I don’t know if Apple will ever get into the business of making HDTV’s. There are apparently some rumors flying around that the Apple HDTV is coming this year. Marco Arment gives a compelling argument that the profit margins on HDTV’s are not high enough, nor is the product lifetime short enough, for this move to make business sense for Apple. And Apple already has their Apple TV unit, priced affordably at $99, that is a perfect compliment to your existing HDTV. Why even bother with the actual TV display market at all?

I think Apple has plenty of reason to enter this market. While the Apple TV is a great product, I don’t think it’s reached as wide an audience as Apple has hoped. If Apple can design an HDTV that’s as innovative and beautiful as the original iPod was, they’ll sell like hotcakes. The bigger picture here is that Apple wants to start competing with cable TV services with their iTunes streaming products. Once Apple has their software running on a significant portion of TV’s, they can really throw off the gloves and start competing directly with cable and satellite TV providers. The Apple HDTV device itself could almost be a sort of loss leader, or low-margin product that’s simply a vehicle for pushing iTunes out into as many homes as possible.

I’m excited to get rid of current cable/satellite paradigm where I pay $100/mo just to watch 10 hours of sporting events and a few TV shows that I could easily get through iTunes, Amazon or Netflix.

I’ve recently started using Croppy, a simple Windows screenshot utility. It works perfectly for quickly sharing images with friends and colleagues – launch the app, resize the transparent crop window, and click “upload to web”. An image of whatever you were looking at is uploaded and a URL copied to your clipboard. Very similar in function to the Mac-based Skitch software – but much more lightweight.

Looks like Linux is finally getting some love from Adobe/Macromedia! After being stuck with a bug-ridden Flash Player 7 for years, they’ve stepped up and put out a beta version of Flash Player 9 for Linux. I have yet to try it, but it looks promising. More and more sites are moving up to Flash 8, and now (hopefully) we’ll be rid of the terrible audio-video synchronization issues that the Linux version of Flash 7 has always had.