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Haven’t blogged in a while, been somewhat busy with giving things into Uni and sorting stuff out for moving to my new flat, which is at the bottom of Putney and about a 15 minute drive from my current house. Will put up photos once I’ve moved in and I’m settled. I’ve taken down all the Prints from my wall, so my room has the air of a rather Cheap Hotel or a highly strict boarding school. I never liked the colour that’s painted either, me and my brother switched rooms a while ago and I just never got around to. Procrastination is a bitch.

Few internet things to mention, Kevin Rose has posted more apple rumour mongering onto his blog, which have a habit of being nothing more than that. Sure the new nano “photo” (see below) looks nice, but in my eyes it’s a nice 3D render with a convenient film grain over the top to hide the fact. Take this with a handful of salt. I think the other things he mentioned are viable, iTunes 8 would be very nice, although there’s nothing to back this up- iTunes doesn’t go up steadily in versions so there’s no telling. Maybe 7.8 but I’d say wait until next year’s Keynote for a brand new major version jump.

What else…other iPod updates yes I can see that. We at JLK haven’t had any new Touches in a while and there are reports of other stores in the same situation so I can see an update to them coming. I don’t know about the 2.1 theory and the fact that it would come before the iPhone version, this hasn’t ever happened before and I’m sure it would not cause happy iPhone owners, myself included! I also can’t imagine the Classics changing though apart from in price maybe, how big are they going to get? 160gb is an almost ridiculous quantity already at the moment. Shuffles might go to 4gb as well, no reason why not.

Bleh, Ugly lack of Cover Art.

A lot of buss has being going around about Songbird, an open-source Music Player made by the Mozilla guys of Firefox fame. (Oh, Browse Happy, by the way.) I’ve tested it out for a bit on my Mac, and while it’s a very impressively featured Music player… it ain’t iTunes. Really. It kind of looks like a Windows/Linux person attempting to give an application a Mac feel, rather than actually doing it properly. Either Giz or Engadget, I can’t remember which, mentioned that it had “it’s very own Coverflow” which is far from the truth. It’s slow, ugly and i could only get it running smoothly if I had it at about an inch in height. In comparison I can run the iTunes Coverflow as big as I want with no lag or slowdown. Not to mention that Songbird didn’t import my album covers from iTunes along with the Music and Playlists, so it was just showing an uglier default cover art than iTunes’. Bleh.

It’s slow to load songs, useless for iPod integration as I have an iPhone and by default has nothing I can’t get with iTunes and a few other plugins/applications like the Last.fm integration. I think the Addons feature has great potential as it does with Firefox and Thunderbird etc. but for the time being, I’m giving this a thumbs down for Mac users anyway. Will give this a go on my Windows machine but I’m not hopeful.