Macgasm

On March 3, 2009 Apple pushed the Amazon Kindle Application for iPhone out the door. This application will be a great boon for the e-book market.

Being a Kindle 2 owner, I decided to install the application. The registering of your iPhone with your Amazon Kindle account is a snap. All you have to do is start up the application and enter in your Amazon e-mail address and password.

Immediately when you login your iPhone or iPod Touch will be registered, much like mine has been, shown here.

From this page you can ‘deregister’ (a better term would be unregister) either your Kindle or you iPhone / iPod Touch. You can also deregister your iPhone / iPod touch directly from the device.

Once you login you are presented with all of the items that you have in your archive, meaning the items that you have purchased from Amazon and not the items that you may have uploaded to your Kindle via USB.

Once you download your archived items again, it doesn’t cost you anything since you’re using your own bandwidth, you can begin reading. If you have already begun reading a book on another Kindle enabled device, you will be presented with the option of synchronizing the two with the latest point. This information is maintained by Amazon and is synced up, as long as your two devices have an active network connection. As shown below.

Despite being another outlet for Kindle readers, there are a couple of problems with the application and the lack of features.

The first of which is that there is no way to sync offline content with your iPhone or iPod touch. Yes, I’m sure if you have jail-broken your iPhone it’s only a matter of time before you’re able to run a jail-broken version of the Kindle application and will be able to put anything you want on the iPhone or iPod touch. For us legitimate users, there’s no way to do this.

The second possibly pitfall is that there is no way to shop the Kindle store. Yes, I understand that you can do this via Safari web browser, but you should be able to do this via the iPhone application, just like on the actual Kindle. This is Amazon’s thought on ‘How to Get books’.

I understand it’s a 1.0 application and can only hope that they end up adding more features to an application. I hope they do continue support and development in order to provide us Kindle users with better options.

Overall it’s a good application for those who are on the fence about buying a Kindle and do not want to plunk down $360 to go ahead and buy an actual Kindle. The download is free and is available from the Apple App Store. Give it a try, and if you don’t like it, so be it. There are definitely a bunch of free books that you can download so it’s not like it’s going to cost you anything. It is currently only available in the United States, just like the everything else related to the Kindle.

[Download] [02.2 MB] [0:04:40]
Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner

In this episode, Grant talks about VLC, Quicktime, iTunes, DVD Player, and Adobe Media Player. Josh adds that Perian is a great codec package for Quicktime.

[Download] [01.8 MB] [0:03:50]
Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner

In this episode, Josh discusses the usefulness of Apple’s Keychain password manager.

[Download] [01.1 MB] [0:02:10]
Hosted by: Grant Brunner

In this episode, Grant talks about word processors on the Mac. He likes to use Pages, but Microsoft Word, Scrivener, Bean, and Google Docs with Google Gears are also great options.

AppShopper is a website  that gives you an easier, browser-based way to search the iTunes App Store.

The website has many of the same features as the App Store on your iPhone; categories, top paid/free etc. The basic difference however is size and ease of use. The App Store is plagued by the fact that browsing through the offerings is…lacking? painful? a total shambles? Appshopper puts the search functions, lists and updates in a clear single page format. Big friendly buttons and search feilds make it a far, far better way to find Apps…if you’re near a computer.

www.appshopper.com

If you’re not afraid to edit some .nib files, and if you have the Xcode bundle installed, you now have the ability to enable a hidden Safari 4 menu that allows you to tweak it tobe more like Safari 3.  You get the old progress bar back.  You get the tabs back where the should be.  Essentially you get all the “win” and you cut out all the “crap”.  Normally we would accomplish these things by hacking away in the terminal, but that’s no longer necessary.  Ideally we would have access to these things in the application preferences already, but,  Apple likes locking us down after all. The fine folks over at pointum have put together a modified .nib file to enable the menu you need to make the changes.  It works just as advertised.

So Apple announced an entire refresh of their Desktop line. Everything from the Mac Minis, to the Mac Pros, and even some other peripherals like Time Machine, Airport Extreme and new keyboards. Let’s delve into each of these updates and see what Apple’s produced for us, shall we.

Mac Mini:
Let’s start with the Mac Mini. The prior update to the Mac mini line was in August of 2007 with the introduction of the Intel Core 2 Duo with Intel’s GMA 950 graphics chipset. The base Model came with a 1.83 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 80GB Hard drive, and the Combo Drive. The Maximum you could configure for the Mac Mini was 2.0 GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, 250GB Hard drive, and super drive.

The new Mac Minis start with a 2.0GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and 120GB Hard drive. They both come with the Nvidia 9400M graphics chipset and a superdrive. There is no more combo drive option for any Mac. They are configureable up to 2.26 GHz, 4GB of RAM, and a 320GB Hard drive.

The new Mac Minis come with 5 USB ports, 1 Mini-DVI, 1 Mini DisplayPort, and one Firewire 800 port. The Firewire 800 port can work with a Firewire 400 device, all you need is a cable to do the conversion. The prices for the Mac Minis remains unchanged. Starting at $599 and $799 for the two models. There are a couple of differences between the two Models. The first is that the Base Mac Mini has 1GB of RAM, and 160GB Hard Drive and 128MB of shared video memory. While the higher end one starts at 2GB of Memory, is only configured with a 320GB Hard drive and has 256MB of shared video memory.

The Nvidia 9400M chipset means that the memory is now DDR3 running at 1066 MHz. This means faster performance and it can utilize the features of the Nahelem chips.

iMacs:

Apple has decided to drop the 20″ displays down to just one model.

The previous model was a 2.4GHz with 1GB of RAM, 250GB Hard drive, and ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT with 128MB of dedicated video memory.

The new 20″ Model has a 2.66GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB Hard drive, and the Nvidia 9400 graphics chipset with 256MB of shared video memory. It comes with the glossy display, just like the previous models. It is configurable up to 8GB of RAM and a 1TB Hard Drive. The 8GB of DDR3 1066 Memory will set you back $1100. So I’d recommend going with the third party RAM on this one.

With having only one 20″ Model, that leaves room for three 24″ iMac Models. The $1499 model has a 2.66GHz processor, the same as the 20″ Model, along with the NVidia 9400M graphics processor and the same 256MB of shared video memory. The only difference between the 20″ and the 24″ models are the base hard drive size, memory size and Screen size. Other than that, they are both identical.

the Mid-range 24″ iMac that goes for $1799 has a slightly better set of specs. It boasts a 2.93GHz processor, with 4GB of RAM, and a 640GB Hard drive all standard. This iMac comes with a Geforce GT 120 with 256MB of dedicated video memory. The main difference between this model and the $1499 model is the configurable graphics cards. This model can support the Geforce GT 130. The GT 130 has 512MB of video memory as well as the ATI Radeon X4850.

The top of the line 24″ iMac has a 3.06GHz processor and 4GB of Memory. The Geforce GT 130 is the default graphics card, with the ability to upgrade to the ATI Radeon 4850. Both of these have the 512MB of dedicated video memory. This model only comes with a 1TB hard drive, there is no other option.

All of the iMacs have four USB 2.0 ports, 1 Firewire 800 port, a Mini-DisplayPort, 802.11A/B/G/N and the Dual-Layer Super Drive.

Mac Pro:

The Mac Pro also saw and update. There are two models, one Quad-Core, and One eight-Core Machine.

The Quad-Core model has a 2.66GHz processor, 3GB of RAM, and one 640GB Hard Drive. You can configure this beast up to one 2.93GHz processor and 8GB of memory (which would be a mistake).

The Eight-Core (or Octo) Mac Pro starts with two 2.26 GHz processors and 6GB of RAM. You can configure this behemoth with 32GB of memory, if you want. I wouldn’t recommend it, since the Nehalem chipsets are triple channel and should be installed in sets of three.

Both of the new Mac Pro models con be configured for four Geforce GT 120 video cards, four 1TB Hard drives, Fibre Channel and RAID and can support up to two 18X super-drives.

That’s it for the Mac Desktop, Early 2009, updates. It looks like those who were waiting for the Mac Mini and iMac updates got what they were looking for in an update. The odd thing is that the Mac Pros were not even rumored to be getting an update. So either this was something that Apple kept really hush-hush, or nobody from that group leaked any information.

[Download] [01.1 MB] [0:02:10]
Hosted by: Grant Brunner

In this episode, Grant discusses the merits of using an anti-virus application on the Mac. If you do decide to run one, take a look at ClamXav.