I’ve been using my Gmail account as an IMAP account with Apple Mail for a while now. Mostly, it works well but I’ve always been irritated by the additional mailboxes which are added to Mail’s sidebar as a result. Often they’re out of sync with the Gmail box which sits under Inbox at the top of the sidebar.

Thankfully, there is a workaround as this post on Mac OS X Hints describes. I’ve now implemented the hack and it works very well. Thanks guys.

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The Guardian is well-known for typos. But this is a gem.

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That’s a real job title. No, seriously, it really is. And there’s more of the same guff here on DIY Planner.

Needless to say, having read scanned the biog, I didn’t read the rest of the post, mainly due to a desire to leave the contents of my stomach exactly where they are.

Now, I like DIY Planner, I really do. I’ve been using a variation of the Hipster PDA for the last year or so and DIY Planner’s templates are second to none. But that sort of post could push a person to the Unsubscribe button.

If you can beat Whole Person Design Coach as a ridiculous job title, I’d love to hear it. Let me know in Comments.

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You’ve probably heard about the iMac lawsuit by now. You know, the one where Apple is being sued for claiming that the 20in model displays ‘millions of colors’ when in reality it displays 262,000 colors and uses either dithering or frame rate control to fool the human eye into thinking that it’s seeing millions of colours.

This issue first arose when the iMacs shipped last summer, but the lawsuit was launched only on Monday. Why? Because Apple recently settled out of court with MacBook Pro owners for whom, as professional photographers, the distinction is critical. One of the reasons, according to reports, that a settlement was reached in that case is that the plaintiffs’ legal representative had trouble finding other disgruntled MacBook Pro owners to join a class action suit.

[Read more →]

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Photoshop Express may have taken a while to arrive, and even then it’s still only in beta, but it’s looking pretty good.

The editing features are beautifully implemented. In addition to basic features like cropping, rotating and changing the exposure there are a number of other options ranging from the genuinely useful to what can best be described as novelty. Among the novelty group are PopColor which allows you to isolate a colour in an image and convert the rest of the image to monochrome, and Sketch which converts a photograph into, you guessed it, a sketch. Results from both tools are very good, however. Exposure correction and black and white conversion are also very good.

[Read more →]

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The Wall Street Journal reports that as well as being heavy internet users in general, iPhone owners are also by far the largest consumers of mobile television and video.

According to an M:Metrics survey, 30.9% of iPhone users have watched mobile television on the device, compared to 4.6%, on average, for other mobile phone users.

That iPhone users are more video hungry than other mobile phone users is no real surprise given that there’s a YouTube application right on the home screen, but the extent of the difference is remarkable.

In related news, this post from Ian noted that iPhone users were responsible for a 3% increase in iPlayer usage following the release of iPlayer for iPhone. Another impressive statistic.

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ZDNet reports that Adobe has ‘clarified’ its position on Flash on the iPhone. The company issue a statement yesterday which added the following to CEO Shantanu Narayen’s comments on Tuesday.

However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it.

To be fair to Narayen, that’s not a whole lot different from what he actually said, which was:

‘So we are also committed to bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone and we will work with Apple. We’ve evaluated the SDK, we can now start to develop the Flash player ourselves and we think it benefits our joint customers. So we want to work with Apple to bring that capability to the device.’

Note the two references to working with Apple, which weren’t included in the coverage on the many blogs which mocked Narayen’s comments yesterday. Most commentators chose to home in on the ‘we’ve evaluated the SDK’ bit and then use that to make the assumption that Narayen was saying that the SDK provided all the tools and permissions Adobe needed.

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Today’s piece in the FT, which has predictably been picked up by pretty much every major news outlet, is a classic ‘we’ve got bugger all to say, but we’ll run with it anyway’ story.

You can tell this by the fact that there’s not a single quote from anyone in the story and the fact that the closest it has to a named source is ‘executives familiar with the negotiations’. In other words, the cleaner who happened to be listening at the door when someone floated the idea.

The FT doesn’t even say whether the executives are employed by Apple, the music companies, the analysts it refers to, or some other third party which has a vague interest.

Nevertheless, if there’s even a shred of truth in the story it raises some interesting questions. So lets assume for a moment that it is true.

Here’s the guts of it:

‘One executive said the research had shown that consumers would pay a premium of up to $100 for unlimited access to music for the lifetime of the device, or a monthly fee of $7-$8 for a subscription model.’

Would you pay £50 for an iPod if it meant you could download as much music as you want from iTunes at no extra cost? On the face of it, of course you would, so would I. Which is why the market research apparently returned such positive results. But there’s an important phrase in the story which could be crucial — ‘for the lifetime of the device.’

That means that when your iPod dies, so does the music. It also means that, presumably, you won’t be able to sync those tracks with a Mac or PC or burn them to CD. And, of course, it means the return of that nasty ogre we thought was slowly shuffling out of the room, DRM. In order to ensure that tracks or only available for the ‘lifetime of the device’ Apple will have to ensure that they can only be played on that device, which means DRM.

Now, would you pay an extra £50 in order to be able to download as many tracks as you want, over Wifi, directly to your iPhone or iPod touch if you could only listen to them on that device and with the knowledge that the music is locked to that iPhone/iPod? Suddenly it’s not so clear cut.

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The Guardian reports that News Corp is in talks with Yahoo about merging its online business with the “ailing internet firm” “embattled internet company.”

No real surprise there, particularly if you read my post a couple of weeks ago.

Microsoft or News Corp? Talk about a rock and a hard place.

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GCap, which earlier this year closed its DAB station Core, has announced that two more DAB stations, Planet Rock and The Jazz are for the chop. The company is also to sell its stake in Digital One and Xfm FM licences outside London.

At the same time as announcing the two closures, GCap, owner of Classic FM and Capital Radio, unveiled a version of its musicradio.com website that works on the iPhone. The site allows listeners to stream the output of any one of Gcap’s stations to their iPhone, look up the last five songs played, buy one of those songs from iTunes or a whole album from Amazon, and listen to the station’s podcasts.

The service will also work on the iPod touch, but as it requires an Internet connection, will only work when the iPod is in range of a wifi hotspot. This makes listening while on the move more difficult on the touch than on the iPhone where the service can be accessed over the Edge mobile phone network.

More from The Guardian.

The trouble with DAB radio

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