Recently in Compooters Category

My next iPhone app is almost ready to go. It's going to be an Internet-enabled app, so this will be interesting to say the least. I do believe I've got all the bugs worked out and made the UI a lot smoother to work with. Now I've just got to put up the ability to turn the service off, if needed. There are 8M+ iPhones out there and freebie apps like this tend to get abused.

It's also going to be interesting as to how I monetize this. The app will be using AdMob's iPhone support for a free version. Then there will be a paid version for $0.99 that removes the ads. I've actually got to do some trickery in XCode to make it as simple as changing a build setting to switch between the two. Or create another target. This is all stuff I'm really green on, so we'll see how it goes.

Tunatic is officially the coolest thing ever. I've been bugged by that new Intel Core Duo commercial with the guy in the purple shirt poplockin' into multiple versions of himself. The song in the background is something I really like, but I've not been able to track down. So, it came up on TV and I once again remember that the song bugged me, but I also thought of some news item a short while ago detailing a service you could use to find a song using a phone or something. Did a Google search and Tunatic showed up, which turns out to be freeware. I downloaded it and held my laptop up to the speaker. I've got my Tivo working now, so I just rewound and played it back for it, and it got it spot on. It identified it as Ursula 1000's "Born To Funk" and provided a link to AllOfMP3 for it. It's sort of the right answer, since it's actually the same track on the same CD, only one before it. Pretty neat if you ask me. Should come in handy for future commercials.

Goddammit, Apple. You were so close. iTunes 7 has syncing from an iPod to a computer, but it's only for stuff purchased from the music store. Seriously, that's just a kick in the nuts...

But at least they gave me some freakin' gapless playback. Whoever coded that, I'll buy you a beer sometime.

CrossOver Mac has been released.

This is perhaps the biggest thing to come to the Mac world in a very long time. Yeah, the Intel switch was big. Sure, so was OS X. But this is huge. Two of the biggest consumer-oriented libraries of software are now available to run on a single platform side-by-side. Hate it or love it, Windows owns the marketshare. With this in place, people will be able to transition over to a Mac even easier.

Now isn't this funny looking:

I've been dealing with an increasing amount of spam getting into my inbox. I have things set up so that all my mail from the various accounts I use is forwarded over to Yahoo! for storage and webmail access. They offer an excellent web interface (the beta is the absolute shit) and good mobile access. They also had a good spam filter. They still do, but a lot more stuff is making it's way to my eyes. I get around 1500-2000 emails per day and a bit less than half of that is spam. Most of it is automated and gets filtered in my email client, and the spam gets filtered out by Yahoo.

I've done extensive spam reporting with their filter to get it to function well, but lately it seems to just not be listening. Plus, I have no feedback on how much it thinks something is spam. This leads to holes that are allowing more and more spam through. They are very good at not creating too many false positives, so I get 99.9999% of my legit email, but also about 20% of my spam is starting to get through.

I primarily use Mail.app for reading my mail and it has a built-in junk filter. However, and most curiously, that filter seems to be completely ineffective. I've actually recently reset it to ensure there wasn't some sort of corruption with it's database, but now it's not learning anything and hasn't found a single mail since I reset it. So, I was left almost defenseless until this weekend.

I'll put this simply: If you check your mail on the Mac and have a spam problem, get SpamSieve. I mean, seriously, there's no other way to put it. It's that good! I installed it this weekend as a demo and it's already gone WAY beyond anything the Mail.app junk filer has found. Plus, I have tons of feedback provided to me. Any message that SpamSieve classifies as spam is color coded to show how "spammy" it is. There are nice detailed statistics on everything, including accuracy percentages and even the individual words in the bayesian filter. I just dropped the $25 to buy it and it's been well worth it. At this point, I'm getting almost zero spam in my inbox and it's already 99.3% accurate. It's basically like DSPAM, but in client form and with better data mining tools.

In other news, I've gotta update to MoveableType 3.3. Wish me luck!