Macgasm

So the word on the streets is that in the US we will be seeing the official TomTom GPS Navigation app first thing in the morning! It is already available in Australia and New Zealand. The TomTom app has been one of the most anticipated apps for a while. When the app store was first introduced with the GPS capable 3G iPhone, TomTom said they would be making an app. But that was cut short when apple blocked out Turn by Turn navigation apps. Sadly though it is looking like the TomTom app is going to be close to $100 USD. I personally think that is a huge mistake, I would gladly pay $20 for it, But when the TomTom iPhone accessories kit is available it is rumored to be about $150 USD. Only time will tell. But be on the edge of your seat and ready to get the Official TomTom iPhone app first thing.

Update: The app is now in the US Store for $99 USD!

The clever guys at Twelve South have thought up yet another fantastic invention for us Mac users. This time it’s a little shelf for the back of your iMac or cinema display, called the BackPack™.

With the tag line ‘out of sight, but not out of reach’, you can pretty much gather what the intended purpose of this gadget is, and a very good gadget it is indeed. If you’re like me and prefer your workspace clutter free and clean, with plenty of room to swing whatever you like, then the BackPack™ might just be your savior. Use it to hold external hard drives as an easy place to keep whilst backing up, leave your iPhone sitting pretty, or keep a secret stash of moonpies on it if you really wish (Twelve South recommend Transformers).

I’ll leave the technological talk to the folks at Twelve South to explain how the shelf works:

The BackPack rests on the back of the desk stand on flat-screen iMacs and Apple Cinema Displays using gravity and two simple, adjustable clips. This allows you to position the sporty shelves at the perfect height without a screw ever touching your iMac. Because the BackPack uses gravity to stay in place, it will not leave any scratches or marks on your machine.

Easy. Available from Twelve South‘s website for $29.99 or from the Apple Store itself for $29.95 (plus shipping), this simple technology can make the world of difference to a workspace.

via Geeky Gadgets

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In this episode, Grant talks about Adobe Bridge.

[03.3 MB] [0:07:10] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner]

Everything in our subculture changes at a rapid pace. Not just the hardware and the software, but the popular viewpoints morph at breakneck speed. Sometimes, however, we’ll get stuck in a rut. Mainly on an individual bases, but sometimes the subculture on the whole will get stuck on a subject, and can’t progress. For me, I get locked into my messaging clients. I have used an X-Chat derivative to connect to IRC since 2003. I’ve tried dozens of competing clients, and I just cannot force myself to switch. I have no good reason for staying with X-Chat Aqua. In fact, it has ceased development until recently. I am in a rut, and I need a kick in the pants.

What I’m saying is that Mac folk and computer enthusiasts in general will get hung up on something from time to time. Be it cloud computing, blogs, AJAX, web browsers, or operating systems, we just can’t see beyond our own noses. If someone comes up behind you to give you a kick in the pants, I say that you should let them do it. You just might be in a rut, but not know it yet. Don’t stay with what you have just because it is comfortable. Progress?Inconceivable!

Photo Credit: hoyasmeg

Alright, this is a little bit of a pain, but it’s well worth the dividends.  Purists will moan aloud about putting images and html into email, but for me, it’s 2009, time to get with it.  Missing out on an advertising opportunity in your email footers is something that can’t go left being all vanilla and texty.

That being said, you don’t need to go being a douche about it, and start posting links to Viagra and Cialis, just promote yourself, or in my case, the services where people can find more info about Macgasm (Twitter, RSS, Flickr, etc).

So, in my nonstop quest to figure out ways to promote the site I decided to figure out how to do it in Mail.app.  They certainly don’t make it easy on us, and I had to figure out a nice little hackish workaround.

Anyway, here we go.

1. Set up a signature like you normally would.
2. Mail Preferences (CMD+,) -> Signatures
3. Now, write some code in an HTML editor.  I put my images on a webserver so it loads quicker.  My footer is just a bunch of image links. But, do what you want.
4. Save the html to your desktop.
5. Open that HTML file in Safari, and make sure it looks exactly how you want it.
6. Good?  Okay, you want to save the file as a web archive
7. Safari-> File -> Save As -> Select Web Archive in the drop down menu
8. Save it to ~/library/mail/signatures
9. Now for the fun part.  Listed in the signatures folder is your signature.  If you only have one signature there should only be one file there, in addition to the one you just saved.  What you need to do is copy the name of the other web archive file (probably some random text), and rename the web archive you just saved.  To do this, you’ll have to remove the original signature file from the folder.  It won’t let you save otherwise.
10. Now you’re either done, or saying, “What the hell, there’s seven or eight files in that folder”.  If this is the case then you have multiple signature files already saved in Mail.app
11. Don’t worry, all you need to do is download a free plist editor, and use it to view the .plist file in that folder.   You can use it to track down which file is associated with which signature.
12. Or, if you just created the signature, you can use the sort by creation date option in the finder, and replace the newest one.
13. You should be off to the races.

Now you can be cool like me, and actually make your signature work for you.

A huge thanks goes out to Griffin Tech for donating two amazing products for giveaways.  They were kind enough to donate both the Clarifi and the AirCurve, and two great people won, so it’s really a win-win-win.

It’s because of great companies like Griffin that we’re able to give a little something-something to our readers. In an economy like we’re facing today, it’s imperative we support great companies that really “get” what we’re trying to do here, so we’d like to take this moment to thank them again, publicly, and ask you to go check out their product line.  Support us, by supporting them.

We introduced you guys to a new application a couple of days ago that I’ve grown to love over the last couple of weeks, now it’s toast.  Lyrical, an iPhone application, would retrieve the lyrics for the songs that were playing on your iPhone or Touch by connecting to LyricWiki, grabbing the song’s information, then displaying the lyrics right on your screen.  It helped me decipher what the hell Mick Jagger was saying in I Just Want To See His Face, something I commended it for, a lot!

Well, now that’s all gone to crap, because the NMPA is still clueless.  LyricWiki is becoming an “legitimately licensed site”, that the corporate’s at the record labels are allowing to put up lyrics.  This isn’t necessarily bad.  It’s great for LyricWiki and we’re happy for them, but what really blows is that the NMPA companies “will NOT allow is ANY third party access to the lyrics (even if they are user generated)”.  So, this mean’s an innovative application for the iPhone can’t continue to provide an awesome service.  Man, do I feel terrible for the guys over at Clink Apps (Lyrical Dev’s), the got limited notice and had minutes to pull their application before the App would stop working.

They’re currently looking into other avenues for getting their application back up and running again, but they’re unsure when it’ll happen.
We can’t even start a count down timer for an NMPA sanctioned LyricWiki application because the record labels won’t even allow that.

What a shame.

[quotes from email conversation with Max at Clink Apps; image via eastscene]

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In this episode, Josh talks about using iCal’s to-dos.

[02.8 MB] [0:05:50] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner]