If the rumored partnership between Apple and Google in the TV space materializes, watch for another notch on the Internet’s stick in the Web vs. Old School Media.

The gizmo starring in this upcoming chapter will be Apple’s $299 iTV device [Apple press release], due out 1st quarter 2007. It will cut in sharply against way North Americans watch television.

Partnering with with Google and its massive library of video content, Apple may push the ad-free TV viewing experience into a significant chunk of households, a phenomenon that Tivo helped pioneer several years ago with its line of DVRs.

It will help power the move to a more diverse, ground up, non-intelligence-insulting medium. I couldn’t be happier.

As for the download-times-are-too-long naysayers, I counter that download speeds everywhere are getting faster year after year, not slower. Broadband penetration is now well over half of US household connections. In 2004 the figure was just 29%. And Apple sold 125,000 movies in the first week of the iTunes Music Store’s movie offerings.

The irony in all this is of course that the cable companies’ very own data networks will be turned against them. And I couldn’t be happier about that, too.

read more about it: CNET , Newsweek, The Register

It took a full day for the Hymn Project guy to update the iT 6 crack to work on iT 7.

Sadly, the JHymn app with iT7 cracking capability is only in DOS form, here.
Read more about it here.

Wednesday, 13 September 2006
iTunes 7 DRM Already Cracked
Topic: News

It’s only been a day since Apple updated iTunes to version 7, but the folks over at the Hymn project have already posted a new version of a program that can be used to remove the DRM from songs purchased from it. It’s an updated version of the recent release that worked with iTunes 6.

I’ve got a secret.

I like sheep.

No wait, wrong secret.

What I meant to say is that I’ve got Safari browsing eBay as fast as I’ve ever seen it before. That’s on either a Mac or a PC.

How did I do it, you breathlessly ask? (sorry for the split infinitive). I’ll tell you, of course – but first, the all-important backstory. I was born in Hollywood, dontcha know?

To get right to the point: eBay can be slow as molasses on Safari, and it makes we Mac users look bad when our shiny, new Macs plod along, sluggishly trying to load a webpage that pops up instantly on a friend’s PC. Hell, it can be downright embarrassing.

To wit: a few days ago, my eBay experience had become completely unbearable in Safari. Sure, Safari zips along on eBay when freshly installed on a new system, but it inevitably slows down to a crawl, much like your average rock drummer or a rebate from iomega. I was alone at the time of this latest slowdown but my head hung low in shame, nonetheless. It was slow. SLOW. Slow enough to make Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris look like Speedy Gonzalez on crystal meth in comparison.

I began scouring the web, in search of a cure for this torpid behavior. I tried everything: adblockers and custom css files; trashing Safari’s preferences; emptying Safari’s cache; dressing in women’s underwear; none of it made a bit of difference. eBay on Safari was still unbearably slow.

“HOW SLOW”, you (breathlessly) ask? Read on, oh asthmatic reader!

Below are two (small) real-time QuickTime movies. Each consists of the following actions: clicking on an auction, then clicking the back button to return to our search results. Safari’s cache was emptied between examples, and the same search results page and auction page were accessed both times.

Click here to see a real-time example of Safari struggling with a typical eBay auction.

Click here to see how quick the same process becomes after applying a free, easy fix.

In case you didn’t time that, BEFORE the fix, the whole procedure took TWENTY-SEVEN seconds. AFTER the fix, the same process took a mere THREE seconds. Now THAT’S some difference.

Why is this happening? Apparently, the idio… er, fine people at eBay have a bit of a PC bias. No, I don’t mean they use words like personhole cover or refer to murder suspects as persons of interest — what I mean is, they don’t really care how their website renders on Apple’s little ol’ Safari (their standard response to questions about Safari compatibility is “switch to Internet Explorer” – eeww). Because of this, they lard up their code with stuff that gives Safari fits.

So, what made such a dramatic difference between the two examples, above?

Drum roll, please: I TURNED OFF JAVASCRIPT.

That’s it. TURNING OFF JAVASCRIPT IN SAFARI MADE eBAY RUN NINE TIMES FASTER. As an added bonus, turning off javascript got rid of all the ads at the top of every eBay page. Go on – sock it to The Man.

Now granted, some of you won’t want to turn off javascript every time you visit eBay. But of course, you don’t have to — you can use Mike Solomon’s excellent shareware application, PithHelmet, which allows you to turn off javascript on a site-by-site basis (if one takes this path, be aware that there are a number of different eBay URL prefixes one must make adjustments for – most notably, www.ebay.com, cgi.ebay.com, search.ebay.com, search.stores.ebay.com, and my.ebay.com). PithHelmet costs a measley $10, and offers a variety of other worthwhile features, such as adblocking, Flash blocking and a host of other groovy goodies. It even cleared up my complexion. Plus, my coat is now shiny and lustrous.

eBay is now snappy as hell in Safari — I’ll never again have an auction for a Justin Timberlake standee sniped out from under my feet at the last moment. And in the long run, that’s what really matters, isn’t it?

~

So you’re a .NET developer, but want to use an Intel Mac?

The informative blog entry Boot Camp vs Parallels Vol 2 was written by a C# developer, so it’s got good focus for us Mac-friendly .NET developers. The answer to “Can you do it” is “Yes you can do it, and it’s easy.”

The big question is whether to dual boot, or to virtualize Windows XP via an application called Parallels.

Dual boot is possible thanks to Apple’s $0 Boot Camp, and Windows runs at full speed. The biggest drawback to this method of course is the requirement that you reboot when you need to switch OS’es.

The $79.99 Parallels application runs most Windows applications at near full speed in a virtual Windows environment inside Mac OS, so both operating systems and their applications are available simultaneously. Graphics-intensive apps like DVD players and 3D games run somewhat more slowly because Parallels does not access video hardware. But for development this is a non-issue.

Handy comparison chart
Ars Technica’s take on Parallels

NEW — see my Parallels review.