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.

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.

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.

As I made clear in this post, this isn’t an Apple issue. It arises from the fact that the company, like every other manufacturer of consumer TFT dislays uses panels which are only capable of displaying 6-bits per channel, rather than the 8-bits needed for true millions of colours. And I defy any iMac owner to tell the different between an image on a 6-bit display and one on an 8-bit display.

The only logical conclusion is that this iMac lawsuit is a crude attempt to cash in on the settlement of the MacBook Pro dispute. The key difference is that the MacBook Pro is a professional machine aimed at people who might reasonably be expected to do colour critical work on it. The iMac is a consumer machine designed for watching movies and surfing the web. Can any iMac owner really claim to have suffered because their display only pretends to show millions of colours?

What next? Can I sue the maker of my inkjet printer because it only prints three pages a minute rather than their claimed 20? And if I did, would the story make it onto the front page of The Guardian website as the iMac story did this morning.

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.

In all the tools, you click the tool to select it and are presented with a number of options, represented as thumbnails of the image, which have the effect or adjustment applied to varying degrees. Hover over a thumbnail to view the effect in the main image and then click the one you want. You can then apply other effects and adjustments. To remove an effect, you just untick the checkbox next to its name.

Effects and adjusments can be undone, even after saving the image by clicking on the drop down menu in album view and selecting Revert.

Here are a few more of my first impressions:

As you would expect from Adobe, the flash-based interface looks very slick. It is a little sluggish however.

The Upload feature which allows you to to upload JPEG images to your Photoshop Express account is well-implemented. It’s reasonably speedy – it took me a little over ten minutes to upload a 25MB folder of images over a cable modem connection and the progress indicators show how much of each file has uploaded.

There are links on the main interface to Photobucket, FaceBook, and Picasa to allow you to log into your accounts on those sites from Express, but no support for Flickr.

Albums are private by default but can be shared publicly at the press of a button.

All in all, it’s looking very promising.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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