It seems that Booth #710 at MacWorld Conference & Expo is going to be a popular destination this year. But what makes an already great booth even better?

Yours truly, of course. I'll be helping out at the Delicious Monster booth this year, so if you're in the area, come and say hello. You can bet I'll be at the Keynote as well. See you there!

Does your Dashboard need decorating? I created these little "bulb" widgets today to spice up my Dashboard a bit. They fade through the colour spectrum endlessly. Which means, they're totally useless, but a nice way to get into the Christmas spirit. The best part is that you can drag a ton of them onto your Dashboard, but I don't recommend doing that unless you like to bog down your processor. :)

Download the widget here.

Enjoy!

MacUpdate has a new cleaner look on their product pages. I approve.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11313 (Yes, the screenshot is from 1.0. I've been trying forever to get them to change it. Just sent another submission).

Edit: Fixed! Hooray!

The year is winding down, and it's time to list off my favorite three albums of the year. An especially useful list if you receive some iTunes Certificates this Christmas.

Funeral by Arcade Fire was released last year, but it is still an excellent album today. The Arcade Fire are one of the biggest "buzz bands" of the past year, being a favorite of many professional artists. Funeral is a pretty good album, and the bands overall creativity puts this album on my top three list. Did I mention they're Canadian?

Den of Thieves by The Trews is a very basic rock album, but it is executed so well. Every song has a perfect beat and tempo, and considering the lack of other excellent albums this year, it gets my vote. Oh, and they're Canadian as well.

Future Perfect by Autolux is an AMAZING album. I admit, I was not very impressed with Autolux the first time I heard them. But after seeing them live, I adapted a new appreciation for their style. Distorted instruments, hypnotizing vocals, and industrial-like sounds make this album, as well as the band, among my all time favorites. Definitely a must-have.

A very close runner up is Ten Thousand Fists by Disturbed. And no, With Teeth is not among the top three here as I have posted about it many times before.

There has been a lot of buzz about the future of Front Row, Apple's new media center software. Built into the new iMac G5s, it is highly unlikely that the iMac will be the last computer to come preinstalled with Front Row. One can already install Front Row on any Mac, using these instructions. This does not really involve piracy at all, as Apple provides the download/installation, and one simply enables it.

So where is the future of this app? Right now, it is a pretty nice front end to iTunes and iPhoto, for example. However, these apps still need to run in the background for Front Row to function. It's almost as if Front Row was AppleScript based (and I'm sure it is). I'm not a fan of sketchy front ends. The future...

I would like to see Front Row become and independent application which reads your iTunes/iPhoto database but doesn't touch either app. Then we could see things like audio visualizers built into the application, or more independent slideshows. DVD playing wouldn't be as sketchy either. Infact, the only thing built in right now seems to be the Trailers feature, which loads the latest movie trailers from Apple's Movie Trailer page. This is by far the coolest feature in Front Row, and additional similar features are needed.

The latest rumors seem to point to the Mac mini turning into a media center, come MacWorld. I can definitely see this happening. Small and powerful, the Mac mini belongs next to a large screen. Plus, it would be the perfect Mac to be first to include an Intel processor, unlike the previously rumored iBooks. It seems that Apple is gearing towards a more media-based future, with the upcoming announcements and rumors. Perhaps if people will not switch to Macs directly, they will buy a Mac as a media center and realize its capabilities. This is already happening with the iPod. Whatever the future is, you can surely bet that Microsoft won't be happy about it.