The Beta News

I’m a big fan of WooThemes. As you probably can tell by the theme on this very page (Fresh News). I do like to change the theme from time to time and what better time to do it than just before a new year.

A standard WooTheme is $70 if you don’t need the Photoshop files (developer package). The $70 is very well spent. According to my good friend Dan at minute44.com, the themes are very well developed and will pass most tests you can throw at it.

I can only say that the support there is excellent too, but back to the christmas offer. You can now buy 5 Wordpress themes for the price of 1. I just bought five new themes, it took me some time to make up my mind, but I finally decided to buy Bloggingstream, The Station, Mortar, Digital Farm and Daily Edition. That should do it for any possible blogging scenarios.

Which one of the themes do you think I should pick?

If you’ve spent all your money on christmas gifts, don’t worry. They have free themes too.

One of my favourite applications, Evernote, released another update today. Besides fixing some minor issues, it features great news for especially Mac-users. The Safari plugin, lets you clip entire web pages to Evernote or a PDF. Evernote now also supports Growl notifications (known from Adium and Gmail Notifier).

FireFox Mac-users will enjoy the updated clipper. The clipping is sent directly to the Evernote client. No more signing in or pop-ups. If you prefer the “old” method you can still use the bookmarklet.

I have Evernote installed on all my supported devices, my PC, MacBook Pro and iPhone. I love how easy I can sync my notes, record an audio note and take advantage of the many Evernote-enabled apps. I used to be a huge fan of Google Notebook, but unfortunately Google doesn’t support that anymore.

What’s your experience with Evernote? Do you use another application to write and sync notes and clippings?

Maybe you’ve seen the latest Star Trek trailer. If you haven’t, you’ve missed one of the best trailers in a long time. I saw it several times and it gives me goosebumps every time I see it.

I blame the goosebumps on the music used in the latest trailer. After seeing the Star Trek Movie trailer a couple of times, I had to find out where the music was from.

So I did a little research and stumbled upon TheTrailerMusicMan on YouTube. I wrote to him and within a short time, he told me the music written by Two Steps From Hell and was called Freedom Fighters.

So far so good. I’ve done some more research and it turns out that one of the composers behind Two Steps From Hell, Thomas J. Bergersen started a blog a few days ago. He wrote this the other day:

There has been a lot of interest in the Freedom Fighters music in the new Star Trek trailer (thanks!) so here’s some more information for you. The executives at Paramount studios ultimately had the final say in what music was used for the trailer. They ended up liking the music so much they wanted exclusive rights to use it (to avoid us from licensing it to other advertisement campaigns). This does however not mean that the music cannot be published on CD, and we’ll likely include the modified version on one of our future public releases.

Make sure you catch the trailer at your local theatre, as the surround sound mixing is EPIC!

Best,

Thomas J. Bergersen

So unfortunately the music from the third Star Trek trailer isn’t available yet.

If you are into music from trailers and what I would call “epic music”, you should definitely check out Two Steps From Hell.

They also wrote the music behind the second Star Trek trailer. That track is called “Down with Enterprise”.

Their albums will become available on iTunes.

Now if you are really really interested in their music you can find their music on YouTube and on their Facebook fan page. A simple Google search will also give you a lot of hits. There are a lot of forums discussing the latest Star Trek trailer and the music in them.

(and just a small hint: If you really want to download “Freedom Fighters”, it’s out there…)

It was bound to happen sooner or later. A cracking program for iPhone apps has been released. It’s called “Crackulous”. I’m not mentioning it here because I want you to use it. On the contrary. This program can do more damage than good.

Crackulous removes copy protection (Apple calls it FairPlay) from iPhone app. There is nothing new in that. Several sites already offer pirated iPhone apps for free. But with Craculous everybody can remove FairPlay from their iPhone apps and share them with friends, p2p sites (torrents, newsgroups etc.) or sell them.

So what’s wrong in sharing your iPhone apps with your friends? I guess nothing is worng in that?! If only it would stop there. It won’t! The next thing we’ll see will be some kind of distribution program on your iPhone. It’ll be the pirated version of Cydia, which lets you download the pirated version of the app straight to your iPhone. Of course there are always some people who use pirated applications as a demo. “I’ll buy the program after I try it…”. Do you really want to try out a $ 1.99 application before you buy it?

90% of the applications on iTunes are made by people like you and me. (Well if I could develop an iPhone app I would, but you know what I mean.) Independent developers who has worked hard to make a great application for us.

I’m sure most developers aren’t making a living of the apps, so money isn’t my main concern here. I’m more concerned at how Apple will react on this. I’m no big fan of the way Apple locked the iPhone down. I mean it’s simlocked and you are forced to use iTunes to buy apps. I think the fear of piracy caused Apple to keep the iPhone on a leash like this. Apple could have allowed the “unofficial” developers more elbow space. A jailbreaked iPhone is even more powerful than an “official”. I think Apple knew, that if you allow the unofficial developers too much space, you would end up with a problem like this. I’m sure Apple know that they’ve sold even more iPhone because of the unlock and jailbreak possibilities, so they could live with that.

Apple can’t  have people distributing unlicensed iPhone apps. If pirated versions of EA Games’ Monopoly surfaces on too many sites, they will pressure Apple into doing something about it. This could mean the end of Cydia and all the great programs there. Swirly MMS has given us MMS on iPhone, Snapture let us take better photos, SBSettings let’s me control my shortcuts and Cycorder let’s me record videos. Cydia could now be the pirate’s extended arm and dig their own grave.

Would you use a pirated version of iPhone apps? Do you have any on your iPhone now?

If you run a blog or a website you probably know what a robots.txt file is, so you can skip the next line. It’s a small text file that tells search engine what to include and not to include in their indexing of your site.

As you might have noticed or read www.whitehouse.gov has been given an Obama make-over. The changes has aren’t just graphical and textual. Perhaps as a comparison to the previous government, the new robots.txt is a bit more welcoming.

This is Obama’s robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

Yes that’s it!

Now compare it to George W. Bush’s 2400 line robots.txt (I won’t post it all)

1. User-agent:     *
2. Disallow:       /cgi-bin
3. Disallow:       /search
4. Disallow:       /query.html
5. Disallow:       /omb/search
6. Disallow:       /omb/query.html
7. Disallow:       /expectmore/search
8. Disallow:       /expectmore/query.html
9. Disallow:       /results/search
10. Disallow:       /results/query.html
11. Disallow:       /earmarks/search
12. Disallow:       /earmarks/query.html
13. Disallow:       /help
14. Disallow:       /360pics/text
15. Disallow:       /911/911day/text
16. Disallow:       /911/heroes/text
17. Disallow:       /911/messages/text
18. Disallow:       /911/patriotism/text
19. Disallow:       /911/patriotism2/text

Let’s hope Obama keeps it this way. It’s a good start. So American…please don’t screw this up

Macworld 2009 is starting today. The rumours about what will be launched at the expo have been around since Macworld 2008. The biggest rumour is always about Steve Jobs’ health. I hope (like I hope for everybody else), that he is doing good and in perfect health. Besides that it’s really not my concern.

Besides Steve’s health there are more much more interesting rumours, will we see a red iPhone? A new AppleTV? Or perhaps a 17-inch unibody MacBook Pro with now removeable battery (yes, that very convenient when you have to erhmmm…well, the battery won’t fall out if you drop the MacBook).

Of course, at some point we’ll probably see a iTablet or some kind of tablet Mac as several tech blogs suggest.

I know a lot of hardcore fans are ready to spend money on a new Apple thingy. I would never do that of course….never ever (my wife reads this blog too).

Which Apple product are you hoping for?

I hope everybody had a great christmas (or holiday). I’m still enjoying mine.

With new year’s eve tomorrow I wanted to thank eveyone for your loyalty and patronage.

Have a great new year and I’ll see you in 2009.