Stan's List

iTunes Music Store is also running a year-end retrospective that covers the best-of-the-best.

iTunes takes a look back at the music that made this year so memorable with a variety of carefully chosen favorites from our staff and a a concise list of some of the top sellers. Whether you are looking for the songs that really made an impact or the albums that stuck with us, iTunes has 2005 covered.

The latest release supports HTML (canvas), has built in SVG support, adds a contextual menu on the URL bar lock icon that has items to show the site certificate, and go to Page Info and more.

This utility measures and reports, via a speedometer-like window, the download and upload speeds of packets as you surf the Web. NetSpeedometer 1.0 is donaware from SubRosaSoft and available for download.

If you like the app, SubRosaSoft requests a donation to the American Foundation for the Blind.

Conrad Weiler noticed a Mossberg article in which the author manages to give Apple another compliment, though a bit other handed.

AppleInsider covers a paperless purchases system used this Christmas season by Apple in its retail stores which Apple has considered a success. The EasyPay system will be used in all retail experiences. It is paperless because the receipt is emailed to the customer, much like a web purchase.

While there is a lot of history to Apple, what I think of is how close the pundits were in predicting the fall. This is what makes the present (last 4-5 years) impressive, where Apple is now shipping nearly 1 1/4 million computers (2 million for this quarter would not be out of line considering the increased market share) and 10 million iPods. Thus, CIO names Apple’s astounding success as one of the top 10 stories of 2005.

St. Paul Pioneer Press story reports that Steven P. Jobs wasn’t happy only 24 hours before the original iPod launch. In fact, he looked like he was about to hurl his pre-production iPod at something, or someone.

You may encounter a web page that has fill in boxes for you to input information. Unknown to you, those input boxes may be JavaScript generated.

According MacFixIt, “this Java-related problem can sometimes be resolved with simple workarounds like clearing the Firefox cache, opening a new browser window or entering text in a separate editor then pasting it into the Web-based text boxes. All of these workarounds are temporary, however.

It now appears that this issue can be permanently fixed by installing an updated version of the JEP (Java Embedding Plug-in) and deleting the old Java-related plug-ins that come with Firefox 1.5. This can be accomplished via the following process:

1. First, download the the JEP .95 package.

2. Quit Firefox.

3. Next, drag the files JavaEmbeddingPlugin.bundle and MRJPlugin.plugin to the /Library/InternetPlug-Ins/ directory.

4. Finally, remove the bundled JEP files (also named JavaEmbeddingPlugin.bundle and MRJPlugin.plugin) from Firefox. This is accomplished by control-clicking the Firefox icon in the Finder and selecting “Show package contents.” Navigate to the Contents/MacOS/plugins/ directory and delete JavaEmbeddingPlugin.bundle and MRJPlugin.plugin.

5. Re-launch Firefox and check for persistence of the issue.”

AppleInsider is reporting that Intel is developing the Power Mac Intel motherboard. Intel produces their own motherboards and provides to OEM (original equipment manufacturers) companies like Dell. The thought is that production costs would be reduced for Apple thus lowering the price of the Power Mac

Ars Technica: Infinite Loop has info on Apple’s appeal of the iPod battery settlement (appeals of settlements rarely succeed) which has been dismissed. This means the settlement can continue.