Macgasm

[Download This Episode]

In this episode, Josh talks about improvements in the 3G iPhone’s camera.

[02.7 MB] [0:05:40] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner]

Hey, Macgazmos!

How are things? Have you seen the new iPhone 3GS? A compass? My God, the thing’s a witch!

Me, I’d love one, but the dogs need to eat and peanut butter doesn’t grow on trees.. Well, actually… ANYWAY, I’m broke, so I’m sticking with my iPod touche. I don’t like talking on the phone anyway, and seeing as how I’m unable to be away from email or the Internet for more than 10 minutes without convulsing, the touche does me just fine.

I did, however, upgrade to the 3.0 software. Pretty good deal there, although us steerage folk had to pay $9.95 to get it. Nonetheless, I am impressed. The ability to cut and paste has been sorely missed, as has typing an email in landscape mode. Now when I compose email, I actually LOOK like I’m using some sort of smart phone, even though I’m really a sub-human touche user, snarked to death daily, by you surface-dwelling 3GSers.

But I digress.

I have a iPod touche story for you Apple crunching minions of the one called “Jobs”. It involves me (duh), my touche (double duh) and the NYC transit authority (not so duh). So, here we go…

I’m always on some sort of deadline and I’m always late – My lack of regular posts on this here web portal should be your first clue. So, a few weeks back, I was visiting some friends in NYC and we were to take in a Yankees game at the new Yankees Stadium. I was beyond excited about seeing the new shrine… So excited in fact, that I neglected to write my scripts for that week of comics due into the syndicate. This is a problem as they hate surprises and a week of strips filed without review is a big surprise.

Just before we were about to embark onto the 4 train for said journey to baseball nirvana, my email blips and I have a short, but clear reminder from my editor: “Scripts needed in the next hour”. Crap. Well, sorry, but I ain’t missing a Yankee game for this. My thoughts raced as to what to do. Can I sit at my laptop and eek out six comics in six minutes? No way, Jose. It’ll take my ancient MacBook six minutes just open Word.

Think boy, think.

I could fake a fever, have my wife email and say I’m so sick I’m not even funny, nor could I be funny, even if pumped full of NyQuil. Nah, I’ve used that card too many times. They’d see right though it like grease on a Famous Ray’s napkin.

Just when it seemed all hope of Derek Jeter turning two was lost, I reached into my pocket and pulled out li’l touche (pet name). Of course! I could write the scripts en route. It would be a challenge, the trip is just about 45 minutes… But it could be done. In fact, I was so jazzed by my idea, that it now HAD to be done. If executed correctly, I would be a hero of my industry, able write professional-grade gags from anywhere!

My plan was two fold, I’d finish the line up in the mail app, and because there was no service in the subway, I could attempt a “send” and it would put in the drafts folder, giving me saved copy. When I arrived at the stadium, I’d use their wifi to send the scripts to the syndicate. I could not lose.

A Fake Rockstar writes funny in a subway

Well, it was a lot harder than it sounds. The distractions were many and with only 3 stops from the stadium, I had only 4 days of comics written. There was no way I’d make it… Until we had a God-send… A ten minute track delay got me through the last two and all I had was a quick review and some editing, when we arrived at 161st Street. We walked into the park and into the huge new Grand Hall, where I would attempt my “send” part of the plan. I seached for wifi, using the “wifi track” app. There were a ton of Yankee public wifi options in the list! One after the other… FAILED. None of them worked.

GAH.

The next ten minutes were a blur of experiencing the new, awesome park and frantically trying to find SOMEONE, ANYONE, who could solve my wifi dilemma. Finally, after two mindnumbing loops of the entire park, I found the info desk – right in front the gate we had entered. I explained to the nice young page my problem.

“Oh, the public wifi isn’t online, yet.” She kindly quipped.

DOOM.

I was toast. End of story. I ended up having to send the scripts when we got back into the city, four hours later. My editors were sour, but got over it.

But hey, I used one of the greatest advances in public technology to accomplish something only few would attempt… Nay, DREAM OF attempting.

Clearly, I still rock.

Yours in public comedy, from any venue,

Corey “FRS” Pandolph

You can share your favourite iPhone apps with your friends, and I don’t mean sharing in the pirate way.  Appsfire lets you parse your iPhone apps to a web interface that your friends can check out.  It’s a pretty neat concept.  While I’m sure most people might not be able to find a use for it on a semi-frequent basis, some of us however tend to get asked the same questions over and over again. We get asked about our favourite iPhone or Touch applications quite frequently here.  This might be a cool way for use to refer people somewhere without having to retype our answers out constantly.

It should probably be noted that this application doesn’t support jailbroken applications at all, and I’m not sure if they plan on supporting that. Check out the demo video.

[Download This Episode]

In this episode, Grant talks about Delicious Library.

[02.9 MB] [0:06:10] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner]

‘Beach ball’, ‘Pizza wheel’, ‘Spinning pinwheel’, ‘Rainbow ball’, ‘That fracking thing again?!?!’, call it what you will, but it’s actually called the Spinning wait cursor.

I can’t really find any other information about this following short, other than what’s been said on the site I found it from.

It’s called ‘Study for Stone Waiting Sculpture’ and it’s by Brian Kane who is a designer, Emergency Broadcast Network co-founder, and Vujak co-creator.

Life sometimes feels like its been halted by the ball which brings impending doom to many Mac users daily. I know I’d like one of these on my wall to just sit and stare at sometimes, if it were real.

via

Usually the 30 second sound bite from a track isn’t a good representation of the song as a whole.  But, it’s usually good enough to help you track down a song when you only remember the melody.  I spent most of today reminiscing about the 90s and started trying to track down some old songs that I knew well enough to recognize on listen, but not well enough to remember the track name.

Much to my chagrin, I stumbled on the best thirty second sound clip on iTunes (There’s some cussing!).  Funny thing is, I don’t see an explicit tag anywhere!  Apps have been rejected for far less than this, so maybe we should all play offended.

Click to get the sound preview through iTunes. High Five?

We’re as excited as the next guy about Snow Leopard, but we’ve been trying to keep our enthusiasm in check while details trickle down to us.  The one thing I’m currently ecstatic about is the new dock features that will be coming our way.  Minimizing stuff and hiding in in the current Leopard dock is a bit archaic.  I mean who wants to minimize stuff one window at a time?  What we really need to do is extend Expose’s features to the dock.  Apple has beat me to the punch with that thought, and they’ve been moving to implement some pretty kickass features for Snow Leopard.  You can check out a video below!

I apologize for the crappy music!

Jamendo is a service that provides Creative Commons licensed music. Of course this music is all free. They provide any genre you can think of. Most of the music is something that you would probably never hear on the radio either. Recently though they have released an iPhone app that you can actually stream music from. The app is free and works on Wifi, 3G and Edge. But how well does it work?

I have been using the app for about a week and have tested it both on my iPhone 3G and my 1st gen iPod Touch. I have to say on the iPhone the app works pretty well. The only time I had any issues with in on my iPhone is when I left 3G coverage and went to edge or from wifi to cellular networks. At that point Jamendo actually would stop working and I would have to manually start it again. But that is really just a small hiccup. Any other time I had no problems with it. I never had to wait for buffering while on a cellular network. To me that was probably the most impressive part.

Running Jamendo on the iPod Touch was a different experience though. I had a lot of buffering issues while running this on the touch. This could be for many reasons though. My touch is a 1st gen model, so the wifi is a bit slower. My touch has also been rather flaky with about every thing in recent months. My iPhone had no problems while using the app on my Wifi network at home.

Overall, I say this is a must for any one that loves music. Especially if you enjoying discovering different types of music. The user interface is simple and easy to learn, even my father could learn to use it. So go out, download it and give it a try.

More Info:

Jamendo iPhone app [iTunes Link]

Jamendo