Todd's O'Reilly Network Blog

CONTACT Earl Vickers The Sound Guy, Inc. http://www.sfxmachine.com PayPerNote 1.0 Saratoga, CA - April 1, 2009 The Sound Guy, Inc. has announced the release of PayPerNote 1.0, an advanced note management program. PayPerNote analyzes audio or MIDI inputs and allows performers to view exactly how much they're getting paid on a per-note basis. "Musicians are very generous and often get...

Taking a look back at a Steve Wozniak interview is a window into a time when the industry was completely and utterly dependent upon hardware innovation; before it became such a commodity at the hardware layer that the software could only be so differentiated. That is, until iPod and iPhone. The iPod accessory business itself is already a $2B market, and there has really been no such thing as "software value-add" to the hardware accessory itself. With iPhone 3.0, this changes.

In the comments to my blog post on adding custom genre artwork to iTunes 8, one reader asks if there is a way to add a "New" tab to the grid view for Movies. I am not aware of a hidden iTunes preference to enable such a tab, but its functionality -- list all movies I haven't watched yet -- can be achieved in other ways.

Apple earns enough goodwill with its usually beautiful design and usability that every now and then it gets away with murder. Case in point: the Airport Express. I recognize that many people are happy with their AE's. I've found that...

Today's iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview was what I call a "block the kick" announcement. What's a block the kick? It is an effort to do such a good job of persuading your core constituency that any perceived momentum of the competition pales in comparison to your own that you block the competition's nascent momentum in its infancy. With 30M units sold across the iPhone + iPod touch line of multi-touch handhelds, and 800M downloads across 25K developer apps, today's event is about running up the score BEFORE the competition finds its footing with developers.

On Tuesday, Apple is previewing its iPhone OS 3.0 to developers. While I have no idea what they will present, I will say this. The fact that Apple is stepping on the gas pedal and pushing 3.0, while the new kids on the block (read: Android and Palm Pre) are barely 1.0 suggests that they have learned the lessons taught them oh so painfully by Microsoft in the PC wars; namely, that he who wins the hearts and minds of developers, wins the war.

Just in time for Read an Ebook Week O'Reilly's 400+ ebooks are now available for direct purchase and download on your iPhone or iPod Touch from within Stanza's Online Catalog. Buying ebooks this way gives you the same flexible, DRM-free ebook bundles as buying through oreilly.com (because you are buying from oreilly.com via Stanza). That means 3 ebook formats and free lifetime updates (and did we mention no DRM?). To celebrate the Stanza news (and Read an Ebook Week) you'll automatically get 40% off any ebooks purchased on Stanza through March 15.

No doubt these are tough times - times that can get one down, emotionally and creatively. But heck, are you going to let a tanking stock market sink your digital imaging creativity? Hope not! However, if the winds have been knocked out of your creative sails, here are a few ideas that may stimulate the creative artist within. At the very least, I hope they distract your from the stock market chart, which looks like a bad - a very bad - histogram.

Out of curiosity, I installed the Kindle iPhone app this morning to poke around with it, and see what a "premium" book reader for the iPhone would be like. It's no surprise that the iPhone screen is a suboptimal display...

We now offer 800 books in DRM-free PDF format, including 130 of our bestsellers as Ebook bundles, which includes PDF, .Epub, and .mobi-compatible Kindle format. These can be easily read on the device and system of your choice, from your desktop or laptop computer, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone or other mobile device. Also today, we've released all of our Head First titles in PDF format, and David Pogue's bestselling "iPhone: The Missing Manual," is now available as an iPhone App. Read all about it, and buy a few.

This news just in, Steve will not be gracing Macworld Expo 2009 with a keynote. For the past couple hours, the blogosphere has been quietly buzzing with unusually tame speculation about the meaning of this announcement and its potential effects on investor confidence. Overall, nobody seems unduly worried about the health or future of Apple's CEO, and a nice consensus...

George Gilder once pointed out that when the availability of a given resource shifts from scarcity to surplus, a lot of wealth is created. In the technology realm, one can think of processing power, storage and bandwidth as the great “wealth exponential-izers” of first the PC era, then the Internet era, and now, the Mobile Broadband era (as these...

Wow, CNET's Rafe Needleman sure raised a ruckus with his Mac switcher's lament article. If you are thinking about moving from a Windows PC to a Mac and want to avoid the feeling of lament, read on, I have some advice that might help you make the change.

Mid-January, yet another interesting software project was introduced by the Google labs: the Google Quick Search Box. According to its project page, Google Quick Search Box -- or "QSB" for short -- "is an open source search box that allows you to search data on your computer and across the web". That is a _big_ understatement.

The need for knowledge about the enormous amount of user data on iPhones is a rapidly emerging area of forensic study. O'Reilly's iPhone Forensics Developer Workshop will supply you with this sought-after and valuable information. Join Jonathan Zdziarski, the original iPhone hacker, for a two day workshop in Chicago, May 26 and 27. Get the details of O'Reilly's iPhone Forensics Workshop here.

In a very tough environment, where consumers (supposedly) aren’t spending and high-end products don’t get bought, Apple just took industry analysts’ projections out to the proverbial woodshed and gave them a good old fashioned whupping.

I took a quick look at the free ClamXav anti-virus software for OS X last month. However, I didn't have any malware to test with it. Well, I found my archive of captive test malware and tried it out with ClamXav.

In the comments to my near-desaster story of last week, several readers suggested I should have a look at a utility called AppleJack. In hindsight, I cannot tell whether AppleJack would have been able to fix the problems that caused my Mac to refuse me access to my main user account. I sure wish, though, that I had it installed so I could at least have given it a try.

Steve Jobs is sick, and may never come back. Apple's a consumer company with high-end products in a bad economy. But the reality of why the company's being punished in the stock market may be nothing more than the Yin-Yang of Apple's Reality Distortion Field at work.

The current AirPort base station combined with iTunes, Apple TV, the iPhone, a handful of printers, and powered speakers have enabled me to configure an "upstairs/downstairs" network complete with printing and remote-controlled music streaming. Here's an overview.