09:06 AM by TadW in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Yahoo! Finance now offers RSS feeds for the latest news on invididual company stocks. In fact, you can get feeds both for individual stock tickers as well as for a whole "portfolio".

Here is an example how to track news for both PalmSource and palmOne in one feed:
http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s=plmo,psrc

If you are new to RSS, jump to this description for all the basics.

(Btw, I am Member of the Day on MR's frontpage today! I think this is my first time, so I feel honored )

08:54 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Sunrise

Sunrise v0.40 is scheduled to be released next Monday (01/17/05). The three prereleases before pre11 were quite unstable and had a few show-stopping bugs. If pre11 is turning out to be fully stable for a few days, another 0.40 prerelease won't be necessary.

If you are new to Sunrise, click here to find out more about its top-notch features for website offline conversion.

[via Sunrise blog]

05:34 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Walter Mossberg is probably one of the first persons on the planet who got to play around with Apple's latest MP3 player, the USD $99 iPod Shuffle. Since WSJ requires online subscription, I share with you the most informative parts of the review here:

I've been testing the new iPod Shuffle for a couple of days, and, in my tests, it fulfilled -- and even exceeded -- Apple's claims for convenience, battery life and song capacity. Sound quality is so good you can barely believe the music is coming from something so small. [...]

The Shuffle uses cheaper, lower-capacity "flash" memory chips to store the music, instead of the small hard disk drives used by the other iPods. This puts it in direct competition with scores of other so-called flash players. But, belying its high-priced reputation, Apple has actually undercut the market. [...]

In my tests, the iPod Shuffle performed well, exceeding Apple's claims. Apple puts the new player's battery life at 12 hours on a single charge. But, in my testing, it did much better than that, lasting 15 hours and 44 minutes. [...]

Similarly, I found that the iPod Shuffle could hold many more songs than Apple claims. By choosing manual mode to load the player, I was able to cram as many as 188 songs onto my 512-megabyte test model, rather than the 120 Apple claims, without reducing the audio quality of the songs. [...]

There are a few design downsides to the iPod Shuffle. The lack of a screen means you can't use playlists of collected songs on it, because you have no way to select such a list. For many people, play lists are a key part of the iPod experience. The Shuffle also lacks many of the extra features of the bigger iPods, such as various equalization settings for music playback, and the ability to display calendar and contact information. And I found the three-way mode button on the back difficult to move. I was forced to press it so tightly that I often tripped the playback controls on the other side.

Convinced?

04:13 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Engadget is spreading the rumor that Korean LG is working on a new smartphone that will run the new Windows Mobile 2005 aka Magneto OS (on which we reported earlier). It would have been nice had they also given us a timeline for the release!

03:58 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Brad from ePublishing Blog asks an interesting question: What is a fair price for an e-book?

Here is the real shame: I was standing there (figuratively), cash in hand and ready to buy, actually hunting for more books by this same author when I saw the price of $7.50. If it has been a paperback I might have bought, but for an ebook I felt the price much too high.

Brad differentiates between well-known, and less well-known authors. He would be willing to pay a higher price for an e-book from an established author, like Dean Koontz, than for an e-book from a relatively unknown writer who is publishing his works through an unknown small press.

Do you agree? What it your personal pain threshold for e-book prices?

10:46 PM by Chaos in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Yes, at Macworld Expo today Apple unveiled some new stuff...

Hardware:
Mac Mini - a sub-500 (American) Mac, with no display. Looks interesting. The hardware is a small step above most of the iBooks/PowerBooks. And the price! Can very reasonably compete with PCs of that price. (Edited out part about lack of DVD burner - it is available as an option.)

iPod Shuffle - a flash based iPod, with no display, and either 512MB or 1GB of space. Yes, no display... They're marketing it as basically meant to play songs randomly. I believe there's also an option to play through albums in some sort of sequence... $99 for 512MB, $149 for 1GB. American prices, again. And it's TINY!

Software included iLife '05 and iWork. iWork is a (small - for now) office suite with Keynote 2 and Pages (a new word processor). No, no spreadsheet for now... Maybe next year.

I believe there were a few other things announced, but those four are the most talked about/most hyped.

03:34 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Jonathan Aquino did a wonderful job comparing Fitaly and Atomik, two alternative text layouts which are both aimed for faster text input on PDAs and other devices with pen-based interfaces. In fact he wrote a script in Groovy (never heard of thatlanguage before!) which calculates the gestures required for entering the words in Textware's Dom Perignon IV Speed Contest.

Looks like Fitaly is the winner with a close margin between 2 and 4 percent.

Also check out these two related posts:

- various statistics posted by Fitaly, of course suggesting that Fitaly is the winner here

- James Kendrick's closer look at "Shark" incorporating the Atomik key layout.

01:19 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Menneisyys compiled a nice overview with lots of pretty screenshots of all CHM-supporting e-book readers that are currently available on the Pocket PC platform (I didn't know they were *that* many!).

It is always nice to hear that the author agrees with me that microOLAP's CHM eBook Reader beats the rest: "Without doubt, the best CHM reader. Works flawlessly on VGA machines in QVGA mode without pixel doubling, supports SE fully, and even has a working (!) bookmarking mechanism."

[via Pocket PC eBooks Watch]