Yes I know, our catalogue doesn’t work with Safari. When I began developing the ‘box (6 years ago now .. yikes that’s hard to believe) Safari was just awful. Hard to debug, poor support for the latest in web tech. So I blocked it out, blocked my ears. Now of course, Safari rocks. Firefox rocks, Chrome rocks, and IE9 will finally .. hopefully make IE rock for the first time. So .. I’ve got my eye on it, and hope to get Safari and Chrome up and running in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, with a developer trick, you can get us up and running with Safari now.

Go to your preferences area click ‘Show Develop in menu bar’ in the advanced tab to make the developer’s menu appear. Select Develop -> User Agent -> Firefox 3.6.3 (Mac or Windows) to spoof the User Agent and make APPLEBOX think it’s Firefox. Boom! Click browse DVDs and you’re away. There are a few minor layout issues I’ve got to deal with .. but if Safari is your thing, go for it.

Safari 5 is absolutely smokin’ but Firefox is still my favourite .. it might be lagging Safari a bit in raw performance at the moment .. but Firefox 4 is due at the end of the year and all is lookin’ good.

Happy Christmas all! Take a 5 minute break, chillax and read our newsletter here.

It’s 12.30am and here I am … playing around with fonts. That’s Rockwell in the post title, Myriad Pro in the text. Not sure how many people will actually see those, or what they fall back to. Ok … back to work.

A quick tip for anyone looking for organic meat around our fair store .. drive the 5 or 6kms to Thornbury to Belmore Biodynamic Meat. I spoke to the guy standing proudly on the front page of their website. You’ll find them here. The last year or so has taken it’s toll .. long hours, poor diet, lack of exercise = 5 kilos extra thank you very much. Enough! Bought a Breville mega juicer that is just outstanding, and am going organic as much as possible now. That brings me to Belmore which is a revelation. I bought a biodynamic eye fillet this morning for around the same price a non-organic cut would cost me at Leo’s. Brilliant. With organic fruit and veg deliveries now once a week, I’m all set!

Our Blu-ray collection here at APPLEBOX is continuing to grow .. 104 titles and counting .. and I’m working my way through all of them. Blu-ray is the best format to watch movies in. Period. Dramas, Action, Sci-Fi, Classics… no format is better suited. Frost/Nixon is a stunning transfer that shows how good a character driven drama can look. 2001 is equally stunning to see how a 40 year old print can be remastered and shown in the full glory it deserves. Ditto for Casablanca. Don’t take my word for it .. Ridley Scott sums it up well.

The stats say Blu-ray penetration is growing at a slightly faster pace than DVD did, almost 4 years in. Which is great news. Prices are coming down .. you can get a Kogan for $269 and Aldi have one going at $199. We’ve of course got a Sony BDP-S350 to rent here if you want to give it a shot without the upfront expense. JB is doing the BDP-S350 for $300 and we’ve also got a deal with the local retravision .. grab our Hi-Def primer in-store for all the details!

Really, if you’ve got a HD TV, do yourself a favour and buy a Blu-ray player .. you’ll never look back.

Just reading Andrew Cooper is extending dStore offline with a retail 2.0 move. From Smart Company:

Cooper is scouting stores that are around 800 square metres; the front half of the store will contain merchandise while the back half will be a small warehouse. Customers will be able to order in-store web kiosks and either pick up their goods on the spot (if in range) or have them delivered the next day.

Feels like a contradiction doesn’t it .. going offline to extend reach? As an online business, if you can’t extend globally - with conventional wisdom being this is the one true path - where do you go otherwise? Where are those customers that you’re not connecting with today? Ans: they’re in every suburb of every city of our wee little country. Local retail gets you in front of people you just can’t reach with a purely online play. Scoop up 5% of 200 million Americans .. And your online business will fly .. but 5% of 20 million Australians is a completely different set of numbers.

Way to go dStore .. way to go Andrew Cooper. Let’s see local retail taken to the next level.

It’s now 7.20am, Adelaide Airport, and I’ve just finished my cibo breakfast. I arrived about 7 mins outside the 45min checkin window Tiger stipulate. Ok .. I’m cabin baggage only .. with kiosk check in I’ll be able to head straight to the gate for a full 30 mins before take off. Hmmm .. No kiosks. Manual checkin overflows with people backed up prob 40 deep. 2 staff wipe sweat off their brow trying to get everyone through. No staff working the queue, streamlining the process. Ok, think i’ll head straight to boarding and checkin there. Wrong move, turned around, back to queue, time dissapears and missed flight!

Dang. Tiger lesson learned. Be on time or else! Jump on adioso.com (via iPhone) next avail flight out is virgin, booked online, confirmation sent, checked in via kiosk, boarding pass issued in seconds, no queues and voilà… Here I am drinking coffee waiting for my flight.

As chief anything-tech-I-gotta-handle, I’m generally the one who keeps the content flowing into the system (big props to Andrew who tackles TV and kids discs .. sick of Barbie yet Andy?). We add about 60 titles a month, from new release to back catalogue and that’s a lot of info and images. We’re no Quickflix with a dedicated content team .. we run on the smell of an oily rag.

But c’mon film makers and distributors! Sometimes finding poster art to promote your film is like digging for gold. You spend plenty of dosh to make your film, but forget that couple of grand to create some great poster art and put it on your website. C’MON! give a brother a break. I dig and dig and dig to try and find something hi-res. We’ve got the best cover art in the business (prove me wrong) but that’s a killer to pull together. I’m trying to get Storage (www.storagethemovie.com) in the system at the ‘mo. Just a little Aussie indie thriller which we’ve bought one copy of .. but can I find some dang poster art? Nup. It won’t be the first time I’ve screen capped a website and put some cover art together myself. And whilst I could wait for the actual DVD and scan it (ala Quickflix, Bigpondmovies and just about everyone else), poster art is typically a quality grade above what ends up on the DVD cover - so that’s what I want.

Yikes! I can’t believe it’s been 3 months since I posted here. Sorry everyone! Life is busy here at APPLEBOX and we’re still humming along nicely. Don’t forget we have our facebook page that Andrew keeps turning over and twitter 140 character movie reviews (put your sunnies on ’cause the green might blind you). James is chiming in as well.

But back to Think Global, Shop Local - Nice slogan! Been around for years I’m sure, but I noticed it down in Port Melbourne the other day (near our friends at glued.com.au) .. and I like it! sorta sums us up nicely.

A brilliant quote from Mike Walsh:

The context? He’s talking about the future of finance. A far cry from local DVD rentals, but I think his observation translates perfectly.