Macgasm

Let’s be honest, professors are kidding themselves if they think students are studying for their exams weeks before the tests roll around. With student aid rarely covering the bills, students these days need to do a lot more than go to school during the day in order to keep their heads above the water.

Between part-time jobs, extracurricular activities, socializing, and home work, finding the time to study well in advanced for a test or an exam is borderlining on impossible.

Well, what if you had an application that would assist you in your studies, one that would set up quizzes, and flash cards to help you maximize your study times? Cram lets you do that. I wish these types of programs were around when I was in school, so I thought it would be appropriate for me to pass it on. For 29.99 it’s a steal.  You can’t put a price on a C minus right?  Who we kidding, A+ students have this sort of thing on lock down, the rest of us are (or in my case were)  just trying to get through the day without getting grounded.

Taking Quizzes

One of the most effective ways for me to assimilate the information I’ve learned is to type it out, and to quiz myself. The process of letting the question make a visual imprint in my head always helped me remember what I was studying. Cram lets you create your own quizzes, so the benefit is two-fold, first you get to learn by typing in your questions, then you get to learn by taking the quiz.

They’ve built in a decent multiple choice format for your tests.  It lets you shuffle the deck, and go in multiple orders so that you ensure that you’re actually learning the content and not just memorizing the order of the answers.  Cram then marks your test and then lets you keep track of your scores.  They’ve even built in tools that let you export your quiz to a pdf, tweet your scores, and even set up a timer so that you’re in the same environment you’d be in during your exam.

Designing Flashcards

The second thing I did throughout my extensive (read as long lasting) academic career was use flashcards. Early on during my college days I had to ride a bus for approximately an hour both ways. I learned early on that the best way to free myself up for cheap nights at the bar was to toss on some headphones and go over flash cards on the bus. It helped me get through school, but it didn’t help me make too many Friday morning classes. Ah well, can’t win them all.

Well it’s almost twenty-ten and people are still writing out flashcards with a pen or pencil. I’m not sure about you, but I can type a lot faster than I can write with a pen. Digital flash cards are where it’s at, and once again, it’s another way to free up some time. Every minute counts when you’re trying to make it to the bar before last call.

Cram gives you access to flashcards both on your Mac and on the iPhone.   You type them up, then run through them until you remember them.  It’s intuitive and laid out in a way that you’d expect, questions on one side, answers on the other.

A Quick Thought

If there’s one thing this particular application space could benefit from, it would be being able to generate these quizzes and flashcards from our notes. I mean, with the ability to make hierarchal notes in both Pages and Word, why the heck are we still having to make quizzes on our own. Just a thought.

It would also be super cool if you could share these quizzes and flashcards with your friends who are using the same application. The Cram team has created a test portal, but what about being able to create social networks around your classes, where students would collaborate on the exam prep? It could change the way students study for ever.

The iPhone/Touch Apps

What kind of benefit would these applications be without having access to an iPhone app? It’s clearly a lot easier to go through a quiz or a flashcard set on the bus if it was on a mobile device. A MacBook Air might be a tight little package, but the iPhone wins hands down every single time when it comes to portability.

You can use a free version, or pay 4.99 for a version that unlocks more than 5 tests and 5 flashcard sets.

Photo Gallery

With the holidays fast approaching, I thought I would give everybody some ideas for holiday gifts for the Apple users in their lives. This will be a series of articles that will allow anybody to purchase a gift for an Apple user, no matter if your budget is under $25 to over $2500. In this article we’ll try and find some Gift ideas for those that have a budget between $100 and $250. If your budget is lower, check out the other articles, $25 to $100 and Under $25..

With Black Friday now over, and ‘Cyber Monday’ here, I thought I would go through one of the more interesting and possibly popular categories for gifts.

From Apple there are the iPods.

• iPod Nano: 8GB for $134.99 at Amazon, or the 16GB for $165.99 at Amazon. They come in a variety of colors.
• iPod Classic: the iPod Classic is the biggest of the iPods with a 160GB hard drive. It comes in Black or Silver. Both are $229.95 from Amazon.
• iPod Touch: The 3rd Generation 8GB iPod touch is the easiest, non-phone, way into the iPhone OS application store. Amazon has the latest model for $178.00

If the Apple user on your list is into photography and editing photos you can always get them Aperature 2 for $160.49, as of right now, from Amazon.

For the audiophiles you can always purchase headphones, although sometimes headphones can be tricky to purchase due to personal preferences you can almost never go wrong with over the ear headphones. One example is the Beats: By Dr. Dre. They’re going for $228.00 on Amazon.

If your audiophile tends to listen to music while doing things around the house there is the Harman Kardon Soundstick II speaker set. Harmon Kardon means quality. They are currently priced at $125.60 on Amazon.

If they would prefer a ‘boombox’ type setup instead, there is the Altec Lansing inMation MIX iMT800 for iPod and iPhone. It currently goes for $203.93 at Amazon.

If you have a Television buff, or just somebody who likes to multi-task on your list. You can always get them an Elgato EyeTV 250 Plus. With this they can watch television on their Mac, all they need is a cable outlet.

Likewise, there is the Elgato H.264 Accelerator. This will aid in the conversion of media files to H.264 encoded videos by off-loading most of the heavy lifting to this hardware device. Amazon has it for just under the current price range at $99.99.

If your Apple user is going to be getting a new Mac for the Holidays you might want to also pick them up an Airport Extreme Wireless Base Station. It’s currently going for $167.75 from Amazon.

As always there are the two standards, the iTunes Store gift card, or an Apple Store gift card. Also remember these are just some ideas for Holiday gifts. There are thousands of other great ideas out there.

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Wayne has put together an awesome post on gift ideas for an Apple geek, and the prices so far range from twenty dollars to just over two hundred (he has some more in the pipeline, so keep your eyes peeled for that). We’ll here’s something else that can go in the first category.

Paul Chung, has put together a nice little homage to the famous Che Steve pose that has come to be used in a lot of articles describing Apple’s leader.

If you’re looking for some interesting artwork for your Mac infested office this might be right up your alley. The 8×10 print will be printed on “Quality Epson archival matte paper using archival ink.” I’m not full sure what that means for quality, but the print looks pretty sweet online, just imagine how sweet it’ll look in a frame.

Via @Macfusiongirl

So, there once was an iPhone app that simply listed off talking points about the Droid phone. It would have been kind of funny to see a competitor sticking it to Apple while using Apple’s own device against them. But, like we’d all assumed would happen, Apple rejected the application, and now it’s sitting on the shelf.

It makes complete sense that Apple would put the hurt on the “advertisement” application, but I think we’re starting to tread on some serious anti-trust ground at this point. What makes this particular advertisement any different from the admob ads I get on my phone? What makes this one advertisement more dangerous than all the Britney Spears promotional applications? Not all that much if you ask me. The funny thing is I don’t necessarily disagree with Apple here, if I was the man in charge I’d pull the application as well, but what I wouldn’t do is single out one advertisement application without getting ready for the obvious shit storm that would be brewing once word got out to the press that we axed a competitor’s application.

Apple’s got a new fight on their hands, and it isn’t about yanking applications from the AppStore. It’s now become whose ads can appear on the device and whose can not. It should get interesting over the next little bit, like always when it comes to AppStore rejections, but this one has a new twist.

It’s a police state over on the AppStore, so I’m not sure why people are surprised that this happened. I’d much prefer if Apple yanked all the popstar’s applications. At least the iDroid app provided talking points, the Britney Spears application just provides a whole lot of stupid.

The first thing you should do when your friends and family refuse to use a Mac is… Relax. I know you’re excited about using and evangelizing the platform. I know that I am. However, it really isn’t any of your beeswax what computing platform your friends use — provided that they don’t ask you for tech support.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t share the experience with people who are interested. In fact, a stock MacBook or iMac is my recommendation to almost anybody who asks for a consultation on their purchase. I’ve even turned people around in their negative opinion of the Mac platform by providing objective facts, and keeping zealotry completely out of it. Sometimes our enthusiasm doesn’t translate well to people unfamiliar with this area of technology. Reducing confusion should be the number one goal. Unless you are getting paid by Apple (Which, by the way, I am not), it shouldn’t matter to you if you sell your friends on a Mac. Just enjoy your Mac, and answer any questions they might have. If you want to help them, just provide facts in a manner which they can use to discern the right purchase for them and their family.

Here is my point in a distilled manner: Don’t superimpose your feelings on them. You might have more information than they do. Heck, a Mac might be just what they need, but that is their decision. Keep your emotions out of it.

Photo Credit: lisa_at_home2002

Here’s something I’ve been keeping my eyes on as someone who has a small web development firm. iTunes LP is finally available for the average Joe. It’s always been around for tinkering with, but it wasn’t until recently that Apple has released some official guidelines and an SDK for us to use.

The really cool thing about the TuneKit SDK is that it doesn’t really require much complicated programming. If you have the skills to put together a website using HTML, CSS, and JS then you can start developing content for the iTunes LP.

What’s even cooler than the TuneKit being released? Well, how about Apple putting out templates, design practice guides, and development guides? This is the kind of thing that reminds me why I love Apple. Sure, they aren’t the most open company in the industry, but they certainly aren’t the most closed either.

Here’s a new opportunity design firms, I suggest jumping on it.

Photo Credit: cx1uk

A couple of days ago I downloaded Handbrake for my laptop. It was a while since I’ve downloaded it last and I nonchalantly downloaded a 64-bit version, thinking nothing of it. Turns out 64-bit handbrake is brand spanking new.

I’ve been spending a lot of time ripping my DVDs lately, trying to get the on my Mac Pro so I can stream them to my Mac Mini attached to my TV. The college chic of having a billion DVDs on a shelf is getting a little stale. If you need to get your DVDs in a digital format so you can put your discs in storage than handbrake is the first thing you need to take a look at, it’s the gold standard in DVD ripping on the Mac.

The 64-bit version has a bunch of interesting new features that are a little too complicated for me to grasp, but if you’re into the minutae details of video archiving then you’ll benefit from checking out their change log.