Jim Dalrymple.com

Well, well — decision day is here and the Beatles lost their case against Apple. I don’t know what I expected, but I was kind of surprised that the decision was so succinct.

The Beatles parent company sued Apple because of a 1991 agreement that said Apple would not use its logo with music-related products. Seems like a violation, but under the law the judge said no.

Good for him. Steve Jobs was happy too — he even invited the Beatles to join iTunes. What a good guy that Steve is.

It’s not over yet though — the Beatles will appeal the decision. I guess that means we won’t see any Beatles on iTunes anytime soon.

My plane just took off from San Francisco, so I’m probably somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 feet in the air as I head home from attending Apple’s music event earlier this week. That was a damn fine event — it’s no wonder Apple is leading the way in this industry.

Of course the big announcements of the week were the iPod nano and the Motorola ROKR. I love my little nano — it was so cool, I’m almost afraid I might break it though.

The iTunes phone is another story — at least in my experience. I know some people have it working, but I wasn’t able to get it to work and neither were many others. That was disappointing to me, but that wasn’t the big thing for me anyway; the nano is the big announcement.

I love how Apple keeps changing the game on its competition. They aren’t changing the rules, they really are changing the game.

I’m looking forward to getting home and seeing Monique and the kids.

I sat there this afternoon looking at my daughters Dell wondering why the hell it had to be so difficult to join a wireless network. A Mac is so easy — turn it on and it finds the network for you. That’s it, nothing else.

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I had an interesting conversation yesterday with an IDC analyst that said the iPod halo effect could be around for some time. The only catch is that Apple has to continue to innovate in order to keep building the momemtum.

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Everywhere I look these days, it’s Flickr, Flickr, Flickr. Like the saying goes, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” so I did yesterday afternoon. I’m still not convinvced Flickr is any better for me than .Mac, but I’m sure there are a lot of people out there that can give me some opinions and examples on why it’s better.

I uploaded a couple of albums already to test out the interface. Overall, it’s pretty good — there are quite a few options and there is a whole community of people that you can make as contacts. I quickly found several people that I know to add as contacts.

I’m currently using a Flickr plugin for iPhoto, which seems to be the best upload/management interface I’ve found so far. The plugin doesn’t seem to be able to create an album for me, although it did upload pictures just fine if I didn’t choose to create a new album.

Shortly after signing up, a good friend got me upgraded to a Flickr Pro account (Thanks), which gives you a whole lot of extras — mostly lifting restrictions of the free account.

Like I said, I’m not totally convinced yet, but I’m going to give it a try and see what happens.

I did some reading over the weekend on what it would take to implement “live searching” on the site. What I mean by that is searching a Web site in a similar way to how Apple has implemented live searching on a Macintosh using Spotlight.

This morning I decided to take the plunge and after toying around off and on today I got it pretty much done. I still have to work on the CSS a bit more, but it’s functional.

It should work on most browsers, although it doesn’t for sure on IE for the Mac — then again who cares. If you use Safari, you even get the rounded corners and drop shdows.

So, to use the live search function just click in the search box and start typing. Results should popup under the search window almost immediately; using your arrow keys (or mouse) scroll down to the story you want and hit enter. If you want to exit out of search, just hit the Escape key on your keyboard.

It’s a Big news day for Apple. The release of iTunes 4.9 brings podcasting to the mainstream, as Apple puts it. They have 3,000 podcasts available to preview download from a new directory within iTunes. I sat down this morning and chatted with two Apple executives, Greg Joswiak and Eddy Cue about iTunes and the iPod.

Apple rolled it’s iPod into one line of color iPods today, which is a good thing, I think. I’ve had one of their 60GB photos since it first came out and love it — not as much as my Shuffle though.

Anyway you can read what Apple said about the iPod and iTunes in separate stories I did earlier today at MacCentral.