It seems that Live Free or Die Hard will be rated PG-13. PG-13?! Yes, even with the obligatory “Yippie ki-yay, motherfucker”.
Apparently you can say “fuck”* one time in a movie and still avoid an R-rating**. What is this world coming to? I ask you.
The good news, though, is that most everyone seems to like it. Not that bad reviews would have detracted from my unshakeable intention to go see it and enjoy the explosions—er, the movie—thoroughly.
* I’d have said “the f-word” (but never, God forbid, “f***”) there, but it seemed a bit like closing the barn door after the horse had already run out.
** This post has been rated R. Children under 17 may read it with parental supervision.
From using the new Safari 3 beta with my everyday browsing patterns, here are a couple of things I noticed:
- The find-highlight feature, which I thought was useless eye candy before, is actually quite useful, and the kind of best-user-experience-improvement-I-didn’t-know-I-needed thing that Apple specializes in.
- You can’t close windows. Not with the red button on the top left, not using the hotkeys. Not at all. You can close tabs in a multi-tabbed window, but if you want to close windows, you’re stuck. The only way I found to work around this is to use the “Merge all Windows” menu option—one which moreover doesn’t have a hotkey assigned to it*—and then close the tab(s) you no longer want open.
The latter is a deal breaker. I think I’m going to be uninstalling the beta in favor of Safari 2.
* Yes, I know that you can manually assign a hotkey to any menu option through the system preferences, but how many non-power users are going to know about that?
Update 2007-09-08 0134: It turns out I was wrong about the closing windows thing. This problem was caused by the Safari extension Taboo, which took care of warning you if you tried to quit Safari when multiple tabs were open. Removing Taboo caused Safari 3 to work just fine when attempting to close windows using Cmd+W. So now I’m using Safari 3 on on of my computers and am very happy with it thus far. Though the fricking Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin keeps making it crash. God, I hate Adobe software.
The consensus on the WWDC 2007 keynote seems to be that it was disappointing:
Back in August at WWDC 2006, when Apple first unveiled Leopard, Steve Jobs made a point of mentioning that some of Leopard’s features would remain secret, lest Microsoft get a head start on copying them.
Apparently, these secret features consist of the new unified window theme and the Cover Flow view in Finder. This is sort of like saying you’re adding a secret new player to your baseball team and then revealing that it’s one of the existing players wearing a new jersey.
I gotta agree. There were no announcements that are truly exciting for power users, though I will admit that this quicklook thing and the Mail-iCal-Addressbook integration is going to be quite useful—but the latter is not innovation, and is something in fact that Apple should have done a while ago.
The WWDC 2007 keynote is beginning as I write. What will be announced? Where can I get my hands on a Leopard beta? Hmmm.
on my PSP in the last two weeks than I had, probably, in the last two years combined. The reason? A resurgence of interest in my still-favorite PSP game, WipEout Pure. I blame this all on Matt, by the way, who in a recent fit of nostalgia got his favorite two titles in the franchise, Wipeout 3 and Wipeout XL for the original PlayStation.
The game is gorgeous, compulsively playable, and has nearly infinite replay value (or will, I assume, once I finally beat it—if ever); it has me thinking about getting some more PSP games in the near future (not, mind you, that I’ve beaten any of the ones I have now). Two that have caught my interest are Final Fantasy, a remake (to come out next month) of the original FF title for NES, and WipEout Pulse, the sequel to Pure, slated for a September launch. Let’s hope that it has some improvements over the original, notably a better use of the PSP’s suspend feature—the game crashes on suspend unless you’re in the menu, which kind of negates the whole point.
Die Hard IV better be R-rated. It better. Is all I’m saying.
Apple has posted new ads for the iPhone, and announced a release date of June 29. Waah! I want one! Conveniently, my spectacularly crappy Razr died recently, so I have an excuse to get a new phone. Woo!