Nearly three years ago, with the release of iTunes 4, Apple accidentally made piracy easy for users. With a few clicks, anyone could start streaming their iTunes library over the internet. People immediately started trading links and even developing applications to suck those downloads down. Today, this feature remains in iTunes, though it was quickly neutered into a “stream your library within your local area network without downloads allowed” form; a natural reaction when remembering Apple’s new relationship with several major music companies, thanks to the just-opened iTunes Music Store.

Developers Andrew Kazmierski and Mark Davis began showing me builds of a new app nearly a year ago that would remove these restrictions and allow easy internet music library sharing once again. I think my response to the idea went something like this: “Musicast sounds pretty cool, but wouldn’t it be RIAA bait? Sure, there are some legitimate uses for it, but it seems like an app that mainly promotes using iTunes for piracy.” Continue reading…

Just over a month ago (and shortly after being featured in my Top Ten list of Most Beautiful OS X Apps), the awesome Cocoa Tetris client, Quinn, was pulled from Simon Haertel’s site due to legal threats from The Tetris Company. (You can view the actual threat here. As readers pointed out, the whole thing seemed rather fishy (and The Tetris Company’s past actions extremely sketchy). However, Simon had to make sure everything was A-OK before feeling comfortable distributing Quinn again.

Today brings good news, in the form of an email in my inbox from Simon.

“After investigating the legal situation thoroughly with the help of several people, including the EFF, I am now sure that Quinn doesn’t violate any copyrights or trademarks. All this stuff has dragged on _far_ longer than I expected, but now I really hope I can concentrate on programming again “

Awesome to hear Simon! Go grab the latest version of Quinn, slap on the awesome replacement icon (as pictured) by Susumu, and start hosting some games. I hereby declare today to be Quinn day… or something. Actually, disregard that comment, and just go play some Tetris. Woohoo!

I don’t have time these days to enjoy much procrastination, but when I do, I’ve been spending increasingly more of my time at YouTube. If you haven’t checked it out at this point, YouTube is basically the Flickr for home movies and has rapidly become one of the most popular websites on the internet. (#10 now, according to Alexa. Talk about a stratospheric climb in popularity.)

So how’d they do it? Well, as any YouTuber will tell you, there’s a lot of crap out there, and you have to wade through it. But with hundreds of thousands of videos out there, there’s also a lot of quality stuff. Some really funny home videos, clips from TV shows like the Colbert Report, animated shorts, etc. And a lot of the fun in the YouTube experience is actually wading through all the crap to find the gems.

The not-so-fun part is the YouTube interface, which admittedly does the job, but in a very spartan way. I wish I could browse YouTube with the same ease and visual luxury that I browse music on iTunes Music Store, ya know? Continue reading…

Check it out, and have fun! (And if you like it, Digg it )

Well, that was a dry stretch. Sorry about that, but I’ve been consumed by my current project for the past week, getting it ready for launch.

This is going to be the final teaser before My Dream App opens up, so I’m going to give you guys some substantial info, instead of the list of names that the last teaser basically was. Continue reading…

Ahh, finally back home. WWDC was quite a vacation, but now it’s time to get back to work… on My Dream App of course.

I know the last teaser was relatively void of details, so consider this post Teaser 2, the Hollywood style sequel with less plot and more big name stars!

So first off, I know I said I was on vacation, but that’s not entirely true. I did spend a good part of the break meeting up with people, discussing My Dream App, and inviting several of them to join the project as guest judges. (Gasp, judges?!) Below is a photo from a particularly awesome lunch that yielded three new guest judges for the event: Dave Watanabe (NewsFire and Acquisition), Allan Odgaard (Textmate and recent ADA winner), and Nick Jitkoff (Quicksilver). They’ll be joining the much-talked about Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster, and soon hopefully some other developers judging in that particular week.

From left to right, Austin Sarner, John Casasanta, Me, Nick Jitkoff, Jason Harris, Rosyna, Allan Odgaard, and Dave Watanabe

But that’s not all, there’s more! More guest judges I mean. Some other people who recently joined as well for guest judging for other weeks: lead TUAW blogger Scott McNulty, the Simonesque critic John Siracusa of Ars Technica’s FatBits, Jim Dalrymple of Macworld, and the recently Business Week’d Kevin Rose of Digg. Then there’s UI design guest judge week, with Adam Betts, Dave Lanham, Jasper Hauser, Piotr Gajos and Gedeon Maheux currently on board.

Developers? Bloggers? Tech media members? UI designers? Judging?! What is this??

Well, it wouldn’t be a teaser without leaving some things for the imagination. But I’ll leave you guys with this. I really, really believe this is going to revolutionize software development. Now, normally me just saying this alone would probably get tagged as crazy talk, but a lot of the people I mentioned share that belief, which is why quite a few of them joined the project on the spot. We’re going to be lowering barriers and making things more transparent than ever, and it’s going to result in some kickass software.

Oh, and I guess since it’s obvious it’s some sort of a competition, I might as well mention what we’re trying to get together as prizes. Macbooks and iPods will be a small part of the prize packages. So dust off your thinking caps and start thinking killer app ideas!

So the Apple Design Awards were announced today, and the biggest news from it, of course, was Inventive / Widget Machine co-developed iClip lite taking home the award for Best Dashboard Widget.

But wait, going back a bit, this was the first ADA ceremony I had the opportunity to attend, and the whole thing was a pretty awesome experience. The event was held in a pretty atmospheric room, complete with a fog machine, purple lighting, and thumping music, and the second coolest part (besides accepting the award) was the opening video sequence, which featured all of the entered applications flying past the screen. Really, really cool.

After each of the winners were announced, runners up first, winners second, the winners were demoed by Apple User Experience Evangelist John Geleynse, who did a pretty good job showing off all of the winning apps. (I wouldn’t have wanted to be in his shoes, demoing Scientific Solution winner, EnzymeX! (By the way, the developers of that application have a great article about the infamous ADA “cube” trophy which is a pretty interesting read.)

Accepting the award with John was unreal. That’s about all I can say at this point, I’m still recovering. I really wish UI designer for iClip lite Piotr Gajos and programmer Chris Willis could’ve made it out here to experience it.

So anyway, more photos and more reactions to come soon, for now, a complete list of the winners, listed in chronological order of announcement:

Best Student Application:
Runner-Up: PhotoPresenter by Arizona Software
Winner: LineForm by Tribar Software

Best User Experience:
Runner-Up: Boinx FotoMagico by Boinx Software
Winner: iSale by equinux

Best Widget:
Runner-Up: WeatherBug Widget by WeatherBug
Winner: iClip lite by Inventive and Widget Machine

Best OS X Graphics:
Runner-Up: Unity by Unity
Winner: Modo by Luxology

Best Automator Workflow:
Runner-Up: Lecture Recording Workflow 1.2 by the University of Michigan School of Dentistry
Winner: Build Real Estate Catalog/Ultimate Productivity Action Pack

Best Developer Tool:
Runner-Up: F-Script by F-Script
Winner: TextMate by MacroMates

Best Game:
Runner-Up: Wingnuts 2 by Freeverse
Winner: Sims 2 ported Aspyr

Best Scientific Computing Solution:
Runner-Up: FuzzMeasurePro by Christopher Liscio
Winner: EnzymeX by Mekentosj

Again, more on this tomorrow, but wow, pretty amazing experience!

While yesterday’s preview of Leopard didn’t show too much (I’m talking about the “top secret” features that Steve left out this time around), it did show enough to, well, make quite a few shareware and freeware applications somewhat obsolete. We all know that Apple doesn’t have a problem scalping the Mac shareware market for good ideas (think Watson), and ultimately I don’t have a huge problem with it as long as Apple’s solutions are better. But whether it’s justifiable or not what they do, they have done it, and are continuing to do it with OS X Leopard. Here’s a list of existing 3rd party applications that are going to find themselves losing a lot of sales or a lot of downloads in the upcoming months with 10.5′s upcoming release. Or, alternatively and rather optimistically, you can take it as a list of applications to hold you over and in many cases provide satisfying near-Leopard functionality until you can get your hands on the upgrade. Continue reading…