Creative has sued Apple in a shameless money-grab. Creative's Zen sucks choad, and they know it. Now, they're suing to halt sales of the iPod and the Nano in the United States.
The lawsuit accuses Apple's iPod navigation scheme of violating one of their patents. It was filed in August of last year. I may not be the sharpest tool in the drawer, but I've had an iPod for a lot longer than that. I wasn't aware you could patent somebody else's stuff and then take it away from them. I wonder if it's got anything to do with Creative's rather lackluster performance last year? The whole thing stinks of the typically Asian lack of honor in matters of intellectual property.
Creative was one of the first companies to build a portable MP3 player, with their Rio. They were also one of the most innovative companies in the PC world with regard to sound hardware. In the mid-to-late 90s, the sound card was generally a separate piece of hardware, and very rarely built into the motherboard. As amazing as it seems know, most PCs didn't have sound at all. Back then, your choice of sound card was actually a lifestyle choice. Companies like Creative, Turtle Beach, and Gravis were all clamoring for your greenbacks. I loved my Gravis Ultrasound, but the best sound card I ever owned was the Sound Blaster PNP32. It had brilliant sound output, and made absolutely flawless recordings. For a consumer-level card, it was top-drawer. It was the last Creative product I've bought. And I'll probably not be investing in a company's products that has to resort to lawsuits to generate revenue. That's usually a pretty good sign that it's not going to be around much longer.
I hope that Apple gets pissed off here. I hope they create irresistble, cheap products to compete with each and every Creative SKU. Sim Wong Hoo can only sit and fume while his sub-par company collapses around him.
Downsides: I HATE GLOSSY LAPTOP SCREENS!!!1. Really. They reflect your fingers when you're typing, and it's annoying as hell. And if you happen to be playing Doom 3, you'll scare a dot in your panties when you reach to adjust the screen, since it looks like a big hairy flesh-covered spider is jumping right at your face. If you've got hairy fingers like I do, at least.
Everything else? Goal! Intel Duo Core, widescreen format, choice of black or white; it's all good. Notably, the black one will cost you $200 more than the white one. I'm not sure why, but they're probably figuring it'll be the new hotness. I'd be just as happy with a white one, personally.
Apple continues to push the iSight into every Mac user's hands. Ubiquitous, integrated video conferencing will be one of the Mac's big selling points, and it works (insanely easily) today.
Can't wait to get my hands on one of these. Actually, since I'm poor as a church mouse, I guess it's just another reason to hate my slacker nature.
Apple's updated iWeb, their web publishing, blogging, and podcasting tool. It actually has comments in the blog part now. Before, it was absolutely worthless, but, in typically Apple fashion, they've waited until the comments were done right before doing them at all.
First off, you create a blog post like this one. Then, you enable comments in iWeb's inspector, rather confusingly under the 'RSS' tab.
And voila! Users will get an Add Comment thingamabob on the blog entry, complete with captcha. You can even allow users to upload attachments with their comments, but I've never really missed that feature before, so I think I'll ignore it. Although it could be very cool for things like asking for grainy cell-phone pictures of your readers' tits. For example.
Nice looking, that. Oddly, user comments aren't scanned for spam, as far as I can tell; and, unlike with most other blog systems, you won't be notified per email. What you will get is a dock notification in iWeb in the vein of Mail's notification.
At which point, you can go into iWeb and read comments or delete spam. Somebody really needs to make a Growl plugin to take care of this, though, as most people don't have iWeb open 24/7.
All in all, a great update for iWeb. It still not probably not suitable for a power blogger, since it lacks features like, oh, seeing your hits and stuff, but it's not bad for just throwing something out there.
