The best new feature in the new iOS 4.2 update has to be Airplay. I don't have Apple TV (so I can't stream video) but we do have an Airport Express hooked up to our receiver. It was (and is) great for playing iTunes through the house, but with Airplay we can now play almost any audio app through our "good" speakers, including Pandora, Public Radio, and Concert Vault. Concert Vault in particular has a pretty substantial library of live recordings (I haven't really explored it before today) and tonight my baking soundtrack was some live Clash from 1981.

Also, this seems to be changing our thinking of what a remote control could (or should) be. Perhaps the future of TV & entertainment center remotes will just be your iPad/iPhone or something similar, and less like the button-crazy remotes of today (like Sony's controller for Google TV).

Great shortcut tip via Daring Fireball for finding menu items on your Mac: use shift+command+/ to get the help menu, then just start typing the name of the menu item you want.

Behind the Mac nerdery I enjoy on Daring Fireball is a typical Yankee fan: cocky and annoying.

Update: Greg Knauss created a helpful Grease Monkey script to "fix" Daring Fireball this time of year: Damned Fireball.

A new site (new to me, thanks to Daring Fireball), Finer Things in Mac, pointed out that iTunes 9 gives you more control over your smart playlists:

Smart Playlists in iTunes 9 have become smarter. They now offer more granular, nested control over rules for collecting content.

I've had some pretty complex playlists in my iTunes, using multiple Smart Playlists to get to a single Really Smart Playlist; this now makes my life easier.

This is probably going take me to another level of Apple/CSS nerdery, but so be it. (I can't be that bad since this has been around for years and I'm only noticing it now.) In the HTML code for Apple's website they have class="sosumi" for the copyright style. Fellow Apple nerds recognize the hilarity of using a system sound name for the copyright.

And yes, I know:

On the train ride I accidentally discovered an unknown (to me) feature in Klondike on the iPod. Sometimes I'm a little too click-happy and wished I could undo a move. As it turns out, you can: to undo the last move, just click and hold the select button for three seconds. (To keep you from cheating too much, the game only allows one undo.)

Good thing Apple released a new, smaller iPod Shuffle, because that last version was a behemoth...

What do I do on a Sunday evening after the kids are in bed? Why, optimize one of my personal websites for iPhone viewing...for fun! So now if you view a Sinko podcast on your iPhone or iPod touch, the layout will be optimized for your smaller screen.

And yes, I know:

You already know that Yankee fans are the be-all and end-all when it comes to deciding what's classy in baseball and what's not, right? Well, I'm very pleased to report that Daring Fireball tech blogger and Yankee fan John Gruber has bestowed the "classy" label to Bill Buckner's treatment on Fenway's opening day!

Classiest thing the Red Sox have ever done.

We Sox fans can now bask in warm glow of Gruber's proclamation! Ahhhhhh. This must be what it feels like to be a Yankee fan all the time...

Hilarious: slow down an old Apple ad with Jeff Goldblum, and he sounds drunk as hell:



And if you like Jeff, be sure to check out the Jeff GoldBluMan Group...

I was playing around with Dashcode and made a version 0.1 Sinko Music Podcast Dashboard widget. If you have a Mac and want to try it out, you can download it here. (Requires Mac OS 10.4.3.)

This is more of a note to self: Hex Color Picker is a useful tool that adds a web color picker to the Mac's built-in color pickers. The best feature is the magnifying glass which lets you choose any color on the screen to get the hex value (very useful to find the color on a web page).

I had a bizarre thing happen: the built-in junk mail filter for Apple's Mail program stopped working for me. After trying everything to get it going again, I decided to clear the spam filter and start from scratch. After training it for over a week, it's worse than ever: it never marks anything as spam except mail that I sent to myself!

Luckily, I still had my license for SpamSieve, a spam filter I bought when I used Microsoft Outlook Express. So I downloaded the latest version and installed it, "trained" it by having it look at my current batch of junk mail (took 1 minute) and already it's caught all new junk mail messages.

If you're a Mac user and have problems with junk email, try SpamSieve now! There's a 30-day free trial, it works with all major mail apps, and is well worth the $30 purchase price.

Fortune has a good article about the Apple Stores: Apple: America's best retailer

Some interesting bits:

Saks...generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 - tops for electronics retailers - while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666... But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone's lunch.

It shouldn't surprise me that Apple built a prototype of a store before actually opening them. That seems like something all retailers would do.

"One of the best pieces of advice...was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn't work," says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product.

And just like Apple pays attention to the details in their software and products, they do the same in their stores:

"We've gotten it down so there's only three materials we're using [in the interiors]: glass, stainless steel, and wood," says Johnson. "We spent a year and a half perfecting that steel. Stainless steel can be cold if you don't get the finish right. See the bounce? See the blues up there?" No, frankly, but Apple hunted down a Japanese supplier and pushed it to achieve the effect by blasting the metal with small beads.

Continuing the cool-buildings theme from yesterday, these are nice some photos of Apple's new 24-hour (!) store in New York. The coolest thing is that there's no actual storefront: the entrance is a glass cube with an Apple logo, and you go down underground into the store.

(More photos of the store here and here.)

Announced earlier this week, Apple is switching from IBM PowerPC chips to Intel chips. Todd Dominey points out:

The best part about the Intel deal is that the whole silly megahertz war will finally be over. For all intents and purposes, Apple and the whole PC hardware industry will share nearly identical components. Even if Apple sold their hardware for 5-10% higher than a Dell, and used nearly the same components, that extra amount would be a bargain when factoring in Apple's product design skills, the value of the bundled operating system, and the applications contained therein. The battle will no longer be about platforms, but software.

That last sentence is pretty key, in my opinion. If people are no longer getting hung up with Apple vs. Windows computers' chip speeds and it's now down to software, that's nothing but good news for the Mac.

Fun new stuff from Apple: iPod shuffle, Mac Mini, an updated iLife suite, and iWork. I can't wait to see for myself how much easier Apple's word processor, Pages, is compared to Microsoft Word!

Apple has released the fourth generation iPods soon. I'm going to start my list of reasons to justify getting one now...