Apple have just released the Serenity trailer in H.264 format. You’ll need QuickTime 7 to play it well (sorry Windows/Linux users, I can’t find any player that can handle H.264 properly). H.264 is the official format of the next generation of high-definition DVD, so the quality is amazing. The Serenity trailer is here, and you can find other demo H.264 files here.

As an aside, QuickTime 7 is glorious. It finally feels up to the same standard as the rest of OS X, instead of a piece of Classic OS baggage we put up with to get our movie fix. I’ll be using QuickTime instead of VLC from now on.

Thanks to Scamp for this link. I dunno how he knew I was a Romero fan, but there you go.

I was watching the Dawn CE and listening to Romero’s commentary track, and he mentioned having real problems finding the funds to shoot his new script - I think the amount he was after to do justice to the ideas was around $30-40 million. He said he could scale back to about $14 million, but going lower would really harm the film, and from what was said, he was being offered a lot less than that. I don’t know if the Dawn remake helped him along or whether Universal just took a risk, but here’s hoping for another classic.

• OS X V10.4 “TIGER” RETAIL FAM PACK-INT

Shipped

I just had a lovely moment of nostalgia when I found that the Field Mice were on the iTunes Music Store! Okay… time to take the magical time machine back to 1994… when I had a girlfriend (for all of three months) named Emma. She’d been given a tape from a guy she knew (and whom I found out later that she had an unrequited crush for, but nevermind…) and this lovely ditty named ‘Emma’s House’ was on it. It was a crummy cassette, dubbed on a cheap ghettoblaster most likely, and I always wished I could get the song in a better quality format.

Problem was that the Field Mice were on the oh-so-hip label Sarah, which exploded into fragments somewhere in the mid-90s. I was all-too-aware of the fate of Sarah because Joel and Josh, aka The Sugargliders, were one of the label’s finest. ANYHOW. Now I can get the song, all is lovely. And in my travels, I found this bio of the Gliders - was this guy watching the same band I did? Alternative rockers, my spotty white buttocks!

Found this on Daring Fireball. Interesting reading. Crumpet is a big Photoshop geek, but I don’t understand it at all. Part of this may be due to my complete lack of colour coordination (I test fine for colour blindness, but I sure as hell don’t dress like it).

In any case it’s sad when a once-innovative company becomes complacent due to lack of competition, if only because it removes the incentive for improvement. As Gruber mentions, Apple has decimated Adobe in the video-editing market because Adobe let Premiere die on the Mac. Now Apple has Final Cut Pro which is generally regarded as an excellent application, but what will push Apple to improve it, beyond user criticism? Certainly not Adobe.

I wonder if something similar will befall Photoshop on the Mac, once small developers start exploiting Core Image and making applications that do 95% of what the average user requires, but cost 5% of Photoshop’s price and are far more user-friendly?

Recently Dave Hyatt took on the challenge to render the deeply evil Acid2 CSS stress test correctly, which no browser currently achieves. It took him only 15 days to fix the bugs in Safari’s parser and he also discovered a bug in the Acid2 code. The Mozilla team lost an excellent mind when Apple hired him. Good work.

So, the trailer is out.

Now, this is nice. My PowerBook is currently using a 5400 RPM 80Gb drive. At the time I bought it, the largest 7200 RPM drive only had 60Gb of capacity, which simply isn’t enough for me. These new Seagate drives improve on both speed and capacity, and they’ll probably have a 3-year warranty to boot (pun not intended).

Yay!

They came from Germany (..what the hell is wrong with german people..), but I care not, for I am bookerised! *dance*

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased Head First Java, 2nd Edition by Kathy Sierra also purchased books by David Flanagan.

Dear Amazon.com,

I’ve noticed that customers who have purchased Head First Java, 2nd Edition by Kathy Sierra expect it to FUCKING ARRIVE before being harassed with more emails!