According to other reports Napster opened the worlds largest music download store today, allowing access to more than 6 million songs in what looks like a direct challenge to Apple’s iTunes store.  Napster has previously focused on selling monthly streaming music packages that could be synced with a portable player, however, they are now selling MP3 format songs (according to PC magazine at 256 Kbps) which can be transferred onto a portable device including (crucially) the Apple iPod and iPhone. 

Like Apple’s iTunes individual songs are sold at 99cents and $9.95 for an album, and will auto sync to a users existing iTunes music library, if they currently use iTunes.  Unfortunately, although tracks purchased from this new Napster service can be played on the iPod there is at this point no Napster subscription option available. 

The associated press reports Chris Gorog (Napster’s Chairman and Chief executive) as saying “It is really the beginning of a level playing field, which I think is essential for Napster, but also for the health of the digital music business in general”.  This is certainly a step forward for Napster but I cannot imagine switching from my current service from iTunes which I am currently happy with.  The exception may arise of course if iTunes doesn’t have a song that I want that Napster does, but that has never happened to me yet.

I am constantly amazed at the applications that keep popping up for Twitter, there seems to be no end to the things that people want to do with it. Twitter really does appear to be the internets answer to cell phone’s texting, except of course it is a lot cheaper (when on the internet anyway). I have been looking around for some applications that allow you to search twitter, mostly because I am nosey. I found a few sites, some of which really impressed me.

I’ll start with summize. Summize allows you to search twitter in realtime, bringing up the latest results for the string that you searched. If while you are looking through your results there are tweets containing your search string summize will tell you and allow you to refresh your search. It will also allow you to twitter these results and provides an RSS feed for the query. Summize also has an advanced search feature that allows you to find tweets based on

• words
• people
• places (and distance from)
• dates
• attitudes (smileys)
• links

It is an impressive search engine that must feed the hunger of any twitter searcher!

Tweetscan also advertise themselves as a real time Twitter search, not quite as user friendly as Summize, but Tweetscan will send you a daily/weekly update of any five search strings that you want. It also gives you a link to run your search at anytime, which is handy if you are not wanting your email inbox clogged up! From what I could tell it doesn’t offer an RSS feed to your saved queries, but I may just be overlooking it…

Terraminds also provide a search engine for Twitter. It is a very basic engine that allows you to search updates or users. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of the query. It is a basic version of Summize. Another basic search engine I found was Twitter Search by Flaptor, who also produce Hounder.

I also found Twitter Who to be a useful application. It searches for people that are registered as Twitter users by using their name or email address, and they promise not to store or distribute the information entered into their search box!

Although not strictly a searching application, I enjoy using Twittervision. It’s hard not to become addicted. It basically shows you a world map and tweets the messages from their originating geographical location. You can have a 2D or 3D map, the 3D map is just so cool! If you haven’t seen it you should go there now! From the same producer there is Twittermap, this allows you to search for a place and see what tweets have been posted.

I think that due to the selection of different searching methods people will gravitate to the one that they find most comfortable, however, it is not clear just now if one method is more popular than another. Of course, Google also picks up tweets, which some people have complained about.

Just a short blurb to point out that the folks at Sitepoint are giving away The Photoshop Anthology.  I have personally purchased several of their books and have found them to be very well written and extremely useful.  You can download the high resolution .pdf book(64mb) here (for the low resolution, 24mb, here), or sign up for Sitepoint updates and get sent the links here.  The offer is only on for another 27 days so get it while you can…

The book is nine chapters long with over 270 pages of useful photoshop tricks and trickery and it is in full colour, a bargain at the price of free…

Opera Mini 4.1was announced yesterday, and I have downloaded it to my Nokia N95 8GB to give it a try out.  My first impressions was that it is an easy to operate web browser that is slightly more intuitive to use than the standard Nokia web browser. 

Opera Mini mobile web browser is free and can be downloaded from here, or by pointing your current mobile browser at http://operamini.com. It is a small application (about 120kb) that features automatic completion of web addresses, is now faster (due to Opera upgrading their servers), allows uploading and downloading of files (without being transferred to your phones native browser), saving and viewing pages for offline use and, perhaps most useful, you can search for text within a page.  I found out from the Opera website that the mobile software uses a remote server to pre-process the web pages before sending them, thus allowing the page to be compressed for smaller data transfers, to enhance the speed of surfing on your mobile.  This, for me, is a big plus if you are commuting to work and don’t have access to a wireless point.

The new version keeps the great features from the previous version, such as synchronising  bookmarks from your desktop or other mobile device running Opera Mini.  Of course Opera on the desktop is not the most popular of browsers so you might have to import your bookmarks to Opera desktop to sync them to your mobile…a hassle worth going through?  It also has the landscape mode for viewing pages and has power scrolling shortcuts, with zooming! 

One annoyance, that was also present in the older version of mini browser, is that when you are typing into a form it switches from the browser to the phone text editor.  I would prefer to just type straight into the form field, like the nokia browser does.

I have been trying the browser out in various websites, mobile and normal.  The mobile bbc website pages do load quickly and even this blog loads at a not unreasonable speed!  The mini browser also allows easy subscriptions to feeds, more intuitively than the nokia browser…

The next obvious question, ‘what is the competition’?  A quick search on google will bring up any number of other browsers, some only for windows mobile such as deepfish, but the two that caught my eye for further investigation were skyfire (currently in beta testing) and jB5 (which I hope to test out sometime this week).

When you are working in a shop that is purely for high street presence, and not retail, it must be nice to be able to spend your entire day surfing the web and chatting to your (drooling) customers.  Fortunately for me my local ‘apple guy’ was able to do this last Friday afternoon.  While perusing the new iMacs he was telling me that the the iPhone 2 is due to be unveiled in June at Apple’s world wide developers conference (although everyman and his dog knows this).   My mac guy said that it would also be unlocked for any network usage, just now iPhone coverage has also been announced for Itlay, Australia, Singapore, India, and the Philippines (see macrumours.com and 9to5mac.com for more information).

O2 in the UK have sold out of 8GB iPhones, although it still possible to pay 329GBP for a 16GB iPhone.  I was told that apple are going for a global iPhone 2 roll-out.  There are other rumours spreading that it may be available in different colours, according to appleinsider.com AT&T’s website for existing users now has an option for a black iPhone.  Macprime.ch also suggest that Swisscom are going to be offering iPhones in Silver, Black and White…

So anyway, as I was saying, it must be nice to spend your entire day chatting and surfing about apple products when you are only there for high street presence.  I look forward to reading about the new iPhone…

For now I suggest checking out the new mac ads, they may have been running this campaign forever now, but they are still funny!