppleInsider reports:

Contois Music Technology last week asked a Federal Court to stop the iPod maker from distributing its iTunes jukebox software and is seeking damages over an alleged patent violation by the iTunes software.
[...]
In the 10-page suit obtained by AppleInsider, lawyers for Contois said that David Contois conceived of and developed a computer interface for playing music on an internal or external computer-responsive music device, which he then exhibited at the 1995 COMDEX trade show and the 1996 NAMM music industry trade show.

According to the suit, persons who were at the time employed by or later became employed by Apple were present at both trade shows and viewed Contois’ software. The suit charges Apple later “copied” the invention and used the design ideas in the interface for its iTunes software.

UPDATE: Apple holds a patent on iTunes’ interface, according to a CNet news.com article.

Deep Thought’s take:An interesting part of the AppleInsider is as follows: “Specifically, Contois documented 19 interface aspects of the iTunes software that it claims are in direct violation of Contois’ patent. These areas include iTunes’ menu selection process to allow the user to select music to be played, the ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player, and search capabilities such as sorting music tracks by their genre, artist and album attributes.”…
(Continue)


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Geek Toys and Mac site of the Week: OS X treats by Pierre Châtel

By Nick, June 20, 2005

When you think of "Haxie" you probably thing of Unsanity. However, there are third party developers out there making some interesting haxies as well.

When you think of “Haxie” you probably thing of Unsanity. However, there are third party developers out there making some interesting haxies as well. One of which is Pierre Châtel. Pierre’s site features two haxies: Slider and Unifier. Slider adds a fade-in and fade-out effect to opeing and closing windows to Cocoa apps. Unifier is a haxie that makes the unified toolbar look (almost) universal.

On top of haxies, Pierre creates various GUI goodies and a small app entitled DeliciTunes, which, as Pierre describes, is “designed to fill a hole in the current Deliclous Library implementation: It allows you to export all the music albums currently in your iTunes library to your Delicious Library.” All in all, some interesting stuff worth checking out.

Pierre Châtel’s blog’n stuff


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