At last! An iTunes store whinge!

Jack must have been sweating for the past two days, but he has found someone who is being nasty about Apple's new music service. The Register's Andrew "Troll" Orlowski lays into Jobs for the current track selection, as if it were in some way significant. Of some significance, however, is his catalog of DRM-related problems starting to come to light. My problems with the iTunes store: 1. No purchases outside US for now. 2. File quality is not high enough. 3. In three days I haven't once got the damn thing to work. Apple should have been prepared for the initial spike.
(From Onlineblog)

Gates talks up online newspapers

At the annual Newspaper Association of America conference, Bill Gates talked about the technologies that he saw changing online newspapers, both for consumer and provider. The usual rich media stuff featured, plus there was some stuff about OneNote, Microsoft's onscreen handwriting recognition technology that is due to feature in the next version of Office.
(From Editor & Publisher)

War brings news traffic spike

The BBC World Service's news site saw huge spike in the number of unique United States visitors in March: there were 5.3 million visitors, compared with 2 million for April. Al-Jazeera went from 79,000 in February to 1 million, despite all the denial of service attacks. The gains were proportionally greater than those for US news websites.
(From ZDNet)

Six Degrees: "simple rules, smart app"

Nice to see that Mark Lemmons et al's Six Degrees weblog is echoing my "Smart Dumb, not Dumb Smart" mantra. If I remember rightly I may have nicked the phrase from Mark in the first place, back in 1999 when he took a look at Compositor. The principle that the intelligent stuff should be upstream -- i.e. in the realm of the human content creator -- has been fundamental to our notion of GNL's editorial system for the past five years.
(From Six Degrees Weblog)

Apple user interface stuff

Geeky bit: good (albeit occasionally illiterate) report on matters related to the rumoured introduction of "piles" to the next dot release of Macintosh OSX ("Panther"). Piles, an adjunct to the desktop metaphor that support "casual organization of information" were invented by Apple back in 1992. Piles would work in conjunction with real-time indexing of metadata about all files in a file system -- a subject close to the sadder parts of my heart. Stuff going on in the "file/database" arena in Windows too. Article has some good links, e.g. Bruce Tognazzini lamenting the way Apple failed to capitalise effectively on their decade head start in user interface design. Tog's best suggestion: a return key on the left side of the keyboard. So badly needed it's ridiculous. Some good stuff about Gestures (c.f. the only good idea in Minority Report). There's a free Gestures haxie available here.
(From The Register)

Online newspapers head towards profit

In a decent report on print media vs web media, Asia Times finds that the gradually increasing profitability of newspapers' ventures online is attributable to massively increased traffic and consumer behaviour, plus technological advances in advertising. Consumer orientated discussion on Slashdot.
(From Asia Times)

Update on QuarkXPress 6 features

Quark has released more details about its forthcoming QuarkXPress 6. New bits include options to select layers at printout (talk to me about this) and "a new Synchronized Text feature [that] lets users share content between layouts in a QuarkXPress 6 project. When synchronized text is edited in one place, corresponding text elsewhere in the project will be changed simultaneously" and "it uses the industry-standard Xerces engine to parse XML, which provides more robust XML support and enhanced error handling".
(From MacNN)

LA Times sacks Iraq photographer after modification

The LA Times has today published an explanation (not an apology) of its policy-breaking publication of a digitally altered photograph on Monday. The picture combined two separate images of a British soldier directing Iraqi civilians. The paper says that it was unaware that the photographer had combined the images prior to transmission and that he has been sacked.
(From LA Times)

San Seriffe is "all time number 2 April fool hoax"

The Museum of Hoaxes rates the Guardian's cherished San Seriffe supplement of 1977 at number 2 in its "Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaes of All Time". The BBC's great Spaghetti Harvest hoax rightly grabs number 1. The Museum notes something I hadn't noticed: in the Guardian's subsequent April Fool's references to San Seriffe, "each time it reappeared the island had changed location. It began in the Indian Ocean, moved to the South China Sea, and ended up in the North Atlantic". The Taco Liberty Bell gets number 4. The "Biblical value of Pi" gets in at 8; Guinness Mean Time is 23.
(From Museum of Hoaxes)