Songbird sings a different tune

Songbird is at it again. The 1.1 beta 2 release has hit the market and nightly builds are available for your testing pleasure.

Songbird is funky audio player with classic mozilla look and feel. If you're a Firefox or Thunderbird user, my bet is you'll love Songbird.

the good: plug and play support for USB media players (incl. ipod), automatic album art downloads, great support community and thus great add-ons.

the bad: still quite slow loading (takes over 30 seconds on my dual core 1.6 MHz laptop), I'm having trouble playing Vorbis .ogg files, and most of my favourite add-ons don't work (notably LyricsMaster, MinTrayR, and Song Notifier). Oh, and the application crashes uncontrollably :-)

Still a work in progress...

Twitter gives Canada the shaft

The twitter blog recently announced the new Twitter/ Bell Canada SMS deal: 2-way SMS for Bell canada mobile customers! What these two partners in crime forgot to mention is that this service comes with a hefty price tag... $0.15 CAD/ tweet! This very important fact was very absent from twitter's announcement:

Today we're super excited to be activating full, two-way SMS service for Canadian Twitter-ers who are also customers of Bell Mobility. If you're a Bell Mobility customer, you can update Twitter via SMS and receive updates from Twitter via SMS. There are no limits and no added fees (beyond your normal texting plan). If you haven't already, you can activate your phone to Twitter over SMS. Special thanks to Bell's enthusiasm and eagerness to make this happen.

What my bolding above highlights is an obvious cover-up :-) The Twitter-Bell negotiated deal means that mobility users pick up the tab for each and every tweet - even if you already have an unlimited texting plan. Why? Because Bell labels twitter texts as "premium texts".... go figure.