This article was written on September 27, 2006 by CyberNet.

It has only been a few weeks since Apple announced the release of iTunes 7 but there were some serious complaints with it. To please everyone they have made iTunes 7.0.1 available which sounds like it has a nice list of updates. They don’t go into the gory details about what is new but it sounds like they touched on a little of everything:

iTunes 7.0.1 addresses stability and performance issues with Cover Flow, CD importing, iPod syncing, and more.

I have it running on Vista and it seems to be okay (it does run a little sluggish compared to XP). I haven’t used all of its spiffy new features but as long as I can put music on my iPod I’m happy.

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Call me dorky, but for me the perfect game is one where you also learn something. It may have something to do with the Great British Pub Quiz, which long ago replaced the formal academic examination in UK schools and universities because a) attendance runs to almost 100% and b) you get to drink beer.

So if you, too, prefer to read a how-to article on the web than kill five minutes on yet another tower-defense game, try out Stuff to Rattle Your Brain, a trivia quiz game from the good folks at How Stuff Works. Or rather, don’t. How Stuff Works is an excellent resource for the curious, explaining, amongst other things, how the iPhone works, whether or not Santa is real, and offering videos of such educational items as the two-faced cat (literally two-faced, not metaphorically two-faced like all cats).

But this application looks like any random piece of flung-together junk you’d find amongst the 100,000 apps in the store. There are mis-spellings, and the questions seem to be weasel-worded to make you get them wrong even if you know the answer. For instance, a question from the “computer” category: “A firewall is a barrier to keep destructive forces away from your property. True or false?” If you give the correct answer, “false”, then you will be wrong.

Still, it’s not all bad. Any app which can include this wonderfully non-politically-correct question is fine with me: “Even as babies and children, girls cry more than boys on average?” The answer? True! (Actually, false). You can let the application store your scores online, and questions are refreshed periodically from the internet.

We guess it is still better than a round of Orba, but the brain-rattling in the title is more likely to refer to the frustration it causes than to a genuine mental challenge.

Stuff to Rattle Your Brain [iTunes. Thanks, Katy!]

What do The Bourne Identity, Mission Impossible 3, Mr & Mrs Smith, Children of Men, and Agent Cody Banks 2 have in common? Absurd, futuristic, and totally fake software interfaces, designed in part by one man: Mark Coleran.

Designing a fake dashboard for an imagined supercomputer or a hovering control panel for a worldwide surveillance system is a different process than creating a genuinely usable UI. Your goal is to imply things: that a machine is powerful; that a villain is formidable; that the software is intuitive, but that the breadth of its powers borders on unknowable. At no point does real-world usability factor in, and nor should it—this is pure fantasy, for an audience raised on Start Buttons, desktop icons and tree menus. Here’s a gallery of some of the most famous interfaces; see how many you recognize.

Coleran’s UIs are a mix of proudly retro and boldly new, mingling compact pixel art, wireframes and the solid, militaristic reds, blues and blacks of software from the 80s with touch-free gesture systems and overelaborate visualizations. It’s the kind of stuff you take for granted in action and sci-fi films, but rounded up in one place, it’s a strangely impressive, almost cohesive view of the future of software, as designed by someone with no constraints. [Mark Coleran via Metafilter]

Adobe has released a public beta of Lightroom 3, the company’s tool for processing and organizing cameras’ RAW images. While still an early release, Lightroom 3 looks to be a worthy upgrade thanks to impressive speed improvements and baked-in image sharing tools.

For Lightroom 3, Adobe completely rewrote much of the underlying code. The result still looks like Lightroom, but it’s considerably faster than previous releases.

Large image libraries in Lightroom 2 frequently meant blurry, pixelated previews that took a few seconds to resolve into sharp thumbnails. At times Lightroom could feel like a web-based editor for how much trouble it had rendering thumbnails.

Thankfully, pixelated previews are a thing of the past with Lightroom 3. We loaded up an 8,000+ image library into the new beta and not only were the thumbnail previews sharp no matter how many images we scrolled through, common tasks like switching from Library view to Develop view and exporting images to Photoshop were noticeably faster.

Speed isn’t the only thing new in this beta. Lightroom 3 will also bring integrated support for publishing your photos to the web. In the beta, that means built-in syncing with Flickr.

To use the Flickr syncing tool simply authorize Lightroom to access your Flickr account. Once that’s done, publishing your images is a drag-and-drop task. Even better, the syncing is two-way: Lightroom 3 will pull down and update your metadata with any changes made on Flickr and will also grab any comments on the image.

Lightroom 3 now imports comments on your photos from Flickr.

For those with Flickr Pro accounts, it’s even possible to edit and update images that you’ve already posted on Flickr.

The new publish tool also allows you to export images to folders on your desktop or an external drive. It’s a nice backup feature, but it also means that you can now use Lightroom to manage your iPhone photos — just publish your Lightroom images to a folder and tell iTunes to sync photos from that folder.

While on the surface most of Lightroom 3 looks just like Lightroom 2, the import dialog has been radically revamped. Not only is the import tool much faster, it now offers full-resolution image previews and the ability to define import templates.

Lightroom 3's import dialog is faster.

The other standout feature in the Lightroom 3 beta is the new set of sharpening and noise reduction tools, which makes it a snap to get rid of noise in high ISO images.

The new algorithm managed to get rid of a significant amount of color noise without overly softening the images we tested it with. Although the results weren’t perfect, Lightroom 3 did a much better job than its predecessor. The noise reduction tools will be particularly useful for those who’ve upgraded to some of the new, extremely high ISO cameras from Nikon and Canon.

Addicted to high ISO levels? Lightroom 3 can help reduce the noise.

On the flip side of the noise spectrum, Lightroom 3 sports a new “film grain” tool that allows you to simulate the look high-ISO film grain without using an external editor. So if graininess is your thing, you can put it back in as easily as you can take it out.

So far Adobe has not set a release date for the final version of Lightroom 3. If you’d like to test Lightroom 3 you can grab a copy from the Adobe Labs website. Be careful though, this is a true beta with known bugs. We definitely don’t recommend using it for production work and highly recommend making a backup copy of any images you plan to import.

This article was written on June 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

(Click to Enlarge)

Windows XP/Vista only
As a web designer one of the things that is difficult to do is test a site in multiple versions of Internet Explorer, especially if you’re running Vista which doesn’t really include an option to run prior versions of IE. A significant amount of computer users still use Internet Explorer 6 as their main browser, and it renders sites rather differently than Internet Explorer 7. And then there’s Internet Explorer 8 which is currently in the Beta stage, and yet again that renders differently than any prior version.

To make things a little easier a nifty free application called IETester has been developed. With it you can test your website in Internet Explorer 5.5, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 Beta. The best part is that the application has a tabbed interface (as seen above) so that you can quickly switch between website renderings in different versions of Internet Explorer.

A nice feature that I didn’t catch at first was that you can actually view them side-by-side by dragging one tab into the content area of another tab. It will “split” the window so that both tabs are next to each other, which is really handy.

I played around with the program for about 15 minutes, and it does what it’s advertised to do, but it definitely has some bugs. In that 15 minute period the application crashed three times on me, but I think I was pushing it too hard. I was trying to open multiple websites simultaneously using different versions of Internet Explorer, and it buckled under the pressure. So it’s obviously not designed to be a day-to-day browser, but it’s fine for testing a website here and there.

What I don’t get is why Microsoft doesn’t take matters into its own hands and start a project like this one. Web developers would probably still be bitter because of their non-compliance of standards in the past, but an application like this would help regain a little respect. We just need to keep our fingers crossed that Microsoft doesn’t go the opposite route and shutdown this project for redistributing the IE DLL’s.

Get IETester
Thanks to Yansky for the tip!

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