Elsewhere, 1/9
Sadly, there’s no live video stream of this year’s Macworld keynote. However, MacRumorsLive will be covering the keynote as it unfolds.
Steve Job’s keynote at this year’s Macworld Expo takes place at 9am PST, and needless to say, the rumor mill has gone into overdrive. Everyone’s saying that this year’s Expo is going to be extra super-duper big. John Gruber has tossed out some of his predictions. I have to say, the one that gets me most excited is the possibility of Apple-branded flatscreen TVs with built-in iTVs.
TUAW asks “What are you most excited for at Macworld 07?”
Cult Of Mac predicts Macworld ’07 will be a riot, literally: xpectations for Steve Jobs’ keynote speech Tuesday are so unreasonably high that anything less than an iPod-cum-videophone-miniPC that downloads movies wirelessly from the net and projects them on your living room wall with 7.1 surround sound is going to disappoint.
Stereogum has the skinny on yet another track from the new Arcade Fire album, Neon Bible and Pitchfork has the entire tracklist, plus release date (March 6 for us North Americans).
Ken Morefield — whom I had the pleasure of meeting at last year’s TIFF — reviews Shut Up & Sing: “One of my pet theories at the moment is that good documentaries are plentiful because life is pretty interesting, but great documentaries are rare because to make one requires the director to resist the urge to impose so tight a structure on the material that it becomes a lecture rather than a case study. Barbara Kopple has made some great documentaries in the past (Harlan County U.S.A.; American Dream), and Shut Up & Sing is in the same class. It’s the best film I’ve seen this year.”
jQuery 1.1a has been released (the official 1.1 release is Jan. 14) and the updates look great: improved performance, new documentation, bug fixes, and a much simpler API. John Resig et al are doing some great work with that little library. (FYI, all of Opus’ AJAX/JavaScript goodness is powered by jQuery.)
The latest issue of A List Apart has just been posted, and it features a great article by Mark Boulton on that most misunderstood design topic of all: whitespace: “Whitespace is often used to create a balanced, harmonious layout. One that just ‘feels’ right. It can also take the reader on a journey through the design in the same way a photographer leaves ‘looking room’ in a portrait shot by positioning the subject off the center of the frame and having them looking into the remaining space.”
The latest version of the my favorite text editor — BBEdit 8.6 — has just been released (changelog is here).
Scientists have published the first detailed map of dark matter, which constitutes roughly 80% of the universe.