Macgasm

Well, it’s over. People are finally starting to take Apple seriously as a gaming competitor. In an industry where acknowledging competition is a little ignorant (Microsoft and Sony don’t see the Wii as competition), it’s a strange twist to see one of the big three gaming consoles jockeying to compete with a fourth, lesser known, company — Apple.

It’s hard to ignore a company that sneaks up on you, steals 19% of your market (for portable gaming, not gaming on a whole), and then plans to continue stealing from you with a new device (iPad). So what’s the response from Nintendo? 3D gaming.

You read that right. Nintendo is planning on keeping Apple at bay by introducing a 3D gaming system that will be announced at E3 and shipped by the end of this fiscal year (March 2011).

Before you get all up in arms, the system is said to be possible without glasses, so you don’t have to worry about lugging around those dorky 3D glasses on the bus. The jury’s still out on how successful 3D gaming will be. Despite the success of a film like Avatar, I’m not all that convinced that 3D should be the next step for games.

Maybe ensuring that my game, which is being played on a stellar 1080p television, doesn’t look pixellated and crappy. You know, that’d be a nice start.

Article Via AppleInsider

Have you ever had your iPhone battery die on you because you weren’t able to charge it during the day?  Maybe you simply left your car charger in your other car. Fret not, Mophie has a battery pack that will not only charge your iPhone, but it acts as a nice case to protect your iPhone from dings.

Enter Solution

Mophie makes an external battery pack that doubles as an iPhone case, it’s called the Mophie Juice Pack Air.  The Juice Pack Air can charge your battery when it’s low, or it can charge your battery as if your iPhone was plugged into an electrical outlet.  However, the latter of the two solutions is not the best.  While your getting a full charge on your iPhone, your Mophie Juice Pack Air’s battery is draining.  So, the best solution is to only use it when your battery is low.

You might be asking yourself, “Well how can I make sure I’m only using it when it’s low?”  Glad you asked.  There is an on/off switch at the bottom of the case that allows you to control when you want to charge your iPhone.  Previous models did not have this feature.  Looks like Mophie listened to their customers and added this.

I have purchased two Mophie Juice Pack Airs.  One for my iPhone, and one for my wife’s iPhone.  We are Annual Pass Holders at Disneyland in Southern California.  This nifty little battery pack has saved our butts more than once while we were at the Park.  Usually by late afternoon, our iPhone’s batteries are almost drained.  That’s when we flip the switch, and viola instant battery recharge.  Disneyland now offers free recharging of devices at the camera store on Main Street.  Which is great, however, you have to have the plug and leave your iPhone with them.

Room for Improvement

With such a great device, you might be wondering why I’m saying that the Mophie Juice Pack Air needs improvement.  Here are my reasons: There are two things that I see that could be improved upon.  The first is, when you are in a poor signal area, your iPhone will drop a call, and show “No Service”.  This is while the iPhone is in the Juice Pack Air case.  This happens when the battery is been charged, or not being charged.  My guess is, the battery is blocking the Antenna in some way.  Otherwise in great signal areas you don’t see a signal drop.

The second thing that I would like to see improved upon is the way the Mophie Juice Pack Air is charged.  It employs a Micro-USB connector instead of the 30-Pin connector that is on the iPhone.  I’m not sure if this was a design decision, or if it is a licensing decision.  Whatever the case may be it makes it difficult to charge it in more than one place.  The reason being people usually have more Mini-USB or Dock cables, myself included.  This is an extra cost that’s not needed if the Juice Pack Air used a Mini-USB or Dock cable.

iPhone Battery Saving Tips

Here are a few battery saving tips:

• Turn off Bluetooth if your not connected to a Bluetooth device.
• Turn off Wi-Fi.
• Leave the brightness at the default setting, and enable Auto-Brightness.
• Turn 3G off if not needed.  This is one option I always leave on.

These are just a few tips to help squeeze every last drop of battery life out of your iPhone.

Colors and Price

The Mophie Juice Pack Air comes in four different colors they are as follows:

• Red
• Purple
• White
• Black

The Mophie Juice Pack Air costs $79.95, you can order it on Mophie.com, or you can pick one up at your local Apple Store.

Overall, the Mophie Juice Pack Air is a great addition for your iPhone.  Like I said earlier, it’s saved my butt more than once.  I think if Mophie makes the improvements I wrote about, this would be an awesome device.  I will now leave you with a Macgasm video podcast that aired a couple of weeks ago; in which Erin Blaskie gives her review of the Mophie Juice Pack Air.  Click here to watch the video.

Photo Credit: Mophie Juice Pack Air Photos

No longer will Mac users have to suffer through the sounds emanating from our PC counterparts. “You require more vespene gases” will be shouted from our speakers as the beta for Blizzard’s Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty will be available for Mac gamers sometime next month.

No official date has been set for its release which can be a bit daunting for the anxious gamers, but at least it’s a big relief to know that it will be coming to our side of the spectrum in the not too distant future.

Some of the features we can expect for April are:

• Blizzard plans to release a major content patch mid-April to enable some basic achievements and improved voice chat, 3v3 and 4v4 maps, among other unidentified features.
• A Mac beta client will be available in April, when it’s ready.
• The Map Editor will be out before late-April.
• No new races are planned for the three episodes of Starcraft II.
• The roach, Infestor and reaper are currently in their Watch List.
• Critters were not priority for beta, and will eventually be added.
• Plans for Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) and community maps ladder and matchmaking.
• Dustin said more players will be invited to beta in upcoming weeks, and encourages gamers to enable the beta opt-in option in the Battle.net Account webpage to qualify.
• Replay hosting and sharing won’t be available at ship date.
• Streamed replays for Tournament Finals is planned in future Starcraft II expansions.
• To read the full 4-page manuscript from the chat you can visit here.

One can’t help but wonder about the eventual release of the much anticipated installment in the Starcraft series. We’ve seen the PC beta go live just a few weeks ago and ever since people have been speculating but to no avail. Now with the Mac beta officially being announced, you just have to hope for a release sometime this spring.

If I had to give an educated guess, after the trials and beta work being done, I’d hope to see the big release sometime towards the end of May! After a quick stop to your local GameStop you can see that they are speculating nearly the same release at June 1, 2010.

Starcraft II pictures like the one above can be found at Blizzard’s official site.

Recording audio notes while on the go; spreading news and information quickly — if you ever had a need/desire to do either of those things, I may have found a great iPhone app that will suit your needs. Cinch is an application that gives you the ability to easily share audio, text and photo updates using your mobile device or from your computer.

Cinch, developed by the folks over at BlogTalkRadio, is a free app that enables you to capture and report your experiences using a simple and intuitive interface. This app allows you to easily broadcast your message through Facebook, Twitter, and the CinchCast.com community.

Now, note that I loosely said “Mobile device” above, and not specifically “iPhone.” While there is a incredibly slick app in the iPhone app store, cinch also allows the ability to add your phone number to the registry, then call a “land-line” number to record your audio that you want published as a cinchcast. This may be subtle, but in my mind it’s absolutely brilliant since it absolutely opens up the potential user base for this tool.

I’ve been using the app for about 2 weeks now, and I have really put it through it’s paces by recording audio notes, audio podcasts and posting them immediately online. Immediately after hitting the publish button you have the option of selecting which social media profiles that you’d like to send an update status too as well (Facebook, Twitter, and the online CinchCast community).

Probably my biggest concern with this app and the user experience is the way that the online CinchCast directory is laid out – it’s not very intuitive and only displays in a linear fashion. This makes it very difficult to find cinchcasts from people unless you know exactly what their name or user-id is. What needs to happen to improve the user experience is an implementation of categorizing the list in a more user-friendly approach allowing the ability to search by category, interest, topic, etc. Hopefully, that will be coming prior to the “beta” tag being removed from the app.

For website owners, there are some valuable tools offered by cinch that allow you to place widgets, badges and embedded cinch content on your website. I found that to be very useful.

Overall, I like this app, and I will continue to use it for quick recordings of topics, discussions and even quick audio interviews. I appreciate the automation of being able to upload a recording, and have it immediately hit my social networking profiles. The price is obviously right (since it’s free), and I would imagine that the developers at BlogTalkRadio will maintain that pricing as their main focus is on the advanced podcasting tools and software they’ve developed. Click here to download.

Photo Credit: skyfaller

Joshua Jones from General Metrics has created a visual representation of Safari using only HTML and CSS3. Inside Webkit-based browsers under Mac OS X and the iPhone OS, loading this page will show an accurate presentation of our favorite browser without using any images.

Joshua says that the next web-reproduction he will attempt is mobile Safari. In the mean time, you can go get the source over at GitHub. He encourages people to go out, and try to get the Safari-in-Safari to load pages.

I’m excited to see what else can be done along these lines. Have any cool ideas or links? Comment on this post, or hit me up on Twitter.

Photo Credit: Cayetano, General Metrics

We all know that we can use “Grab” from the Utilities Folder to make a screen grab or a window grab.  However, I have a tip that makes this a whole lot simpler.  This will take some hand coordination, but after you master this you’ll ask yourself “Why didn’t I learn this sooner?”  The tip I’m talking about is “Screen Capture”.  To perform this, you’ll need to hold down Command+Shift+4.  Now your mouse pointer will turn into a crosshair with coordinates.  Now simply drag your crosshair over the area you want to capture.  Once you captured your screen, you will hear a camera snapshot sound.  The saved image is now saved to your desktop as a .png file, which is a “Portable Network Graphics” file.  That’s it.  Now take your screen captures, and place them into a document or email.

Photo Credit: Screen Capture from my System Preferences

Apple computers have always been a staple in education.  I remember when I was a kid we had Apple Computers all throughout my academic career. So, I wasn’t surprised when I heard that Apple is giving discounts to schools who order 10-Pack iPad bundles.

Eric Slivka of MacRumors.com is reporting that Apple is only selling the Wi-Fi models, and not the Wi-Fi/3G models, at a discount to educational institutions.  They are selling all three storage capacities, below are the models and prices:

“BF822LL/A: iPad Wi-Fi (16GB) $4,790
BF825LL/A: iPad Wi-Fi (16GB) with AppleCare Protection Plan for iPad – Auto Enroll $5,580
BF823LL/A: iPad Wi-Fi (32GB) $5,790
BF826LL/A: iPad Wi-Fi (32GB) with AppleCare Protection Plan for iPad – Auto Enroll $6,580
BF824LL/A: iPad Wi-Fi (64GB) $6,790
BF827LL/A: iPad Wi-Fi (64GB) with AppleCare Protection Plan for iPad – Auto Enroll $7,580”

The prices above are shown for iPads with and without AppleCare.  If you order the 10-Pack without AppleCare, you’ll receive $20.00 off per iPad.  However, if you order the 10-Pack with AppleCare, you’ll receive $40.00 off per iPad.

Unfortunately, this discount does not extend to students who wish to purchase individual iPads with their student discount.  Those prices are the same as retail.  The prices are as follows – 16GB/$499.00, 32GB/$599.00, and 64GB/$699.00.  It would be beneficial if Apple discounted the iPads for students, however, I am not sure why they are not offering student discounts.

MacRumors.com goes on to describe the packaging and contents:

“…while also reducing packaging by eliminating separate retail boxing for the devices. Each package contains ten iPads with USB-to-Dock Connector cables and power adapters along with a single set of documentation.”

This is a great offer for any school that is looking to add the iPad to their educational curriculum.  The applications for the iPad in schools are unlimited.  They will have great interactive books, with rich media content, that will only further assist in educating students, and make learning fun.

Article Via MacRumors.com
Photo Credit: Apple iPad iBooks

Simplenote (link opens iTunes) is a text-based note solution for iPhone.  Cloud Factory, the developer, offers Simplenote as a free application supported by ads, but other paid options are also available (see below).

Note List

As its name implies, Simplenote is all about simplicity.  The app offers a clean, uncluttered interface unmarred by the kind of eye candysome other note apps emphasize.  There are no colorful folders, animated filing systems, or word processing tools, and you cannot insert photographs or audio notes.  Instead, Simplenote provides the user with one thing:  a tool with which to write text notes.

Simplenote boasts a number of features, including fast, encrypted syncing with the free web app; offline access to notes; the ability to search and sort notes and email them from within the app; clickable email, phone, and web links; portrait and landscape typing with lockable orientation; and TextExpander compatibility.

Syncing with the web app is painless and absolutely flawless.  You are required to set up an account in order to sync with the web app, but once you do, your notes are automatically (and quickly) updated on both the iPhone and the web.

What makes Simplenote compelling, aside from its simplicity, is its compatibility with several other applications.  For example, users can download DashNote, a dashboard widget, and, once they sign in to their account, their Simplenote notes appear in the widget.  Another application that syncs beautifully with Simplenote is Notational Velocity.  Changes in one are reflected almost immediately in the other.  Other desktop applications that work with Simplenote are Nottingham and JustNotes.  Users can find additional extensions, scripts, and plugins that work with Simplenote on the developer’s website.

Text of a Note

Although Simplenote is free, the developer offers two paid options that provide users with additional benefits.  First, if you want to use Simplenote but don’t like the ads, you can pay a one-time fee of $3.99 which removes the ads from your account.  Second, Simplenote offers a premium service for $8.99 per year.  The premium service includes the following perks: ads are disabled; notes are automatically backed up and are always accessible; users can create notes via email and can share their notes using a specially-created RSS feed; users have unlimited API usage and receive access to premium support and new services.

What’s Macgasmic:  Simplenote is a like the Zen of note apps.  I’ve tried other apps that pop with eye-candy and boast additional features, but I always come back to Simplenote because it is so easy to use and because it just works.  The other apps I’ve tried are a hassle to sync and the cutsie stuff just gets in the way.  Simplenote does what it does extremely well and it isn’t jumbled with fluff or bloated with a million typesetting options.  What makes Simplenote stand out is its easy integration with both desktop and web-based applications.  The syncing feature works like a dream.

Simplenote Web App

What’s Not:  Simplenote will not please everyone.  The fact that you can’t add images or audio might be a deal-breaker for some people.  The developers state on their site that they have no plans to add these features to the app–ever.  While simplicity is definitely the key design focus for this app, the developers could make a few changes that would retain the simplicity but increase usability.  For example, they might consider adding a basic outlining feature so users could easily make lists on Simplenote.  It would also be nice to be able to group notes in folders, especially when you have hundreds of notes to manage.  The developers are apparently considering the possibility of adding a tags feature to the app to assist in organizing notes.

Simplenote is an excellent note-taking application that reflects its developers’ desire for simplicity.  It offers superior syncing capabilities in addition to an appealing user interface.  The application is free, so there’s no reason not to download it, and, when you do, be sure to try out some of the compatible apps like Notational Velocity.  You might discover, like I did, that Simplenote becomes an essential addition to your app arsenal.

40 Second Video from Simplenote.com