The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Rejoice, British motorists! No longer will you need to cower when you spot police while listening to your iPod through an iTrip. The once illegal activity of using FM wavelengths to listen to your music on your car stereo is illegal no more, thanks to impending relaxation of a decades old law.

The iTrip and other low-power radio transmitters were verboten under the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949, which was this week amended to allow them after what the BBC calls "strong consumer demand". The transmitters will come off the black list on December 8th (also Wii launch day, if you're in the UK).

There is, however, still one small problem. You need to tune in the device to a spare FM channel, and these aren't so easy to come by in heavily populated areas such as London, where pirate radio thrives.

Of course, if you're driving around Congestion Charge-addled London in the first place, you're no stranger to constant struggle.

I've been seeing a lot of people using Macs at the university I work at lately and that made me wonder whether this is a more widespread phenomenon. It seems that it is. According to an article at Macworld, Apple is now ranked second in the UK education market, well behind leader Research Machines but ahead of Dell and HP.

And it gets better for Apple. The company's last quarter put it in the No. 1 position in the UK, with nearly 12 percent of the market. MacBooks in particular are hot, though that's not really news if you've walked into a coffee shop in London in the last six months.

How are things at your school/college?

AppleInsider has a story about a group of Mac users who have had enough of their faulty MacBooks, and they're not going to take it anymore. The group has set up a page at ClassAction.com and is looking for support to force Apple into a recall of the company's newest consumer notebook. AppleInsider also points to macbookrandomshutdown.com, a site dedicated to RSS (random shutdown syndrome) that already has over 1,250 reports of afflicted laptops.

This shouldn't be much of a surprise. There have been reports of random MacBook shutdowns for months, and Apple even copped to the problem last month, but there's not been much movement since then.

I didn't sign up at either of the petitioning sites, but I could have. I bought my fiancee a MacBook about a month after they were released and within a week it was shutting down at will. We were lucky, though. We made an appointment at Apple's main store in London and after the Genius witnessed two shutdowns in as many minutes, he said he'd give us a brand new MacBook. Things have been OK so far.

Are any of you still suffering with the same problem? How has Apple handled your complaints? Sound off in comments.

If you think the iTunes Store could use a bigger push from movie studios, you'll be just as disappointed as I am to hear that most of the big players have no interest in signing on before the holidays.

According to this story at the Mac Observer, analyst group Piper Jaffray met with four of the six top Hollywood studios to talk about their plans to put their flicks onto the iTunes Store, but they've all decided to wait out the holidays for fear of "retailiation" [sic] - a great word to describe how big retailers like Wal-Mart could pull back on their support of DVDs if they become unprofitable because the movies are available cheaper online.

There's more. Apparently, studios aren't too thrilled about Apple's "rigid pricing strategy" either, and that other popular bugaboo, the looming threat of piracy, comes up too.

It's not all bleak, though. Piper Jaffray says more studios will have movies on the iTunes Store within the next six months. I'm just looking forward to downloading Adaptation at some point.

[Via Digg]

Will the iPod die? Apple's player has dominated the market for a few years now, but it's under ever-increasing attack by competitors new and old. According to this post at For Once And For All!, the iPod isn't going anywhere, and it mostly comes down to the reasons you'd imagine - people don't like change, the iPod is just too cool, and it works well to boot. There's a nod given to the possibility of failure, which is put down to cumbersome DRM and customers not being able to keep up with Apple's hectic schedule of replacing the player every so often.

From my vantage point, on the packed subway cars of the London Underground, I'd say Apple's major competitor isn't who you immediately think of - it's the cellphone companies. Over the last year there's been a noticeable shift among my fellow public transport users from iPods to phones as people look for more (and better) convergence. And phone companies are obliging.

LG, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and more are all pushing music (and photos and movies) as a selling point for their new phones. For a while, I even tried using my Sharp 903 as my sole portable player - I mostly listen to podcasts, so this was definitely a possibility - but the user interface left me cold. If I could find a phone that gave me a decent UI, I'd probably drop my iPod and not look back. (And this is why Apple should get in this market sooner rather than later.) But that's me.

What are you using your iPod for these days, and does it do everything you need it to do? Sound off in the comments.

[Via Digg]

It's no exaggeration to say that the day I started using a feed reader, my internet life changed forever. Suddenly, instead of having to click through my regular cohort of a few dozen sites, I was able to scan hundreds of sites for the news I wanted. And while the debate over which feed reader is the best isn't as heated an affair as the whole Vi vs Emacs ruckus - Vi wins, of course - people are still pretty passionate about their chosen application.

And so it was that I came across this post at Macintalk that compares my favourite reader, NetNewsWire, with that other darling, NewsFire.

While NetNewsWire takes a few hits for its dull aesthetics, it makes up for it where it matters, offering more viewing options and a built-in browser. NewsFire has more than just good looks going for it, though, such as an in-line podcast player. In the end, as is so often the case, it comes down to what you want to use it for. I don't think I'll be changing just yet.

What about you? What are you using to read TUAW's feed, or are you stuck browsing the site in Lynx? Not that there's anything wrong with that.

At the risk of appearing to be fixated with Messenger for Mac (what can I say - despite its quirks, I like it), I'll point to a neat tip at Mac OSX Hints that allows you to throw out that pesky Windows Live logo Microsoft has foisted upon us with its latest IM client update.

The solution is pretty simply and amounts to nothing more than renaming an image - but that leaves you with a blank block in the client. So some posters have come up with more interesting solutions that let you personalize the application window.

What are you going to put there, may I suggest the TUAW logo? Hit the comments and show us your ideas.

[Via Digg]

If you've sated your Tetris lust through Quinn and you're looking for something a little meatier to play, you might want to check out this kludge a CodeWeavers forumite has used to get Half-Life 2 running on an Intel Mac.

Armed with the beta of CrossOver Mac, user JustinD downloaded Gordon Freeman's alien-blasting adventure through Valve's Steam service and proceeded to shoehorn it onto his MacBook. It isn't pretty since you can't use anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, and there's pop-in, missing video, and other surprises, but, hey, it's Half-Life 2 on your MacBook.

I don't have an Intel Mac lying around to try this out, so hit the comments if you get it working.

[via Joystiq]

Looks like Microsoft's recent upgrading of Messenger for Mac to version 6 didn't go down as smoothly as they would have liked. Microsoft's own Messenger newsgroup is just one of the places buzzing with people having problems logging in.

I found this out while struggling through this jungle of versions myself. Going from 5.1.1 to 6.0.0 locked me out of the service, with only a typically vague error message to guide me. To make matters worse, I was able to log in to the fancy new Windows Live Messenger on PC. Trashing my preferences and going back to previous versions did nothing, and Google wasn't much more helpful. That was around the time I stumbled on to the newsgroup.

In the end, my solution was simple enough - I changed my admittedly weak Passport password to something a little more robust and, voila, I was in.

Are any of you having similar problems? Let me know in the comments if so and what workarounds you've found.

Hey TUAW, I'm Alex, the newest blogger around these parts.

The first Mac I ever handled was one of the later Performa models. It was a beige beast of a computer attached to an ABI Prism DNA Sequencer, and I remember thinking how odd it was that there was only one mouse button. This was at a time in my life when I still thought I could be a scientist.

That dream faded, but Macs stayed in my life. Oh, there was a time when I strayed, when I spent a few years wandering in the Wild West of Linux and impossible (for me) binary management, but then OS X came along and I couldn't stay away any longer.

These days I spend most of my days in balmy London writing about videogames at Kikizo, IGN, and AOL. Macs and OS X make the job that little more enjoyable. My nomadic lifestyle demands portability, which is probably why I'll be using wonderful 12" PowerBooks until I can't find another, or Apple decides to answer my, and many others', prayers and gives us a new (or even smaller) version.

That's me taken care of. Let's get to it.