Technology

Don't forget to tune in to the MacWorld Keynote tomorrow at 6 pm Berlin time. As usual, there will be no live stream, but you can follow the keynote transcript live with pics at the known places, such as engadget, gizmodo, MacTechNews (German), and this year on MacRumors. As you have probably heard, although Steve is not giving the presentation, there are quite a few rumors surrounding the keynote, so that we are probably in for quite an interesting event. Read on to learn more.

Apple just released this press release a few minutes ago:

"CUPERTINO, California—December 16, 2008—Apple® today announced that this year is the last year the company will exhibit at Macworld Expo. Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the opening keynote for this year’s Macworld Conference & Expo, and it will be Apple’s last keynote at the show. The keynote address will be held at Moscone West on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. Macworld will be held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center January 5-9, 2009.

Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.

Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris."

So what does this mean? Well, Apple could still hold its own special events (at more appropriate times than in early January), but there are two things that concern me (after the jump):

When I see America's future president using Web 2.0 technologies to create a Digg-like website, where users can post - and digg questions to the president elect, I begin to grasp just how much I look forward to the next administration. The idea is simple: Anyone can post a question to the site, and other (logged in) users can vote for questions of their interest. At the end of a round, the ten most popular (most votes) questions are selected, and answered by Obama and Biden themselves. Click Read More to find out the winners of round one. I can tell you this much: I am really interested in the answer to the top question!

As you can tell, I've been in real video posting mood these past few days, and here is another little demo I have wanted to show you for a long time. It's a small app I developed a while ago, which does live color object tracking with your web-cam (in this case, the iSight camera from my iMac). I blogged about it before, but I think we all agree that a video would better explain how this little thing works than a textual description. So check it out after the jump!

Here is another little demo I want to show you guys. It's an app for the iPhone / iPod Touch I hacked up a few weeks ago, and allows you to draw shapes using the multi-touch screen. The app recognizes the shape you are attempting to draw, and replaces your squiggle with a nice clean version. Check out the video after the jump and please let me know what you think!

Hey dudes! Want to know what Trackmania Nations Forever looks like on the Mac using CrossOver Games? Well, wait no more and watch the video below, where I take the game for a spin on my iMac. So, why my sudden urge to video review this game that I have known for a long time? Well, in this video I not only demonstrate my awful racing skills, but also the soon-to-be released ScreenCamera (project name) for the Mac, which allows you to do screen-casts like the one below for free. Check it out after the jump (Read More).

Nokia is currently advertising their soon to be released smart-phone N97, complete with a touch screen, slide-out physical keyboard, 3G, WiFi, GPS, 5MP camera and 32 GB memory. From the specs, it obviously beats the crap out of the iPhone. But can the interface reach the elegance of the iPhone? Read more to find out.

So by now, all you GoogleMail users may have noticed the new Themes feature, which allows you to customize the look of your GMail web front-end. These range from complex, weather dependent ones (like the "Tree" theme I am currently using) to bare-bone ones like the Terminal look (for all you uber-geeks out there). Depending on how much you like to fool around with your computer settings, you may have stumbled upon many of the other features Google has built into GMail. Furthermore, you may have seen some of the future features of GMail, which you can test in the Labs section. Here are some of my favorite features:

Hi everybody! I am writing this from my iPod Touch, and I must say that it is absolutely incredible! I will post more information and first experiences about it soon, so stay tuned!!!

Actually I have known about it for about over two years now, but I have never really tried it. One reason was a stupid thing at my university we call quota :-)
Lately I came about a blog entry of a guy introducing the new features of the latest Ubuntu release. He also mentioned, that Rhythmbox was able to play Last.fm audio streams and I quickly decided to register and see how it works...