The world as frankps sees it!
Culture
Spotify with inbuilt apps
2 months ago
Spotify recently published a public beta of an upcoming version of their app. This major update will introduce a redesigned user interface. The new main page gives you a better social overview, as for example what your friends are listening to, both of songs and playlists. Search has been reimplemented with predictive search results. Just start start typing in the search bar and Spotify will suggest possible tracks, artists, albums and playlists. The Buddy List now shows what your friends are listening to right now and you can also see and hear your friends’ starred tracks, as well as the music they’re adding to their playlists. OS X Lion users can enjoy the new Spotify as a full-screen app.
Another major new thing in Spotify is their app store, called App Finder. The new Spotify comes with an improved Last.fm support. It is now not only limited to scrobbling, it now also give you recommendations. There are also apps for newspapers that review music, and funnily enough the first Norwegian newspaper is already present:
The Dagbladet app is beautiful and I have both read reviews and at the same time listened to the albums being reviewed. Hats off for Dagbladet, as they have made one of the best apps available in App Finder and I hope that they will have great success with it. Another Norwegian app is Soundrop, but I’m still trying to figure out how it works 
The songs on the album is descretly put on the left side of the review under the album cover, and you can easily add songs to your favourite list of music and to other playlists as you are used to.
Other applications to look out for are the one from Guardian and Rolling Stones magazine. They are both not in the same league as the one from Dagbladet, but both provide great music suggestions and that is what it’s all about in the end.
Getting Started with Profile Manager
05 months ago
I recommend reading the ebook on Kindle and other supported computers and devices.
The last couple of days I have been reading “Managing iOS Devices with OS X Lion Server”. It is a fantastic ebook. Yes, and it is only available as ebook. No paper version.
Arek Dreyer has written all there is to know about managing iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) with Profile Manager, a feature included in OS X Lion Server. Learn how to configure Profile Manager, access as a user and as administrator its web front end.
With this ebook you get a perfect introduction on how to use Profile Manager’stools to configure user settings for services such as Mail, Calendar, VPN, LDAP, Wi-Fi, and also important security settings to prevent unauthorized access to data stored on your users’ devices. If a device is lost or stolen, it tells you how the user and you, as an administrator, can remotely wipe the devices gone missing. The Profile Manager uses the Apple Push Notification Service (APNS), so you can immediately push configuration changes to your devices, as long as they have some kind of network connectivity. The ebook continues with more advanced setup of Profile Manager, showing you how you can organize both users and devices in to various groups with different kind of settings.
To sum it up in one sentence: This ebook will teach you how to configure your Lion Server to be an Open Directory master, use an appropriate SSL certificate, provide Profile Manager services, and perform basic troubleshooting.
The price is almost better than book, only $4.99 in iBooks and even lower on Kindle ($3.99). The ebook will soon also be available on peachpit.com.
iBooks store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/managing-ios-devices-os-x/id455014665
Kindle store: http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Devices-Lion-Server-ebook/dp/B005G2FSNG
Who is Arek Dreyer? So you are new to managing OS X? Arek has written several Apple-certified books, including “Mac OS X Server Essentials v10.6: A Guide to Using and Supporting Mac OS X Server v10.6″ and “Mac OS X Directory Services v10.6″. I recommend both books as mandatory read when they get updated for OS X Lion.
Last.fm tells me things I already know
2
Yepp, Last.fm is right. I have not listened to Kylie this year. Do I need to know, or do you think I know that I haven’t listened to her? And do you think that I am gonna listen to her right now?
Well, Last.fm has started presenting the 40 most scrobbled artists this year. She is #40. I’m officially out of sync with what is hot and what is not.
iBooks coming to Norway?
0The Norwegian edition of Apple’s iBookstore might be launched in Norway soon. 17. November there will be held a information meeting between Apple’s agent in Norway, eBokNorden, and Norwegian publishers.
Sjur Mossige, eBokNorden, has not got a definitive date for when iBooks will launch in Norway, but it seems to happen before Christmas. Something that will be long before the Norwegian industry solution for e-books is ready, a solution that has been postponed several times and is expected to first be ready around March next year.
Funny thing is that because Apple is a foreign company, it means that they will be able to sell Norwegian e-books without tax until 1. July next year. The iBookstore address will be in Luxembourg, and Apple will like other foreign companies be able to sell digital services without VAT in Norway until the new tax rules take effect.
The interest from the small, independent publishers is big, and it seems that many of them are welcoming this marketplace and look at it as an opportunity to increase sales of their books, Mossige said to Norwegian Bok & Samfunn.
My take is that it is extremely unfortunate that we have such an incompetent publishing industry in Norway. Their Adobe DRM-based has been more or less ready for half a year now, but still not launched. Apple is now getting a 3-4 months advantage, making them able to establish themselves and gain market shares that it will be hard for the Norwegian publishing industry to take back. Books bought on iBooks will also have another DRM solution incompatible with Adobe’s ADEPT DRM. The books will therefor be completely locked to iOS devices.
Apple with more ePub support
0
Yesterday Apple came with an update to their office solution, iWork. The update 9.0.4 is important for all of us still dreaming of a paper free life. Pages can now export documents to ePub, the chosen format in iBooks (iPhone/iPad) and many other eReader devices.
The added ePub support in iWorks makes it a lot more convenient for scientific staff and students to make use of the iPad in their work and studies.
It is important to note that export to ePub only works with the word processing templates and not with the beautiful page layout templates. You might also loose some of the formatting. Apple has also provided a support page describing the differences between ePub and PDF, and a very helpful Pages template for use in creating an ePub.
Liza Daly has tested the ePub support in Pages, and she has comments on Apple’s XHTML:
<div class=”s2″>This document will show you how to use paragraph styles to create a publication that looks great..</div>
She found that this was the paragraph style, and this is not acceptable. <p> is what is semantically accurate.
A few word about Pages: The word processor comes with with advanced tools for writing and easy page layout, and it can also open, save, and email Microsoft Office files. You can also share all your work on the web on the iWork.com service.