Archive for September, 2008

Posted on September 18, 2008 - by brian hamm

Twitter Site Updated

You may be stumbled onto the Twitter site tonight and thought to yourself, “hrm.. something feels different”. And you’d be right.

The guys at Twitter are starting to roll out a series of updates. According to Twitter, this round is purely cosmetic.. and will support some future (not so trivial) updates.

I like the new look. The ‘home’ page and site designer are definite improvements over the previous versions. Doesn’t look like they’ve spent any effort updating the ‘followers’ and ‘following’ tabs this around.

A good step in the right direction, though..

Posted on September 18, 2008 - by brian hamm

Follow Me

Normally, individuals will follow Mac companies/sites on Twitter to help stay updated on Mac software and related news.

As it turns out, TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is now following me.. as of 5 minutes ago. Interesting. Of course, they’re following 2500 other Twitter accounts as well, so.. ;)

Still.. thanks for the add guys!

Posted on September 15, 2008 - by brian hamm

Air Sharing - File Sharing For Your iPhone

If you have an iPhone (or iPod Touch) with 2.0 firmware, and wish you could use some of your iPhone’s free space to store a few documents.. consider your wish granted. Air Sharing, from Avatron Software, is an application you install on your iPhone (or Touch) and turns it into a WebDAV server. If you don’t know what that means, I’ll give it to you in english. Your iPhone is now a wireless flash drive :)

From your Mac, PC or Linux box, you connect to your iPhone the same way you connect to a file server. For Mac users, this is the Finder’s ‘Connect to Server’ under the Go menu. Enter your iPhone’s IP or Bonjour (network friendly) name and your iPhone will appear in the Finder’s sidebar, along with any other devices on your local net. The rest works just like you’d expect.. drag, drop, rename, open documents right on your phone.

Air Sharing supports documents from iWork, Microsoft Office, PDF, RTF, Plain text, Source code, Movies, Audio and Images. See the Avatron site for exactly which fomats are supported. An integrated help file will walk you through how to set up your Mac or PC to work with Air Sharing, and will explain all of the options.

Avatron is offering this fantastic utility for free until September 19, after which time it will cost you $6.99. You can get Air Sharing at the iTunes App Store.

Posted on September 9, 2008 - by brian hamm

Adium 1.3 & Facebook disconnect issue

Ok, so you’ve been running the new Adium 1.3 and have added your Facebook account. You’ll find that this works great.. a much better experience than chatting from the Facebook website. You’ll ALSO find if you have Adium connected and try to use the Facebook website, you’ll be logged out almost immediately.

The only solution for the moment is to (from Adium) click the ‘Status’ menu and select ‘Offline’ for your Facebook account when you want to use the Facebook website. Of course, the opposite is true as well..

There’s a discussion starting up at Cocoa Forge if you’re interested.

Posted on September 9, 2008 - by brian hamm

New iPods, iTunes 8

Moments ago, at Apple’s ‘Let’s Rock’ event, Steve Jobs lifted the curtain on iTunes 8 and some snazzy new iPods, just in time for the upcoming holiday season.

The nano is ‘tall’ again, but it’s curved.. even on the top. It now sports an accelerometer (more on that in a sec). VERY colorful. New headphones include a micro controller to skip tracks and a microphone for voice recording. Prices are lower.. with more storage. 8GB model is $149, and a new 16GB comes in at $199

The accelerometer works like it does on the iPhone and takes advantage of the nano’s new (old?) dimensions. Turn the nano on its side and you see the familiar cover flow interface to browse music. This is also how you watch video. And here’s a nifty trick.. want to shuffle your music/playlist? Just shake the nano to ‘mix it up’. Love that.

Taking aim at Sony’s PSP?

Next up.. iPod Touch. The new design is curved like that of the iPhone 3G and has a stainless back (ooh, shiny!). Integrated volume controls. It’s thinner than the iPhone. ‘Genius’ playist creation (more about this later). They also focused a lot on mobile gaming during the event.. looks like they’re going after Sony’s PSP. Models are 8GB, 16GB and 32GB.. $229, $299 and $399 respectively.

The iPod Classic remained untouched for this event. You may wonder why they still have a Classic. One word.. (hard disk) storage. You’re not going to find a solid state iPod with 80GB or 160GB. When companies are producing solid state memory at those capacities (and competitively priced), i think you may see the ‘Classic’ go by the wayside.

Real Genius.

iTunes got a full point update to v.8 and features a new browsing mode (grid). Cover flow is still there, but grid is better for viewing a whole lot of content at once. The new ‘Genius’ feature is essentially the evolution of smart playlists. It does what services like Pandora and Last.fm have been working on for a while now. Genius analyzes your music and finds/suggests similar songs from your library, or from the iTunes Store. You need to upload information about your library to the iTunes Store to participate. This is all opt-in and anonymous, of course.

Also new to the iTunes Store, HD television shows.. not just movies. TV shows in HD are $2.99, $1.99 for standard def (as before). iTunes 8 is free and available today.. check software update or try downloading directly from Apple’s site.