Blogitech from Chris Maddern

Chris123NT has posted a wonderful guide that proves exactly what I thought would be the case but didn’t get round to trying for lack of an x64 install of Vista on any machine, oh, and time!

In order to install iTunes and the iPhone on x64 Windows 7 you need merely get source the Apple Mobile Device Center files from a Vista x64 install, copy them over and then run a registry script (i.e. the install that fails).

Head over here for the full guide; the files are now available in a rar file in one of the comments so just scroll down and save yourself an x64 Vista install.

That’s now all applications / hardware working fully on Windows 7 6801. Hang on for a production-system review soon!

Chris

I don’t often talk about my job on here, mainly because it’s not often relevant. But recently I’ve been in a lot of meetings / discussions about creating a system to keep the executives up to date on the progress of various projects.

It was an interesting meeting in which the system changed from a spreadsheet to a full implementation of Microsoft Project, but I left with lots of words in my head like ‘tags’ and ‘categories’. It took days for the association to hit me but it all sounds to me rather like the job for a blog.

Each entry could be an update tagged with a project title among other keywords. Wordpress could even be slightly modified to store progress of each category along with a few other key pieces of information, but essentially it seems like it could work; you could browse by category for a chronological update of the status of projects. It may even be more advantageous for the developers as they gain the scope of explaining any potential issues to a third party (albeit virtually).

I’m not sure if this has been done before / is implemented anywhere but would be very interested to hear any thoughts on the matter or any experiences.

Chris

This comes at a time that the GBP is losing ground against the USD at a rate not seen for quite a while and is causing manufacturing distributors to see rises in cost against selling prices of up to 10%.

It’s not certain how large price rises will be, but HPs confirmed and many other manufacturers (rumoured to include DELL) are planning this rise.

So.. if you’re looking for a new term deal. Sooner rather than later may be a good idea.

So, Steve’s taken the stage and done his bit. Now it’s up to us to spend the next 3-5 days marveling at the design brilliance of Apple and how they’ve changed our lives before settling back down in to the (not unimpressive) reality that they’ve just re-engineered an existing solution to be intuitive and look very nice.

This may not be the case this time; all of the updates announced today are relatively subtle. iTunes 8 is a good for-instance. I installed it full of hopes. It looks basically the same in the frame. The new view is nice, but for the first ten minutes made my machine (QX6800, 4GB) hang in a manner briefly reminiscent of installing Crysis on my pre-QuadCore machine.

Read it all..

While trying to see if a peculiarity in the rendering of this site was due to the IE6 install on a machine in my work (eurgh… companies) I stumbled accross a service that will produce a screenshot of your page rendered an any and all browsers available. And what’s best.. it’s free!

Browsershots will render your page on any of hundreds of OS, Browser and Settings configurations and produce you screenshots of the results. This is the easiest tool to test your page on any setup, ever.

Good Work!

BrowserShots

I found out over on TUAW that the iPhone App Air Sharing is available free for the next week (ish). Air Sharing allows your iPhone (or Touch) to become a wireless drive for your PC / Macintosh.

I know that I for one am heading over to download it now.

(about 1 1/2 hours to go!)

Okay, so it’s only a few hours until Apple’s Let’s Rock event.

Personally, I can’t wait to see what Apple come out with but there’s a lot of rumours and supposition.

The iPod Nano is expected to be updated in both design and storage capacity.

The iPod Touch is most likely going to retain it’s specs to allow for a price drop to compete with the subsidised iPhone.

A major version release of iTunes (iTunes 8) is expected bringing a few new features; among which is the ‘Genius’ feature to allow for smart playlist generation; perhaps a feature that could be more useful if iTunes ever adopt a subscription model. But most exciting is a rumour that I’ve heard (semi-reliable source) that suggests the newest version of iTunes will be coded to be truly Vista-compliant and not just an XP version that has been hacked together to work; i.e. no more rediculously slow operation!

There’s been lots of talk of Mac Book updates; I doubt we’ll see anything on the pro side, but an Air update is probably round about due now (unless they choose to wait for the new Intel processors next year beginning) and the Mac Book vanilla may see an update now in time for Xmas.

I think the key to remember is ‘Consumer’. This event will most likely be about the consumer ranges in order to drive excitement (read: sales) for Xmas.

More to come…

(photo courtesy of engadget)