Ahhh, now this is good news.

GOG.com has made deals with publishers to redistribute classic computer games online at a relatively low cost ($5.99 or $9.99), DRM-free and modernized to be compatible with XP and Vista. Already among the promised titles: Fallout 2 and and Freespace 2.

See, this is how you fight copyright infringement: not by demonizing (RIAA lawsuits), not by abusing (DRM; copy protection), but by offering a fair legal alternative.

(Via AppleNova)

Please, please let these screenshots be not fake. (via fscklog)

‘There’s no Nike+ app for it!’ has been one of the few remaining counter-arguments of me buying an iPhone. My late iPod nano has left me with a remaining, unusable (on its own) Nike+ set of pedometer and receiver, and I sure wouldn’t mind being able to use those again. At the same time, replacing my mediocre¹ Sony Ericsson T610 with a more powerful substitute might make sense, especially when that substitute can also serve as my new portable music player. Who doesn’t like convergence, when it’s done really well?

Each day, I spend close to an hour commuting in the train (25-ish minutes back and forth), during which I currently have no Internet connection. Now, if I could spend some of that time more usefully, other than reading unread tweets or solving Sudoku, that might be nice indeed.

Issues with the App Store aren’t the only kind of thing that scare me. It’s hard to believe, but this device would actually be a step back in Bluetooth support compared to my T610. Puzzling, because Apple arguably pioneered Bluetooth support on personal computers, offering a useful solution years before Windows XP finally did with Service Pack 2. Then, in 2007, it quietly dropped Address Book Bluetooth support (such as for sending text messages right to the currently open contact) with OS X 10.5², and shipped the iPhone with only supporting headsets. No A2DP, no file transfer, no modem tethering… I was hoping these were simply features they’d ship after higher priorities have been resolved, but even with the 2.1 previews, we have no improvement. No cabled tethering either, unless you count the unsupported, currently unavailable NetShare app, which is merely a SOCKS 5 proxy, thus hardly offering a full solution.

On the bright side, we have a user interface that doesn’t try to scale down the traditional personal computer desktop to a small screen variant. Many of the controls have clearly been conceived from scratch, which is in stark contrast to most other smartphone UIs.

And then, finally, we have T-Mobile’s rates. I have yet to see a single comparison where any other provider in Germany comes out cheaper (the ones I’ve seen need to go back to arithmetics 101, it seems), but there’s a difference between being competitive and being affordable. You see, before last summer, I didn’t have a cellphone for years. And I kind of liked it that way. Or, shall we say, I didn’t miss it — most of the time. There are those moments where you’re unexpectedly and randomly stuck someplace, sometime, and if you could make just this one phone call, it would fix it all. And with the job, of course, I get called quite a bit more. But overall, I’m not even sure I average one call a week.

So you can perhaps tell I’m not exactly the most likely target audience for this product. I’d use the iPod aspect daily. Same goes, probably, for e-mail and other lightweight Internet-bound apps. And the PIM aspects — calendar, contacts, notes. But as for all things cellular, whether audio or text, I’m just not much of a user.

And so I’m in this unusual situation where what I’d really like to have is unlimited (or a very high limit of) data, but very low limits of calls and messages. Shame I’m in such a minority.

Why not the iPod touch, you ask? Because I’d be back to square zero regarding Internet connectivity in the train. (A 3G ExpressCard plus an iPod nano would be a more feasible alternative to that.)

1. Yes, I know what they say: gift, horse, mouse, yaddayadda. Now that the battery and charging cable have been replaced, it does the basic job fine! ↩
2. Although, at the same time, they did add A2DP support. ↩

I haven’t fully moved to CoRD yet, largely because of various quirks in its UI. (I see that a new beta is out that may address most of my issues, but I haven’t had a chance to test that.) As a result, I mostly use Microsoft’s ‘official’ Remote Desktop Connection client 2.0.0b2. Plus, I’ve always loved its icon (props to Iconfactory on that, I believe).

This morning, it crashed. [Not a] big deal; crashes happen. I was curious why, though, and while the crash report didn’t help me figure that out (the topmost call in the stacktrace is MBUMutex::Acquire(unsigned long), which tells me absolutely nilch about the actual intent), I did find something else.

Here’s a portion of the Binary Images section from the crash log:

Binary Images:
    0x1000 -    0x23fef +com.microsoft.rdc 2.0.0 Beta2 (2.0.0 Beta2) <0775a7210cb4454ea17af3dfdec33e2c> /Applications/Remote Desktop Connection.app/Contents/MacOS/Remote Desktop Connection
   0x92000 -   0x108fe6 +com.microsoft.netlib 12.0.0 (12.0.0) <9fac28ca22ff49bf9185194497585126> /Applications/Remote Desktop Connection.app/Contents/Frameworks/Netlib.framework/Versions/12/Netlib
  0x436000 -   0x5bafc7 +com.microsoft.rdc 2.0.0 (2.0.0) <ad448d7a974d4d90ad5b89b5dfa08bc1> /Applications/Remote Desktop Connection.app/Contents/Frameworks/RDCPAL.framework/Versions/12/RDCPAL
  0x86c000 -   0x94dff7  libxml2.2.dylib ??? (???) <ccd6e2cb514fcd0b541bf153aae13481> /usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib
  0x9c8000 -   0x9e6fe7  com.apple.OpenTransport 3.0 (3.0) /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/OpenTransport.framework/OpenTransport
[..]

Notice something? That they still use OpenTransport strikes me as weird, that they use the same bundle identifier com.microsoft.rdc for the two distinct bundles RDCPAL.framework and Remote Desktop Connection.app, which furthermore run simultaneously, is even stranger, but oddest yet? This explosive combination actually works.

After all, a bundle identifier is supposed to be globally unique. There are several API calls that let you launch and otherwise access a bundle through its identifier. How would that ever work when two bundles which clearly, while related, are distinct in their nature and purpose, have the same identifier? Should Xcode prevent you from building a project whose identifier matches one that already exists? Probably impossible to do on a reliable basis. Should dyld refuse to link or XNU refuse to launch a bundle when one with the same identifier is already running? Or should Microsoft simply have someone smack the CFBundle documentation over developers’ heads?

It’s out!

Erik posts his first impressions, as does Fraser.

Me?

Let’s review the wishlist.

Improved performance.

You betcha.

RAW import API.

No. And while RAW support keeps improving, Apple’s pace of updates still leaves much to be desired.

Adjustments API.

Yes! Bring on third-party noise reduction plug-ins.

Local editing.

Sooorta. There’s a “local contrast” feature I haven’t played around with yet, and the Retouch Brush (which looks quite powerful in the demo; haven’t tried) falls in the same category. It isn’t quite what I was hoping for, however.

HDRI.

Nope.

Customizable full-screen toolbar.

Nuh-uh.

A metadata HUD for full-screen mode.

Thanks to the new all-in-one HUD, yes!

Much better keyboard-based toggling between metadata input and UI keyboard shortcuts.

Much as I can tell, this hasn’t really improved. If anything, it’s gotten worse. With the Retouch HUD open, using two-finger scroll anywhere on the full-sized image won’t pan it — it’ll drag one of the HUD’s sliders instead. This makes for some really strange results.

Much more background processing, such as of exports.

Yes!

Admittedly, I haven’t actually played around with it much. I don’t have too many halfway recent photos to test it on anyway, and I also lack time — both to take them and to edit them. That said, many of my wishlist items were fulfilled, and the worry of quite a few people that Aperture was effectively dead has, as of today, been proven unfounded. The competition between Photoshop Lightroom and Aperture continues to be exciting to watch — even more so with the price having dropped again, from $499 to $299 to now $199.

And so, I look forward to the day I can go on a trip and take tons and tons meaningful photos, come home and import, organize, post-process and publish them.

It’s the season, and John Nack at Adobe righly observes that, bizarrely enough, that ’season’ doesn’t just focus on virgin births and rampant consumerism, but also on bashing Adobe Systems, Incorporated. But then, while he can be sufficiently smart and apt when talking about then-upcoming products, he becomes defensive and apparently unable to see the bigger picture when such products are criticized.

Aside from split personality, the only reasonable explanation for this strange discrepancy can perhaps be found in what his blog posts – both the asinine ones and the rest – have in common: implicitly portraying Adobe as inimitable and flawless. Whether it’s CS3’s decidedly non-iconic icons (remember that? not that you wanted to) or the current Omniture fiasco.

For, you see, John couldn’t possibly hold such a high position and still not grasp what the criticism is – and still, he pretends just that. His entire rebuttal focuses on that spying can be bad (and that “Tracking user habits can be a good thing” – which I for one don’t disagree with), and that he feels privacy should be taken seriously. But Adobe hasn’t primarily been accused that their apps spying, or their apps violating privacy agreements, implicit or otherwise. Those matters secondarily play a role as well, but aren’t what’s being discussed. The crux of the matter is something entirely different, and just reading more than a few words of the original post that broke the story (which John did in fact link to) should suffice to make it clear.

When you launch a CS3 application the application pings out to what looks like an IP address - and internal IP address: 192.168.112.2O7.

That makes sense, right? Adobe wants to be sure you aren’t running multiple copies of their programs…. Wait something is wrong here.

It’s not (just) about spying. It’s about spying and then concealing this by fooling the slightly unobservant network admin (and possibly broken firewall roles, as John Gruber points out).

(It isn’t just Adobe doing this, either: Apple deserves the same flak.)

This isn’t just another story about phoning home, or about incomplete, misleading or hard-to-accept privacy policies. It’s a story about lies. Apple hasn’t responded at all (bad for them). Now, Adobe has – but with a hard-to-believe pretense of ignorance.