iTunes Plus upgrade with choices now

Kirk McElhearn’s rant on iTunes Plus upgrade policy written for Macworld probably reached the eyes of those in Cupertino. There has been a change, for the better.

As of January 28, 2009, Apple has changed their policy, and you can now upgrade individual albums or songs (if you purchased the songs on their own). I would like to think that my Macworld article had something to do with this change…

Enabling two finger zooming on maps in iPhoto ’09

From a twitter tip by @Stroughtonsmith, you can enable zooming on maps in iPhoto ’09 with the scroll wheels or using two-finger scrolling to zoom by typing this in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iphoto MapScrollWheel -bool YES

(via TUAW)

iPhoto ’09 Faces works with your pussy…cat

I love the Faces feature in iPhoto ’09 that I spent hours just trying to match photos of friends and family. And according to Jason Kaneshiro, Faces also recognises his cats and were able to identify the two cats he has. Think the pattern recognition works as long as there are clearly defined features on the subjects’ faces. So are you going to id your dogs too?

HD video Web service shoot-out

CNet did a comparison with a few of the more popular Web services that provide HD video hosting and with the availability of more affordable HD cams like Flip HD and Creative Vado HD, and applications like iMovie ’09 that comes with stabilization feature, having a good HD Web service site to host your movies will be a bonus.

Not surprisingly Youtube is named the best, not just for its low cost of FREE, but also for its good HD encoding and additional tools like adding subtitles and annotations.