Microsoft has come up with a fantastic new concept: a place where you can legally download music, for only 99 cents per song! If only someone else had thought of it earlier, and beaten them to the punch.

Seriously though... I know Apple didn't come up with the idea but it's pretty hard to pretend that they didn't make it very successful very quickly, and even harder to pretend you're launching a competitor, but have never heard of the iTunes music store. But apparently not impossible:

Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president for MSN said, “Our goal with the MSN Music service is to finally bring digital music to the masses by offering what we believe is the largest and highest quality catalog of legal music on the Internet, available on the broadest selection of portable devices.”

First off: which masses are they “bringing it to”? The millions of people in the world who are both trendy enough to want digital music, and yet who have been living under a rock and haven't heard of iTunes and/or the iPod? Do this guy really think there are people sitting on their couches watching iPod commercials and thinking, “I'd love to have digital music, if only I could find somewhere that sells it”?

Second: does he think that because Microsoft's PR group has been living under a rock? If they believe that the library of 500,000 songs mentioned in the article is the largest catalog of legal music online, they might want to, you know, check some recent numbers from their only serious competitor.

It's nice that they want to compete and all, but perhaps they should focus a little more on not sounding like they are either criminally ignorant or lying while they do it.

Category: Geek

Writebacks (0)

I've been using fink's GIMP 2.0 installation for a while, but my old drag-and-drop script was still set up for 1.2. I could have just fixed it by changing the symlinks that point GIMP commands to a specific version so that they refer to 2.0 instead of 1.2 (which I ultimately also did), but I've been bugged for a while by the old script's requirement of launching GIMP in advance, and having to fix another part of the process finally motivated me to do something about it. Poking around a little I found this hint, which improves on the script I'd been using (the one mention at the beginning of the new hint).

The new script has some issues, mentioned in the comments, but unfortunately the fixed version that is alluded to is MIA. The bright side it that it gave me an excuse to play with AppleScript a bit, and now I have a script that uses X11 and handles multiple files correctly in almost all cases. I still need to fix it so it doesn't launch multiple instances of the GIMP if it tries to open several files and finds that the GIMP isn't already running, but that should be easy enough to fix. And if not, it's still worlds better than the old script. Here's to progress! AppleScript is very cool, but I never quite get around to learning more than a tiny bit of it... but I guess that's what Automator is all about: automation without learning/remembering AppleScript.

If any of the other 20 people running GIMP on OS X using fink instead of Gimp.app need good drag-and-drop support, drop me a line :)

[Update: It now handles all drag-and-drop cases correctly, and also launches the GIMP if you run it without dropping a file, so it's now an app for all purposes that matter to me!]

Category: Geek

Writebacks (0)