I mentioned on a previous post I’ve learned of breaking news by way of Twitter. Today’s plane crash of an US Airways flight into the Hudson River was no different.

However, this photo from a man on one of the rescue boats, via iPhone & Twitter, is almost unreal.

The photo was taken by Janis Krums with the message, “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”. Very cool and powerful at once.

Since I can’t think of anything to talk about at the moment, I’m posting a screenshot. Those that know me, know I love to customize my desktop and even my apps. Expect these from time to time.

Main desktop (click for larger image):

Dashboard (click for larger image):

What’s going on here?:
Dock: Extraordinary by Kenta w/ indicators by Max Rudberg
Icons: Mixed mostly my Jonas Rask, MacBook icon by Louie Mantia
Top left: Adium with a HUD modification for the contact list
Bottom left: Bowtie using the Zukunft theme

On the Dashboard, I’m using the Radar in Motion, SlothCam, Sports Fan, and Delivery Status widgets.

Any other questions ask.

Yesterday, Apple delivered what they say will be their last Macworld keynote address. This has always been the event that Apple has blown away fanatics & critics with game changing product offerings. It was at this event two years ago that Apple announced the iPhone.

Most will say there wasn’t any game changers this year. Still, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything I’m excited about from this year’s keynote. Apple unveiled new versions of iLife & iWork, a new 17 inch MacBook Pro model, and announced that all music from the iTunes Store would now be DRM-free. I’ll cover iLife & the iTunes announcement, as those are what got my interest the most.

iLife is Apple’s media organization @ creativity suite that comes on any Mac. Most would agree that there isn’t any other suite that compares to iLife, both in what it can do and for the price. The biggest changes, in what’s known as iLife ‘09, are in iPhoto and iMovie.

Last year, iPhoto gained a feature called Events, that attempted to group your photos according to the date you took them, figure that pictures from a particular day were part of a particular event. This year, Apple added two major features, Faces & Places. They also added themes for slideshows, and Facebook & Flickr integration. Here’s a run down of these features:

• Faces – Apple figures that people are often the most important subjects in your photos. So, why not give the ability to organize your photos by the people in them? Makes sense.

  Faces does this in two ways. First, it recognizes where faces are within a photo and asks you to apply name to the faces. Then, iPhoto will ask you to confirm or decline any other queries on faces it thinks might be the same person. Based on that feedback, iPhoto will learn your Uncle Bob from your Uncle Joe. This can come in useful if say, Uncle Joe would like to see just the photos of himself, as well as some other things I’ll get to in a minute.

• Places – More and more consumer level cameras are coming with GPS chips that enter a geotag into a photo’s metadata. iPhoto ‘09 comes with support for these geotags with Places. What Places does is organize photos depending on the place you took them, so all your photos taken while on vacation in Puerto Rico will be grouped together.

  This makes it easy when uploading your vacation photos online, or creating a slide show or photo book within iPhoto.

• Slideshow have gotten some things added to them this year. Before, slideshows were basically a flip through of your photos with some transitional effects on them. With the addition of themes, slideshows in iPhoto are suddenly not so boring. Slideshow themes include Classic, Shatter, Snapshots, Scrapbook, Ken Burns, and Sliding Panels. Also, every slideshow uses face detection to position photos correctly and keep the faces onscreen, so nobody is cut off.

  Very cool.

• Facebook & Flickr integration – Facebook is by far my favorite social networking platform. It allows me to keep up with my friends and former classmates are up to, see when get togethers are happening, and it’s accessible from just about anywhere, like my iPhone.

  Now, iPhoto offers a direct link with an option to upload those photos straight to Facebook with a click. Any album you upload to Facebook shows up on the sidebar like any other album you create, so you can see what photos are in each album. It also takes advantage of the Faces feature and translates that info into Facebook tags, so you can see who everyone is in a photo. Further, if you don’t happen to know who someone is, your friends can tag that person on Facebook and that information is then send back to iPhoto the next time it syncs.

  The Flickr integration works much in the same way, except it uses Places info instead, since Flickr also supports geotags.

iMovie ‘09 is basically a continuation of where iMovie ‘08 took off. I’ve been pleased in how quick you can edit video within iMovie ‘08, without having to be a total geek to do so.

In this years version, they’ve added some really cool audio and video editing tools, a theming option, and a video stabilization feature. All of which are better explained if seen, so feel free to check out Apple’s iMovie tutorials.

Garage Band, the music making and podcasting app, received one major upgrade; music lessons. Now, you can actually learn how to play a guitar or keyboard, with basic lessons that you can control at the pace you desire. When you get through those lessons, GarageBand has a feature called Artist Lessons, that feature musicians such as Ben Folds or Norah Jones, where they’ll walk you through one of their hit songs. Pretty cool.

Moving away from iLife, Apple’s last announcement was that every song sold on the iTunes Store would be DRM-free, a move music lovers have been waiting for. It wasn’t that Apple didn’t want to do this before, they did, but they also wanted to control the price of music where the big four music companies want to set their own prices. Apple finally compromised, so there’s now a tiered pricing system in place. Individual song prices can now be $1.29, $.99, or $.69. There’s also a $.30 per track upgrade fee on any tracks you own from the iTunes Store if you’d like a DRM-free copy.

For the most part, DRM didn’t bother me as I’ve always own some form of iPod for the time I’ve been buying MP3 players. But, there have been instances, such as when I’m streaming music to the PS3, that DRM has become an issue. Taking that limitation off should make a lot of people really happy, as the chains have been restrained.

The talk that Apple didn’t drop anything mind blowing this time around is a little annoying to me in a way. After refreshing the entire line of iPods last September, refreshing the laptop line in October, and doing everything they did with the iPhone within the last six months, what was Apple really supposed to do? We all know Snow Leopard isn’t going to be a major upgrade to Leopard and Apple isn’t going to release that until it’s ready. Outside of updating the iMacs with new graphics, there wasn’t much else for them to touch. Lets face it, upgrading the graphics in the iMac isn’t a whole lot to get excited about, compared to the iPhone or the Intel transition.

What Apple did do, especially in their consumer level suite iLife, was add those things that a lot of companies overlook or do half-assed, and did them right. Really, it’s the finer details that sets Apple above a lot of software and hardware companies, in my opinion. I’d have to see I’m excited about going out and getting the new version of iLife and playing around with it.

For more information on iLife ‘09 and it’s features, go to: http://www.apple.com/ilife/

Nothing against Blogger, I actually like the service. But, I have a couple reasons for the move:

• With an impending trip, I have a good opportunity to mo-blog or blog on the go. WordPress’ iPhone app is simply awesome, in my opinion.
• While WordPress’ free service doesn’t offer many options, upon using WordPress on a personal domain, the amount of customization and plug-ins for the service are incredible. I plan on having a personal domain in the coming months, so, switching now will make the transition go a little more smoothly.

I hope this doesn’t cause too much confusion. In any case, you’ll find me over at http://skoo402.wordpress.com/.

Thanks.

Well, it’s 2009. I know we’re all supposed to make resolutions, but I’m not going to do that. Actually, I hear it’s bad for your mental health to do so.

My new year will start out like most; anticipating a college football bowl game (in this case two, with Nebraska and Florida playing in 2009), and looking forward to news from the Macworld Expo (which will be 100% Steve Jobs free this year).

One major change will come, however. Within the next two weeks, I look to be back living in Nebraska. As it turns out, things aren’t what I anticipated them being in Pensacola. My section of town has seen it’s crime rate rise in the past few years, which many believe is an after effect of the displacement Hurricane Katrina caused. That’s a situation I don’t feel comfortable with, especially when given the option to not live in that situation.

I also haven’t been able to find work. I’ve grown tired of simply sitting around and waiting. Upon calling my old job in Lincoln, the thought I could go right back to work up there was confirmed.

Not having work not only affects my pocket, but affects my social life. I’ve met nobody since moving here, and frankly, I don’t really feel like making new friends. I’m perfectly content with the ones I had in Lincoln. Those friends don’t have to work through the trust issues I have with people in general.

Also, on the topic of work, I have career connections at my disposal in Lincoln, something I can’t say for Florida. My dad & step-mom gave me Final Cut Express, a industry standard video editing application, for Christmas. So, all I need now is a camera to shoot video with that I can chop up.

I’m able to move back in to my mom’s, where I’m only going to be responsible for buying food, so I’ll be able to save up money for a lot of the things I need, such as a new camera and a car, and to be able to save up for furniture when the time comes for me to leave the house again. However, unless the job takes me somewhere else, I don’t anticipate leaving Lincoln for a long time.

Upon adding everything up and weighing my pros and cons, if the cold weather is the only thing I have to complain about, then that’s not much. I find job security and good friends too valuable now.

Some of you may have heard about the two Indian pitchers who were signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates. What you may not realize is exactly what they went through to get there.

This makes me curious to see how the sport carries over in India and abroad. For the most part, the sport is only on the radar in the western hemisphere. In any case, it’s a good story and I wish these two guys the best.

[via CuteOverload]

A couple weeks I sent a message out to everyone on my list on Adium that I would be moving to AIM and if anyone needed to find me, that’s where I’d be.

Not one person switched over.

It’s not that I’m not liked. I usually end up talking to someone online during the day. It’s more of a stubbornness to switch. People I talk to have built up such a base on Yahoo, nobody’s going to move. I went through these same trials with another individual with Skype about a month ago.

The problem I have is that Yahoo Messenger on the Mac is a sad excuse for a program of any kind. It’s buggy (still in beta), eats memory, and just feels bulky. Further, even after over two years of work on the current version, there’s a poor form of voice support and nothing for conferences.

Meanwhile, I have this app that came with my Mac, iChat, that sits dormant for the most part. I’d much rather use this slice of technology for many reasons.

iChat’s voice support is by far the best available on the Mac. Further, I can get a multi-person voice conference going in seconds, which I can then import into Garage Band and start a radio-style podcast if I like. Video chats are also awesome on iChat, with some neat features embedded into that option. I can share photos and video in full screen as well as start a video conference in full screen with up to three other people, all in the H.264 codec, giving near HD quality.

Further, iChat just feels like part of my system, where other applications feel, well, like they’re from a third party. I’ve managed to work with Adium, the great multi-client IM client for the Mac, but it offers no video or voice.

So, I’m taking this time to appoligize to iChat for never using you. It’s nothing personal.

Yup, it’s snowing in Louisiana!

There’s a major difference in the states of mind of people from different locations when it comes to snow. Down here in the Deep South, it’s a novelty. It doesn’t usually do this kind of thing around here, so its fun to us down here.

Up north, when I lived in Nebraska, it was always cool when that first snow came. But, after that first month, you became sick of the crap and grew ready for Spring.

All the above photos are from the Baton Rouge/Lafayette areas in Louisiana (about 250 miles west of me) via TwitPic, a service used for sending pictures from Twitter.

Rappers I Know Podcast XIII “FWMJ’s Revenge”

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