Awesome!
300 Million Facebook Users
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.
Bing adds visual search, Google Flips
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!
Gurt Big Icons
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 return to UK YouTube
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.
The rumours are true…
Apple Event 090909
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.
Installed Snow Leopard
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.
Currently installing…
Well having set up one of my new LaCie Poulton 1TB Firewire drives I am installing OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 onto it.
The external drive needed to be formatted for the OS X operating system and the partition map set up to allow me to install the OS onto it. All relatively simple with Disk Utility.
Then I set it to install, said it would take 47 minutes, wonder if those are real minutes or Apple minutes?
Snow Leopard has arrived…
I ordered my copy of Snow Leopard earlier this week and was pleased to receive it on day of release at about 7.3oam this morning!
I am intending to install it on a different external drive to the one I currently run Leopard 10.5 on as a fresh install and then install my applications as and when required.
I prefer to do it this way as I don’t have to worry about crowding the drive with unused applications or filling the memory with “helper” applications for apps I don’t run.
Of course the main downside is that none of my preferences are there, so I have to “add” them all back in again.