Wrong on the capacity, it tops out at 64gb. Right about FaceTime cameras and everything else. This one was a gimme. If you look at the Apple Store you will see that, despite it’s absence from the Keynote, they still sell iPod Classics with 160gb hard drives. It’s just a matter of time, though. I don’t think Apple is THAT sentimental. Apparently the Classic does serves a market big enough to keep it around for now. My guess? They won’t bury it on stage like they did Mac OS9.

iPod Shuffle & Nano

Wrong and extra wrong. Not only is the shuffle still around, but they added the buttons back. It’s a fine gateway drug into the world of Apple/iTunes at the $49 price point. The Nano sticks at $149, loses it’s hardware buttons, loses the camera, and gains a multitouch display. It looks like it lost the ability to play video, too. The Nano replacing the shuffle was by far the wackiest of my predictions. No surprises.

AppleTV

Wrong about switching the name of iTV, and glad to be wrong. Wrong about announcing a developer program. It does run iOS, though. Right about $0.99 TV show rentals (streaming, no less!).

Other

Right about streaming content to iOS devices to AppleTV.

Predictions are a lot less fun once you know the truth.

"Status Of My Predictions For The Sept 1st 2010 Apple Event" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

Thing The B: I’ve gone ahead and re-activated Disqus-powered comments on posts here. I think we’re good enough friends that I can trust you not to pee in my pool, right? Good.

There is an economy of scale that comes along with comments. Extra Future is small enough (less than 500 hits a day, on average) that we should be able to have a conversation. Here’s to hoping.

"New Threads; Comment Is Free" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

• Huge capacity iPod Touch (128gb?) with FaceTime-enabled cameras, iPhone 4 guts, and Retina.
• Goodbye iPod Classic.
• The Shuffle goes away, and in it’s place there is now an iPod Nano at the $99 price point, right in between the old Shuffle ($49) and the current Nano ($149). I doubt Steve will actually kill the Shuffle on stage, but it will quietly be taken off the store, lead to a remote field and abandoned to rot with its ancestors.
• Newly-christened iTV Developer Program
• TV Show Rentals for $0.99
• Wifi Syncing for iOS devices
• Streaming content from the iTunes Store (like, say, the aforementioned TV rentals.)

I’m not super sure about the Shuffle. The $49 price point is part of why the Shuffle exists in the first place, but I don’t know a single person who owns one. The primary market seems to be children whose parents wish to reward for less than $100, or people who work out and are afraid of breaking their iPod Touch or Nano. The price point is hard to argue with , though, as a gateway to the larger (more expensive) Apple ecosystem.

Wouldn’t it be something if the Nano got Facetime?

"My Predictions For The September 1st Apple Event" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

1. Go to the Random article page on Wikipedia. The page it goes to is your band name.
2. Go to Flickr’s most interesting photos for the last 7 days. Find the third image. That is your band’s album cover.
3. Go to the quotations page and pick the last quote on the Random Quotes page. The last three words of this quote is the title of your album.

You have likely played this game on a grey workday afternoon, but Kreskin makes the process much easier. Using the sources above, Kreskin grabs the needed information and presents you with a lovely image with a permalink that you can pass around, no manual labor needed. Kreskin also picks from a random assortment of freely-licensed web fonts to snazz up your album covers.

Here are a few of my favorite albums so far:

• Shadow Chasers – Failure of Years
• Leveillina – Reason in Madness

Kreskin is an Extra Future 6-hour Project.

"Introducing Kreskin, A Band/Album Generator" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

Verizon: Makes money by selling bits. Sells dozens of phones with dozens of different operating systems from dozens of different manufacturers. Has sunk some money into Droid, but isn’t married to the platform. Will go with whichever benefits their bottom line most.

Apple: Makes money selling software, and some bits. Just got into the ad space with iAds. Their iPhone sells its own bits and sells its own ads. Doesn’t like making concessions to wireless carriers, and will call them out in public. If they launch a version of their iPhone for Verizon, Verizon isn’t likely to get a cut of their App, Music, Video, or Ad market. Those are all bits that Verizon wants to charge extra for.

iTunes Cloud: Live streaming of a user’s purchased iTunes tracks to any supported device. Only likely supported phone platform? iOS, the iPhone’s operating system. No phone carrier is going to get a cut of tracks purchased for this service.

Net Neutrality: Means that carriers aren’t allowed to slow down certain kinds of internet traffic to help their business goals. Means that iTunes Cloud can stream as many tracks as the user is willing to buy bandwidth for. Means Verizon doesn’t get a cut aside from their 3G bandwidth spectrum pricing, which is getting cheaper all the time despite their (recent) complaining about capacity problems.

Dots: Partially connected.

"Google, Verizon, Net Neutrality, and iTunes Cloud" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

Last month my tech demo of implementing the famous (and beautiful) Mega Man II intro sequence in HTML5, CSS and jQuery got linked on Engadget and I’m pretty happy about that.

I have active profiles on Twitter, Last.fm, Steam, and my (somewhat outdated) portfolio is on philnelson.net.

"State of The Extra Future: July 2010" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

Back To The Future first arrived on cinema screens 25 years ago. When I was a boy, most kids wanted to be Michael Jordan, or the President, or maybe an astronaut. I wanted to be Doctor Emmett L. Brown.

He was the wonderful scientist-of-all-trades in 1985′s Back to The Future, played by the inimitable Christopher Lloyd in what has been, thus far, his finest role on the screen. I doubt he or anyone else will ever top it. As a child, I didn’t want to be a scientist, I wanted to be that scientist. Doc Brown just knew stuff about pretty much everything, and while being a little scatter-brained (with the knowledge of real, working, time travel in their head, who wouldn’t be?) was unquestionably brilliant, if not a little short-sighted.

Back To The Future released 3 July, 1985. I was barely two years old at the time, so I never got to see it in the theater. Later, though, it became my favorite movie. Over the last 20 years I’ve watched the trilogy dozens of times. Though they are very much a product of the 1980s, and the fashions looks silly to us now, the films themselves never get old, and Doc never becomes less inspirational to me. ” If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.” It’s a platitude, sure, but but coming from a guy who invented a time machine, it means a lot.

20 years since I personally first saw the the original BTTF film, am I any closer to mad scientistry? My business card says so, but I doubt I’ll ever reach Doc’s level. Part of Doc’s appeal was that he was this platonic ideal of the Mad Scientist that existed in my mind, even before I knew it was there. Like Peter Cushing’s portrayal of Van Helsing in the half-dozen Hammer-produced Dracula films, or Kevin Conroy’s voicing of Batman in the mid-90s Batman: The Animated Series, Lloyd’s Doc Brown took up residence in my headspace and will probably never leave. At least, I hope he won’t.

Update: In the BTTF film the time travel event takes place on October 25th, 1985. In BTTF 2 Marty goes to October 21st, 2015. BTTF was released July 3rd, 1985. For those wondering, as topherchris was, “how July 5, 2010 fits into this,” the Back To The Future DVD commentary: In it, Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale (the director and co-writer of the film) explain that they put this in there as a sight gag, since July 5th was around when the movie was going to come out. It exists only as a little joke for keen-eyed viewers. Apparently it doesn’t.

Update 2: The original version of this post misused quotation marks around “25 years,” which has been fixed.

Update 3: It looks like the July 5th, 2010 screen shot is actually a hoax.

"25 Years Into The Future" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

1. Open Audio Hijack

Audio Hijack has a lot of settings and switch, and it’s user interface may seem a little abstract to the first-time user. What we’re going to do only takes three clicks, though. First, select Safari from the pane on the left side of the screen. Then click “Hijack” in the top left of the window. Audio Hijack may ask you to restart Safari. Next click the Effects tab in the right panel. Your screen will look like this:

The one we’re interested in is turning up the Gain, which will actually pump the Audio coming from Safari up over the “100%” system limit. For now, though, you have to load up your movie on Netflix.

2. Start Playing The Movie on Netflix

I’ll assume you now how to do this, otherwise you wouldn’t even know if you had a problem with quiet audio. While the movie is playing, switch back to Audio Hijack. This was we can tweak the audio in real time, to get the right volume.

3. Pump Up The Volume

Click the slider on the Gain control in the top left of the Effects window shown in the picture above. Drag it to the right to pump up the volume, up to a maximum of 238%. That should be plenty for any quiet Netflix movie.

Due to the general awesomeness of Audio Hijack, this trick works for ANY application in OS X.

"Fix Netflix “Watch Instantly” Audio Volume With Audio Hijack" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

and then spent 5 minutes looking through Safari’s Preferences window to no avail, this is how you enable Extensions on Safari 5:

1. Open Preferences
2. Click Advanced
3. Click Show develop in menu bar
4. Close and reopen Safari
5. Click the Develop menu item
6. Finally, click Enable Extensions

Viola.

"How To Enable Extensions For Safari 5" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

The image above is what I get when looking up the word “Dictionary” in Snow Leopard’s built-in Dictionary application, and clicking Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page is very long, and should have vertical scrollbars, but there are none.

Update: Mac OS X Hints has information on how a “fix” which involves logging in to Wikipedia and setting your skin to use the previous one.

Hat tip to Shawn Medero.

"Wikipedia Is Broken In Dictionary.app" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

"Web Development Thought For The Day" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

Apple wants people to use H.264 to play videos, primarily because their mobile devices (which make them a ton of money) can decode the video stream in hardware which is a big win in battery life .vs. decoding in software like Flash. Apple controls the decoding of H.264 on the Mac and iPhone/iPad lines, so they don’t have to wait for anyone else when they want to do something new with it. Apple has spent a lot of money and time making H.264 work great on their devices.

Google just wants people to play videos. They’d prefer it if the technology used to encode and playback those videos didn’t belong to anyone, so they don’t have to deal with the politics of being nice to some other company because they need their support vis-a-vis video. They bought a company called On2 and open sourced a video codec and container format (which may have some severe patent problems) to accomplish this end and try to diffuse the situation. Google is the only company in this tug-o-war who actually makes money selling videos, or more precisely, renting the eyeballs of people who are viewing videos to advertisers.

Due to the above, video on the web is a nightmare right now. There is no video format you can encode to that will play in the big three: Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, unless you want to use Flash to play the video. Which means users will need to have Flash installed on their device, in which case it will not play on the largest mobile device market: the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, or even current releases of the smaller ones, like Android, which also do not support Flash. If you encode to H.264, it won’t play in Firefox or the current version of Internet Explorer (8), but will work in Safari, Chrome (on the Mac), and the upcoming version of Internet Explorer (9). Adobe has pledged to support WebM in it’s Flash products.

There is no way Apple is going to support WebM for their mobile platform unless it can be decoded in hardware. Broadcomm, a major producer of chips for mobile device, has announced a chip which will decode VP8 in hardware, but this is fairly new development. It is not unreasonable to consider that Apple has plenty of so-called “skunkworks” projects to play all kinds of Video content on iPhone and iPad, but it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll see any new video support in the upcoming new iPhone model.

"For The Uninitiated: Web Video Fracas 2010" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

"On Steam for Mac OS X" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

Apple doesn’t disallow the use of private APIs out of spite; they disallow it because their private APIs are not fully baked.

It should be obvious, but: Apple’s intentions are utterly unimportant in this matter. Using private APIs for system-level applications is one thing, but iBooks is in the App Store. iBooks uses private, Apple-only APIs that are not available to other developers. iBooks directly competes with any number of other applications that sells things to read. iBooks is using an unfair advantage given to it by Apple’s engineers. There’s nothing ok about any of that.

Adding to this, there is the potentially coming storm of a United States .vs. Microsoft situation regarding the iTunes Music Store. There are other music stores out there, after all, and Apple has not put them all on equal footing. If using special features that no other developers have access to isn’t an anti-competitive practice, I’m not sure what else qualifies.

The more iPads, iPhones and Macs that Apple sells, the closer they’re coming to an antitrust showdown.

"Apple’s Use Of Private APIs In The App Store, iTunes Music Store" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

If you’re as avid a user of the excellent password/login-storing app 1Password as I am, you probably spend a decent amount of time trying not to think about what might happen to you if the application or it’s database were to suddenly go bad.

Ah, you’re probably thinking about it now, huh? Sorry about that. Like the game, important data loss is not something you want occupying your brainspace, and yet there it is. Waiting. I come here not to terrifying you, though I may do that on purpose later if there’s time, but to help you out. You might not know it, but 1Password provides a daily keychain backup function from within the 1Password itself, and when melded to the also-excellent Dropbox online backup and file sharing system, it can be made to automatically backup your 1Password database offsite, for free. Here’s how.

Get ‘Er Accomplished

Prerequesite Um, I am assuming you use Mac OS X and 1Password already. If not, you can pretend none of this ever happened. I won’t hold it against you. Much.

1. Download and signup for Dropbox. Install that shit.

2. Navigate to Your Home Folder → Dropbox and create a folder called 1Password.

1. Open 1Password, and click Preferences in the application menu.

2. Click the Backup tab in the preferences window, and then the folder-selection box under Backup Folder.

3. Select the 1Password folder you created in step 2. Click the poorly-named “Open” button in the bottom right of the window, or just hit return. Either of these will save you selection.

1. Click Backup Now to make sure it works. Wait a minute. If it works, 1Password will open a Finder window with your newly backed-up files.

2. Close 1Password.

3. Sleep the sleep of the just.

You’re welcome. Comments can be sent to comments at the domain this post is on, and cash gifts can be sent to me right here.

"How To: Automatically Backup Your 1Password Keychain Offsite With Dropbox" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

Suggested Applications

Cold or Flu remedy, “hair of the dog” hangover cure. Secret drinking.

You Will Need

• A coffee mug. Might I suggest one with the Buchanan Area Chamber of Commerce logo on it?
• Honey, preferably in one of those little bears.
• (optional) If you like your tea REALLY fucking sugary, then go ahead and add a sugar cube. Jesus.
• A lemon, cut into quarters, or some lemon juice.
• Angostura bitters
• Whisky, Rum or Rye. I sugest Maker’s Mark whisky, but since you’re mixing it, it doesn’t have to be the good stuff. Old Crow will work just fine in a pinch, and I will not judge you. We’re all friends here.
• A bag of tea. Any kind will work, really.

Cook It Up

Get your coffee mug, pour/squirt just enough honey in it to coat the bottom of the mug. Add juice from a lemon quarter, or a couple squirts from that fake plastic lemon thing or whatever it is you people have, I honestly can’t keep up with all these different kind of lemon juice delivery systems so get off my back. I’m trying to help you here. Now add a dash of the Angostura Bitters, and a shot of your liquor. Throw in your tea bag, and fill the rest of the mug with boiling water. Steep the tea as you normally would. Taste the most delicious thing you’ve had all day. You’re welcome.

"The Extra Future Drinks Library: The Old Hotty" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

You can find more information about No-Prizes at your local library.

"The Extra Future No-Prize" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

Here is the exact message I got from Adbrite, vis-a-vis my ad submission for FRMT.me:

The landing page contains slang terms for profanity, which we can’t allow in AdBrite. Please remove the word Shizz and resubmit the ad.

Needless to say, I won’t be doing that.

"AdBrite, Longtime Advertiser on Goatse-Laden Sites Like Boing Boing, Uncomfortable With The Word “Shizz”" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

You can, if you want, download it in a in Ogg, or m4a format.

"Enhance Your Television Experience With Bland!" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.

House style on the name is to print the domain all caps and the TLD in lowercase, like so: FRMT.me.

"Introducing FRMT.me" was originally posted by Phil Nelson on Extra Future. All rights are reserved by the author.