I continue to receive periodic email newsletters from Creative, hoping that eventually they will update the firmware for my poor little Zen Touch MP3 player. Today’s email included a teaser subject that I couldn’t resist: Creative patents industry-standard MP3 player technology If you guessed that we have another example of patenting the obvious, you’d be right! Here are some choice excerpts from the press release (emphasis mine): Creative’s invention for the user interface for portable media players enables selection of at least one track in a portable media player as a user sequentially navigates through a hierarchy using three or…
I’m back to trying out FeedBurner again, primarily to see if their stats capabilities are helpful for my RSS and Atom feeds. I notice a lot of people change their “advertised” feed to be the Feedburner URL, but I think it’s cleaner to use a URL on your domain and just redirect (assuming you have this capability with your web host). That way, you can try FeedBurner for a while and return back to your original links if you want. Here’s the sequence I used: Create two new templates in Movable Type (rss_fb.xml, atom_fb.xml), filling with the same content as…
Earlier this year, I discovered SplashBlog, a really nice mobile photo blogging client for PDAs. At the time, I thought it looked like it would be a great solution once they supported more systems beyond SplashBlog.com and TypePad. But, the 2.0 release included significant software as well as business changes. Now the application is free (was about $20) and you get a free SplashBlog.com account good for 100 picture uploads. Unfortunately, they’ve dropped TypePad and will now support only SplashBlog.com going forward.
“Palm smartphone experience, meet Windows Mobile platform” — Yesterday Palm finally announced the Windows-powered Treo smartphone, to be launched on Verizon sometime in 2006. I’ve been anxiously waiting to see what kind of reaction this would bring, but so far it seems fairly muted. Maybe with all the rumors floating around, everyone was already expecting this move. It’s curious, though, that the announcement was made so far in advance. Back in the day, it wasn’t so cool to preannounce. In a related http://ugateamunited.com/online/cytotec/ move, Palm sent an email to registered developers: Development resources for the Treo on Windows Mobile will…
Tonight while vegging out watching some “must see TV” (well, at least Lost is finally on again), I caught again the Kate Winslet American Express commercial. I appreciate commercials like this — smart and subtle. It wasn’t until the very end (when Kate picks up a hook) that I figured out who it was. A little digging on IMDB helped me piece together (I think) the movies with the dialog: “At 17 I went to prison for murder” (Heavenly Creatures, 1994) “By 19, I was pennyless and heartbroken” (Sense and Sensibility, 1995) “I almost drowned at 20” (Titanic, 1997) “My…