Apple acquires Proximity asset management company

The company’s flagship product is artbox, an all-in-one asset management and workflow.

Artbox can catalog content and makes it easy to search, find, browse media and create rough cuts. It also integrates with editing tools like Apple Final Cut Pro.

Supports video and image formats, like TIFF, TARGA, PNG, DPX, Photoshop, MPEG-1*, MPEG-2*, MPEG-2 IMX*, MPEG-4, DV25, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, HDV*, AVI, Quicktime, Media100, and more.

Artbox is targeted at professional video applications including TV, news production and post-production.

All technology and intellectual property, including artbox workgroup and artbox enterprise have been acquired by Apple.

Rose leaks new iPhone info

Saying from a reliable source, Kevin Rose spills the beans on a recent Diggnation

2 Batteries. 1 phone and 1 Music Player

Slideout keyboard (ichat? email?), touchscreen

4GB and 8GB Flash. $249.00 and $449 respectively

Supports many carriers and technologies (CDMA, CSM, etc)

Can't confirm it's running a mini version of OS X

At least one analyst says Apple has begun small scale production on the device with a release scheduled for around the end of Q1 2007

Universal Photoshop in Q2 2007?

Think Secret reports the new version should be here around March or April 2007

Of course it will be Universal, but will sport other new features too

Photoshop CS3's interface is said to closely resemble the look and feel of Adobe After Effects.

Best news is performance is said to be exceeding performance expectations on both Intel and PPC platforms.

New Zealand iTunes and Apple Online Stores

As rumored by the The New Zealand Herald Apple opened iTunes and Online stores in New Zealand.

In addition to the Herald scoop, one blogger had found New Zealand flag images on Apple's iTunes content servers.

Songs are priced at NZ$1.79, music videos at NZ$3.59 and most albums at NZ$17.99.

Australian iPod owners will not become criminal next year.

A bill that goes into effect on January 1, 2007 was amended by both houses of Parliament

The amended bill permits the use of iPods, time-shifting recording devices like TiVo, playing region encoded DVDs from outside Australia, and recording yourself lip-syncing to commercial recordings. All which would have been illegal under the original version of the bill.

Apple claims no ownership of "podcast"

In response to concerns that Apple was attempting to trademark the term Podcast (Podcast Ready) Dave Gray, host of the Global Geek podcast on the "PodcastNetwork", sent Apple a $1 “royalty check”.

GlobalGeek Podcast

Apple sent a written response and said, “Apple does not object to third party usage of the generic term ‘podcast’ to accurately refer to podcasting services,” and “Apple does not license the term ‘podcast.’”

Leo Laporte launched a public campaign to change the term to 'netcast' as he feels the term 'podcast' leads to confusion and hinders the general acceptance of 'podcasting'.

Apple gains right to "digital media" download patent

Apple settled out of court a lawsuit filed by Vermont inventor David Contois.

The patent filed in 1996 by Contois Music Technology originally consisted of a desktop computer holding multiple songs with an interface that allowed a hotel guest to select three songs and play them on an electric grand piano.

On urging of his lawyer David broke it out into three elements; remote music storage, selection of music to download and playing music on a music device.

The terms of the settlement were not disclosed but Michael Starkweather, a lawyer for Controis stated, ""I believe that, with this patent in hand, Apple will eventually be after every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer to pay royalties on every download of not just music but also movies and videos".

Another Apple Rumor roundup

EETimes reporting that next gen video iPod delayed until Q2 or Q3 2007 due to delays in the NVidia GFX chips (another rumor that Nvidia beat out Broadcom)

MacOSXRumors reports on an Ultra-thin 12" MacBook Pro

Dual-Core processor, optical drive

USD $1700 to $1800

Apple has hired video game designers and may have aspirations of entering the video game market in long-term? Pippin, iPod Games (cheats).

16GB Flash based iPod? Toshiba announced a 1.8 100GB HD, video iPod?

Correction on the Beatles

Listener Tom points out. "The Beatles aren't a London band, they're quite famously from Liverpool."

Resolution Independence. The good, the bad, the really ugly.

In 1984 the original Mac had a resolution of 72 DPI. They use 72 because in printing 72 points = 1 in. Thus what was printed on the MAc screen had a 1:1 relationship with what appeared when you printed stuff out.

Guess what? Things gave changed. Most monitors to day fall between 85-100 DPI and that number is going up. Windows tried to fix the 73 DPI dilemma by using a 96 DPI standard (in between 85 and 100).

Monitors are getting bigger, pixels are getting smaller, and icons are becoming increasingly-larger in order to maintain their relative size on-screen (128 x 128 icons debuted in OS X Tiger). Almost no monitor sold today (including Apple's) adhere to a 72 pdi resolution.

Resolution independence will debut as a user-level feature in Mac OS X Leopard (and Windows Vista) giving us the ability to choose the resolution at which they wish to view any graphics on their screen. (instead of just 72 pd. (96 pdi on Windows ) as it exists today.

An operating system needs two things to be resolution independent: the ability to scale UI elements, and the use of vector images and high-res bitmap images to ensure scaling occurs properly.

OS X has the scaling functionality but lacks the vector and high-res bitmaps in the interface (in most cases)

You can catch a preview of the scaling using Apple Developer Tools and the Quartz Debug.app. Developer-->Applications-->Performance Tools. Under 'Tools' menu choose 'Show User Interface Resolution' and check the 'Restore scale factor to default on quit'. Now you can adjust the scale factor up to 3x and see the results when you launch an App.

All of this has sparked big debate among icon designers, software developers and engineers over what is better, multiple size bitmaps vs. vectors.

Vectors get very large in file size when you try to add a lot of shading to create photo realistic icons and UI elements like we have today

Vectors don't scale well to small sizes 16 x 16 or 32 x 32. Designers traditionally had edit each resolution for the best look.

Some argue that todays GPU won't deal with vectors as efficiently because the GPU can process raster images in parallel. If you seen the "drawing in" effect of a large vector PDF, Flash or Illustrator file you know what they mean.

The solution from Apple's perspective seems to be a combination of both. Leopard will support 512 x 512 icons. And Apple's resolution independence documentations says:

Vector-based art is automatically scalable, so you should use vector-based images for simple artwork; such as black-and-white images or flat images without dimensional detail (such as shadows or gradients).

There is a great article on iSlayer.com (the developer of iStat) with links to other relevant articles on the subject

iSlayer Resolution Independence

Saving photos from flash cards

Listener Bruce recently went on a cruise from Scandinavia and Russia. He snapped 270 pictures in a 1GB SD card, but when he went to import them into iPhoto the card appeared empty

Luckily he found PhotoRescue.

Demo lets you scan the card an see recoverable images with a thumbnail

PhotoRescue

Can purchase for USD $29.00

I personally like and have used Picture Rescue from ProSoft (USD$59.00)

PictureRescue

What to do if your Mac got the "blues" after 10.4.8 update

This is a strange one, but some people are reporting that there Mac LCD displays getting a "blue" tint after running the 10.4.8 update

Listener David suffer "the blues" and a remedy is:

The solution may be to delete the file "com.apple.universalaccess.plist" from ~/Library/Preferences

This file can become corrupt during the update process, resulting in the blue tint.

You may also try to replace your Color profile or create a custom one. You can find some online to deal with the blue issue. They install into your Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Display directory and then you need to go to the Displays pane of System Preferences, go to "Color" and select the new Color LCD profile.

MPEG video files get "muxed" up in Quicktime

Play comment from Gregor

MPEG Streamclip

MUXED: they contain interleaved audio and video tracks (they're mixed together instead of stored in separate tracks). QuickTIme, iMovie, FinalCut, etc seem to have issues with muxed files.

New TiVO hacked files also are in muxed format. (see maccast.com)

www.maccast.com

VLC will playback and muxed files.

Can also convert with VisualHub (USD$23.32)

VisualHub

To playback MPEG-2 in QuickTime you actually need the QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component. (USD $19.99). Even with this it won't handle muxed files.

QuickTime MPEG2 Playback

Cataloging your archived files

Play question from James

DiskTracker, Shareware USD$30.00

DiskTracker

Disk Library, Shareware USD$29.00. More OS X like look and feel Universal

Disk Library