Atomic Playboy

These are my links for January 23rd from 04:38 to 04:41:

• Dutch government study: net effect of P2P use is positive – pThe Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs commissioned a study by research company TNO about how much Dutch Internet users download music, movies, and games, and what the social and economic effects of this downloading are./p
• Practika: A Free Icon Set | Freebies | Smashing Magazine – pPractika: a free set of 11 practical and useful high-quality icons, designed by DryIcons, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The icons are available in resolutions 64×64px, 128×128px/p

The Dictionary application in OS X is just plain gorgeous with its typography.

This is how you make a proper unsubscribe feature for your newsletters. I click the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email, I get a page with this, and it’s done. No further action needed. First I thought it was a bit unsecure without a confirmation button, but then I spotted the resubscribe link in case you accidentally unsubscribed.

That’s good design by 37Signals.

The new British coin designs are indeed very lovely. Via Kottke.

The Escapist is a new e-zine featuring a ton of names that are well-known amongst the gaming intelligentsia — the first issue has an article by Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade, where I am a moderator on their forums.

You can read the stuff on the site, via feeds or as a downloadable PDF, and even have the PDF mailed to you when there’s a new issue.

The site looks good, though I would probably have a stroke if I started thinking about accessibility issues. Also, it’s very annoying that the site hijacks your arrow keys and PgUp/PgDn keys for site navigation.

Also, the site has lots of signs that tell me it’s powered by Ruby on Rails.

(Via Pixel Kill)

iTunes for Windows is released. Get it from Apple or grab it via this torrent (BitTorrent download)

First impressions: Ctrl-W closes the entire application. This is bad. In OS X, it just closes the window and keeps iTunes running and playing. This means I have to keep it in the activity field while running. Slightly annoying.

I’ll toy around a bit with the music sharing; tomorrow I’ll set up an SSH tunnel from school to home and see if I can access my music that way. iTunes only allows music sharing on local subnets; but an SSH tunnel is considered local for all intents and purposes.

Update: Some more impressions.

• iTunes quits if I right-click the close button. Broken behavior, no Windows applications do that.
• No always on top. Windows is (duh) windows focused as opposed to the application focus on a Mac; I want always on top for the mini-mode. It iTunes had only used the default Windows widgets instead of the OS X brushed metal appearance, I could use the nVidia drivers to force a window to be always on top.

For something that calls itself “the best Windows app ever” (Apple.com front page as of writing this), it sure is inconsistent with every other Windows app in existence…

More update: I’ve tried the Rendezvous sharing now. It rocks.

I have a Mac here too, and I used to mount my music collection via SMB to access it from my Mac. Now I just need to have iTunes running on my Windows machine, and the Mac sees the entire collection at once via the Rendezvous shared playlist. Rock on.

I want more Rendezvous/Zeroconf applications for Windows!

Various user interface graphics by Susan Kare, who has done (among others) the famous icons for early Mac, Windows 3.0, OS/2 Warp and more modern icons such as the icons used in Gnome. And don’t miss the cute t-shirts with her icons. Moof!

(I’m starting to feel like MeFi…)