Peter Norris

At WWDC today Steve Jobs announced the iPhone will be coming to Canada. On July 11th, the new 3G iPhone will be available on Rogers (and apparently Fido). As Steve stated, it will cost $199 for 8 gigs and $299 for 16 gigs. As of now, there is currently no word on data plans. But suffice it to say, without an unlimited (or decent unlimited) data plan, the iPhone won’t sell very well (and I most definitely won’t be getting one).

The extent of iPhone information on rogers.com

I’m not going to go into details about the new iPhone, you can find all those here. For me, the one thing that really makes me want an iPhone is the support for 3rd party apps. The iPhone is an amazingly powerful platform and the possibilities for apps that could be developed are endless. Some of the apps that were demoed at the keynote today show off just how amazing the iPhone is, not just for blogging apps, but also for games. Just look at Super Monkey Ball- a game that is played entirely with the built-in accelerometer.

The new 3G iPhone

While I’m waiting for July 11th to arrive, I’m going to hope that I can drop the remaining two years of my contract with Bell and switch to an iPhone. That and learn Objective-C and Cocoa so I can develop iPhone apps.

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The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is not like most other North American TV networks. Networks like NBC are behind the curve when it comes to content distribution. They have yet to realize that a large portion of their audience prefers to get their entertainment through different means than the television.

While they are starting to understand this change, they are still locking down their content. You can purchase it on iTunes, but it comes wrapped in DRM. You can watch it (some shows) on their site, but only if you are in the US.

CBC however is, as I stated, not like most other North American networks. You can not only download and watch streaming news (like most news stations are doing these days), but you can watch entire episodes of shows like jPod, The Rick Mercer Report, and Air Farce, all on their site, no matter where in the world you may be.

And if that isn’t enough, this Sunday they are airing a program called “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister“. And on Monday, this program will be officially available on BitTorrent DRM-free. This makes CBC the first broadcaster in North America to do this. The CBC truly understands the needs and wants of one of their largest, and hardest to please, demographics.

The CBC News Article

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On Friday, January 4th 2007, the high definition DVD format war was won. And it was won by Blu-Ray.

On friday Warner Bros announced they would release their movies exclusively on Blu-Ray and Toshiba, the main backer of HD-DVD cut short their CES press event and ran and hid. This announcement leaves just Universal and Paramount as the only studios supporting HD-DVD. With all but two studios supporting Blu-Ray, I’m going to go on record and say: Blu-Ray has won the war.

Because the majority of movies will be released on Blu-Ray, more and more people will start to buy Blu-Ray players, and hold off buying HD format movies from Universal and Paramount. By the end of 2008, one of the two remaining hold-outs will succumb to consumer pressure and switch to Blu-Ray. Once this happens the last studio will be forced to switch, as there will be no market for HD-DVD.

In my 2008 Tech Predictions post I said the format war would be settled by one event, and only 4 days into the year, this event took place. I always felt like Blu-Ray was going to win, right from the start. Blu-Ray is technically superior to HD-DVD and seemed to have an edge on HD-DVD.

The outcome of the war has been decided, however the battle rages on. It’s only a matter of time before HD-DVD waves the white flag, and concedes defeat to Blu-Ray.

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With a new year comes new technology and a new way of doing things. Here are my predictions for technology in 2008. 

1.  Online distribution of digital content will turn mainstream and become a valid way of distribution. Content will branch out from music to movies, TV shows, and books, all through legal channels.
2. HD will continue to grow and become even more popular. HD movie and TV show may even appear.
3. A clear winner in the Blu-ray/HD-DVD war will emerge due to one format suffering a single major blow in their fight to be victorious.
4. User created content will become even more popular and mainstream, as the public tries to find new ways to deal with the writers strike. 

Obviously, these aren’t the only changes in store this year, but I feel these are the main ones and will have the most profound impact. What do you think will happen in 2008?

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I hate it when sites aren’t designed to work with all browsers. How hard can it be to use open standards and make compatible sites? A couple of weeks ago my sister got a Macbook and she had been using Safari (I saw no need to confuse her with extra browsers- it would have made my life a lot worse), but when she went to log into her account on the university website she couldn’t log in. It said they didn’t support Safari. So I had to get her Firefox so she could access her account. And for some odd reason she likes to use the smileys and colour backgrounds in hotmail. Of course, those don’t work in Safari, or even Firefox. It looks like Microsoft limited those to IE.  It isn’t difficult to make sites that work with all browsers. There should be some sort of standard or compatibility requirement for sites. Sites should work in all browsers. In would just make life so much easier (especially for us Mac users).

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Oh no!!! Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in on the internet before the book is released!! Oh no!! The world is over!!At least thats what some fans of the ever popular wizard think. On Tuesday (or late Monday), images of every single page of the 7th and final book in the series began making their way onto BitTorrent sites. Someone, likely a book store or publisher employee, managed to steal a copy and then proceeded to take pictures and upload them. While the pictures weren’t 100% readable, they were still fairly understandable. Of course some people would argue that this probably isn’t the real thing, but it appears to be legit. Fans say that the writing style fits author J.K. Rowling, and I don’t think someone would go through the trouble of writing something near 700 pages and make up a fake book to trick a bunch of teenagers, kids, and even adults. In case you can’t wait until 12:01 am on Saturday to get the real thing, and you don’t want to kill your eyes reading blurry images, Potter fans have joined together to transpose the pictures into a readable pdf.

The (not so?) weird thing is, some fans are all upset, saying this is going to ruin the surprise. If you don’t want to know, don’t download it! Most sites won’t put the big secrets about who dies and who lives on the front page. They likely won’t even publish it, and if they do they’ll warn you first. So stop crying. This isn’t going to ruin the surprise if you don’t want it to.

I’m not going to say where you can find the files, but I’m sure if you look hard enough you can find them.  

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As more and more of our lives move online, it’s important to practice keeping your personal information safe. Here are a few simple tips to help you do this.

Don’t use the same password for everything.

This one is pretty simple. If you use the same password for everything, and one account if compromised, they all are. You can use different passwords for different groups of services (like one for Facebook and Youtube where your personal information is already visible, and one for email and IM accounts). Of course, no matter how many passwords you use, you’ll never be safe unless they are strong passwords. 

Use strong, complex passwords. 

A strong password is a good password. But what makes a strong password? The best passwords are a mix of both upper- and lower-case letters and numbers. It is important not to use regular words as these are easy to crack using dictionary attacks. And simply adding a number to the beginning or end of a word won’t work either. These are susceptible to the same attack. A good password would be pAs5w0rd. But it’s important to remember, there is no such thing as a fully uncrackable password. That’s why it’s important to use several different passwords.

Make sure web pages are secure.

When using banking sites and and e-commerce sites make sure they are secure before entering sensitive information. Secure sites have URLs that start with https:// and often display a padlock either in the address bar or one of the corners of the browser window. This icon shows that the site and their database have been certifies as secure. 

 For extra security, use pre-paid credit cards.

Without a credit card, you can’t join the millions of people shopping online. And even though a site may appear to be secure, this security can often be compromised. If you want to be able to shop online, and have an extra layer of security, consider using prepaid credit cards. When you buy the credit card you load it with a certain sum of money, and then use it like any regular credit card. If the number somehow gets stolen, you’re not at risk of losing thousands of dollars.

 There is much more you need to do to stay safe online, but these tips should help you get started. 

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Yesterday, Kevin Rose of Digg, along with Daniel Burka, Leah Culver, and Shawn Allen, releases their latest project: Pownce. But what is Pownce? It’s Twitter, IM, and File-sharing all rolled into one great service.

Once you create your account you can add other people as friends. And then, you send messages, files, links, and events to one person, multiple people, or everybody. It brings some of the great features of services like Twitter and combines them with new features that we have yet to see.

Pownce is both a web and desktop application. Pownce make’s use of Adobe’s AIR interface to bring web functionality right to the desktop in a small, well-designed application.

The downside is Pownce is currently invite-only, as it is still only in the early stages of development. I have yet to get an invite and really test it out, but once I do I’ll post my impressions.

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A hacker by the name of Gabriel says he broke into the network at Bloomsbury (the British publisher of the book series) and stole a document containing important plot details of the 7th book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The details were posted online at insecure.org.While it’s always possible that these details are true, chances are they are not and Gabriel just wants to have fun with diehard Harry Potter fans. I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone if these rumors are true, but if you want to know what they say, click here.

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Its now been 2 days since the WWDC keynote and I’ve finally had time to digest the news and I’m ready to talk about my opinions and thoughts. According to Jobs Leopard has 300 new features, 10 of which he presented at WWDC. However, 6 of these features he introduced last year, and so the majority of the keynote was almost exactly the same as last year. The only new features mentioned were a new UI, a new Finder, and Quick Look.  

While I’m liking these new features, these were really the only new announcements regarding Leopard. He did mention some new feature additions to what he talked about last year, but nothing impressive. They also released a beta of Safari for Windows. Despite the fact that there have already been a number of  bugs and security problems, Apple said they wanted to grow Safari’s market share and, because the iPhone uses Safari, help developers make Safari compatible sites. They said Safari on Windows loads sites fast, and while it might do that, the browser itself is feels very slow and chunky.

Speaking of the iPhone, Apple announced a way for developers to make 3rd party apps for the iPhone. If you want to make your own iPhone apps, all you have to do is make a web app. Jobs basically told everybody to make web apps using AJAX and other web2.0 standards. I don’t know how these are iPhone apps, but Apple thinks so. One major problem with this is using the apps when not on WiFi. Your apps are going to be slow and could use up your data plan if it has a limit fast. I have to say this was a disappointing keynote.

There were no hardware announcements and only a couple of new features announced. After the keynote Apple stock fell 3%. This just goes to show how much people have riding on these keynotes and how much people expect from them. Hopefully we will see some new Apple products and news soon. 

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