Goodbye, Steve, and thank you

Apple’s Ringtone Dilemma

Excellent commentary on the current Apple iPhone ringtone debacle at Alistair’s Place.

Perian v1.0

Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. They’ve just released version 1.0, go get it. Use it alongside NicePlayer to get full-screen video on your Mac without shelling out for QuickTime Pro. If VLC‘s not your bag, that is.

Fixing the backspace and forward-delete keys in OS X 10.4′s Terminal.app

This one’s bugged the hell out of me for ages, but until I started using [GNU Screen](http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/9/16838/14935) I never got round to fixing it. Desp has the skinny on [fixing the backspace and forward-delete keys in OS X 10.4's Terminal.app](http://desp.night.pl/terminal.html).

Apple and EMI team up to sell DRM-free music

Well it’s about time! [Engadget has coverage of the Apple & EMI joint event, live from London](http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/02/steve-jobs-and-emi-present-an-exciting-new-digital-offering/). In summary, EMI are selling their entire catalogue as a new iTunes Music Store “premium” option: $1.29/â?¬1.29/£0.99 per song gets you a DRM-free, 256kbps AAC track. That’s 30 cents/20 pence extra for no DRM, hence better interoperability, and better audio quality. Apple will still sell “standard” EMI tracks with DRM and 128-bit AAC encoding for $0.99/â?¬0.99/£0.79.

“Premium” albums will cost the *same price* as “standard” albums, which is great news; along with Apple’s new “[Complete My Album](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/03/29itunes.html)” feature this will hopefully redress the “death of the album” that’s been happening since single-track purchase came into existence.

Optimising Mail.app for low bandwidth usage

Update: Turns out the reason Mail.app was downloading everything was due to to an malfunctioning plugin (JunkMatcher). Uninstalling this fixed it all, thankfully! (more…)

Interesting article on Apple’s FairPlay DRM

[Interesting article on Apple's FairPlay DRM](http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/2A351C60-A4E5-4764-A083-FF8610E66A46.html), including commentary pointing out that Apple benefits less from DRM than most think.

Tip to speed up Mail.app

Everyone’s talking about this [tip to speed up Mail.app](http://www.friday.com/bbum/2007/03/02/vacuuming-mails-envelope-index-to-make-mail-faster/). I’ve linked to Bbum’s article as he provides a better overview of what to do and how it works. It’s surprisingly effective!

MPlayer OS X and MEncoder binaries

Update (2009-12-22): New binaries, including mencoder x264 support (hopefully) and a link to the MPlayer Extended frontend.

Update: I’ve overhauled this article to reflect the various changes that have happened since its creation. I’ve also finally re-added the binary downloads (built from the trunk as of 2008-09-08), please leave a comment letting me know if they work for you (or not)!

If you’re a Mac user, like me, at some point you’ll probably have had the misfortune to trying to play Windows Media Videos (WMVs). You’ll have discovered that the options are limited: there’s the “official” choice of Microsoft’s awful Windows Media Player for Mac, which they’ve now stopped developing, or its successor in the limited-but-free Flip4Mac components, which work through Quicktime. so by default won’t play full-screen thanks to Apple’s cheap-ass decision to cripple its media player. (Seriously, what is up with that? You’ve just spent a large chunk of money on a machine and they won’t let you play a movie full-screen easily without shelling out more cash? Sheesh.)
However, there is a better way…

(more…)