Macgasm

If it was any other company in the world, the media wouldn’t even mention this, but somehow Apple fires an employee for truancy, and suddenly it’s front page news. Sure, the employee had an opportunity of a life time, and was able to assist people in need, but bailing on your job without giving them much notice to fill your position is pretty selfish.

I need to state that I’m thankful that a young man took it upon himself to help out in Haiti, and that if presented with the same opportunity, I probably would have taken the same action he did. What looks better on a resume? Apple Genius or Humanitarian who has had first hand experience providing aid in a disaster zone?

But, I draw the line at the expectation that I’d have a job upon my return, especially when I know full well what the corporate policies are of my employer. If nothing else, Apple, Inc. is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies don’t make exceptions very often. This particular employee may have been acting in a applaudable manner, but what happens when thousands of other employee’s start calling in at the last minute to cancel shifts? A big problem, that’s what.

I don’t support the policy in any way, shape, or form, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last decade it’s that no one owe’s you anything, and unless you’re playing within the rules of the game, you’re on your own. Apple decided to exercise a clause of their contract with employees, and the Apple employee decided to take a chance and see how far the rules stretched. Sadly, the rules weren’t very elastic this time.

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In this episode, we talk about what iPod is right for you.

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I hear a lot of people talking up Google Chrome. Being a web browser enthusiast myself, I am somewhat confused about why non-nerds are evangelizing any web browser; let alone THIS web browser.

Okay, I lied. I know why people are talking about the browser. Google shoves it down your throat when you use their products. I posit that most people are jumping on the Chrome bandwagon simply due to the fact that they have seen their advertisements on sites like YouTube. Advertising works.

But are there any good reasons to use Chrome? Well, the number one selling point up to now has been the speed. I’m sure the good folks at Google have all sorts of spreadsheets and graphs they’d like to show me about speed, but I really don’t care all that much. I just do not see a noticeable difference in the speed of rendering pages between Google Chrome’s beta and Apple’s Safari. The bottleneck for me is almost always bandwidth.

Now, with the 4.x beta of Google Chrome, they are pushing extensions pretty hard. To me, this seems insane. This is Firefox’s claim to fame, and the biggest stumbling block they have to deal with right now. Mozilla almost always responds to criticism of sluggishness by blaming extensions. When people load up their browser with extensions, all the snappiness is drained immediately. Why would Chrome, a browser that sells itself on speed, try to push extensions? It doesn’t make sense to me at all.

I’d like to know your feeling about Google Chrome. You can comment on this post or hit me up on Twitter.

Photo Credit: aussiegall

Digital media is all fine and dandy when you know how to get your files in the formats you need, but a large part of the population struggles to not only find their content, but also convert a video file so that it works on an AppleTV or an iPod. Any application that helps solve these problems is worthy of a recommendation. Evom has taken the process of video conversion and made it as simple as a drag and drop experience. Sure, you can’t tweak your codecs for the audio and video, but you can drop an entire folder into the application, select if you want the files to be iTunes, iPod, AppleTV, or HTML5 compliant, and then let the application crunch the files. Evom is even kind enough to let you upload your videos to YouTube.  Evom also takes the files that have been converted and movies them into iTunes so that you’ll be able to stream your media to an AppleTV.  It makes the process of video conversion a lot easier on users and lets them spend less time managing their content and more time watching the videos.

There’s a lot of applications out there that can do this stuff, but I’ve yet to stumble across something that does this so simply, and in such a manner that most users could figure it out quickly. Evom is quite the gem.

Evom is currently free, but they go out of their way to let you know that the application is still in Beta, so the price could change upon the final version.

Ok, ok I know I don’t have to convince you that the iPhone is the best gadget EVER! But this app certainly helps to make it even more productive if that’s even possible.

Dictation apps have been around for years, and most people picture someone wearing a big headset and talking into it. Not with this app from the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking for Windows – Nuance.

The Dragon Dictation app is brilliant.  Tap and speak into your iPhone which comes so naturally to us. After speaking the analyzer does it’s thing, then you can email, text message or copy to clipboard and your voice has been transcribed for you. You press a word and you can get a dropdown of suggested corrections as well. Now I tested this out quite a bit and the disclaimer nothing is perfect applies here, but it comes pretty darn close. I was amazed as to the accuracy that was achieved. Even pretending with a thick Indian accent produced decent results.

People have complained about the iPhone not being able to keep up with the Blackberry in terms of keyboard typing speeds, and if that’s the case for you then this app is a pretty sweet middle ground.  It can transcribe, fix the odd mistake and have that email sent before a Crackberry user thumbs the send button.

The best part of this app is it’s part of the iPhone and therefore portable. Other than lugging around a laptop, I don’t know any other portable transcribing software out there. Doctors, cops, writers and journalists all could benefit from using this app. This has so many purposes and it’s free.

Download from iTunes

Image Credit: tibchris

On Thursday Amazon announced the February launch of a limited beta Kindle Development Kit (KDK), opening the popular e-reader to third-party developers. Many analysts and industry observers view this as a play by Amazon to fend off what is expected to be a a new entry into the e-reader market by Apple’s highly-anticipated tablet product rumored to be announced at Apple’s January 27 event.

Although the e-ink display of the Kindle will prevent the kind of game development seen for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, it is anticipated that applications to be offered will include word games, travel guides, and other information-based services (no word yet on whether the Kindle’s audio system will be available to applications, so hold out hope for fart apps). Due to the nature of Amazon’s agreement with AT&T, however, intense data usage will result in charges being passed on to Kindle users at a rate of $0.15/MB.

It is anticipated that Amazon will employ the same revenue share model Apple offers to developers, with 70% of revenue going to the developer and the remaining 30% being retained by Amazon. For Amazon, this percentage could result in a net profit for a product where they are currently losing money or just breaking even with e-book sales. Given that the Kindle 2 has now been available for one year it is quite possible that the next-generation Kindle could be released to coincide with an operating system upgrade that supports the new application environment.

[via cnet]
[image courtesy Amazon.com]

In the market for a security system? What about one that utilizes your Mac and some webcams?

Whether you’re sick of roommates stealing your laundry change, or there’s a pesky neighbor egging your house, at some point you’re going to wish that you had a camera snapping the shots of the perpetrator.

EvoCam will get the job done, from multiple angles, and multiple camera sources. It’s probably all you need unless you have night-vision goggle wearing ninja’s trying to break into your house. If that’s the case, just give up and hand over your keys. You’ve got no chance.

The really cool thing about EvoCam is that you can manage multiple web cameras and have those cameras record both audio and video, and then automatically have the program upload the footage to a web server. There’s some other small features that are pretty typical for webcam surveillance software, but the multiple camera access really sets this apart from any other software I’ve checked out. They support a whole bunch of web cameras, so you’re probably covered if you have stuff kicking around already. The application will set you back thirty bucks.

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In this episode, we talk about TotalFinder.

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