We all know the feeling. Hearing that great song on the radio that you’d give up your Mac to remember the artist and title. Or come across this great new song playing in someone’s car or in the mall that you’d give up your iPod to know the name of. Well, these days all you’d really need is your iPhone, a wifi connection and Listen.

TUAW’s Erica Sadun, lead purveyor of free crazysexycool apps and utilities for the iPhone has come up with with another winner.

Imagine you hear that mysterious song somewhere with wifi, and you happen to have your iPhone. Fire up Erica’s Listen, put your iPhone near the audio, wait a few seconds, and you get the artist, title and album the song came from, right on the multi-touch screen. Sounds too good to be true.

Listen samples five seconds of audio, then goes online to consult a database, matches the sample to the music and spits back the song info. Is that crazysexycool or what?

I used it in the office today, and people went oooh and ahhh. Granted, it doesn’t catch everything. It caught maybe three out of every five (it’s still a beta, after all), but sample a reasonably popular song and it’d get it every time. And it’s not really a new idea - there are cellphones with this sort of feature out already for a while now. But hey, who cares? This one’s sure to make it into the Doodler’s Top 10 Favorites for 2008.

The Listen beta is available for your iPhone via Installer beginning today.

Far be it for me to start blogging about Windows topics in a Mac blog, but this one is a special case. Yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Bill Gates, Microsoft Chairman and CEO gave the Keynote speech. Which, incidentally, is also his last one as he is retiring from Microsoft.

It’s interesting to note in comparison with a Steve Jobs Keynote how an MS Keynote would progress. For one thing they have more gimmicks and entertainment mixed in. They have to work harder (I guess because they have less interesting points to share), and there is a lot of creative stretching involved as well. Nothing to write home about though.

Our favorite gadget and tech sites gave it equal time and had online real-time coverage of the Bill’s CES Keynote, just like the Macworld Jobs keynote speeches. It’s kinda odd reading though, specially if you’re used to following Macworld coverages. Check out the live reportage of Gadgetell and Engadget.

One of the more entertaining moments is a seven-minute produced clip about Bill’s last day at Microsoft, with appearances by Matthew McConaughey, Jay-Z, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Jon Stewart, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and even Apple stalwarts Bono and Al Gore (Apple board member). It’s one of those things Apple could have done, but it’s a bit surprising Microsoft did it. Gizmodo’s Brian Lam says “this video makes Bill Gates look cooler than Steve Jobs”, and I agree (up to a point: Bill wore a pink shirt and a purple sweater to the Keynote).

I enjoyed the video immensely, and you can watch it for yourself here.

Bill, you old coot, we’re going to miss ye.

Macs 1, Windows 0. Here.

The entire Mac world is going nuttier than the fruitcakes we got for Christmas that we aren’t touching, now that the Macworld Keynote is just a little over a week away.

Normally I don’t entertain these pointless rumorfests and try not to jump on the bandwagon, but I must admit, the fever is high and I’m starting to have a temperature myself. I think the heightened expectations are fueled by the advent of the iPhone and the related tech that came with it, notably the multi-touch interface. Which is why a multi-touch Mac is one of the popular, though least likely, candidates for the “one more thing” shtick of Steve this year.

A site called AppleTell has floated a roundup of predictions, from the Very Likely (Mac OS 10.5.2 and the sub-notebook), the Possible (iPod HiFi and 3G/16gb iPhone) and the Improbable (multi-touch tablet Mac).

The three things that have me in a tizzy are the updated iPhone, the multi-touch Mac and the subnotebook, particularly the latter. A lot of my friends who want to upgrade to a newer laptop have been holding out for Macworld just in case a Macbook Lite comes out (me included). Small form factors seem to be a big deal for some Mac users - personally I miss my old 12″ Powerbook and have been looking for something like it for a while now.

(While I wait, I’m currently satisfying my UMPC craving with an Asus EeePC running Xandros, a Linux variant, for the moment, and I am so enamored with the lightness, portability and convenience of the thing that I actually started a new blog for it, just for fun. If reading it won’t hurt your Mac sensibilities, check out my new EeePC blog here.)

I know one thing for sure - I’m staying up late for Macworld 08 live online coverage by our usual suspects next week (in Manila it starts about 1AM on the 16th, or thereabouts). And the following morning, me and other Mac blogs will be writing up a storm for sure. I love this time of the year.

For the full Macworld rumor roundup, click here.

The folk from ModMyiPhone are alerting iPhone users about a malicious install that might mess up your units.

Apparently if you have jmwiki.com in your list of sources in Installer, an app called “113 prep” that purports to be an update of Erica Sadun’s utilities and implies that it prepares your unit for the 1.1.3 firmware is actually malware. When installed, the app will just say “shoes”, and when you uninstall it it takes with it important files from the /bin directory, and breaks other working apps like utilities from Ms. Sadun, and apps like sendfile.

Please do not install 113 prep and remove the JMCO source jmwiki.com from Installer.

(Via MMi)