Macgasm

It’s that time again — time for another Macgasm giveaway. Mophie is providing one of our readers with a free Mophie Juice Pack. Josh recently took one on vacation with him to Europe, and had some positive reviews, which you can read here. All you have to do is join the Macgasm Facebook group and post the link to the giveaway in your profiles. The winner will be randomly drawn and posted to the Macgasm Facebook group on March 6.  Good luck!

[Download] [02.6 MB] [0:05:50]
Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner

In this episode, we discuss the possibility of Amazon eBooks coming to the iPhone.

There’s a benefit to installing software well after everyone else on the planet. You get to see it in a light that no one else can see, the hype machine and marketing speak is no longer relevant. You get to spend a couple extra weeks pumping yourself to a hysteria inducing frenzy, and the moment you install it and try it out, you get to see that it’s a giant cash grab. It’s as simple as padding the bottom line, and there’s absolutely nothing in the package that warrants the update. Talk about a giant letdown. iLife 09 sucks.

Well, it doesn’t suck as in a OMG it’s broken kind of way. It sucks in a OMG I could have stuck with iLife 08 for another year kind of way. I was lucky, it only cost me ten dollars for the upgrade because I bought a brand new laptop that shipped with the 08 version on it. My wallet is thanking me at this point. Don’t get me wrong if you were using the iLife 06 package still then this would be as good of a time as any to upgrade to iLife 09, but if you have iLife 08 I would wait until iLife 10.

iPhoto 09: Faces, Places, and Maps OH MY

The faces addon is pretty cool, the places functionality is pretty hot, online sharing is something that should have been built into the package from the beginning. Sounds like features worth upgrading for? Sure. If you have extra time to tag faces in a trillion photos, if you have the patience to manually place all of your photos on a map then this by all means give the program an update. But chances are unless your a professional photographer (you’d be using better tools if you were), then the only thing this application does is take up more of your time–something I can’t afford to give my crappy pictures anyway. On a side note, what digital camera comes with GPS support? Professional cameras need not apply. Your iPhone? Pft. That barely qualifies as a camera.

Online sharing was broken for me. I couldn’t upload to flickr because I had to many “sets” and I needed to upgrade my account to a pro account. What a load of crap. I don’t want sets. I don’t need sets. What I need is to be able to upload a random photo here and a pathetic attempt at a photo there. Just upload my damn photo, don’t tell me i’m inadequate. I’ve gotten enough of that from professional educators over the years. I don’t need my software playing that role now too.

iMove 09: An actual return on investment

If you edit a lot of home movies you’ve probably slurged, or better yet pirated, one of the final cut packages by now or even some of the Adobe products. But, for most of us, we exist in a space between needing a 200-1500.00 software package and needing something to chop up my latest attempt at being Gus Van Sant. Sadly, Van Sant doesn’t do screencasts, and I don’t do epic feature films. I use iMovie and he probably uses an entire studio to edit his films. The precision editor makes it worth the price of admission for me (Remember I paid $10.00), but if you’re more of a photo person then again I say iLife 09 is a giant waste of money for you. Video stabilization is pretty cool and really helps with the gag reflex when you’re showing people small clips of video from your latest holiday, but no one wants to watch those movies anyway, with the exception of family members, so do you really need to stabilize them to begin with?

Garageband: Oh look I can take music lessons

I already play the guitar, so I don’t really need lessons, but it’s a great place to get started if you were thinking about giving it another shot. Oh wait, you have to pay for them. Never mind. It’s not added functionality, it’s more of an added revenue stream. It hasn’t added anything to make your music sound better which is what I’d think an upgrade would do. Fail.

iWeb…sucks

iWeb sucks and there’s nothing about it I care to even talk about. Now that I think about it. I don’t think they really added anything to make your site better. They should probably focus on cleaning up the terrible wysiwyg code that they leave behind.

iDVD: it’s all about the themes

You buy the update because you need new themes for your home DVDs. You buy the update because you edit an occasional wedding video and your clients are starting to get a little suspicious of the menu with the curtains flailing in the wind because every single wedding dvd they’ve seen has it. Again there isn’t really anything new to iDVD. I would really, really, really, would like to seem them give you the ability to create your own menus with ease. That would be awesome. That would be something I would be willing to pay for.

As it stands if you need any of the above features then this updates for you, but after evaluating what we actually got from this release months after everyone was hyped about it, I’m not all that convinced that everyone needs to run out and get the new copy. Evaluate your needs first, make the purchase second, you’ll thank me for it in the long run.

I have a secret crush on Reddit.  I don’t tell many people about it because most of the people I know frequent Digg daily.  I prefer the community over at Reddit.  When I got word that the Reddit team was releasing an iPhone application I was pretty stoked about it.

A lot of the comments in the Apple store talk about how buggy and crappy the application is compared to most of the other iPhone applications.  I don’t get the logic.  I’ve yet to download an application from the AppStore that doesn’t crap out on my at least once.  Seriously, every single one of them, at some point or another just dies for no reason at all–it has led me to think it’s more the phone than the individual applications.  Reddit is no different, and has crashed a little bit more frequently for me.  It works amazing on the 3G and Edge networks I’ve been on over the last couple of days, but for some reason when I’m on a wireless network the application chokes on itself occasionally.  It’s annoying, but it’s far from a deal breaker.  Safari dies on me almost every single time  I use it, but I still keep going back to it to surf the web.  I’ll probably still keep going back to Reddit’s iPhone application to get my tech news as well.

The site acts in exactly the same way as the website–you pick your category and you get a listing of the most popular stories.  You can vote them up and vote them down, comment on them, bookmark the story, and open the stories in Safari.

They’ve also added a nifty little feature that acts more like stumbleupon, than it does reddit.  The refer to as ‘Serendipity’, and I find myself using it when I’m trying to kill some time. How does it work?  At any moment , while in the Reddit application, you can just start shaking your iPhone. The program then goes and finds an interesting link for you.  Loads the page, and away you go.  You might look ridiculous when you’re riding the bus to work in the morning, trying to get your internet fix before your nazi of a boss ruins your day yet again, but, it is well worth it and it’s fun as hell and addicting.  You can check out the Reddit team’s official review in the Youtube clip below

On Tuesday Apple released the public beta for Safari 4, a major revision of their web browser.

I have downloaded the beta and will be using it today, and over the next few days as my main browser, and will update this review as I go.

Before I begin I have to admit that I typically dislike Safari, I find it to be the weakest part of the iLife suite. I don’t know why, as there is no one thing I can put my finger on, other that it’s cold, barren look. I have always leaned towards using Firefox over Safari and in December made the switch to Opera. This does give me experience with all three major Mac browsers but I will admit a previous prejudice against Safari.  With this in mind, I’ll try to leave my previous experiences aside and be impartial.

Apple has added a number of key features in Safari 4.  They have introduced a tool similar to Opera’s Speed Dial, where your most visited or user selected pages are displayed as thumbnails for easy and quick navigation. Cover Flow is now intergrated as a tool to browse bookmarks or history.  There is a new feature for the indexing and searching of  browser history. Apple has also released the new Nitro Engine for Safari, which they claim makes Safari the fastest browser yet. Safari 4 now comes in a Windows native format and also ships with Developer Tools.

One change that they’ve made and may be the hardest to adjust to is that they have moved the tab bar above the address bar. I find this an interesting move because it sets Safari apart from the other web browser’s GUIs in a strange way. Usually Apple has a very good reason for this, so we will see how it goes.

If there’s anything you’d like me to take a specifically closer look at, feel free to ask away in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

First Impressions.

After about 2 hours of use I can confirm that on some pages, Safari 4 is noticeably faster than Firefox, Opera or the previous version of Safari.  Very media rich sites, such as Gizmodo’s main page, loaded faster as did html only pages such as Reddit’s main page. Pages with an even mix such as Macworld or Cnet are about the same.

The Tab bar on top has definite advantages but as expected, it’s really disorienting. It’s only become a problem so far when a link opens in a new window rather than a new tab. The window opens so that it appears to be in the tab that you started from. However, this is a minor issue that is only a habit to break.

The Search Bar’s autofill is much more powerful. It now provides a split up list, similar to Spotlight, that has previous searches and suggestions based on what you have typed so far. Also, the Address Bar performs much more like Firefox’s Superbar than previous version, by searching the text, name, address and tags of a website as you type it in.

So far, so good. I am much happier with this version of Safari than any previous, depending on how today goes, I might make another browser switch.

Update 2: So, I’ve been using the Safari 4 Beta for about a day now doing my regular browsing and trying to get a good feel for it. The improvements are all good, solid worthwhile changes that I don’t think anyone will get too hung up on. Moving the tab bar is a bold move, but, it seems to work and uses screen real estate a little better than before. The implementation of Top Sites is great, and if you haven’t used Opera before I think you will be surprised at how much you come to rely on this feature. The Bookmarks layout change is also a good one, I think the inclusion of Cover Flow is a little extraneous, but I find it a little gimmicky no matter the implementation.

I’ve have run into a few bugs so far, the biggest of which is the inability to hyperlink in WordPress’ online client, which is why there are no useful links in this post. The other has been one of my frustrations with Safari for a while. I never want links to open in a new window, ever. I prefer having scads of tabs over even two windows, however, I can’t find how to alter a links set behaviour to ‘Open in New Tab’, rather than ‘Open in New Window’. There’s always the option of command-clicking but there’s no way to change this in the preferences, as there is in Firefox or Opera. I watch all my television online and this may actually be a deal breaker for me, but I doubt most people would even notice.

Overall, a great revision that keeps Apple bumping shoulders with all the best browsers. The new features are logical, useful steps towards an ideal product but don’t quite get it there yet.

So, that’s my review of Safari, but guess what? Omni made their browser OmniWeb free so now there is a new gun in town, I will let you know about that one next week.

Update 3 – I have found one essential feature missing from the Safari 4 Beta. When quitting with multiple tab open or if (shocker) your browser happens to crash, Safari will not resume your previous session, does not provide a dialogue to save these open tabs or anything. I found this out after I had about 20 tabs open to various news sites with a line of tabs of things to be read from reddit. Wouldn’t you know, Safari crashes(not sure why, might have been the number of tabs) and when I relaunched it only takes you to your Top Sites. When doing a quit by menu it does not save either. This is a major Fail for me, but may not be a big issue for someone more organized.

I have to admit something to you all. I have a terrible, nerdy and to some, an entirely confusing habit. I spend a lot of time on my computer, mostly reading a lot of news and researching my various interests. But, I also find that I like to watch movies and TV shows pretty much constantly. This becomes a problem on a 13.3 inch screen. I typically end up having a tiny video screen in the top left corner and as much as I can read crammed into the rest of my screen.

But no more thanks to Trans Lucy 2 by Startly Technologies.

‘Trans Lucy is a DVD player that lets users float the video display above other applications and adjust the translucency so they can see and work with documents “œbehind-the-scenes.”

Trans Lucy is a radical new way to watch DVDs on your computer. Unlike other computer DVD players, Trans Lucy lets you float the video display above your other applications. Trans Lucy goes one step further by allowing you to make the video display translucent so you can still see and work with your documents that are “behind-the-scenes.” You will love being able to watch movies and keep working at the same time. But this goes beyond just entertainment. A user can watch educational DVDs while working on course material or use Trans Lucy for a myriad of other similar instructional purposes. The ability to multi-task is greatly increased with this patent pending technology.’

As such, I’m watching Scrubs full screen as I write this. My girlfriend says it makes her sick but to me it’s another way to cram as much media through my eyes as possible.

Startly Technologies bills Trans Lucy 2 as primarily a DVD player but it also handles any file that Quicktime can. Through the use of plug-ins and extra codecs most video formats are supported, such as .avi, .mp4, .m4v and divX.

If you’ve ever run into a situation where you HAVE to get that term paper done but watching Lost somehow takes precedent; this is your perfect solution.

Download Demo or Purchase Trans Lucy 2 here

Startly Technologies Mainpage

Apple released the first public beta of their web browser, Safari. Safari 4 beta has a few changes, both in appearance and speed.

The first difference is the location of the tabs for browsers. The old location for the tabs was just under the bookmarks bar, where now the tabs are located at the top of the screen. Which is different. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad yet, as I’ve just started using it.

The second difference is the ability to drag tabs into a new windows. Let’s say for instance you are browsing macgasm.net and you find something you want to learn more about, but you’ve already got 4 or 5 (maybe more) tabs and you don’t want to mix up all of the content. Just Click and Drag the tab into a blank area, and poof, a new windows appears with that tab. Now you can keep better control of your content without having to open a new windows and do any copy and pasting to get everything situated properly.

The last improvement made is in terms of speed of the browser. Not just in terms of javascript processing, but in terms of general speed. With the limited amount of time that I have had to play with the browser I have noticed that it does seem to render pages faster and general speed of the browser is vastly improved. I haven’t made it crash yet, but who knows, I can find a way to do so.

The biggest thing to keep in mind is that this is a beta. There will be problems and it’s not generally recommended to run beta software on a production machine. So, just keep that in mind. But if you’re brave feel free to give Safari 4 Beta a go and see the differences.

Here are the requirements for Safari 4 from the Apple.com/safari/download website

* Any Mac running Security Update 2009-001 and Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 or Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11
* Mac with an Intel processor or a Power PC G5, G4, or G3 processor and built-in FireWire®
* 256MB of RAM
* Top Sites and Cover Flow on Mac OS X Tiger require a Quartz-Extreme compatible video card. More details

You can download the beta from Apple’s Safari Page. It is available for both Windows and Mac.

[Download] [03.9 MB] [0:08:20]
Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner

In this episode, Josh regales us all with his experience with the Mophie Juice Pack.