I've always disliked the default Mac OS X 10.5 background image, let's hope 10.6 is a little classier.
About a month ago I took my kids to the Busytown play up at Imagination Stage in Bethesda, MD. It's based on the Richard Scary Busytown books, which are very popular with my kids. The play was great (here's a review) and my wife even took the kids back a second time.
The play was commissioned for a theater in Seattle a few years ago, and the songs were a lot of fun. I would love to have a recording of the songs, I'm sure we'd be singing them at bedtime now if I could remember anything other than the chorus to the Pickle Car song. And those three lines are beginning to grate on me.
The problem is that Imagination Stage doesn't have the rights to make their own soundtrack CD, or even just a recording of the play, available for sale. It seems to me that playwrights are missing a big opportunity here and need to more aggressively license these rights. CD and DVD production is so cheap these days that putting together a good soundtrack or DVD of the play shouldn't be too hard or too expensive, and it's a great way to get some more revenue from the people who attended. We paid about $60 to attend the play and paying $25 for a soundtrack afterwords would probably have been a no-brainer.
At this point I'm hoping to catch one the actors and ask if there's a bootleg making the rounds, or maybe order a copy of the script and music and learn to play the songs on the piano. But there's a market out there for the forward thinking children's playwright.
I found a real gem on iTunes today, Tulley Cathey's classical guitar recitals from the University of Utah (iTunes link). They're high quality recordings (audio and video) of some live performances. It's great music to unwind to on a Sunday night.
The first customer review of Bubbles is in! It's four stars (out of five), here's an excerpt:
"I got this to entertain my toddler, and it seems to do a great job at it. $.99 is about the right price."
You can read the whole review of Bubbles on iTunes.
My first program for the iPhone has been posted to the iTunes store. It's called Bubbles and it lets you pop soap bubbles. This is the link to Bubbles on iTunes.
Oddly enough there are two other bubble popping programs available as well. One costs $1 like mine but seems to have worse graphics, and the other costs $2 and has fancier looking bubbles. I will have to be a ruthless business person if I hope to corner the market on handheld bubble popping software. Beware, competitors!
OLPC News published my editorial on why I think announcing the XO-2 is a bad mistake for OLPC. I take full credit for the frowny face XO photoshop job as well.