Macgasm

Those of you who follow me on Twitter might remember this little gem of a tweet I posted a couple of months ago:

You probably thought I was crazy, right? Some of you might’ve even stopped following me. Well guess what? Some people are even crazier than me! No, really!

Seriously, you can stop laughing now.

Apparently someone thought of an even weirder “stylus” for the iPhone, very useful when it’s freezing cold and you don’t want to take off your gloves to tweet your daily ramblings: snack sausages. These sausages from CJ Corporation are, electrostatically speaking, close approximations of the human finger and as such can be used for input on the iPhone’s touchscreen. And if you think this is just something gimmicky that nobody actually uses check out this report: sales of Max sausages in convenience stores have surged a full 39 per cent over the same period last year, presumably because of how popular they are becoming among iPhone users.

So I end this post with a little challenge: what else can you find that works as a stylus for the iPhone?

Via kottke.org and The Register.

Growing up, I remember my mother kept a small file of coupons she faithfully clipped from the weekend paper. To keep her grocery store trips organized, my mom would write her list on an envelope and place the relevant coupons inside. This system worked great… until the day I lost her coupons during one of these ventures. (You can imagine she wasn’t thrilled.)

Gone are these days. The advent of iPhone has brought many organizational apps to the masses, a new favorite of mine being Shopper. A $0.99 application, Shopper does much more than create grocery lists. I used it last week while shopping for ingredients to make homemade guacamole, and found it a great way to keep track of everything I needed.

Adding an item to a list is easy, as shown by this screenshot:

I was surprised, however, that “avocado” wasn’t an item already in Shopper’s database. No matter, I was able to add it to the list myself. The final product looks like this:

You can add quantities of items to each category. The little people dancing to the right of each item are Shopper’s nutritional guides. The more stars next to an item, the better its nutritional value. It’s almost like the calorie counts posted in New York City fast food restaurants!

Shopper’s best feature is its barcode scanner. This morning, I had a small bottle of apple juice. Another item not in Shopper’s database, I created it as an item and added it to a new list. Touching the item, and then touching “barcode” activates the scanner. Scanning my apple juice entered the brand (Tropicana) and returned results of which stores near me are selling that exact product.  Pretty much the best way ever to find your favorite foods.

Other items of interest: You can set Shopper to automatically calculate tax (no double-guessing your mental math) and it also includes Home and Garden, Clothing, Electronics and many more categories to suit all of your shopping needs. And if Shopper recognizes nearby stores, it will automatically organize your shopping list to reflect the store’s aisle layout and prices.

Take that, paper envelope and coupons.

I met my last boyfriend while I was on the clock at my Apple Store gig.

It was a slow night,  a few weeks after Halloween, which is typical for retail that time of the year. It was near closing time, so us Specialists were congregating in the middle of the store, grateful to have a break from incessant customer questions.

In walked The Boy. He was with a friend, who needed to have the glass on his iPhone replaced. While waiting, I chatted up The Boy out of boredom. We talked about his white MacBook, and I showed him the 24 in. Cinema Display. And before he left, I handed him my Apple business card. This turned into a six month relationship.

So in honor of Valentine’s Day and Apple, Macgasm presents the best ways for OS X users to find the nerdy love of their dreams. (Better start perfecting your “slide to unlock”!)

• Your local Apple store: This especially works well if you’re female and know the difference between a DVI and a HDMI connection. Apple Stores are boys’ clubs, so the odds are in your favor. Even if you’re not in the market for a new machine, stroll in and chat up a Specialist. Ask for his/her business card. And when you get home, send a friendly Facebook message saying thanks. You never know!
• OK Cupid: Or online dating, in general. I’ve been an on-and-off member of OKC for the past two years. Why do I keep going back? It’s free, easy to use, and many members are Apple-obsessed. Admittedly it takes a lot of effort to separate the wheat from the chaff (that’s what you get with free), but when you find someone special it’s totally worth it.
• Twitter: is how I’ve met many new friends in New York City. Our fearless Editor-in-Chief Joshua found me this way as well, during last summer’s iPhone 3GS launch/live-blogging extravaganza. Search for #apple (or any related keywords) and see what people are saying. Write some @ replies to the interesting ones. You may start following each other, and progress to Facebook friends…and maybe real life lovers.
• Anywhere you see someone with an Apple product: Last week I was chatted up by a stranger on the subway. Even though our conversation ranged from our respective neighborhoods to abandoned construction in Brooklyn, I was happy when he pulled out an iPhone to get my number. I grabbed mine out of my pocket and said “Me too!” This led to the “How did we ever live before iPhone?” conversation.  So chat up the cutie in the coffee shop with a spandy-new 15 in. MacBook Pro. Pretty soon you might find out how many inches he brings to the bedroom.

So there you have it, kids. I wish you all a lovely Valentine’s Day, if you’re married, coupled, complicated or single (like me).  The nerdy loves of our dreams are out there. Whether you’re using GPS or FourSquare to find them, happy loving!

There’s finally some “scientific” proof that iPhone users have serious A.D.D when it comes to their application use. It seems that after the first month there’s a steady decline in the use of an application. It seems like captain obvious-like analytics, but now that I think about it, this graph is pretty representative of my usage patterns. The only real difference is that instead of my interest in the application lasting about a month, it actually lasts about a week. I could easily rhyme off the apps that have lasted longer than a month on one hand–Civilization revolution, Twitterific, GuitarTool Kit, and Lexic. Outside of those five applications, there’s more turn over on my phone than… Well, I’m sure you can guess.

What is it that encourages throw away applications?

Whoever figures it out might hold the keys to prolonged success on the app store. Could it be that the utility of an iPhone app is far less than we’ve expected, or is it casual gamer syndrome? I’m willing to bet that it’s a little bit of both, all mixed into one. Lack of multitasking means that we usually have one app to accomplish one particular thing. For instance, Birdbrain monitors your twitter usage and determine who’s adding you and unfollowing you. Twitterific is for actually using Twitter. Both are excellent apps, but I only have so much time on my hands for Twitter play. If it’s a toss up between seeing who’s adding or unfollowing me, and actually goofing off with some people on Twitter, I’ll choose the later nine times out of ten. This isn’t a slight on Birdbrain in any way. It’s a slight on the AppStore mentality of one problem, one cure, one application. The Flurry report points out that the biggest category for iPhone and mobile apps is social networking. I think that this plays right into the graph’s downward slope, and wonder if there’s a direct link between the two. Would the graph look the same if we eliminated social networking applications from the study?

Most iPhone games have a very short shelf life. A game is played to completion and usually offers very little replay value in most cases. The price point of $0.99 doesn’t help either; making it extremely easy to hop around from one application to another without much financial burden. Instead of researching the best app within a category before we make a purchase, we can just purchase three or four of them and try them all. I’m not complaining. I’d rather try four or five applications myself and make an educated decision on which app is the best for my work-flow, but again, these practices also contribute to the downward slope on the graph in question.

One thing is for certain, developers seem to have somewhere between a week and a month to really hook a user and convert them into a loyal customer. If there’s ever been a moment to ensure that your application runs smoothly and effectively, it’s from day one. If you aren’t focusing on the user experience starting from day one you’re in for a world of hurt, because if you hope to implement things in the future it might be too late as user’s will have moved on.

Via Cult of Mac

As Internet connection speeds have increased, wifi has become ubiquitous, and web technology has blossomed, we have seen a large jump in the prevalence of web apps. No longer are mail and chat clients staying open on the desktops of the masses. More and more people are writing, chatting, working, and slacking completely from within the web browser.

I’m a nerd. I am used to having dedicated clients for everything. In fact, I still do. Mail.app, iChat, and X-Chat Aqua are all open on my desktop as I write this. However, that isn’t what the Kids These Days™ are doing. My little sister doesn’t even know that there is a program designed specifically for checking e-mail.

Services like Meebo and Google Talk are taking the place of the Adiums and iChats for less technical people. Opening bookmarks and clicking links are easier for them to handle than downloading, installing, configuring, and running dedicated applications. Heck, don’t even get me start about Facebook chat. That is a whole article in and of itself.

I am seeing this truly proliferate. Communication, work, music, videos, and even games are all being done strictly in the confines of the web browser. It actually makes me feel warm and fuzzy that the web has really matured. When I think about the fact that I am living in an era where movies will stream to my screen wirelessly with the press of a button, my mind is completely blown. It is a good time to be into technology.

So, I want to hear from you. Are you moving to web apps? Is there a place in the future for dedicated local applications? Comment on this post or hit me up on Twitter.

Photo Credit: skatoolaki

From the can’t believe I missed this, but have been so swamped that it doesn’t surprise me file, Google’s latest beta version of Chrome has officially integrated extensions. I know. I’m as surprised as you are.

In other news, Chrome still crashes like a mad man on me, and if I even try to use it while navigating wordpress’ backend the whole browser crashes hard. Leaving behind my article, and forcing me to re-enter the stuff in its entirety. But I guess some progress is better than no progress at all. Once these bugs get worked out I’ll probably be moving over to Chrome full time.

Favourite extentsions so far?

1. Feedly.  If you’re an rss news junkie and absolutely hate looking at google reader and all of it’s 1995 design constructs then you MUST take this for a spin.  I’ve been using it as my primary reader for well over six months now, and it was the one thing keeping me attached to Firefox.
2. Xmarks.  If syncs your bookmarks across multiple browsers.  It’s everything that delicious should have been.
3. Firebug Lite.  It adds onto the already great web developer tools built right into chrome.  Can’t complain about that.
4. Google Voice.  Making phone calls from your browser is pretty bad ass.

It’s taken seven long years, but Apple’s managed to sell just under 10 billion songs, most likely at a dollar a piece. That’s a lot of coin for an industry that’s struggling to keep up with technology.

The lucky person who downloads the 10 billionth song is going to be rewarded with a $10,000 iTunes gift card. In a pretty funny twist, apparently you don’t have to actually purchase a song on iTunes to win the gift card. It says in the fine print that you can enter up to 25 times per day using the like they’ve provided. There’s no word whether a person purchasing more than 25 tracks on iTunes will be eliminated from contention.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber is reporting that the iBooks application will not be included on the iPad by default.

He’s stating this because according to the feature’s page for the iPad it states, “The iBooks app is a great new way to read and buy books. Download the free app from the App Store and buy everything from classics to best sellers from the built-in iBookstore.”.

What does this mean for other e-readers like Amazon’s Stanza, Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes and Noble’s E-reader applications?It means that they will still be available on the iPad and will not be completely wiped from existence. This also re-affirms Apple’s position of making money off of the hardware instead of the content.

This move will also, as one reader of Daring Fireball has stated , give Apple the ability to frequently update the application. This is much like the remote application for iTunes and the Apple TV. I wish Apple would start doing this with all of their applications so that when there is an issue they can fix it without having to send out an entire firmware update, which can take longer.

The other possibility is that this might work on the iPhone or iPod Touch, or there may be some variation for the iPhone to accomodate the screen resolution. Conversely, it is entirely possible that there will not be a version for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

This is probably being done so Apple does not tempt the anti-trust regulators by disallowing their competitors products on the device.

Source: [Daring fireball].