Macgasm

I love singing when I’m a passenger or driver in the car. On the nearly 3 hour car ride through the Pocono Mountains to my in-laws, I have to have something to entertain me through the ride as my husband takes the wheel and I keep him awake by screaming on top of my lungs. (Hey, at least he tolerates it.) I’ll be perfectly honest: the iPod touch, to me, is a music device before it is a device that plays games and takes notes. Therefore, having great music is incredibly important, and having music I can sing along to is priceless.

But I don’t really want to sound ridiculous when I’m singing. And hey, do you? Don’t you want to know what you’re singing so you don’t fudge those words? Lyrical Premium (iTunes link, $0.99) is able to do make it easier for you to look like a brilliant singer who has a terrific memory. Using your iPhone’s connection or wifi, Lyrical pulls song lyrics from LyricWiki.org and displays them on your screen:

There have been times when I’ve caught myself in a song not knowing what to sing next. I’ve been using my Treo instead, and with Google’s help, finding those words. Lyrical is a GREAT alternative. Fortunately, there’s also a free version in case you want to see how incredibly powerful the app is before you take the plunge and buy it.

While incredibly powerful as a lyrics engine, there’s room for improvement. As an example, Lyrical has offline browsing for songs you have played, which is especially helpful for those of us who have iPod touches and don’t have unlimited wifi. I especially will appreciate that when I’m stuck smack in the middle of the Delaware Water Gap on that long car ride! But it would be incredibly awesome for Lyrical to traverse through your entire music library and grab all the song lyrics when you are online (by request, I suppose), instead of having to manually play each song to grab the lyrics. To that end, I’d be curious to know what would happen if the ID3 tags were modified after the lyrics were pulled. Are the lyrics tied to an ID3 tag or are they stored separately?

Further, it would also be great to make Lyrical a standalone MP3 player that operates like the iPhone/iPod touch music app. In a way, this already is possible — you can play a song from Lyrical and it will pull the lyrics for you. However, when the song stops playing, it’s over. I happen to prefer shuffling my music and listening to more, and if I’m in Lyrical and start the music, I don’t want it to end after the song is done. It seems that the only way I can get my music continuously is to start the Music app on the iPod first, which is not incredibly intuitive. Still, though, that’s the way to get the music playing forever — and I’m currently leaving it running to get as many lyrics to as many songs as possible. With the number of songs in my library, this will take about a week.

I love Lyrical and hope that there’s more to come from here. If music is your thing, and singing empowers you, get Lyrical. You won’t be disappointed.

Giveaway: See the screenshots above? That’s the kind of music I fancy. I’ll be giving away a code to Lyrical Premium to one lucky person who can guess a song I have on my iPod. Will it be you? Comment away! I have one code, so if more than one person guesses a correct song, I will randomly choose the winner.

If I was going on a road trip all I’d want to take with me is a nice compact tablet.  It’s starting to sound like this might be more likely than not in the next couple of months.  The internet is buzzing over a couple big players announcing that Apple will be releasing a ten inch tablet in September.  Could imagine getting a heavily discounted tablet with your purchase of a laptop or desktop in the Fall.  Students will be tripping over themselves to throw money Apple’s way.  Hell, I’ll be tripping over myself to throw another 800 bones Apple’s way (price speculation). If it plays movies, has decent battery life, and lets me read books, then it’ll be worth the price just to mess around with it (Husbands or Wives everywhere might disagree).

The Financial Times is saying it’ll be able to do all the aforementioned tasks, and that Apple will be touting the devices as a modern day Vinyl case that all of us music lovers can use to relive our glorious wonder years, staring at album art, and reading the liner notes.  Hall and Oats have never looked so good.  We can all get lost in Oates’ ‘stach now.

[via Wired]

I’ve had my iPhone 3GS for about a month now and I put a case on it as soon as I set it up. One of which is the Griffin iPhone 3G Wave Case. After having used it on a daily basis for a month, I thought I would share my thoughts on the cases.

The Griffin Wave 3G cases come in packs of two. Black and Green are the two that I have. The cases comes in two parts, one for the back, and one for the front. The cases also come with a front piece of plastic to protect the screen.

The case fits together in an interesting way. On the bottom half of the back of the case there are portions that cut out to allow the top half to snap in place. See the two photos below for an example.

Top Half:

Bottom Half:

The top half of the case an area cut out for access to the buttons on the left hand side, and is molded to cover the bottom half of the case. The top half is the exact inverse of the bottom, excluding the left hand side. The top right hand side of the case is molded to fit underneath the bottom upper right hand side of the case. This is the way that the case stays in place without falling apart.

With all of that said, the two separate colors seemed to be manufactured differently, or at least one is better than the other. The black case seems to hold up better. It has fewer dings and has more of the coating for translucency. The green case I got does not seem to be able to keep the translucency coating on the case. Maybe it’s just the cases that I got that has an issue. The loss of translucency coating does not affect the function of the case, but it does detract from the design.

According to the Griffin Website the Wave Case 3G works with both the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS. On my iPhone 3G the case fits snugly around the iPhone. However, there is a very noticeable gap when I install the Wave Case 3G on my iPhone 3GS.

Overall this is a good case, it’s sturdy and it definitely does protect the phone. On the Griffin site, as of this writing, the Wave 3G cases are only $9.99 each.

If Apple Inc is looking to revamp Snow Leopard’s Finder they should take a deeper look into PathFinder. There’s an excellent opportunity to bring the finder up to date in the upcoming release and I’d like to see them seize that opportunity. But, it’s doubtful that we’ll be seeing Apple changing things up enough for it to substantially alter the current paradigm of the Finder, so it would be very smart to get some hands on time with Path Finder. It’ll change the way you think about the Finder’s abilities–It really can be a one stop shop for productivity.

Tabbed finder Windows, Application launchers, and Size Browsers.

Tabbed Finder Windows is where it’s at!

It has been talked about a lot, and Apple has ignored the call entirely, tabbed Finder windows would save many headaches for a lot of people. I would love to minimize the multitude of windows floating around my desktop, as I’m sure most of you would! Eliminating the finder’s pollution would be the first major step towards less clutter. PathFinders M.O. is getting things done quicker and more efficently, so logically, they’ve implmented an excellent tabbed functionality–they’ve even given you the ability to drag and drop files from one tab to another.

Application Launcher

OS X has spotlight, which does a pretty damn good job searching for files and applications, but some people with older Mac’s and limited system resources find that it can be a bit of a hog and bogs down the system quite

a bit. There’s ways to disable it (not for the faint of heart), and now that there’s a whole slew of Application Launchers for OS X it’s starting to look like Apple needs to give users a simple way of disabling spotlight entirely. Path Finder has also thrown its hat into the ring with the other Application Launching software currently on the market. If any of the other features in Path Finder have you considering the software then the Application Launcher might be something that gets you over the hump towards making the financial investment. It’s sleek and simple. It’s light weight, and it doesn’t kill older systems.

Size Browsers

Need to track down run away folders or files? Path Finder has that covered as well!

It’s a finder window with file and folder sizes thrown to the left of each item in the window. It’s going to let you track things down super quickly.

The Main Application Windowpanes

If you don’t believe that this application puts everything at your finger tips you can check out some of the tools they give you right out of the gate.

Processes and Selection Path

Want to see what programs are running and bogging down your system? Want to be able to force quit them without having to leave a finder window? Path Finder does the trick again.

The Terminal

How about doing some terminal magic on the fly? Maybe change some permissions? Check.

What Path Finder Does well.

The whole software bundle does one thing exceptionally well, it gives you the information you need immediately. It gives you tools you need to be productive, and really takes the pain of system maintenance out of the computing experience. It’s unbelievably good at what it does and it certainly helps to declutter and organize your system better.

[image via toopie]

Wow.  What a fantastic and innovative idea. JetSet ($0.99, iTunes link) has a fantastic appeal to it that simply won’t tire you out. And while it is a game for airports (read on), you can enjoy it from the comfort of your own home too.

As travelers, nobody envies the TSA security personnel who have to scan your luggage to make sure you’re not bringing anything illegal onto your plane. Imagine being in the position of the security guy. Your job in Jetset is to scan all incoming passengers’ luggage and remove all articles of clothing or items packed that are not permissible on the plane. One moment, shirts won’t be allowed, so you’ll have to strip your passenger, and the next moment, they’ll be allowed again. If he’s still naked, you’re going to be penalized. It’s great fun to race against the clock and make sure you’ve gotten your passenger’s prohibited items removed (or replaced if the rules change mid-turn).

But the best part of Jetset is the part I can’t experience just yet until I actually go to a few airports myself. As part of Jetset’s awesome appeal, there are over 100 airports that you can unlock “souvenirs” for — that is, when you are actually in the vicinity of the physical airport, you’ll be able to play with specific souvenirs. How cool is that? You can get gold, silver, and platinum souvenirs as well — just like a frequent flier.

But that’s not all. The game ties into a Facebook account where you can trade, share, and bask in the glory of your scored souvenirs.

Amazing. This game has me craving more, and I can see myself wanting to play it for a long time. I can just envision myself in 15 years on an antiquated iPod touch at the Natrona County International Airport unlocking the souvenir from there for the first time.

[Download This Episode]

In this episode, Josh discusses intellectual property theft on the App Store.

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

Isotope (iTunes link, $0.99), a space shooter game that has some amazing graphics, is growing on me. Many claim it’s like Geometry Wars, but I can’t tell you for sure as I haven’t played that. (If you’re a fan of that kind of game though, I’d suppose this one is also for you!)

For the most part, you’ll see yourself just trying to kill some massively nasty ships in space. But what makes this game fun and continuously enjoyable is that you have specific goals — better ammunition, a more powerful ship, etc, and a way of progressing through the galaxy in Campaign mode. The desire to be stronger than your enemy combatants should keep you playing for awhile. Of course, mastering the controls is another thing:

I found the default device controls rather difficult at first. Perhaps that’s because I am a lefty and my brain is wired differently. Fortunately, this is addressable: you can actually click on your target rather than use your DPad to aim in the general direction of enemies. Otherwise, the default settings for movement and for shooting your enemies is the DPad (your left thumb controls movement, whereas your right thumb controls aiming). You can also control your movement via the accelerometer, but I found that absolutely confusing — I’m just not that good at the accelerometer!

The other thing about controls is something you really can’t fix: if I’m idle and want to use two thumbs to shoot at ships coming at me, I have no way of doing this. Wouldn’t that be great? If you’re so immersed in the game for this to be an issue, you know that the game is great to play. That isn’t their fault though, but it shows what you’re thinking of when you’re surrounded at all sides by the enemies.

In Survival mode, your goals are different – you just have to keep killing baddies. It’s fun and incredibly immersive.

All in all, after you get the hang of it, Isotope is a very enjoyable game. The graphics are splendid, and the rush to escape or to kill those enemy ships is sure to make your adrenaline pumping. There’s even a free version available so that you can try before you buy. The one big request I’d make of the Isotope team is to make lefty controls, swapping the thumbs for those of us who might want to relax our fingers, but if not for that, it’s still a great game to play.

After doing some research on clipboard enhancers I stumbled across an application named Stuf.  It has an excellent premise that I thought I should pass along.  Essentially it’s like every other clipboard application you can add files, folders, text, and images, but where this one stands apart is that you can share your clipboard over Bonjour.  What this means is that you’re able to share content across a network really quickly.  Can you imagine how beneficial this would be in an office setting?  Need to share aTPS report?  Copy it, and then let your boss get it himself, he should earn his pay to, right?

The really cool thing is that it supports multiple clipboards with some settings to keep some stuff private:

You can have any number of clipboards you want. So, I could make a clipboard called “My love letters”, and choose not to share it. This means that the clipboard is not available on the network at all, and only on the Mac you are using. Alternatively, maybe I’ve got another clipboard called “Customer quotes” which I’m happy to share with my colleagues, but maybe not other people on the network. In this case, I’d share the clipboard on the network, but I’d set a password, which I would only tell my colleagues.