Link

“They can keep growing the free iTunes in other directions if they want to, such as the App Store, movies, etc. But for serious music lovers with an appetite for pro-level music library management software, there needs to be an alternative.”

Great post from Betalogue, though I believe Apple won’t release such a thing anytime soon.

The problem is, music library organising isn’t seen as “professional task” (it is for me, I’d pay for someone to organise my music library. God knows how many times I wished I had a well sorted iTunes while recording with my band) and for this reason Cupertino doesn’t think people would ever need a pro version of iTunes. More important, they don’t care about the fact that iTunes has many problems and needs serious fixes, so it’s not all about “more actions”.

It’s about more stability. And of course, a pro look.

I’d love to have my own music encyclopedia.

Thanks to @elasticthreads I’ve just found out that Quicksilver b57 is available. The popular app launcher has finally gone out of the alpha and seems like it re-emerged with a group of open source developers. I’m gonna look into this.

I’m testing this new beta right now and it feels faster than ever. QS has indexed my Mac in less than 1 minute and overall the app is so very stable.

Anyway, here’s the official discussion. You can download the latest build here.

Link

“Hoddie compared Windows Mobile to the iPhone, whose apps he described as “beautiful,” which encourages third-party developers to produce apps of similar quality.

He added that Microsoft’s second problem is segmentation in the hardware ecosystem. Windows Mobile ships with several different manufacturers’ hardware, including HTC, LG and Samsung. The problem? From a developer perspective, that requires coding an app for several phones with different UI styles, buttons and screen sizes. (The same problem, incidentally, has started to plague Android developers.)

That would give the iPhone another advantage: The iPhone operates on a closed system, which can only run on Apple hardware, meaning third-party developers can produce apps and games that work exclusively with the iPhone. Therefore, despite Apple’s questionable and controversial approval policy for iPhone apps, developers can code one app that works with 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices, which is less time consuming than developing several versions of one app for a variety of Windows Mobile smartphones. In turn, that spells out to a larger number of apps in the App Store, which enables Apple’s hardware to cater to a larger and broader audience.

The inability to recognize the new smartphone audience is another one of Microsoft’s flaws, Rubin said. Microsoft’s mobile OS history is rooted in personal digital assistants, which were marketed toward enterprise audiences. Today, the smartphone has shifted into the mainstream as a consumer device, and yet Windows Mobile is still largely focused on enterprise features.”

Great piece from Brian Chen (Wired) which describes very well the situation of Windows Mobile. You know, closed systems are better sometimes.

Link

AIR 2 builds on the success of AIR 1 by giving developers new capabilities, and even tighter integration with the desktop. Some new features of AIR 2 include:

Support for the detection of mass storage devices.

Advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets.

Support for native code integration.

The ability to open a file with its default application.

Multi-touch and gesture support.

New APIs for access to raw microphone data.

Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support.

Global error handling.

Improved cross-platform printing

Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards.

Time for decent AIR apps?