News for Monday, 12 June 2006

It is interesting how Google's fame has changed with time. From the first days of internet popularization to now, this company has grown, proposing new service after new service, and its highly positive image has gradually been shadowed by a kind of mistrust, a hint of fear, in the consumer's mind.
The users' anxiety toward the ubiquity of this research engine and its derived products is being illustrated by numerous metaphors such as the hydra or the octopuss. Up to the point where people begin to forget that the free tools Google offers might as well just simplify their digital life.
This is the case for Google Browser Sync , which confirms that Google-made tools can be increasingly seen as an Internet suite, as Microsoft Office is for office work or Adobe CS for graphic design.
This new service, which comes out under the shape of a Firefox plug-in, is very simple: with it, gmail users will be able to synchronize their bookmarks, but also their sessions! For example, if you quit a session with multiple tabs on a computer and start another one on another machine, the same tabs will reappear. It's transparent, doesn't use much resources and can therefore quickly become an addictive and elegant solution for those using internet both at home and at work. It is also a useful way to synchronize your Windows and OSX browsers on a MacIntel running BootCamp or Parallel Desktops.

It has been a long time we did not talk about this SourceForge Project. Macam is a free universal driver for USB webcam. Since the version 0.8.5 it is available as UB and therefore supports Intel-based Macs.
This update 0.8.6 brings support for SPCA561A-based cameras. QuickCam Messenger, Messenger Plus, and Communicate should work even better.
As a reminder, you still need a third-party application, such as ichatusbcam, to be able to use USB webcam with iChat, even though the last Apple hardware models featuring an integrated iSight are all using USB2 and not FireWire (as for the external iSight)...

Memory chip maker SanDisk wants to become second best in the field of portable MP3 players. To that end they have chosen to criticize the iPod and iPod users instead of pushing forward their own products.
In a website http://www.idont.com/ iPod users are shown as sheep following the move.
According to one of their links, the "i" in iPod stands for "isolation":
http://www.cyberrodent.com/ipod.html
They also advertise for another website whose name needs no comment and in which an article on SanDisk portable MP3 players happens to have been published:
Anything but iPod.
By not advertising on their own player's features, the guys in SanDisk kind of ackowledge the fact that they're by no means better than the iPod's. Labelling iPod users as animals certainly is a bit rude. Time will tell if this strategy is to meet success or oblivion. In any case it's a bit of a fame they have won as for now.

The company Meizu has released an audio/video player that could have been branded by Apple and named iPod Video (with the proper iPod trackpad/wheel).

This player features a 2.4" LCD display, 320x240 pixels, supporting 26000 colors.
It is also available in Black or White, but its capacity is limited to 1 or 4 GB. It weights 55g and its battery lifespan is estimated to 20hours in audio mode and 10 hours in video mode.
Next challenge for Apple: Make the true iPod video better.

It is with grief that we heard about the prematured passing away of Michael Bartosh.

Aged 28, he accidentally died in Tokyo on Sunday.
The president of 4am Media, he was probably the greatest Mac OSX server Guru. We are presenting our condolences to his wife and family.

If you have a PowerBook with a dead LCD panel, it is of course possible to recover the motherboard to turn it into a desktop machine. As shown on the photo below, a simple plastic box will be sufficient:

If you want to know more :
http://www.entremaqueros.net
The step-by-step procedure is in Spanish but with Babelfish, one can get a understandable translation: http://babelfish.altavista.com

In the wake of a recent news item about a split MacBook, further records of similar assembly flaws have come to our attention. Yesterday I could lay hands on two Macbidouille team members' Macbooks. The first one had a 1 mm gap above the Magsafe connector, while the bottom of the framing of its LCD flat pannel was clearly offset (2 mm). The second one had less visible flaws that are nonetheless just as annoying. When pressed on, the top part of its flat pannel's framing creaks worryingly and gets depressed.
Apart from these annoyances, both machines run smooth and perfect. But these finishing details are a pain in the Mac. It looks like the plastic parts are clipped, while the odd screw is just there to hold everything together. The clips seem to be very fragiles and to break easily during the assembly process, which explains the gaps and the lack of rigidity.
Sure, we have been told than the MacBoook is a low-end laptop at a tight price. But let us not forget that the reason we were paying the high price for a Mac was its perfectly flawless assembly finish. Looks like Apple is sacrifiying this on the altar of the market shares, praying for the 10 percents...