I never personally used any of these as the TI calculators were what I used in school, but the idea of bringing back an icon is very cool. Now, the prices seem somewhat untenable to me. Now if you loved one of these, it’s definitely worth checking out…

HP 15C Scientific Calculator – $29.99

HP 12C Financial Calculator – $14.99

Certain Products may include functionality that enables you to purchase additional services, or licenses to additional functionality or content for use within the Product (“In App Purchases”). In App Purchases that are consumed during the use of the Product (e.g., virtual ammunition) cannot be transferred among devices; can only be downloaded once; and after being downloaded, they cannot be replaced. Once a consumable In App Purchase is purchased and received by you, Apple shall be without liability to you in the event of any loss, destruction, or damage. All In App Purchases are deemed Products, and In App Purchases made within Third Party Products are deemed Third Party Products, and treated as such, for purposes of these terms and conditions.

I’m a bit concerned about this as Heather and I use the same iTunes account. Apple made me happy by allowing this use case as it seems rather ridiculous to assume an app couldn’t be used by both spouses. However, we likely won’t be able to use the same ‘In App’ purchases. This isn’t a deal breaker, but I am concerned about my ability to back this content up and restore if needed. I wouldn’t want to lose any added content any more than losing a purchased app.

Guess this just needs to be clarified a bit…

[youtube width="480" height="295"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyAQb9FUKo8[/youtube]

UPDATE: Ugh…had to completely redo CBS’ embedding code as it wasn’t XHTML 1.1 compliant, but I think I now have it all fixed…

UPDATE: iLife ’09 preordered. Yes, this one does excite me the more I think about it.

Cool new features:

• iPhoto
• Face detection/tagging
• Geotagging
• Place/Person organization
• Facebook & Flickr uploading
• iMovie
• Precision editing (about time this was brought back from the old iMovie and hopefully it actually works)
• Themes
• Travel Maps
• Garage Band
• Artist Lessons (Yes, this may be gimmicky, but heck I wouldn’t mind being taught by Sarah McLachlan, Norah Jones, or Ben Folds to play their songs)

NOTE: My opinions are mine and mine alone…

Dear Bill,

Thank you for contacting us.

Because the Flip Video Program has been designed to work on the 32-bit systems, we cannot guarantee full functionality if used on a 64-bit system. At this time, we do not have information regarding the development of an application for the 64-bit systems.

We hope this has adequately addressed your question.

Thank you,
Flip Video Support

That is the answer I got from Flip (after a couple of back and forths) when asking why I couldn’t get reasonable quality out of their “Movie Mix” feature (starkly reduces quality and lowers resolution to 320×240) or why their codec doesn’t work in Windows Movie Maker (seems to for others, but they’re probably on 32 bit).

This is simply not an acceptable answer in this day and age. 64 bit Vista is a VERY mainstream OS and came on almost every laptop I looked at. Developers, you can no longer be lazy and ignore compatibility.

Oh well, editing in iMovie ’08 works great, so no biggie there, but I want to be able to use either platform successfully

Google Chrome

So, Google officially launched Chrome yesterday and I grabbed a copy for my Windows Vista image running under Boot Camp (as there is no Mac version yet). I’ve only done some rudimentary playing around with it, so these are just initial thoughts:

• Windows Vista system crashed after install, causation or coincidence (could have been another process’ fault)?
• UI is interesting, minimalistic, but I’m not sure I really like it yet.
• No flash plugin included?
• “Quick Dial” could be useful (Opera had this first)

Based on what I have read so far, it doesn’t sound like Chrome brings anything truly new to the browser wars, but I am looking forward to seeing what they’ve done. Will it work “better” with Google products? Will it be faster than any other browser across the board? What do they intend to do here to rise above their competitors?

The landscape is getting somewhat crowded with IE8 in beta, Safari expanding, Firefox 3, and now Chrome (no, Opera doesn’t make my list).

All in all, this is quite a cool time to be on the web…

Data transaction security in MobileMe’s web apps is based upon authenticated handling of JSON data exchanges between the self contained JavaScript client apps and Apple’s cloud, rather than the SSL web page encryption used by HTTPS. The only real web pages MobileMe exchanges with the server are the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files that make up the application, which have no need for SSL encryption following the initial user authentication. This has caused some unnecessary panic among web users who have equated their browser’s SSL lock icon with web security.

Interesting bit about why the typical SSL lock doesn’t come up in MobileMe. I can buy the rationale, but it does seem like it is ripe for confusion amongst the general populous…