One of the more dismissed iPod features announced recently is the one that allows users to instantly find out what song is playing in a Starbucks and then buy the song on the spot if they so choose. At first glance it’s easy to dismiss this as something you’ll never use but I believe this will lead into something bigger.

Although I would tend to agree that teaming with Starbucks is a bit of a yawn you can’t deny that the idea is great. How many times have you been somewhere, heard a song and wished you knew the name of the song or artist? Now imagine if more places teamed up with Apple to make this a reality. The local gym, mall food court or what have you could be setup with similar equipment to what Starbucks is putting in to place. Or, how about a small band playing at a venue making album sales while performing?

Since Starbucks is a place that benefits simply because it is the kind of place a person can order a drink and listen to music, I imagine Apple would need to build in some kind of incentive for other businesses to get involved. Someway for the company to pay for the equipment needed to run the service.

The real benefit, for Apple anyway, is that the chance for an impulse buy goes up substantially because the customer can buy the song right away, they don’t have to try to remember the song and buy it later. This will undoubtedly lead to increased music sales for Apple and even though we’ve always been told iTMS exists to sell more iPods one has to think Apple makes something on music sales. With an increase in sales volume iTMS will become more of a money maker than it is today.

I just read on engadget.com about the new iPod touch. New iPod Touch is essentially an iPhone minus the phone part, but it adds in WiFi so you can connect to 802.11b/g networks. It includes Safari and a special icon for YouTube specifically. Battery life is claimed to be 22 hours for audio and 5 hours for video.

iPod Touch can also buy songs directly through WiFi without the need to be hooked into a computer but it will sync songs back to iTunes when the two are connected.

Here is a tip for anyone who may read this. When you send an email, it should always have a subject. Always. It’s just common net etiquette. An email without a subject is like a book without a title and a book without a title is not something you would want to read because it apparently has no point. If you’re writing an email and you can’t come up with a subject, then you need to rethink whether or not your email has any purpose in the first place and if not, then don’t send the email.

Subjects provide the potential reader with a starting point of what your message is probably about. It sets the tone, makes it so the message is easy to find again later and sets it apart from all of the others. A subject allows the reader to sort messages, follow a conversation, group related messages and most importantly it tells the reader that your message has some sort of purpose.

So please, the next time you’re about to click that send button, take a moment to check your subject field. If it’s empty, fill it in. If it’s not then kudos to you my friend.

I recently started doing some freelance web work. The company I’m working with right now demands that sites be coded to XHTML strict standard and that testing be done on all major browsers on the major platforms. Macintosh is one of those major platforms that I don’t have yet have always secretly wanted to get one. Doing freelance work is the perfect excuse to pick up a Mac Mini so that’s just what I did today and I’m expecting it to arrive sometime next week.

I’m not sure if owning a Mac Mini will convince me to make a full switch or not. It’s hard to say at this point because I’m so used to the Windows world but others have tried to make the switch for themselves and lived to tell about it. And with the new Mac’s being based on Intel processors and the availability of VMware Fusion or Parallels it’s possible to run Windows along side OS X anyway.

Recently on digg.com there was a list of UNIX/Linux commands every person should know. A few people were a bit miffed that the list included nano rather than VIM. VIM is easily my favorite text editor so I wanted to share some of the most useful commands that VIM provides. No doubt there are people out there that have their own set of commands they use most so I encourage them to comment about it.

Read on to learn more about VIM.
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My Wii has now been back for a week and all is good. Although the shipping took forever the entire process went very well. It was refreshing to deal with a company that didn’t try to walk you through some idiotic script of did you try this and did you do that. I guess when you depend on your product to generate future sales you can afford to actually please the customer.

We (my brother-in-law and I) were able put a number of hours on it, along with the projector, playing a number of games including Resident Evil 4 and Super Swing Golf. My short review is, RE4 is a keeper, Super Swing Golf is hardly a renter. I usually stick to the first party Nintendo games so RE4 is a bit of a departure for me. Although I wasn’t able to put a lot of time into it, it was fun.

I stopped by our local Best Buy to pick up a classic controller. The place was filled with people and yet they had a number of Wii’s on hand and nobody swarming them. There are Wii’s on ebay selling for *less* than $250 (plus the outrageous shipping of course). Has demand slowed or production increased?