Month: March 2012

Wow! I remember Kevin as a young kid on TechTV back in the day… now he’s a millionaire and moving to Google. Dewd.

Kevin Rose Joins Google

Digg founder Kevin Rose has been hired by Google, according to sources close to the situation.

Rose’s mobile app incubator Milk yesterday announced it was shutting down its only product, Oink.

Google is not outright buying or ‘acquiring’ Milk, the sources explicitly said, but Rose and some others from the company have been hired. It’s not clear what will happen to Milk after Rose joins Google.

UPDATE: More people familiar with the deal said the rest of the Milk team is joining Google, with employees netting $1 million to $2 million each. although I’m still trying to nail down the value of the overall transaction. Milk investors are getting their initial investment money back plus a little extra, sources said.

Google declined to comment, and Rose did not reply to multiple requests.

Rose’s first day at Google is to be this Monday, the sources said.

Rose has an avid online following, stemming from his days as a host on TechTV and the long-running podcast ‘Diggnation.’ Though Oink — which was a local recommendations app — may not have succeeded, it was able to hit 150,000 downloads in its first month.

That kind of ongoing fan engagement could be a boon to Google+, which has been criticized for low engagement and tricky user accounting.”

This is one of the best, most useful, and most used (by me) utility ever! Audacity! Universally touted and used by both amateurs and professionals, this great editor is now at the full blown version 2.0! No longer in beta! Awesome! Get it!

Audacity 2.0

“Audacity 2.0 is our current version. It has dozens of new features, developed in the 1.3 series. It replaces all previous versions, especially 1.2.6 and 1.3.14. See New Features in 1.3 for changes during the 1.3 series. See also Release Notes for more details.

Some of the major changes in 2.0.0 over 1.2.6 are:

Many effects significantly improved, especially Equalization, Noise Removal and Normalize. Vocal Remover now included plus GVerb on Windows and Mac. VAMP analysis plug-ins now supported.

Improved label tracks with Sync-Lock Tracks feature in the Tracks Menu. Multiple clips per track. Tracks and selections can be fully manipulated using the keyboard. Many more keyboard shortcuts.

New Device Toolbar to manage inputs and outputs. Timer Record feature. New Mixer Board view with per-track VU meters.

Automatic Crash Recovery in the event of abnormal program termination.

Fast ‘On-Demand’ import of WAV/AIFF files if read directly from source. FLAC now fully supported. Added support for optional FFmpeg library for import/export of AC3/M4A/WMA and import of audio from video files.

Interface

Fixed playback speed and synchronization problems when dragging clips or tracks between tracks having different sample rates.

(Windows) Removed a crash risk where shortcuts could be used to record or import in one project while importing or exporting in another.

Imports and Exports

Fixed crashes when changing the sample format of read-directly WAV or AIFF files using the Track Drop-Down Menu.

Fixed a crash importing MP3 files that had duplicate metadata tags (this is a bug in current libsndfile which has been patched in Audacity; MP3 files mislabeled as WAV which have duplicate tags will still crash Audacity on Linux if Audacity has been compiled against an affected version of system libsndfile).

Fixed an issue where excessively high or corrupted sample values in the audio could corrupt exports from the start of the problem for the rest of the file, and could corrupt the rest of the project.
(Linux) Fixed Audacity could not be compiled against FFmpeg 0.7.x and 0.8.x.

Effects and Analysis

Fixed crash on launch when using “Ambisonic Decoders (PC)” VST plug-ins and other plug-ins that enable additional floating point exceptions.

Fixed Plot Spectrum background could be transparent on some machines.

Bug fixes for Click Track, High Pass, Low Pass and Vocal Remover.

Chirp, Tone and Silence generators now remember their settings.

Other miscellaneous bug fixes

Changes and Improvements

New Interface preference to show the track name in the display (this is off by default).
Longer default Playback preference for effects preview and preview before cut.
Restored use of Page Up and Page Down to scroll horizontally.”

My favorite ubiquitous file share folder in the Cloud has a web site interface update!

Dropbox Re-Design

“Over the past few weeks, we’ve been quietly rolling out a major redesign of the Dropbox website. Today we turned it up to 11, and anyone who signs into dropbox.com will see a simpler, more powerful, and more beautiful web experience. Here’s what we came up with:

A focus on the stuff you care about

One of our main goals was to slim down dropbox.com and focus on the star of the page: your stuff. We’ve put all the tools you need at your fingertips, but only when you need them.

The new action bar at the top of the screen does it all. Think of it as a multi-tool that adjusts to your needs. You can use it to sort your files by name, date, size, and type. Or, if you select a file or folder, the bar will change to let you perform a variety of actions on your selection.”

Up until very recently (yesterday as I write this) Chrome had NOT been successfully hacked. Well, now Sergey Glaznov has successfully hacked it, but it is already patched for his hack! This is due to his winning a Google sponsored challenge to “pwn” their browser… but…

After the pwnage: Critical Google Chrome hole plugged in 24 hours

“Less than 24 hours after a Russian hacker pocketed $60,000 by exploiting a previously unknown critical vulnerability in Google Chrome, company developers released an update removing the security threat.

The quick turnaround underscores one of the key advantages of Google’s open-source browser: the speed in which highly complex bugs are fixed and updates are pushed out to users. By contrast, Microsoft, which must run updates through a battery of rigorous quality-assurance tests, often takes months to fix bugs of similar complexity.

A post published Thursday morning to the Google Chrome Release blog said technical details will be withheld until a majority of users have actually installed the fix. For now, it described the vulnerability as an ‘UXSS and bad history navigation’ issue and identified it as CVE-2011-3046.

Even after a more detailed description is published, it’s likely some characteristics will be withheld. Chrome is based on the WebKit, the same browser engine powering Apple Safari and many mobile browsers. Google researchers will likely be reluctant to provide information making it easier for hackers to compromise users of those systems until they’ve been updated as well.”

From Techcrunch, yesterday:

“Wondering what to call the newly announced iPad hardware, demonstrated at this morning’s Apple event in San Francisco? Well, it’s not going to be the ‘iPad 3,’ the ‘iPad HD,’ or even the ‘iPad 2S.’

Nope, the new iPad will just be called “iPad.” That’s not confusing at all.

To make matters worse, it seems that Apple will continue to sell the older model iPad, the iPad 2. Except now the iPad 2 will see a $100 price drop (hooray!), bringing it down to $399 for the 16 GB Wi-Fi only model. The 3G version will be $529.

Meanwhile, the new iPad starts at $499 for the 16 GB Wi-Fi and $629 for the 3G version.

But the name change – seriously? This means we’ll now be referring to the two currently available devices as the iPad 2 and just ‘iPad?’ And what about the first generation device, which many people (myself included) still own? The iPad 1? iPad the original? iPad Classic? (Ha.)”

Read the full article here:

Yes, Apple Is Actually Just Calling It ‘iPad’

YouTube is doing some serious “innovating” in it’s video player! This is cool stuff!

Looking ahead in the YouTube player

“Pssst! We’ve got a surprise — we want to give you a sneak peek to videos on YouTube.

Years ago we created a way to link to a certain moment on a video, which let you find, share and comment on just your favorite parts. Now we’re expanding that control even more. Over the coming weeks, you’ll be able to see an image preview or a series of thumbnails with three new features on our video player. So whether you’re sneaking a peek ahead, scanning backwards, or using a thumbnail to find where you stopped watching a video, you’ll soon have three options to instantly look through YouTube videos. Here’s how each works:

Taking a sneak peek
So excited (or maybe so scared) that you want to find what happens later in the video? Hover your mouse over the seek bar and a thumbnail of that moment will appear, and you can click to start watching from that moment.

Scanning through thumbnails
Let’s say you started a video but had to come back and finish it later. You thought you were the middle of the video when main character looks dramatically into the camera, or maybe it was the shocking look from the supporting character a few seconds ago. Now you can drag the handle along the seek bar to show a filmstrip of thumbnails of previous and upcoming scenes.

Zooming in on long videos
If you’re watching a video that’s longer than 90 minutes, like one of the growing list of movies on YouTube, you’ll see an added feature that lets you zoom in on the seek bar, one and a half minutes at a time. This second bar that appears gives you more granularity for finding that exact moment you want on a long video…

With an hour of video uploaded to YouTube every second, we’ve got a lot of sneak peeks to get ready on YouTube, and not every video will have this feature available at launch. Let us know what you think as you start seeing these features around the site.”

Awesome news for those of us that are current Codeweavers Office users! They have consolidated all their products and combined them into one new, super cool version!

Here’s the email I got:

“In the absence of our fearless leader, Jeremy White (who is traveling on business today), I am charged with making the happy announcement that we have shipped CrossOver XI, for both Mac and Linux.

This release of the product marks a major step forward, for two reasons. First, we have consolidated and simplified CrossOver into a single product. The previous Pro, Standard, and Bundle distinctions have been consigned to history. Likewise, we have rolled CrossOver Games into the main product as well. So now there is only a single product: CrossOver. However, customers can still choose the price point that works for them by choosing the length of the support entitlement they want to purchase: 1 month, 6 months, or 12 months.

Second, CrossOver XI runs many more applications than its predecessor 10.0 (“Impersonator”). Perhaps the most important of these is Microsoft Office 2010 (which we are pleased to offer initial support for), but there are dozens more. CrossOver is built on Wine 1.4, which incorporates more than 16,000 patches since version 1.2, meaning that a lot more stuff runs, or runs better, than it did only a year ago.

One important note: CrossOver XI is the last version of CrossOver that will support OS X 10.5 (Leopard). The next major version of CrossOver will require OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) at a minimum.

Finally, we have also launched a completely new website to support CrossOver XI. We hope that this new design will make it easier for people to discover what CrossOver is all about, by giving them the information they need to make an informed purchasing decision. We have also greatly streamlined how customers can get support from us.

If you are an existing CrossOver customer with an active support entitlement, you can visit our web site to download this latest version:
https://www.codeweavers.com
You will need to log in with the email and password that you used when purchasing CrossOver. Please write to info@codeweavers.com if you need help with this process.

Thanks again for all your support, and I hope that you enjoy CrossOver XI!

Cheers,

Jon Parshall
COO
CodeWeavers”