My name is Jason, and I’m a WebOS developer!

Background:
Ever since I started using smartphones, I have always wanted to create applications for the phone that I was using at any given time. From Blackberry, to iPhone, to Droid, to Palm Pre Plus. It was never about striking it rich like many have done with their mobile apps (not saying I wouldn’t like the extra $); it was always more about just the cool feeling of having something you created from the ground up running on hundreds, maybe thousands, of what is arguably a person’s most personal possession today: their phone.

iPhone Software Development:
I got an iPhone the day it came out back in 2007. Of course when the iPhone was originally launched there was no official SDK for creating applications, so there wasn’t much that could be done as far as writing apps, past jailbreaking and creating apps with the unofficial SDK. Flash forward to when the platform saw the launch of the app store and then you saw an explosion of developers writing applications for the device. Unfortunately by the time I finally got around to learn the languages necessary to create applications for the platform I was already on may way to the next platform, Android.

Android Software Development:
After getting fed up with the iPhone and finally feeling like Android was ready for prime time, I made the jump! After using the platform for a couple months and getting used to it, I again started the task of beginning to learn the languages needed to write applications on the platform. After getting a working hello world app going and all that, something interesting happened. I found myself dabbling in a new platform already! A platform that I thought had already died shortly after getting its legs. That platform was WebOS!

WebOS Software Development:
Plam’s WebOS really came out of nowhere for me. I had seen it and played with it briefly when it initially came out, and found it to be sub par. A short while later, I found myself at a Verizon store playing with the newly revved hardware and updated OS. I fell in love almost immediately! WebOS felt like the first mobile OS that was actually built with the end user in mind. It was completely intuitive, and I don’t mean like how the other guys say their OS is intuitive; this one actually is. Everything about the OS just felt right. It did what you wanted, and more importantly it did what you would expect in just about every situation. The multitasking was light years ahead of what anyone else was doing. Needless to say, I really like it, obviously. Anyway, I knew that this was finally going to be the platform I’d get an application on. I was so passionate about the platform that I had to be involved as more than just a user. I started by getting a WebOS book and attending Palm’s awesome Developer Days event at their headquarters with my fiancée. We learned a ton of great info there, got some more dev materials, including a FREE developer phone! A free phone? I know! I started writing a couple applications shortly after that, which ended up being a little over my head, so I toned it down and created an app that ended up being the first app I would submit to the catalog. (at the time there was a $99 fee to become a developer, and a $50 fee per application submitted to the catalog. Both of these fees are now waived!) The app was called USAF, and was an informational app about the United States Air Force for use by anyone, in the Air Force or not. It was a way for me to get practice and show my support for the armed forces, since I am a USAF veteran. Getting that app published in the catalog was a huge day for me! Not to mention when I started getting downloads. I was expecting (and would have been happy with) 50 total downloads. When the numbers were more like 1000 per week, I could barely believe the stats! A few updates to the app later, and I am still loving it! I simply cannot wait to see what happens to the platform with the recent acquisition by HP and 2.0 of the OS on the horizon!

If you have not seen or played with WebOS, please give a Palm Pre Plus a try. You won’t be sorry!

Why are you not using WebOS?

What smartphone do you use? Careful, some will judge you heavily based on your answer. The cell phone as we once knew it is dead, it’s all about the smartphone now. It is getting to be more and more rare that you see the flip phone of years past, and much more common to see a smartphone in its place. At first glance, there are a ton of options for the average consumer. You see advertisement after advertisement touting the superiority of one phone vs. another. The fact of the matter is, however, there are really only a few true contenders. Much like the raging war of the desktop platforms, the same is happening the mobile space. It comes down to four; Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s WebOS, and Blackberry. This may go to five if we ever see a Windows Phone 7 Series. To be honest, the rest are merely sub-par knock-offs of these.

I have used or owned just about every smartphone there is to date. Each of them has been good in its own way, but at the same time, many of them were lacking significantly. Before the iPhone and Android, your choices were Blackberry, Palm Treo, and Windows Mobile (hardly worth mentioning; yes it was/is that bad of an experience). I myself was a diehard Blackberry user back then; they really had the market locked with their addictive qwerty keyboard bricks. Blackberries really were an addictive experience, hence the term “crackberry”. These phones, compared to today, were very limiting, but for the time they were an amazing breakthrough.

With the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, the game was officially changed. This marked the smartphone revolution. I was, of course, one of the many in line on day one to spend $600 for a phone that, when you look back, didn’t really do very much at all. With the introduction of the iPhone, we all expected the competition to step up and show us some really amazing devices, but sadly, this was not the case at all. The scene turned into a bunch of companies trying to make “iPhone killers” by simply copying features, and usually not very well. No one was innovating. To be honest, I don’t think they were even trying, relying more on false advertising and trickery to move these crappy devices off the shelves.

In October of 2008 Google decided to throw its hat into the ring and compete in this space. They released Android running on the G1. This was potentially the first true competitor to Apple and its iPhone. “Potentially,” being the keyword there. The G1 was met with somewhat positive reviews and attention; however it was obvious that Android in its initial release was very beta and was going to need time to get up to popular demand.

In January 2009 at the Consumer Electronics Show we were shown another company step up to the challenge. Here we saw an announcement from a company that many forgot about or gave up on, a company that was struggling to stay afloat, a company that needed a home run or would risk certain death. That company was Palm. Palm had been hard at work on their new platform, and on that day, they unveiled WebOS. Along with this announcement came new hardware, the Palm Prē, and an amazing new accessory, the Touchstone charging station. This charging station was the first mainstream consumer charger to acheive wirelessless charging through the use of electromagnetic induction; with the added bonus of not needing to house your beautiful phone in a nasty, and very bulky, third party case. All of these announcements were very well received and caused quite a stir of excitement. Unfortunately, the story did not end as well as it started. With a poorly planned launch time (a few days before the iPhone 3GS), low stock count in the stores, somewhat flakey hardware, and a carrier that really didn’t seem all that excited about the product (Sprint); WebOS and the Palm Prē were quickly dismissed and swept into the gutter.

A year later, Palm was back at CES to announce a refreshed line of hardware and updates to the WebOS platform. They announced the Prē Plus and Pixi Plus, with revved up internals and a better build quality. These freshly updated lines also got carrier upgrades, moving to Verizon, and later AT&T as well. Even with the new hardware updates, software updates, and added carrier choices, people are still failing to recognize what this platform has to offer.

I truly believe that the WebOS platform by Palm is the best thing no one knows about. When every other company is spending 90% of their budget on marketing and 10% on innovation of the product, it feels as though Palm did exactly the opposite and spent 90% on innovation. Every aspect of the platform and phone feel as though someone actually thought it out and used it before committing. The user interface of WebOS is such a pleasure to use and navigate. You get exactly what you want every time.

On all the other platforms I always found the need to hack/jailbreak/root the device to make it truly what I wanted it to be. This never ended well; it was always a pain to update to the latest software builds, and usually made the phone less reliable. With WebOS, there is none of that. Palm embraces developers and open source like no other company I have seen. Android says they are open, but compared to WebOS, they are as closed as the iPhone. With the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android, the operating system feels as though it was not built for you. WebOS, on the other hand, feels very organic, like it was made to be a true extension of you. WebOS works for you, rather than against you. WebOS makes using a smartphone a joy again, rather than a constant headache. If you are not 100% happy with your current phone, there is a way to be: give WebOS a try and see what the world of smartphones is supposed to be like.

Goodbye AT&T Voicemail, Hello Google Voicemail!

I have been using Google Voice for a couple days, and I think it is time to step it up! I have been looking into ways to more tightly integrate my new Google Voice service in with my phone. There are a couple of key areas to focus on when trying to seamlessly integrate Google Voice with your cell phone. Phone calls, Voicemails, and Text messages. As you of course know, I use an iPhone; more specifically an iPhone 3G (at time of writing), so I will be working to integrate with that. In time I suspect an Android phone will integrate with Google Voice seamlessly. Hell, they might even just give you a Google Voice phone number when you buy a Google Android Phone.

Stage I – Voicemail
I really like the voicemail in Google Voice, with its ease of use, ability to listen anywhere, and the transcribing features. Before today, if someone were to call my iPhone and I didn’t answer, they would get my AT&T Voicemail. Now don’t get me wrong, Visual Voicemail on the iPhone is great, but nowhere near as powerful as Google Voicemail. Now you may ask why not just give everyone my Google Voice number and problem solved right? Well, yes and no. It is going to take a while to get my new number circulated to everyone, and in the meantime it would be nice if I could start receiving all my voicemail in one place. There is also the problem of relaying text messages between my cell phone and Google Voice, but there will be more on that in blog posts to come. Anyway, back to the matter at hand: voicemail. I needed my iPhone number to go to my Google Voicemail when I don’t answer, and that is precisely what I have done. Here is how I did it.

Some of you iPhone users may know about things like Field Mode Testing which is a diagnostic tool that you can get to by typing *3001#12345#* on the dial pad in the phone app followed by pressing the call button. Nothing too special there, but a similar method to this is used to change where callers are sent when you do not answer your iPhone. Now, if you type *#61# followed by the call button, you will see a screen like the screenshot below, which shows you where your phone is currently forwarded to for voicemail. This is an AT&T central receiving center for AT&T voicemail from what I can tell. In case the regular number isn’t the same for everyone it would probably be a good idea to write this number down, just in case you need to revert back for some reason. The next step is for making the switch. Go ahead and fireup your dial pad again and enter the following:

*61*1<your google voice number>*11*<voicemail delay in seconds>#

If your Google Voice number was 555-555-1212 and you wanted your phone to ring for 20 seconds before going to voicemail it would look like the following:

*61*15555551212*11*20#

That’s it! Your iPhone will now fwd to your Google Voice number and subsequently your Google Voicemail when you don’t answer your iPhone.

Hope this helps you. Check back for additions to integrate the rest of the services more tightly.

As always leave comments, questions, and feedback in the comments below or send me an email twothirtyam@me.com


iPhone Skype app: a secret information gathering alliance?

Time to get all conspiracy theory on you! This may be way out in left field, but I am just shooting from the hip here and telling you what it looks like to me on the surface.

It seemed to take forever but a couple weeks ago we finally got Skype for the iPhone! Sure it took longer than it should have but what on the iPhone doesn’t? Well, after the first install, we came up against the app crashing upon starting, consistently. Well long story short, it turned out to be some kind of incompatibility with Jailbroken iPhones and MobileSubstrate. So we were back up and running just fine after a MobileSubstrate update. So it was MobileSubstrate? Well no, take a look at the lengthly article by Saurik on the matter.

So fast forward to today, a new Skype app update, cool, so I install it. Upon launching the app, I get the following message “This version of Skype is only supported on unmodified iPhone OS 2.2″ which you can see in the screen shot.

Bottom line, what is this app doing that no other app is?
Why is this particular app so different in the way it works?
Do they not work with the same SDK that everyone else does?

I really hope this turns out to be no big deal and I have blown it way out of proportion to be honest.

With all the talk of actions being taken to make Jailbreaking “illegal” and so forth, I don’t want this app to turn into a fact finding mission for Apple/AT&T to begin shutting off service for iPhone users that are “breaking the rules”.

Comment below, tell me I am over reacting…please :)

(the app seems to work ok, but is this the beginning? Because obviously if you have Jailbroken your phone, you know that you are not going to get technical support on anything)


Twittering in Mexico!

10 months. 6500 tweets. Addicted. Yes.

Ok, now that I have admitted it and it’s out in the open, lets move on. :)

My girlfriend and I went on a vacation to Mexico for 8 days. It was a fantastic trip!! I had been gathering up gear that I was going to need, during which I realized, I would be without the normal means of communication I have now. Internet everywhere I go, iPhone in my pocket, and so on. To normal people, this would be ok, but my addiction to bandwidth wouldn’t allow it! So instead I formulated ideas on how to twitter while being disconnected in mexico (for a reasonable amount of money). Now in all seriousness, I wouldn’t die if I couldn’t twitter (hopefully), but I took this as a challenge / project of sorts, just to see what could be done. Lets get into the details a little, here are the ideas I had..

Options:
- Peek e-mail device (possibly hacked to work outside USA).
- Unlocked / Jailbroken iPhone 3G w/ Mexico SIM card.
- Laptop with rented 3G Card.
- Rent a mexico cell phone.
- Laptop with WiFi (if available).
- No twittering at all. not an option ;)

Right away, let me kill of some of these options. Obviously no twittering at all was not an option, or why would I be writing this! Secondly, WiFi was non existent to say the least!

Ideally, the Peek device would have been perfect. It is cheap, simple, and used cell data instead of WiFi. If you setup an email gateway to sent tweets through email, you are set. The problem is that the unit is locked down to only work with the T-mobile SIM that it came with, and since the SIM is blocked from roaming it made the device completely useless.

Next we have my iPhone 3G. My iPhone is unlocked so all I had to do was get a local Mexico SIM. I got said SIM from a company called Movistar. The problem I found with getting SIMs in Mexico is that they are all pay-as-you-go, so they didn’t seem to have any that included cell data. This knocked out any hopes of using iPhone apps to twitter. Instead I was left with only SMS as an option. Great huh? well yes and no. Twitter uses a US short code which doesn’t work from mexico, so I had to setup a SMS gateway to pass the tweets through. This was the only method I tried that actually worked for me reliably.

On a last note, there was 1 single ethernet cable in the place we were staying that worked most of the time, although it seemed to have the slowest DHCP server on the face of the planet, so that was an option as well, sort of, although it didn’t allow for mobile twittering

Long story short, if you can’t get international data, SMS is totally the way to go!


International Cell Phone Network (cell min vs. unit)

It is 2009, and time to fix the problem of cell phone companies. It most likely needs no explanation, since everyone, and I mean everyone has been screwed by their cell phone company at least once, but more than likely multiple times. I’m not just talking about them doing something unfavorable directly, but indirectly as well. I will be more focused on indirectly here, but feel free to vent your direct instances in the comments below. :) What do I mean by indirectly? How is that possible? Well, look at your bill, pretty high isn’t it? Doesn’t really seem to be a fair price does it, for what you are getting. I am kind of getting off on a tangent from what the overall point of this post is, but it ties into what I am going to expressing soon, I swear!

So as far as the “fairness” of bills go, I want to pick on a couple of sections in particular. Minutes, Data, ETF, and Text messages.

Ok, now lets get into it. It is now 2009, and cell phones are now the defacto standard for communication for a lot of people. More and more people are dropping land lines in favor of cell phones, for many reasons: cost, ease of use, and convenience. This is great except when you look at what you are getting for the price you are paying. It seems to me that every part of the cell phone market is advancing except the business model of the “providers”. (Well battery technology isn’t keeping up either, but we can talk about that another time.) I don’t think that you can argue that cell phone providers aren’t working together to keep profits at a maximum, with little care given to the consumer. Arguments can be made that the minutes are “fair” but when it comes to data (which as a user group has exploded in recent years) we are getting ripped off big time! Generally as much as $60 a month. Along with this $60/month, we used to get truly unlimited data, not bad right? Well now that we as consumers are actually using the data, there is now a cap of 5GB in most if not all cases, so they can tack on some of their outrageous overage fees on us, just like with minutes.

Lets also not forget the, what should be illegal, act of charging you a fee to stop doing business with their company!? Sure sounds like extortion to me! Ever heard of a protection racket? Exactly. You have to pay off a lot of people (lobby much?) to have the ability to charge customers a fee for wanting to leave your terrible company. The worst part about it, is that they all do it, and they are all for the most part, equally terrible. What makes it worse is that they seem to all be in communication with each other and appear to be price fixing, simply because they can. One company charges X for a service, the next week, the other company changes the same. Where is the competition? What happened to earning customers’ loyalty through great service, instead of an extortion fee?

Finally, and the reason behind this writing, we as people are becoming more international, we are finding the need to have our phone work wherever we are at any given moment in time. Between the grossly expensive “international plans” and poor interoperability between carriers, this is no easy task. I am proposing we change from the old model of minutes to a newer model that is more aligned with our global society: units. For this example I will say that my Home Zone is the United States. The system works like this:

You will have a designated “Home Zone” which is the country where you will be primarily using your phone. You will purchase a plan from your carrier, but instead of getting lets say 1000 minutes per month, you receive 1000 units. Now with that said, when you make a call in your Home Zone, you will be assessed 1 Unit for every minute of talk time. Fairly straight forward so far right? Here is where the magic happens. Keep in mind your Home Zone is the United States, now you want to go to London. Normally you would have to either pay outrageously expensive roaming charges OR with this new way of doing business you simply pay (in units) the rate (in units) for that country, or Zone. So for instance lets say there is an agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom that when users come from the US to the UK, they will be assessed 1.5 Units/Min. Now, without any pain to the customer, all the customer has to do is travel to their destination, turn their phone on and make a call. Units will be deducted from their balance.

Worldwide, carriers already have agreements in place for roaming, so why not simplify the process for everyone? Now I know this would mean the poor phone companies, who are living in the past, would not be raping the profits that they are now, which is why this idea will never come to fruition. But just think of the possibilities of a truly worldwide cell phone network, the possibilities are endless.

I would love to hear any additions or comments you have about this idea. Throw them down below in the comments section.

Thanks everyone, enjoy your txt messages that are $1000′s/MB. :)


Top 20 Mac OS X apps/utilities (and why)

The other day I had one of those moments where I realized why I switched to Mac and why I love the platform so much. It is simply put, the nearly perfect apps that are developed for the platform. There are a lot of apps out there for all platforms that do one thing or another “pretty good”. It is however rare, to find an app that is simply perfect. Although after looking through my Applications folder, I find a number of apps that are just that, perfect. This is my chance to take a little time and share some of my favorites. I would also like to give you a little background as to why they are so perfect. I realize that nothing is perfect, and there will be plenty of forum / comment trolls to flame me, calling me a “fan boy” or ready to point out all the “flaws” and bugs these apps have. Well without wasting too much time, let me address those folks, screw off and go back to living your sad and pathetic little life behind your 1337 screen name. Anyhow, for the rest of you, lets get onto the apps shall we? :)

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1Password by: Agile Web Solutions. If you are looking for a state of the art password manager, this is your app. 1Password is not only a password vault, but has plugins for all your favorite browsers, and with the simple click of a button, it will recall your logon info and sign you into all your favorite sites. All of this is done safely and securely. A really nice app!

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Adium by: Adium X. With all the IM services out there and all your friends and family all on different ones, you don’t want to have 3 or 4 different IM clients running. Not to mention, none of the “official” clients are very nice anyway. Well Adium solves all of that. Adium is a multi client IM app. You can add all your IM accounts into this one app and Adium does the rest. Not to mention Adium is very customizable and has many plug-ins. The absolute best in class app on the mac!

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Coda by: Panic Software. Whether you are just learning to code web pages or are a seasoned pro, Coda is the app for you. Dubbed “one window web development”, Coda is laid out brilliantly to ensure you are as productive as possible. They really looked at how the workflow should be, and molded this beautiful app around that. Worth every penny!

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HandBrake by: HandBrake. Want to take your DVDs with you on the road but don’t want to lug them around? Want to have all your movies in MP4 format on your media server in your house? This is your app! Handbrake will take your DVDs and rip them into many different file formats and types of compression to fit your needs. I personally rip everything into H.264 MP4s for the Mac mini media center we have. Works like a charm every time and it is beyond simple. Oh and I almost forgot to mention it is open source and FREE!!

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MarsEdit by: Red Sweater Software. This app is for anyone and everyone that has a blog. It is a great app that allows you to compose all your posts offline, save drafts, edit and then post them with the click of a button. I used this app to write this post in fact. It works with a multitude of blog engines; I am using it with WordPress. Clean layout, a must have if you want to blog from anywhere.

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OmniFocus by: Omni Group. It’s all about GTD (getting things done) these days, and as far as I am concerned, this is the way to do it! If you are familiar with the GTD ideology or just want to stay organized, GET OMNIFOCUS! Get your tasks out of your head, organize them, and do them. Simple as that. This is truly brilliant software.

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Quicksilver by: Blacktree. “Act without doing.” Quicksilver is a launcher that allows you to be more productive in launching apps than anyone really should be. To be fair, launching apps is about 1% of what Quicksilver is capable of. All I can say is, get this app and let the addiction begin. Once you start using Quicksilver, you will wonder how you ever managed without it!

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Transmission by: Transmission Project. Transmission is by far my favorite BitTorrent client. It has a super clean UI, and is very easy to use. It has a good amount of preferences for setting up your BitTorrent workflow as well. One other feature it has that I love is that is has a webserver in it that will allow you to control your active torrents from any web browser. I find this to be very useful, and use it from my iPhone quite often; really slick.

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Transmit by: Panic Software. Transmit is what you need if you do a lot of FTP transfers. Transmit is made by the same folks that make Coda, so right there you know it’s awesome. Transmit is a 2 pane style FTP client. It has “your stuff” on the left and “their stuff” on the right. It has a very simple and intuitive layout, making it easy to use. The layout also makes your FTP jobs much faster and more productive.

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Twitterrific by: The Icon Factory. If you use Twitter then check out this little app. There are a ton of Twitter apps out there, but so far on the mac desktop this is the one I like the best. It is very un-intrusive and sits up in your menu bar. It has a ton of ways to customize alerts. The free version works exactly the same as the paid version with the exception of an ad every once in a while, which isn’t bad at all. They also have an iPhone version which works equally well! Oh, and don’t forget to follow me ;) http://twitter.com/heartagram

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Aperture by: Apple. If you are an avid photographer or a new amateur photographer (like me), this is the app you need for photo manipulation and management, everything from color management to rating images. It also adds the ability to add rich detailed meta data to your images. There is a tethered shooting option as well, to shoot and add pictures to your projects automatically. It is a little pricey for the amateur at $199, but once you use it and see its power, you will find it to be totally worth it. Free Aperture Trial.

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AppZapper by: AppZapper. Need to un-install apps that you don’t need anymore? This is what you want. AppZapper does one thing and it does it very well. Open AppZapper, drag your unwanted apps onto it, and it will find all associated files with that app. At this point you ZAP it, and the app and all associated files will be gone!

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Cha-Ching by: Midnight Apps. Managing your finances is not always the easiest thing. But it can become a little more friendly with the help of Cha-Ching. This little financial app is the easy to use alternative to Quicken and the likes. It’s very easy to use and intuitive. If you want something simple to use or want to replace your current software that has too many “features,” check out this little piggy.

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Evernote by: Evernote Corporation. This is by far the best application for note taking and storing. It is the most cross platform app I use by far. It works with Mac, Windows, iPhone, Web browser, and Windows Mobile! With this app you can take your notes on anyone of those clients and all your notes are stored in the cloud and synced everywhere, making your notes accessible anywhere, anytime. You can tag your notes, and even add voice and pictures. One of the coolest features is the ability to OCR text from pictures! You have to check this app out for your note taking needs.

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Growl by: Growl Team. Growl is a notification system for OS X. Quite simply, Growl lets Mac OS X applications unintrusively tell you when things happen. It is a must have for everyone using OS X. It is free and beyond useful!

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Overflow by: Stunt Software. If you are like me then you hate when you have too many things in your dock! Although it would be handy to be able to have more apps in reach like they are in the dock. Enter Overflow: with overflow you have a single icon in your dock, that when clicked, will present you with a fully customizable grid of all your apps. You can set them up in categories or how ever you like. It is a fantastic companion to Quicksilver, when you know what you want but the name isn’t coming to mind to type it. Click the Overflow icon and you are launching your app in 2 clicks!

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Perian by: Perian Project. Perian, dubbed “the swiss-army knife for quicktime” is a Quicktime component that adds support for many video file formats. If you have a video file that won’t play because you don’t have the correct codec, install Perian, and chances are you will be good to go.

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Simplify Media by: Simplify Media. This app lets you listen to your music from practically anywhere! Simplify Media lets you listen to your home music collection in iTunes over the internet from almost anywhere. I use it to listen to my home iTunes collection while I am at work. It all streams seamlessly through iTunes, it’s like the music is on that computer. There is also an iPhone client that lets you listen on the go. One other really cool feature is the ability to add up to 30 friends’ libraries, so you can listen to their music in the same way. This gives you practically an infinite song library! Breakthrough app.

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Visual Hub by: Techspansion. I was a little hesitant to put this one on the list because the developer has stopped work on it and the app is effectively dead :( But because this app is SO great, I am putting it on the list anyway. This app, plain and simple, is THE video transcoder for the mac. It can transcode practically anything into anything else. If there is any way for you to still get a copy of this app, do it, you won’t be disappointed!

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Connect360 by: Nullriver. Ok, since you can’t actually get that last pick anymore, here is a bonus pick! This one is for all the Xbox360 owners out there. This little app allows you to use your mac as a media center extension so you can stream music, videos, and photos to your Xbox360 from your mac. It does exactly what it says and does it well.

There you have it, I hope you enjoyed the list and got some good info on what software to get for your mac. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. Also, if you have picks that you like better than any of the ones I have listed here, send those along as well!

iTunes 8 + iPhone 2.1 = Getting There

I have had an iPhone since version 1.0, and although the iPhone is great, it has been a rough road. The first generation iPhone was absolutely amazing, considering what its competitors were at launch. I was in line for 6 hours on launch day to get mine, and it was completely worth it. After a few months, much of the wow began to wear off after I started noticing what it didn’t have. It didn’t have MMS, video recording, or the ability to install extra applications. Along came Jailbroken applications, which did alleviate much of this. The problem with that is that jailbreaking wasn’t really an option for the “everyman”.

Throughout the 1.x releases Apple added a FEW extra features and fixed bugs, but that was pretty much the extent. It wasn’t really until the 2.0 release that we began to really have the “New Platform” that we had been promised. Problem though, 2.0 had a TON of bugs and flakey apps. Apple hit us with a couple incremental updates: 2.0.1, then 2.0.2.

Some of the biggest issues with the initial 2.x releases were:
- Horrible battery life.
- Insanely long backup times. (hours)
- Very crashy apps

Flash forward, and we have iPhone Firmware Version 2.1

Version 2.1 finally feels like a finished product. It fixed a lot of the battery life issues, reception issues, and overall crashiness.

Along with iPhone 2.1 came iTunes 8. With these 2 updates combined, we are definitely seeing a product that feels finished. I am in no way saying that as customers, we are getting everything we deserve, but it’s getting closer. We still are missing major features that are available in just about every other phone on the market.

I would love to end this article by saying that Apple is heading in the right direction and steering the ship toward the island of happy customers, but this is very much not the case! Apple has been making moves lately concerning the iPhone that frankly scare the hell out of me. This once dream phone is starting to turn into a locked down nightmare. With Apple seeming to block whatever they want for any reason and letting through apps that have little more value than a gimmick, it leads me to wonder, do they want this phone to be what it could be, what it should be, and what we deserve it to be? Or rather have they been in first place in this market just long enough to lose sight of the real goal?

Being a loyal user, I am hoping much of this is going to blow over fairly soon and they will realize the error of their ways. If they don’t, they are going to have a very serious problem of users switching to other options. More importantly perhaps, if they keep screwing their developers, they aren’t going to have enough content to keep the few users that do stick around.

If the problem does continue, or heaven forbid gets worse, it will make getting the word out that much more important. I hope I won’t have to, but just in case, I am starting a project called Apptimism. This project will be for developers to get the word out about their dealings with Apple. It will also be a place for developers to have a pool of beta testers to choose from. Additionally, it will lend itself to promotion of apps. The main reason for this project is to help the end user, the customer, get what they deserve. This in turn will give everyone a better overall iPhone experience.

Best of luck to everyone and here’s to Apple doing the right thing!

UPDATE 10/1/08: Apple has removed the NDA! Looks like things are starting to turn around.

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Quick iPhone App Review: Dynolicious


Today we look at an iPhone app called Dynolicious. A Dyno in my phone? what? how does that work?

The idea of an in car dyno is nothing new, G-Tech is a popular product in this arena, but at $200 – $300 it’s kind of pricey for the average person with curiosity. The iPhone is the same price, but hell you already have that. This is only an additional $13. The iPhone has a great set of accelerometers in it, which is what this app uses to measure HP.

This app measures the following and does it pretty damn accurately I must say:
* 0-60 MPH
* Other Speed Tests (0-10 MPH through 0-100 MPH in 10MPH increments)
* Quarter Mile Elapsed Time
* Quarter Mile Trap Speed
* Elapsed Time and Trap Speed for standard intervals (60′, 330′, 1/8 Mi, 1000′)
* Lateral G’s (current and peak)
* Braking G’s (current and peak)
* Wheel Horsepower
* Estimated Engine Horsepower

Below are some screenshots of the app. For 13 bucks it’s a cool little gadget to mess around with if you are a car enthusiast, or just curious about your cars performance.

Also check out Garage419′s video: Dynolicious vs. G-Tech

dyno-screen1.jpg dyno-screen2.jpg dyno-screen3.jpg

click images to enlarge.

Rating: ★★★★☆