Apple

Panther ‘stickies’ can view PDFs

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— From Mac OSX Hints
“If you have Stickies open, you can use it to quickly open and view PDF documents. Simply drop a PDF file into a sticky note and it appears inside the note with its own scroll bars constrained to the size of the note. If the sticky is translucent, then the PDF appears translucent too.

This hint works especially well with floating stickies (Command-Option-F).

Unfortunately, this trick only works with PDF files and not RTF or DOC files. If you drop any type of file on a sticky other than a PDF or textClipping, you only succeed in inserting a picture of the file’s icon.”

Cannes Celebrates iMovie Film

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“The surprise hit of the Cannes film festival is a movie made by a first-time director with a budget of precisely $218.32,” reports Charlotte Higgins for The Guardian. “Tarnation was created by 31-year-old jobbing actor Jonathan Caouette, using the Apple Macintosh package iMovie. It is a touching and often disturbing family history pieced together via photographs, home movie images from the 1970s and 80s, and interviews by Caouette with his mother and grandparents.” [May 20]
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iTunes: Software Newcomer of the Year

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iTunes for Windows

— from PC World’s ‘Best of 2004’
Apple makes Windows apps about as often as Microsoft ships bug-free products, and if iTunes for Windows (free) is any indication, that’s a crying shame. The iTunes media player works on PCs the same way it does on Macs, right down to the handy feature that lets you share your music library with other PC or Mac iTunes users on your network. It looks great, it’s easy to use, and it has a surprising number of useful features, like the abilities to generate rules-based Smart Playlists and to trim individual tracks.

Meanwhile, Apple’s complementary iTunes Music Store (99 cents per track, album prices vary) started the party last year on subscription-free digital tunes, pioneering the 99-cents-per-track model that most online music stores now use. With easy navigation, an impressive exclusive track selection, and such innovative offerings as audiobooks and radio show archives, iTunes Music Store is going strong. Competitors like RealPlayer Music Store made this a tough choice, but it’s hard to beat a store that’s built into the best media player software around. We do have one major complaint: iTunes tracks are incompatible with digital audio players other than Apple’s own IPod. How selfish!