Apple

As many people around the net have reported today, Apple has started selling songs using its variable pricing scheme. And unfortunately, it looks like Amazon may be following suit.

Now, I like DRM free music as much as the next guy. But for popular songs, I’m not jazzed about paying $0.30 more per track. For some reason, I’d rather be locked into the DRM than have to pay more. Apple was probably going to get less of my money when this scheme first came out as I was going to buy more songs from Amazon if they were staying at $0.99 / track. But I guess they too have seen the higher prices from the record industry and more cash in their pockets. I have a feeling that the record companies are the scape goat here and Amazon and Apple know that they can make more dough by doing this.

Like a lot of Mac users out there, I took the plunge and tried out Safari 4 Beta.. Unfortunately, I’m rolling back to Safari 3. Its not that I really want to, its that I have found a very annoying issue. You see, my company uses IM like it is going out of style. It is one of the main ways that we communicate. Ever since installing Safari 4, I have come across an issue that drives me up the freaking wall. The issue is, when I am typing a message in the Mac Messenger client and hit send, the cursor no longer keeps focus for me to type another message. It goes somewhere else magically and never comes back until I click. So if I am in a discussion with someone, it is type, click, type click, type click. Very freaking annoying!!! The solution, according to this guy, is to remove Safari 4.

I’ve been messing around with the new Safari 4 Beta release and so far I’m pretty pleased with the browser. There is a bit getting use to some of the new features but overall, I think that they have made some changes for the better.

Here is a run down of the big features:

Top Sites – This is a nice feature that gives you a nice display of the top sites that you visit on a regular basis. You can easily make this your home page by setting your home page preference to

Last night I recieved the following email:

To obtain the documents you need to learn more about the settlement, make a claim or exclude yourself from the settlement, go to www.iPodnanoSettlement.com or call 1-888-232-3395.

Your Control #: XXXXXXXXXXX

You will need your Serial # to make a claim. By keeping this email and providing your Control # (shown above) when you request your Claim Form, you will receive a personalized Claim Form.

I don’t get to write about this too often. But tonight I ran into a situation where iTunes did not fail gracefully.

I recently joined facebook and decided to test out the free facebook app from the iTunes App Store. So I plugged in the iPhone, fired up iTunes, and did a search and found the app.

Unfortunately, when I went to “purchase” the free app, I was greeted with the following: