Before I jump straight to introducing the app Disco, let me tell you why I would recommend this app to anyone who loves to DDR and lose some weight. Ok. I kid. This app is not about doing that Melbourne Shuffle to get the attention of that chick over there. This app is about……

DISC BURNING

Yes… Disc burning….. SERIOUS BUSINESS!

I don’t know how often do you guys burn DVD’s cause I do it really often to archive my porn collection Movies and TV Series to save some hard disk space (yea I know how cheap hard drives are now, but I don’t like to power stuff I won’t probably touch in the next few years.)

So, let’s take a quick tour at Disco, shall we?

This is the first screen you get when you launch the app (F**k, why is my mouse pointer right there. I need better screenshotting skillz). Right here you can take the red pill and insert a blank disc, or take the blue pill by dropping the files or CD/DVD image (such as .iso files) to the app.

I took the red pill by inserting a blank CD (I have so much of these lying around back here in Malaysia). F**k! The app insists that I take the blue pill as well. So I did and dragged over the CD image that I want to burn.

On the next screen you can then confirm that you really wanted to burn the files or CD/DVD image by clicking BURN (duh!). Also, as you can see here there’s the Image button that allows you to make an image of a CD or DVD that you own (the button un-greys if you insert a non-blank disc of course).

And there we go to the burning process…….

As you can see while burning the disc there’s some…. uhhh… smoke over there? To be honest, the smoke usually appear huge and alive like 30% into burning a DVD. No luck here because as you can see burning a CD is really fast nowadays. If you really want to see the smoke effect (which is really unique) go here

And finally, after the disc burning has complete…

That’s not all Disco has to offer. If you have a huge amount of data (i.e. the whole Season 1 and 2 of Prison Break), by dragging all the files into Disco, the app will automatically span the data onto multiple disks so you don’t have to figure out how much a CD or DVD can fit and how many of them you need. Disco is blazingly fast, really easy to use (a friend of mine was like “WTF? that’s all you need to do?”).

Pros: Easy to use, cool Smoke effects, awesome interface.

Cons: Expensive ($29.95), disc spanning feature spans data at random, lack of advanced features.

If you’ve got the extra cash, I’d say go for it and add this app to your mac apps arsenal. When I bought Disco it was at an introductory price ($14.95). However, I was dumbf**ked later on because in MacHeist I bundle, Disco was there and I ended up gifting the app to my friend.

Till the next App Attack, I hope you liked this one.

So, the beta is up for download. Only for Windows at the moment (Mac version will be released on March). However, you can’t download a single shit using the app. All you get is this pop-up:

You can’t even download any songs off their Artist of the month - Foo Fighters.

Also, the app which is based on Songbird is still really buggy (that’s what you get in beta I suppose). I tried searching for Will.I.Am and the search box CONCATENATES it to one word “WILLIAM” and all the search results are only related to William. WTF!? Did the app think I was trying to do scripting or programming in the search box?

Just for fun, I tried typing 1+3+5 to see if the search box can do math. Turns out it doesn’t, it eats up the plus signs and concatenates everything into 135. Same thing goes for whatever non-alphanumeric character you throw in ( ! , . - + & * ). I guess the search box is just plain hungry.

While surfing Digg I stumble upon something really interesting. The digg entry is titled “From today, feel free to download all the music in the world“. What!? You gotta be f**king kidding me, mate. It’s just too good to be true. I’m not surprised a large number of digg users reports the story as inaccurate.

After reading taking a quick glance at the article. I’ve found out that the company offering the free downloads is Qtrax.

“With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks.”

Source: Times Online

Looking at their website, the first thing that caught my attention is this:

Where is the “No E-mail from RIAA” entry? When I was about to look for the download link, I was cock-blocked by this:

I guess we’ll find out at MIDNIGHT EST eh? whenever that actually is.

The application that they are using is [not so popular] Mozilla Songbird (but I guess now it’s gonna get a bigger slice of the pie eh?)

Wow, just wow. Featured artist is FOO FIGHTERS? And I can even see Alicia Keys down there.

So, what are your thoughts on this before we hit MIDNIGHT EST!? Scam or not. Personally, I think even if it turns out to be real, there will be 8072387282 catches. Music non-transferable/non-playable by other players, not iPod compatible (unless they make the album art for each song an ad LOL)- you name them.

P/S: No RIAA agents were harmed during the writing of this post.

Source

As seen on Digg. ;)

Just received it this morning. The bag itself feels really solid. At a price of $56.71 USD ($38 without freight charges), this is a good buy considering the fact that Crumpler messenger bags back in Aus are really expensive (around $140 AU).

The bag itself.

Interior of the bag, with my MacBook Pro and some magazines.

Delivery [from US to Malaysia] only took several days, which is amazing. You could have a look at it here. (Currently out of stock at time of writing :P)

I personally rate this bag 4/5 for build quality, 4.5/5 for design and 5/5 for value.