Comments on: Maccast 2008.10.10

By: unclejerry

unclejerry — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:27:01 +0000

About the web cam voice mail question you had on the show.
When I had my ibook and upgraded to Leopard and wanted to use Photo Booth, instead of spending a bunch of money on a web cam I bought the XBox web cam. Only $40. It’s a USB camera and worked just fine for pictures. For video it was a little jumpy, probably because it was running on a G4 and just didn’t have the processing power to run high frame rate video. I’ve plugged it into my new MacBook and it’s just fine so I’m pretty sure it was the G4 processor that was making it choppy. But it was a quick and cheap alternative to some of the higher priced web cams that are out there.

By: Al

Al — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:04:18 +0000

One note, for those that want a LCD monitor with a built-in web cam, Dell has monitors with built in webcam – I have the SP2208WFP which works with iChat/Skype/Photobooth etc. The only application that does not work that I know of is iMovie. The older 20″ with the webcam worked the same, but I have not researched to see if the new 20″ monitor still works with the Mac.

By: Keith

Keith — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:40:48 +0000

Oh! And a final note about New vs. Unplayed:

There’s an option in the context menu to mark an item as “Not New”. It should be noted that this actually marks the item as PLAYED. This is something that I keep hoping Apple will change in an iTunes update to make it a bit clearer.

By: Keith

Keith — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:36:58 +0000

Just a couple of thoughts from today’s show…

1. In response to your comment that you didn’t know why anyone would want the option to turn off the auto-correct on the iPhone, I can tell you that it will be a godsend for anyone trying to type in a language other than American English. It’s tendency to auto-correct everything it doesn’t understand sucks if you want to type in french or dutch or something, or use much in the way of abbreviations, jargon, etc. etc….

2. As for the notes about teens and the P2P music download rate, most coverage fails to mention that the 61% number (teens who download illegally) is the latest in a consistent drop from the 80% level in 2005. In addition, the survey is somewhat misleading because it doesn’t take into account that people could buy both from a music store and download illegally. Additionally the survey shows that over 20% of teens purchasing music buy from a physical retailer. (details at AppleInsider: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/04/08/teen_iphone_share_seen_doubling_as_ipod_itunes_flatten.html)