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Airfoil IS a “poor man’s Sonos”! January 11, 2008

Posted by James Webster in : apple, gadgets , add a comment

Two years ago I suggested that Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil could potentially be turned into “a poor man’s Sonos”. Well it looks like they have made that happen with the release of Airfoil 3. The only missing piece I can see is an iPhone-optimised web interface to Airfoil to take the place of the Sonos Controller.

The new Slim Devices/Logitech Squeezebox Duet looks quite interesting as well, although given its cross-platform nature it may not survive a rumoured acquisition by Microsoft with its current feature set intact.

Given I currently live in a pokey London flat from the middle of which I can see into all four rooms simultaneously I don’t think this is a segment of the gadget market that I need to buy into just yet!

The AAPL ‘Keynote Index Fund’ January 1, 2008

Posted by James Webster in : apple, finance , add a comment

Matt Haughey of A Whole Lotta Nothing wondered about the effect of the MacWorld Expo keynote on the value of AAPL and whether a strategy of buying the stock a day before the Stevenote and selling it a day after would result in a positive return. He crunched the numbers and put them up for all to see over at Keynote Index Fund…

Overall, for the entire past decade, the numbers are 1.2% growth for 24 hours and 2.2% growth for 48 hours.

However if you just bought and held AAPL for the past decade the numbers are a little different…

Of course, if you held the $10,000 of shares bought in 1997, your investment would be worth $525,187 today (with AAPL around $200/share today, counting two 2-for-1 splits).

So as a day-trading strategy ‘go long in AAPL for the Stevenote’ might be a reasonably reliable course of action to pursue minor short-term profits. But Bogleheads and Warren Buffet fans will be pleased that buy-and-hold still beats day-trading, for AAPL at least!

UPDATE: Actually this reminds me of an idea floated by Richard Giles of Wired Magazine as a tech market barometer; the number of pages worth of advertisements in Wired magazine appears to be correlated with trends in the NASDAQ major index and leads it by a few months. I just bought this month’s Wired and it appears to be a little thin!

I need another modifier key! January 24, 2007

Posted by James Webster in : apple, development , 4 comments

Between Spotlight’s hotkey (Apple + Space), the default Quicksilver hotkey (Ctrl + Space), and the extensive use I make of the “show current application’s menu items in Quicksilver” hack (which I bound to Option + Space), I have run out of modifier keys that will let me take advantage of IntelliJ’s wicked code completion. Not unless I sacrifice one of my Quicksilver/Spotlight keyboard shortcuts. Maybe its finally time for me to buy a USB foot pedal! That one is pretty expensive however ($120USD), looks like there are instructions to make a cheaper one on Instructables (via MAKE: Blog).

Unless of course a Quicksilver guru can tell me how to tell Quicksilver to ignore its hotkeys if a certain application has focus?