Published on December 31, 2006
Elgato EyeTV Hybrid
Originally uploaded by ocellnuri.
Merry Late Christmas, and slightly early Happy New Year everyone! I dropped off the Earth for the last week. I got hit with something really nasty and have been completely out of commission since Christmas Day. I’m on the way back though.
(This is intended as a preliminary-mini-review for anyone looking for a HDTV solution for the Mac, let me know if you have any questions.)
Today I was able to get up and set up one of my Christmas gifts from my Mom and Step-dad (Thanks so much!), a HDTV tuner for my Macs. The Elgato eyeTV Hybrid accepts analog and digital TV signals. I picked up an over-the-air HDTV antenna and was watching hi-res TV in a very short time.
The unit will also time-shift, gives you a full screen program guide, and let’s you schedule recordings ala Tivo. All of this can be done with the included Apple Frontrow remote, or with a larger included remote.
The software will also automatically add recorded TV shows to iTunes, transcoded for the iPod in H.264 video if you’d like. Slick! It will do everything on my iMac (Intel Core Duo) and will do Analog TV on my G4 Powerbook.
My only gripe is that the unit will not time-shift Analog TV unless you are actively recording a show. My $50 Windows TV Tuner could do that, but never did anything HD. It’s a trade-off that I don’t mind.
Sorry about the horrible pic… it’s very difficult to get a shot of TV and have everything in the room look normal.
Published on December 23, 2006
CS3, where have you been all my life? I’ve got the CS3 beta running on both my Intel iMac and my G4 Powerbook. It is snappier than CS2 was on my Powerbook, but it completely screams on my iMac! We have needed this for so long, great to see that it is being delivered.
The speed boost is great, but I’m even more excited about the features being added. Particularly, the greatly improved Bridge application. It also looks like Camera RAW has borrowed a lot of the controls that Rawshooter brought to the table when Adobe bought the technology from Pixmantec. I couldn’t be happier, because I used Rawshooter for a long time when my main photo editing machine was a Windows box. I’m also very excited about applying filters as adjustment layers through the “smart filters” function. That is going to completely change the way we use filters in Photoshop.
I can’t wait for CS3’s full release to come out. Great things are ahead for sure.
Published on December 17, 2006
To me, this is completely beautiful. This is the direction I see small electronics going. You won’t have to design physical buttons, because the buttons will be placed with software. They can adapt contextually. In one situation you have a menu of application launchers, and in the next situation you have a number pad. A firmware update could add something like a push-to-talk button without any changes in hardware needed.
My only fear with the touch screen is the lack of tactile feedback. Blackberry/Treo junkies will have a hard time giving up touch-typing on a thumb pad. However, Sony already has technology that uses small piezo-electric elements to vibrate the screen when a button is clicked, giving that push-button feedback that we depend on to let us know that we’ve activated a button. I believe that they had also made it so that if you slid over a button, the screen would vibrate, letting you “feel” were buttons were before pressing down hard enough to activate them.
At any rate, I see a lot of very exciting things happening in this market. How will these things influence product design?
Via: Gizmodo
Tags: phones design
Published on December 13, 2006
Happy Holidays from Flickr… this is excellent news.
Beginning this month all Pro account will have totally unlimited storage and bandwidth. While probably only a fraction of Pro users were bumping up against the old 2GB-per-month upload limit, who can argue with unlimited? Free users have cause to celebrate, too: The per-month upload limit for free accounts has been bumped up to 100MB, a 500% increase over the previous 20MB limit.
I come no where close to hitting the 2gig upload limit as a Pro user, but it’s still nice to know that things are completely unlimited now. However, the upload increase for free users is a very big deal in my opinion. The 20meg upload bandwidth imposed on free users was really too restricting to be very useful for most people that I talked into signing up. 100meg should make things a lot more fun for new users.
Via: DownloadSquad
Tags: flickr
Published on December 9, 2006
“”Now Gmail can check for the mail you receive at your other email accounts. You can retrieve your mail (new and old) from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail.” In limited release, but coming soon. Looks cool!”
Yes! This is excellent. I’ve always promoted merging all of your e-mail accounts to Gmail, but many friends couldn’t figure out how to forward e-mail from different accounts to Gmail. Now it won’t be an issue anymore.
Also, I just got some new web hosting, and I can’t get their server-side forwarding to work. Hopefully now I won’t have to mess with it anymore.
read more | digg story
