tech, news, productivity, views and stuff
BBC News reports:
Social networking website Twitter has confirmed that it has closed a “significant round of funding”.
Co-founder Evan Williams said in a blog post that the site had secured money from five investment firms.
Will this secure the future of Twitter, or with all the possible problems with the networking site mean the death of Twitter?
At the recent ALT Conference in Manchester I made extensive use of Twitter to support and enhance the conference. It’s a very easy tool which allows delegates to share ideas and links, discuss keynotes and presentations as well as keep informed about what is hot and what is not at a conference.
Awesome!
BBC reports on the continued growth of Facebook.
The world’s largest social networking site just got bigger with the announcement it has 300 million active monthly users from around the globe.
Facebook also revealed that it had started making money ahead of schedule.
Read more.
BBC reports
Software giant Microsoft has introduced “visual search” to its Bing search engine to try to further set itself apart from market-leader Google.
and in other news…
Google has unveiled a service called Fast Flip to let users consume news more quickly and to boost the flagging fortunes of the news industry.
The product is designed to mirror the way readers flick through magazines and newspapers.
Now you don’t need to read the news online anymore, you can just look at the pictures!
One of the nice features of Snow Leopard is the 512 pixel wide icons – can you still call it an icon.
Cult of Mac has a wonderful gallery of said icons with Leander Kahney’s commentary on the detail Apple has in these icons is almost art in itself.
All the icons for folders and apps in Snow Leopard are now drawn in glorious 512 x 512 pixels. It’s a step toward making the operating system resolution independent, and perhaps also to make Snow Leopard a touchscreen friendly OS.
But it’s also obviously done just for the art of it. These icons are real beauties. They are full of great details and little surprises. One icon contains the words to a song, visible only if you blow it up to its full size.
Music videos are once more available to YouTube viewers in the UK after the streaming site reached an agreement with songwriters’ group PRS for Music.
In March, YouTube blocked thousands of music videos to UK users, after failing to reach agreement over fees.
Read more.
Apple will (as is usual at this time of year now) be making an announcement on the 9th September 2009, which is 090909 not that I think that is significant, but it is the date in question!
Anyhow the event is called It’s only rock and roll, but we like it.
Generally at this time of year Apple announce new iPods, for example back in 2007 they announced the iPod touch.
So what can we expect to see? Well the rumours indicate that we will see new iPods with cameras including not just the touch, but all the nano and the classic.
Will we see a Tablet, hmm, I hope so, but I am not expecting too.
I have now installed my copy of Snow Leopard. I have installed it onto an external LaCie Poulton 1TB Firewire drive for my iMac.
My current OS is Leopard 10.5 and that is also installed on a (different) LaCie Poulton 1TB Firewire drive. I am using external drives as the internal drive on the iMac was a little too small for me at 250GB – when did 250GB become too small?
So far everything seems okay and Snow Leopard appears a little snappier than 10.5.
My main concern is that EyeTV 2 is not compatible and so I will need to go out and buy EyeTV 3 which means that is not such a cheap upgrade as I would hope.
Adobe CS4 should work fine, and I already have iLife 09 and iWork 09, so no worries there.
Over the next week or so I will be installing various apps to check they work before moving over my data.
The advantage of not upgrading is that I can always fall back on my previous installation if it really doesn’t work out.
