The new Flash Player beta version is ready to download on the Adobe Lab web pages: Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2. Most important: The support of the video codec H.264 and the audio codec AAC. Both belong to the best codecs in quality and efficiency on the market. And both belong to the MPEG-4 standard. Jon Dahl on Rail Spikes provides more background information on codecs and their advantages. The Adobe developer Tinic Uro gives more details on the codec implementation.
Attention should be paid to the Adobe announcement especially against the background, that there is still no confirmation on a Flash Player for the Apple iPhone. Youtube, which encoded their videos only in a Flash-video format, now started to encode new videos also with H.264 to serve the attractive target group of iPhone (and Apple-TV) users.
Maybe the pleasant step of Adobe is also a first sign that the wish of a Flash Player for the iPhone is eventually coming true. This would be great news – especially for innovative GUI- and interaction concepts.

We can be anxious what the future will serve us

Skype kept shtum about the cause of the massive breakdown of the Service infrastructure within the last days. They only emphesized that it was not a hacker attack. Now the company Skype sheds light on the reason: A patch of the Microsoft Windows operating system caused the breadown of the entire Skype system serving over 200 million registered customers worldwide. The Windows monoculture has some perfidies … also for us Mac and Linux users … but luckily everything is runnning back again.

Steve Jobs’ open letter, published in February, to push the music industry to DRM-free music, makes a first impact: Today, EMI Music in London announced, that they will offer premium downloads without DRM (digital rights management) and with better encoding quality within the iTunes store. Single premium downloads (256 kbps encoded ACC without digital right management) will cost $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. Purchased songs can be upgraded for $0.30/€0.30/£0.20 per track. Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group and Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs presented the new concept in London, today.
It’s interesting, that the price for complete albums will not be changed for the premium version. The music industry tries to season their complete albums.
Basically, this is a real improvement on the consumer side. Until now, all "early adopters" have been punished with all these DRM-restrictions. And on the other side: the good old CD, without copy protection, with printed cover, with better quality and with an "integrated backup feature" . Let’s not talk about the hacker attacks from Sony’s "copy-protection" root kits. It would be a real step forward, if the honest customers, who buy their music legally, will not be punished for that.

Sources: apple.com, wikipedia.org, source & picture: emigroup.com

Apple published a new beta of BootCamp for free download. All those out there, who wan to run the ressource consuming Windows Vista on their Intel-Macs, can download the 138 MB package. As the name implies, BootCamp enables the user to boot his Intel-Mac with a Windows operating system. If you want to use Windows and Mac OS X parallel, you sitll have to use commercial solutions like Parallell Desktop.

Somtimes there is now way around the Redmond operating system

How to reduce the paper chaos is one of the things nearly everyone is coping with. Especially if your work is creative, if you are searching for innovation, if you have to manage projects, meetings and contacts you really get lost. Great ideas, solutions and approaches just disappear. A variety of software tools assist the Mac users to get store, find and manage this information and knowledge. Mehr …