Apple will charge $20 for existing iPod Touch users to upgrade!

I still can’t get over this. I mean, this is a new thing for Apple. Twenty Dollars! (Well, Nineteen Dollars and Ninety Nine Cents.) Apple is going to charge $20 for existing iPod touch users to upgrade to the new firmware, of all things. Please.

Apple’s creatively named “Time Capsule” to complement Airport and Time Machine

Wow! Steve Jobs released a NAS, Wi-Fi, 500GB (or 1TB) backup hard disk called Time Machine at Macworld Expo ‘08. I still don’t believe it. I mean, Wi-Fi? Who needs Wi-Fi in a backup disk, of all places? Oh well, maybe the Apple Logo makes it worth the money.

Apple releases Macbook Air!

Apple released the highly rumored MacBook Air yesterday at the Stevenote at Macworld Conference and Expo 2008! The MacBook Air is a new, ultra-thin, void-of-optical-drive sub-notebook that will ship in two weeks. Whether it’s worth the $1799.99, of course, is still up in the air.

The Evolution of Design As Evidenced in Cereal Boxes and User Interfaces

There are a lot of parallels between cereal box design and user interface design. Take, for example, these two cereal boxes:

The first box is a corn flakes box from 1963. The second box is a modern Cheerios box. Notice the difference?

Now look at these two (Mac OS, incidentally) user interfaces:

The first is from Mac System 1, which debuted in 1984. The second is from Mac OS X Leopard, which came out last year. Notice the difference?

A Comparison of URL Shortening Services

URL shortening services link a long URL you give them to a shorter one they provide. Apparently, the big name in URL shortening is TinyURL. I was wondering the other day which URL shortening service made the shortest URLs. So I compared a bunch of them, shortening a long Engadget URL. (I read Engadget daily.)

Original:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/15/live-from-macworld-2008-steve-jobs-keynote/

Metamark:
http://xrl.us/bd7gn
notlong:
http://enga.notlong.com
Qurl:
http://qurl.com/sj6ss
Shorl:
http://shorl.com/badrabrofropih
Snipurl:
http://snipurl.com/1x966
Tinylink:
http://tinylink.com/?kADrhuq1GD
TinyURL:
http://tinyurl.com/38xtah
URLcut:
http://urlcut.com/1ozmt

Hmm. We have a tie for last place: Shorl and Tinylink both have 31 characters in their new links. I’ve got to admit, that’s an improvement over the original 78 characters, but it’s pitiful compared to Metamark’s 19 characters. Metamark is the clear winner, two whole characters longer than Qurl’s 21 characters. The moral: the most popular is not always the best.

The 2008 Software Company Number-Of-Products Showdown

Maybe this will become an annual event. Maybe it won’t. Whatever. The point is, many software companies have too many products. This year’s contenders are Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Which will win?