Twitter recently introduced a feature on its website called "Who To Follow". This feature presents you with a list of people you aren't following already, but who are active in your social graph. However, I happen to be very proactive in finding new people to follow through a variety of means, and have no need for Twitter to point it out to me. I thought it was a bit obnoxious to see, especially considering both of my first recommendations were people I had blocked.
This Safari extension removes that box from the Twitter homepage, whether you have it turned on for you or not. It's a simple CSS stylesheet that sets display:none on that box. You'll never have to see it again.
You can download it here. I'm still a bit new at Safari extensions, but it should auto-update in the future if I ever release an update.
Released.
Technical details of the upcoming Flash Player for Mac, wherein the Adobe team is switching to using Core Animation to do faster rendering of non-video Flash files. It's worth noting that the performance will only initially be seen in Safari on Mac OS X 10.6, as the plugin is fully Cocoa-ized now.
Also interesting to note is that Flash is still using the ancient QuickDraw APIs which have been deprecated for years.
We've all got our thoughts on what the Jesus Tablet will be, so here are my guesses. I fully expect to be completely wrong on all of this, as many of these answers are completely blind shots and that Apple will blow my expectations out of the water.
Hardware
- 8"-10" touch screen, running at 1280x720
- Very thin; less than 1/2" thick (the iPhone 3GS is 0.48" thick)
- About 1lb heavy, light enough to hold in one hand
- 8 hours of battery life
- 32 or 64 GB SSD
- WiFi
- 3G over GSM, and Apple's US 3G partner will continue to be AT&T
- There will be some way to pair your Tablet cell connection with your iPhone's cell connection; either with an official announcement of AT&T tethering, or by adding your Tablet to the 3G account
- Front-mounted camera
- Some kind of collapsible stand in the frame, so the device can sit on a table
Input/Output
- Multi-touch on the display, exactly like the iPhone
- Multi-touch on the back of the device, similar to the surface of the Magic Mouse
- Photos and video via front-mounted camera
- Audio via front-mounted microphone and speakers, wired headphones, or Bluetooth
- Dock connector
- Expanded voice recognition
- Software keyboard, no Bluetooth keyboards available
Software
- It will run the iPhone OS 4.0; or rather, the iPhone OS will become a "Mobile OS X", consisting of the heavyweight Tablet and the smaller iPhone.
- It will allow multiple apps to run at the same time, with some UI for viewing multiple apps alongside each other. This may not be possible on the iPhone.
- It meant to replace a full PC for most common day-to-day needs
- iPhone applications will not run "automatically", but will need to be resubmitted through the App Store approval process. Most applications will run without much modifications. Icons will need to be higher resolution.
- A system-wide Dock for documents, applications, and small widgets will be onscreen at all times
- The home screen will be significantly revamped, and renamed to the Dashboard. App icons, web clippings, and widgets will be freely arrangeable.
- Handwriting recognition will be available for text input, with an optional stylus, or with a gesture such as two closed fingers drawing as if you had a pen.
- Some gestures will be used on the back of the device, such as scrolling and zooming.
Apps
- Standard kind of iPod and Internet communications apps the iPhone OS comes with. iTunes video, iTunes LP content, Maps, and Safari web content will look phenomenal.
- Sketchbook, an unlimited workspace to sketch and write notes, with collaboration features.
- iWork, a full port of the iWork application suite, tied to the Internet (and expansion of the iWork.com web application), with collaboration features.
- iChat, a port of the Mac app, with a heavy emphasis on video conferencing
SDK
- The SDK will be available immediately, with a simulator.
- There will be an emphasis on application interoperability.
- Applications will be able to register plugins with view controllers and UTIs. When an application wants to expose an object (say, an image) to other apps, it will look for app plugins which respond to the "public.image" UTI, load one which matches the UTI, and present the view without leaving the application.
- Applications will be able to expose services, similar to how they work on Mac OS X. Services will be integrated into the voice control system.
Product
- 32 GB model will be available for $899
- 64 GB model will be available for $999
- Available in US in March, major countries by summer
- There will not be a WiFi-only model at launch.
Other Predictions
- Updated MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs, with the mobile Core i5 "Arrandale" processors from Intel.
- There will be no mention of Verizon
- There will be no updates to the iPod or the Apple TV
- There will be no announcements of the iPhone 4G
This uses the new <video> tag in the HTML5 spec, but only supports browsers which implement the H264 codec.
Two interesting bits. First, this is great news for anyone on a platform where Flash is either unavailable (like iPhone) or where performance is terrible (like Mac and Linux). Second, there is a debate about the HTML5 spec's video codec, as it supports video in Ogg Theora or in H264. Safari and Chrome support the H264 codec, while Firefox and Opera support Ogg Theora. But this player only supports the H264 codec. I wonder if other sites will follow suit, and implement a de-facto standard based on H264.
URL Shrink is a new OS X tool with a very simple purpose - converting URLs to shorter permalinks on various web services. As the internet has matured, and services like IM, IRC, and Twitter have forced us to write shorter messages, it was clear that a system was needed that was as ubiquitous as Quicksilver.
For now, the main service of URL Shrink is just converting a URL that is on the clipboard, although this will be expanding over time (including things like a system text service, a command line client, a Quicksilver plugin, etc.). To do this, there is a keyboard shortcut (option-shift-space) which will convert the URL in the background to a tiny URL using one of the services provided. If you've selected one as your favorite, it'll choose that one. For example, I'm personally partial to is.gd, so all the URLs that are processed by URL Shrink on my machine go through is.gd.
At a low level, URL Shrink is a system where multiple shrinking engines can be added. It was designed to be extremely easy for developers to write just a little bit of code to integrate with other web services, including private URL services. For information on that, see the project page below.
URL Shrink is licensed under the BSD license. I encourage its adoption within other applications; I'll be adding .framework and .a targets for building this into Mac and iPhone apps respectively. Indeed, the project was born out of the URL shrinking capacity of another app I'm working on.
Inactive
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So first, Gizmodo's source, who has "repeatedly been 100% correct before", says that Jobs' health is "rapidly declining" to explain why Jobs would not be delivering the Macworld keynote. Then, today we hear about Jobs' health straight from the horse's mouth(http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/01/05sjletter.html), saying that he's fine, there's no problem.
Gizmodo's response? "But we were right on something...The reason why Steve Jobs is not doing the Macworld 2009 keynote is his health." Despite nothing in Jobs' letter saying why he wasn't doing it, Gizmodo decides to just make up what they read, and insert the FUD that this decision was based on Jobs' health.