Imagine a world when, with the press of a button, you are presented the perfect playlist of music that all just flows together.

Oh. Apple already did this? Cool, does it actually work?

Apple’s new iTunes 8 presents a slew of new features including the ability to generate playlists of music that goes together. The website makes it sound so easy:

1. Select a song
2. Press the Genius button
3. A list is generated

Apple wasn’t lying, this is the way it works… but you will need to do some work before you can just “press the Genius button and pow its there”.

I have over 4,000 songs in the iTunes playlist so trust me when I say this process took a while. When you press the Genius button for the first time it asks you to log into the iTunes store. After logging in you are asked to agree to some terms of use. after you sign your life away you get to wait while your playlist is uploaded to iTunes, then while they generate your matches and you download them. It was painful sitting there watching the progress bar inch along at a snails pace. Maybe it was slow because I did this a few hours after iTunes 8 came out. Anyone else find the service slow?

Once you have the Genius list generated the system works just as advertised. Press the button and volia. One thing I do not like is the new side bar that comes with Genius… but this is totally optional so I have nothing to complain about.

Something worth noting is that all the new iPods that support Genius require you to generate the Genius list in iTunes before the feature becomes available. Not a big deal, I was just slightly disappointed with all the waiting. Clearly I’m impatient.

Anyone else find soemthing they really like about the Genius or any other new feature in iTunes 8? The visualizations are pretty sweet.

iPhone CDMA

Thats right, you didn’t read wrong. I said iPhone CDMA. It does almost everything the iPhone 3G does and it’s cheaper, has twice the space and I can send mass text messages.

This is me giving the finger to Rogers for their ridiculous iPhone plans. Lets backtrack to January 2008 for a minute.

Once upon a time, when iPhones were only available in the States, I pre-ordered an iPod Touch. It was a great piece of technology. I said ‘was’ because it disappeared a few months later. After mourning the loss of my beloved device I began searching for an imported iPhone. After giving up in light of the crazy-high prices on eBay I waited patiently for the iPhone to officially come to Canada.

The iPhone came to Canada, but not without a steep price. I weighed my options, fork over my hard earned cash for this sweet sweet phone or carry on with my Bell Mobility contract for a few more years and feel like a little part of me is missing.

Around this time is when it hit me, the iPod that I had once lost would have been able to function almost the same as the iPhone (minus all the phone and GPS goodness). The next day I headed over to my local Apple store and picked up an iPod Touch 32 GB. That night I had my fun downloading and rampaging the App store and damn was it ever worth it.

Now I carry with me my trusty Samsung SPH-A860 in one pocket and my iPod Touch in the other. It covers everything I need. Sure it would be nice to have access to the internet at all times on the iPod but seeing as I’m on a wireless network 90% of the time I think I’ll survive the other 10% without the access.

And that there is how I’m doing my part in not giving Rogers my $4,000 (give or take a bit) in iPhone and iPhone contracts. For the bit of inconvenience that the two devises will give me I think it’s worth it.

So, I’ve been having trouble for a few months visiting certain Flash based sites or sites that contain Flash ads in them. I’d say that that I experienced “problems” with approximately 5% of the sites I’ve visited. I’ll define “problems” as a total, complete crash more commonly known as a “black screen of death.” At first I thought that the problem was due to my upgrading of OS X from Tiger to Leopard back at the beginning of November, rather than performing a clean install as I should have done. I could live with the occasional crashes (a blank screen and force reboot) until I had time to do a clean install of Leopard.

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Leopard’s out and the world has stopped in its tracks! Okay maybe not, but there were block long line ups in New York, 9am Friday morning blog unboxings and the only news which would ultimately matter to me, my experience with the install. So, when I walked into the office on Friday morning I was happy to see that I had 5 copies of Leopard waiting for me to uncage them.

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