Let it be a sign to tech companies everywhere! Canada love’s its tech, and Americans should stop under estimating us, we’re just as geeky as the rest of you!
Actually, we love our tech so much up here that Rogers has run dry on stock, and Apple’s iPhone’s are no longer on store shelves. It’s starting to sound like Apple can keep up with demand for their phone, and that shipments have started to dry up altogether. It’s not only a Canadian problem though, there’s reports of other countries falling behind as well.
People in Finland have a two month waiting period before a phone arrives. In Spain, it’s rumoured that telco’s have been trying to pawn off the 3G phones to those who wouldn’t know any better because the 3GS is sold out.
When was the last time a cellphone had that kind of problem? Looks like Apple produced a gem.
Boy Genius Report is getting the ball rolling today with some screen captures of iTunes 9 and its integration with the social media sites — in particular Facebook, and it’s pretty cool. But, if you take a deeper look at the screenshots, something has gone unmentioned in the article that is probably a lot more newsworthy, if you ask me.
Take a look at this screen capture, and the area I highlighted. Looks like a Samsung device doesn’t it? It could be nothing, but it sure looks like a Samsung YH-J70JL just underwent a sync and is asking to be ejected. If this is the case, then it looks like Apple is opening up iTunes 9 to the masses, and that other music download services better start to panic. Things might get messy!
Whether we like to admit it or not, we’ve all downloaded music at some point. Tags and album art don’t always match up the way we might like them to, and manually editing the file info is tiresome at best, and downright annoying at worst. Didn’t we invent computers so we could take mundane tasks out of our lives and do something a little more interesting?
I’m kind of cheating here a little because it’s an Air App, but I thought it was handy enough to pass it along to you.
Tidy Song literally tidies up your crappy media tags in the songs. Do you have a song by Sublime that’s labeled as Bob Marley? Everyone has one or two of those kicking around. Tidy Song fixes it. It also removes duplicate songs, fixes misspelled songs, fills in years and genre information, and adds missing album artwork. It’s beautiful.
The iTunes store is fantastic. I love that music, movies,TV shows and applications are always available to me. However, there are obvious flaws. I could go on for days about the flaws, but there is one that I feel needs to be addressed here: Tabbed Browsing. Let’s get one thing straight, the iTunes store is just a browser. It only browses one thing, but it is a browser nonetheless. We’re all familiar with the concept of tabbed browsing, and I’m sick of not having the option in the iTunes store.
It is almost impossible to comparison shop or browse effectively when you can only have one selection at any one time. Think of what a Utopia we’d be living in if we could bring up a handful of similar applications, and then tab between them to compare them. This simple feature would make using the iTunes store a much better experience. Let’s let Apple know what we want. Tell them that tabbed browsing is a no-brainer.
When I think of a fitness application, I think of a simple tracking application. You’re required to be disciplined enough to keep track of your workouts. But iFitness ($1.99) is something else entirely. Not only does it give you the basic tracking, it also gives you an incredibly exhaustive library of workout routines you can do from home (but more practically, in a gym). The beauty of this application is that the workout routines are not just featured: they are actually illustrated with full color photographs and descriptions on how to do each individual step. This way, you can spice up your workout routine easily without fear of doing something wrong — and you don’t have to locate or hire a personal trainer to do so.
Additionally, iFitness lets you create tailored workouts and track your progress. You can focus on a variety of abdominal exercises one day and then switch it up by doing some cardio the next time you hit the gym. With iFitness, you can get a weekly regimen down at ease and not forget what kinds of workouts you have planned for the day. Plus, you always have the exhaustive database of exercises at your disposal (over 230!)
Extras in the application include a weight monitor, BMI calculator, and a body measurement tool. It has it all.
I’m not even one of those people who works out that regularly, but I can already see that iFitness is going to motivate me. It’s pretty fascinating what iFitness can do for you, and I know that this is a keeper.
We all love the AppStore, but we all hate not having something equivalent for the desktop. It’s really annoying having to update your applications one at a time, and something can be said about being able to browse a category of products without having to surf around the net.
It doesn’t get much easier for new users. It took me months as a new user to find a bunch of useful applications. Knowing no one, and certainly being the first in a line of Mac users meant that I was on my own, and navigating the internet for new applications wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to do at the time.
It’s all changing, and Bodega has certainly made my life a heck of a lot easier. It would be awesome if all of the developers that have their applications in Bodega would get together and introduce some type of notification system that would allow you to know you need to update: Think AppFresh, but in Bodega. That’s the missing ingredient, the killer feature that would put Bodega over the top. I’m tired of fighting for my updates, and notifications would go a long way to getting me to update.
I have been very fortunate to have the opportunity to play around with Curio over the last few months. If you are not familiar with Curio, you need to get familiar with it. Curio is mind mapping at its best. Just think, if you are a Writer, Teacher, Business owner or anything really, you can make use of this wonderful application. In the demo, you will see a brief look of what I put together for a Mac class that I am planning on teaching. It makes planning and mapping your projects so fun and easy. For more information on Curio, visit their site http://www.zengobi.com
Let it be a sign to tech companies everywhere! Canada love’s its tech, and Americans should stop under estimating us, we’re just as geeky as the rest of you!
August 19, 2009
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