Macgasm

Evidencebelow.

Everyone’s going batshit crazy over the 3G S release, but no one’s noticed that the 3G update did something spectacular.  At least, I think it did something spectacular, and Twitter has confirmed my suspicion.  All this talk about the new 3G S camera specs, and no one has notice that the 3G camera seems to be turning in better photos than it did before the 3.0 iPhone OS update.  At first I thought I was crazy, but it seems like no matter how hard I try to take a crappy photo, they’re coming in clearer.

Anyone else noticing that the phone is taking better pictures now?

Evidence below.

I don’t want to hear about any GPS system for the iPhone that doesn’t include offline maps.  Hell, someone could release a free GPS navigation for the iPhone and I still wouldn’t use it if it didn’t include offline maps.  This weekend I decided to take a nice little mini vacation and head to Tremblant for some rest and relaxation.  Being Father’s Day on Sunday, I figured I’d head straight from Tremblant to Cornwall (My Parent’s Hometown).  I mean I had Google maps and my iPhone clearly showed me the way.  I made sure I had some information written down just in case things went south with my phone, and away we went.

As you can see by the Google maps attached below, I had two options. I could go through Montreal, or I could head to Hawksbury and then head south to Cornwall.  It looked simple enough, and there was no reason why I couldn’t shave off an hour of time by taking the most direct route.

It looks simple enough right?  Well, you see that nice bend in the road below? It was a disaster of epic proportions. Seconds after making the turn, I felt like I was in a rodeo. No exaggeration.  Two ginormous pot holes on a dirt road.  I felt like I had run over a dinosaur.  They came at us out of nowhere. My immediate exclamation, “Fuck that!”  There was no way I was embarking on a road that started off that way, so I figured I’d just find my way to the next closest town and readjust my directions.  Oh, wait.  No signal. Zero. Nada.  I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no idea where the hell I was going to go next, or how long it would take me before I could find some service.  It was a disaster.  My two and a half hour trip turned into a four hour trip and there was nothing I could do about it, because my piece of crap map on my iPhone didn’t have any maps stored on the device.  Lesson learned.

So, AT&T, and any other company out there thinking you can sell as a GPS application for ten bucks a month, without having access to offline maps, is seriously deluding themselves.  It’s not worth it.  Do the math. Approximately 120.00 dollars a year to access a GSP system that going to leave you high and dry when you need it the most.  Sounds like a crappy idea to me.

[Download This Episode]

In this episode, Grant talks about hiding your tracks on your Mac.

[02.1 MB] [0:04:30] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner]

Some people find it necessary to reply to emails in their entirety. There’s some benefits to that, but for most occasions it would probably be more beneficial just to reply to a snippet of text that someone is inquiring about.  We don’t need to see someone’s signature a million times in an email do we?

It’s quite simple to do, and you’ll find that it’s by far a superior way to ensure that your questions are being answered directly.

In Apple’s mail application, all you have to do is select some text that you want to respond to, then click the reply or forward button. This will attach the selected text in the body of the new email.

This also works on the iPhone in the Mail application, the difference here is that you use the copy and paste tools to  select the text, then you click the reply button.

Lets get more efficient!

It’s giveaway time yet again.  To keep things simple, just click that retweet button you see on the left there, and tweet what it tells you to.  That’s phase one.  Phase Two is to add us on twitter (we need to be able to get in touch with you if you win).

This time we are giving away the Griffin Clarifi. The Clarifi is made for the iPhone 3G and will fit and work on the 3GS. The Clarifi is outfitted with a lens that you can slide over your iPhones built in camera to take clearer and sharper pictures. This is the case designed to make Evernote even more useful on the iPhone

Review:

I have had the pleasure of having a Griffin Clarifi since it came out, and it is by far my favorite iPhone case. It is also the only case that I have on my iPhone 99% of the time. It only comes off when I am traveling and I need to use my Incase Power Slider. The Clarifi is made of polycarbonate and has a lens that slides over your iPhones built in camera. This lens is really the show stealer of this case though. The lens is designed to help enhance your iPhones camera. Making images clearer and more sharp. The case was designed to work with apps like Evernote and Barcode scanning applications. Of course I got it because of Evernote. The design of the Clarifi is nice and thin, it adds very limited bulk to your iPhone and you probably wont even notice it is on there. The lens comes in handy when you want to snap a picture of a business card are a receipt. You will get a nice clear image, which is near impossible with the unenhanced built in camera. The case also offers great protection of the iPhone and allows full access to all your controls and ports. If you have a charging dock, the bottom of the clarifi will come off so you can cradle the iPhone with out removing the whole case. This to me is the most essential iPhone case made to date. It is nice and stylish while also providing great functionality and usability.

Update: Our very own Jason Hamilton pointed out on Twitter that the clarifi works well with the 3G S phone and its macro capabilities.

Winner will be selected on July 4th

[Download This Episode]

In this episode, Josh talks about apps for your menu bar.

[02.5 MB] [0:05:20] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner]

So I was thinking about the update to iPhone OS 3.0: How come Apple doesn’t keep their applications up to date like the rest of the iPhone OS developers”? By this I mean how come we do not see more Apple application updates for the iPhone OS?

Maybe it’s just me, but I would tend to think that you would want to have the best possible experience for your users and provide the most stable, secure and top of the line applications to your users. I can’t seem to figure out why they do not use the AppStore to provide updates to their own iPhone OS applications.

I know it cannot be the whole Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) excuse, even for the iPod Touch users, since they could just not provide an update to anybody who doesn’t have the latest version of the iPhone OS. Those who do update to the latest OS Apple already paid their money and are provided the latest firmware updates to those users.

Could it be incompatibilities? Possibly, however you could just program the application to figure out what type of iPhone OS device it is, and provide only the specific functions that are available to the device. So if you have a first or second generation iPod touch some options may be disabled.

It’s not like updating the iPod application is going to break anything. Particularly since there are possibly some bugs within the application and it just seems like a waste to have to do an entire firmware upgrade, just to fix a bug. The same could go for the Messages, Calendar, Weather, and the rest of the Apple applications.

Now, I can see them not updating the base-band except through firmware because that might require some changes to other applications or other functionality. Any additional features that are added could also come through individual application updates; much like Apple’s current Mac OS applications.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like Apple should be eating their own dog-food and use their own Application store to update their own applications. If you have any clues as to why they do not update their applications more frequently, or other thoughts, just let us know.

Over the last couple of days, a few hacks have come out to enable tethering on your iPhone with your carrier. Some of these require using terminal commands. Now, if you are not a terminal junkie or not very familiar with the terminal, hacking through it can be a very bad idea. But this hack I am sharing is effortless. By going to help.benm.at on your iPhone through Mobile Safari, you will be taken to a site that will alter your carrier settings a bit. The nice thing is it does all the work for you. If you view the site on your computer, you will see the site is in German. This is not the case when you access it on your iPhone. Just a word of caution though, in some cases enabling tethering with this method has disabled visual voicemail. But this is reversible with a restore, or by a fix on the site.