Yes, that headline. Obvious. But appropriate.

Yes, after much delay (about a month), iTunes 11 is here today. And yes, it is one of the biggest overhauls of the media management service yet. Perhaps the biggest. And yes, it is now better positioned to compete in the era of the cloud. And yes, they even made the icon a bit better.

It was back at the iPhone 5 event in September, when Apple first previewed the latest version of iTunes, pointing out many of the new/revised features on stage. But how does it hold up in terms of actual usage? Pretty good. Not perfect. But better than any of the previous versions of the software.

Probably the biggest issue that people have had in recent years with iTunes is that it has become bloated. What started as a simple music player now is the center hub for other media like movies, TV shows, and books as well. More significantly, iTunes is also the homebase of the App Store on the Mac/PC. And it has been the way to manage all of your iDevices. First iPods, then iPhones, and now iPads too.

At the same time, Apple has been working to move everything into the cloud. Your iTunes music can now reside there as well as your other media, and you can choose to keep it there and call it on demand if you don’t want to take up space on your various machines, or if you have many different machines you use.

In the previous versions of iTunes, the iCloud elements felt very tacked-on — because they were. With iTunes 11, the software finally looks and feels like it was designed to fully take advantage of the cloud. I actually recently got a new Mac and didn’t bother to transfer my dozens of gigabytes of music and video files over to the machine since it all resides in iTunes in the Cloud. So I’m using this new iTunes as a full cloud player.

Again, it works a lot better than the previous versions of iTunes for this, though performance still leaves a bit to be desired. For example, clicking a track to play it from the cloud always seems to result in a couple-to-few second delay. Not huge, but not as fast as say, Rdio.

If you let a song load and play through to the end from the cloud, then the song transition is seamless (Apple is undoubtedly starting to load that next track before you get to it). In other words, the loading delay is only something you’re going to notice if you jump around a lot. But that tends to be what I do — certainly in testing out the software.

I’m not sure what the technical reason is for the delay — I assume Apple is calling up to their servers to make sure you own the song and then starting to download it to ensure continuous playback. That’s the thing, unlike services like Rdio and Spotify, which are subscription-based and give you access to their entire library, you still only have access to music you’ve actually purchased with iTunes in the Cloud.

The upside of this, of course, is that you can put all the music on your machine and do basically anything you want to it. And if the music resides on your machine, there are obviously not going to be delays and performance is great. But it seems pretty clear that the writing is on the wall for the end of this era, and eventually Apple will have to move to some sort of subscription-based fully cloud-centric approach.

Beyond the deeper cloud integration, the biggest change you’ll notice in iTunes 11 is the look of the software. Music playback is now less focused around the list, spreadsheet-like model (though that’s still there if you want it) and more around a visual approach. In particular, the album view is fantastic. When you click on an album, you’ll get a drop down featuring all the tracks and the album artwork stylized to blend into the background.

In 1987, as the first reduced instruction set computing (RISC) ARM chips hit the scene, programmers at Acorn Computers created RISC OS, a simple, ‘co-operatively multi-tasked’ OS designed for small computing environments. While it’s no Linux, it’s still a great way to get to know RISC computing and, more important, it boots fast and has a working GUI. Now, according to a post on Rasberrypi.org, it’s available for download for all Pi users.

You can download the OS here but the Raspberry Pi creators recommend a quick stroll around the OS using this PDF as a guide. You can also try the OS using an ACORN emulator for Windows and OS X (although the Mac version seems to be missing). There is also an interesting history and tutorial on the site.

People rave about the filer and the consistent UI, but I’m just excited to see seemingly dead OSes resurrected as teaching tools. It gets us back to the bare metal of the machine and, more important, puts budding programmers into a situation where not everything is a given.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

3D printing is coming into its own. No longer relegated to the professional sector, anyone who has the cash can essentially join in the fun with a Makerbot or a RepRap.

But FormLabs has found a way to bring the high-end performance of top-notch machines down to the price of a Makerbot. Yesterday, they launched the Form 1, an affordable, professional 3D printer, on Kickstarter with the goal of reaching $100,000 in funding in one month. Today, they’ve received about $660,000 and have over 400 backers. And the number keeps climbing.

I spoke with co-founder Maxim Lobovsky about his sudden success, asking him how the Form 1 differentiates in the space. Essentially, there are two groups of 3D printers, the high-end professional machines and the hobbyist machines. The high-end printers cost anywhere between $10,000 and $1 million, whereas hobbyist machines cost between $2,000 and $3,000, yet don’t have the same high resolution output.

“We see Form 1 as the first 3D printer that takes affordability to the high-end, professional level,” said Lobovsky.

To give you some perspective, Makerbots start at $2,199, and the most basic Form 1 pledge you can make on Kickstarter is $2,299, and includes “the full Form 1 package including the printer, 1L resin, and Form Finish Kit.” Clearly, Formlabs isn’t looking to undercut price, but then again, this isn’t another hobbyist 3D printer. Lobovsky believes his competition lies with the professional machines, and in terms of those costs, the Form 1 is a steal.

There were only 25 spaces for the basic Form 1 package, which sold out almost immediately.

The Form 1 uses Stereolithography to help makers product their designs. It’s considered the “gold standard” in 3D printing, using a high-precision positioning system to direct a laser onto a tray of liquid resin. This achieves “dramatically better resolution,” according to Lobovsky.

But perhaps more important than the technology is the ecosystem around Form 1. The guys at FormLabs have created software that imports .STL models from any 3D CAD package, supporting structures for complex geometry. And after importing, it only takes a few clicks to get the machine fired up and printing.

This allows any designer or engineer, from the professionals at major corporations to the students putzing around in SketchUp, to enjoy the same high-performance as big companies.

“Bringing the cost of these expensive machines down isn’t enough,” said Lobovsky. “These machines are usually operated by someone entirely dedicated to the job. We knew if we wanted to make the Form 1 available to every maker, every designer, we had to make every part of it accessible. So we streamlined the process.”

According to Lobovsky, there’s no magic formula or secret sauce to Kickstarter success, though he did say they spent extra time and effort on the video and imagery within the post, as well as honing their message. We’ve seen a few stories like this, namely that of the Pebble smartwatch, yet all of the shining stars of Kickstarter are very different. Rather, it’s the demand for this product that has led to such success.

FormLabs claims there are around 30,000 professional 3D printers installed around the world. However, approximately 10 million people actively use 3D CAD software. FormLabs simply aims to fill in the gap.

The most amazing part of this already-amazing story is the way that FormLabs was able to bring down the cost of the machine. Lobovsky says it was thanks in large part to three different factors.

The first is that the team used a new kind of laser, specifically a 405nm Bluray laser diode. In the past, the lasers used to run these professional 3D printers have cost more than the machine itself. With this new type of laser that only recently came on the market, FormLabs was able to keep manufacturing (and thus market costs) down.

The second factor was the expiration of a few patents, meaning that the team didn’t need to pay high licensing fees to get this product to market.

Finally, and most importantly, FormLabs was able to look at all those high-end, $10k+ machines, and essentially decide what was necessary.

“Most high-end machines are built for companies with specific needs and don’t want to compromise on performance in certain areas,” said Lobovsky. “We looked for the base feature set that is useful for a lot of people.”

It took FormLabs just under three hours to reach their goal, and with the way this number keeps climbing, I wouldn’t be surprised if they surpassed Pebble’s $10.27 million in funding by the end of the month.

Dror Berman, Founding Managing Director of Innovation Endeavors, expressed enthusiasm at the early-stage success of the Form 1 in an email.

“It’s great to see Formlabs moving forward so quickly. By making high quality 3D printers affordable, Formlabs is essentially changing the economics of creating and breaks down the doors for inventors and entrepreneurs of all kinds. We want to be a part of this revolution.”

Europe in the mid to late 18th century was not as backwards as some people may believe. In fact, much of the developed world was at a point of incredible intellectual advancement. In Switzerland, for example, a man named Jaquet Droz and his team were building real, honest-to-HAL robots. They didn’t call them that back then, but these automaton androids were incredibly advanced even by today’s standards.

Most of them were built to dazzle the incredibly rich who would then fork over money and commission their creators to build more such splendid automated objects. Though highly advanced androids such as Jaquet Droz’s “The Writer” were not for sale – as they only existed to tease kings and high lords, many made their way into private collections and one has been reanimated for the first time in Switzerland by the Swatch Group.

The Writer, shown above, is a fully mechanical little boy who sits at a desk and writes out complete phrases using a quill and ink. It was the inspiration for the machine in the movie Hugo. The head and eyes even move with the writing hand and, although in operation the machine sounds a bit like a typewriter, it’s an amazing feat of mechanical design. Two other existing Jaquet Droz automatons are called The Draftsman and The Pianist. They are on display in Switzerland and even at over 200 years old they still impress.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today’s Google Doodle is a working Turing machine that contains six puzzles. Sophia Foster-Dimino on Google’s Doodle team built the app in honor of Alan Turing’s 100th birthday.

What’s a Turing machine? It’s not an actual machine, per se, but a thought experiment that allowed for the advent of digital computing.

Turing went on to head the team at Bletchley Park that decoded Germany’s Enigma encryption machine, thereby turning the tide of the war. The British government subsequently sentenced him for “gross indecency” – homosexuality – and offered him prison or chemical castration. He chose the latter and killed himself two years later.

Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown posthumously apologized to Turing in 2009.

Let’s take a moment to remember Alan Turing, the inventor of the modern computer and a persecuted intellectual who, in the end, gave us everything we use every day.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

User Hariprasanth sent us a strange missive: it seems that if you upload something to Google Docs today, your storage space immediately increases from 1GB to 5GB. I didn’t believe him at first – it said 1GB as I was uploading – but immediately after the upload finished it read 5GB. Given everything we know about GDrive so far, including that it should launch with 5GB free storage and that the original Docs accounts were capped at 1GB, things look pretty good for an immanent release.

As you recall, we have a copy of the GDrive app that was floating around and it still won’t work with our current accounts. An ex-Googler tried the app and found he wasn’t able to run it on his machine.

If all of this is correct, services like Dropbox and Sugarsync had better batten the hatches.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mountain Lion, Apple’s latest version of OS X, is currently in beta. However, it is in a stable enough form that some journalists were given sneak peeks over the past few days. I’ve been working with the OS for most of the last week and weekend and, as a public service announcement, I’d like to state that while Mountain Lion is a compelling upgrade to OS X it’s not currently ready for prime time.

To be fair, the worst version of OS X I ever used was an early build of Lion. This build essentially rendered my machine useless and made me cry uncontrollably when my Time Machine backups failed. Never, as they say, again.

However, being a glutton for punishment, I gave Mountain Lion a spin.

Mountain Lion installed without a hitch on a 2010 vintage MacBook Air although it refused to install on a 2006 Mac Pro – a disappointment that still burns a little. I know this old workhorse is six years old and more than capable. I’m sure there will be a fix down the line but right now there is no way to get it to install.

The OS has “grey screened” once and my install was marred by a system failure that required, literally, about 24 hours to fix. I didn’t have to sit there the whole time to fix it, but apparently one install froze, the machine locked up, and the secondary install process required a massive download. This took most of a day and night.

The most interesting improvement is the Notifications system. Not unlike Growl, Notifications sit unobtrusively in the corner for a moment and then disappear. There is a new icon in the upper right corner, next to the search glass, that allows you to see recent notifications. Growl still works fine as do most of my apps. I only noticed that QuicKeys, a text macro app, failed for the first few hours of use and then magically started up when I reset the machine.

Messages is arguably abysmal, with two odd UIs clashing with each other wildly. When you look at messages, you mostly see the huge message window. However, there is also a smaller buddy window that is a clone of iChat yet also folks in video chat and Facetime in a melange of odd queues. I’ve also had trouble syncing my conversations across devices. I would love to be able to receive, for example, iMessages that appear on my phone on the desktop and reply from either device. As it stands, the service is focused around an iMessage email address. I’d love it to work with phone numbers as well.

Mail is improved slightly as well, with a new “star” system for important messages and a VIP system for important senders. For example, you can set Mom or the significant other to a VIP and then only receive a notification when a VIP emails. MacWorld has a wildly complete look at Mail, but there’s not much different that anyone would notice except that the new Mail does not support RSS feeds.

Twitter integration worked quite well as did page sharing in Safari.

As for behind the scenes I noticed that Mountain Lion was as stable as Lion and, barring the rare catastrophic shutdown, I’m working as quickly and as efficiently on ML as I was on Lion. I never experienced Gatekeeper’s security system during my time with the OS.

Would I recommend that non-devs upgrade right now, just to “kick the tires?” Assuming you have access to a beta – for whatever reason – I’d say no. I’ve seen a number of bloggers and other tech-types mentioning they we’re upgrading but generally it’s not worth the potential headache and the agony of waiting 24 hours to see if your MBA was totally hosed thanks to an install error was enough to make me want to revert to Lion. However, Apple sent this out as a pre-release for a reason. It works quite well and the new features are actually mostly apps rather then baked-in improvements. Don’t pull the trigger yet. It’s fun to experiment but it’s also fun to have a computer that works.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

News of the Lenovo YOGA tablet just broke the other day, and now at ShowStoppers we’ve got the chance to get up close and personal.

It’s pegged as the world’s first multiposition notebook, the its unusual contorting dual-hinge layout makes it a real eye-grabber. The fact that it’s known for running Windows 8 certainly makes it an impressive piece of kit.

“Touch is dominating our lives,” a Lenovo rep told us. “People want a tablet and they want a PC, and the YOGA is the machine to do it.”

There’s still no official word on availability — that really depends on Windows 8 sees the light of day — but it’s expected to cost potential customers somewhere between $1,000 and $1,200.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today’s giveaway is pretty exciting. For your pleasure, we have a Timbuk2 D-Lux Racing Stripe Laptop Messenger bag, a $120 value, yours for the low, low price of free. Like the previous contest (won by a young man named Ryan Mense), this is a comment contest. Your goal this time is to tell us about how this bag will save/improve your life. That’s right: treat this bag like a DJ who did something for you last night.

Here’s a bit of info about the D-Lux, but darn it if it doesn’t look cool.

Timbuk2 incorporated user feedback into the D-Lux Messenger to create a laptop messenger that works with and without your machine. The racing stripe makes you go faster and the upgraded features mean safer, more comfortable portage for daily rides on and off the interweb. Features include a vastly improved cam buckle, side-entry Napoleon pocket, color-coordinated, three-zipper front organizer, and slim, studded laptop sleeve for your computer’s protection. The D-Lux is a machine for your machine.

Additionally, if you enter, consider friending me on Facebook so I can send you a message a bit more quickly. If there’s one negative to Facebook comments it’s our inability to directly contact you all if you win. Anyway, not mandatory, just helpful.

Good luck and look for our amazing grand prize later this week. Don’t forget to check out the rest of our Bag Week 2011 reviews.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You’ve heard of the CSI effect, right? It’s this wacky “syndrome” whereby we’ve watched so much CSI Miami and Law and Order that we can’t fully put our weight behind a verdict without some solid DNA evidence. I guess it’s easy to forget that we had an entire legal system sans DNA for quite a while. In any case, we’ve apparently got an itch to be a bunch of white-coated forensic scientists, which is why we’re so lucky that this crazy, and also beautiful, machine exists in the world.

It’s called OpenPCR, and it’ll make science-style DIYers drool. PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction, and it’s a crucial tool for just about any type of modern molecular biology. The way it works is by amplifying a specific region of a super teency-weency strain of DNA, and after that I kind of got lost in the biological jargon, but it’s all explained here.

With OpenPCR, you can do two different types of tests: DNA Sequencing and DNA Barcoding. Sequencing is where you use the PCR machine to check out some of your own genome, while Barcoding is checking out what kind of species a certain bit of DNA belongs to. If you have yet to be convinced, just check out how these two girls used DNA Barcoding to uncover a New York City scandal (hint: 2 out of 4 Sushi restaurants and 6 out of 10 grocery stores were selling mislabeled fish.)

For $599, you’ll get all the parts to the machine, instructions to set it up, and 16 PCR samples — the way by which you target certain regions of the DNA. Features include a heated lid that eliminates condensation, 2-degree per second ramp time (Centigrade), and compatibility with Mac and PC.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch