Macgasm

Waterfield Designs, Inc., creates some of the highest quality bags on the market.  Ranging from messenger bags to iPad cases to wallets, the company, which is located in San Francisco, is well known for great customer service and amazing bags for almost any type of gear.  Today I am reviewing one of their many cases for the iPad:  the iPad Exo Sleeve Case.  At the end of the review I will also provide a list of other options Waterfield offers for the iPad.

The iPad Exo Sleeve Case is designed to hold an iPad when it is inside another case.  The Exo Sleeve was designed specifically to accommodate Apple’s iPad Case, but it should fit virtually any other close-fitting case you might have on your iPad.  For example, I’m using the Exo Sleeve with my Vaja ivolution Top SP case (see Macgasm’s review here), and it fits perfectly.

The Waterfield Exo Sleeve with the iPad in the Vaja Case

The Exo Sleeve is not intended for a naked iPad, but Waterfield also makes the Ultimate Sleeve which looks just like the Exo Sleeve but has additional padding to protect the iPad.

Several options are available for the Exo Sleeve. For the trim you can choose between a fabric (lead indium) ($49.00) and brown leather ($53.00).  The case can be ordered in either vertical or horizontal orientation.  If you want a shoulder strap, you have the option of the simple strap mini ($9.00) or the suspension strap mini ($19.00); or, if you have your own shoulder strap, you can just request D rings ($5.00).  If you would like a little more space for carrying accessories (more on that below), you can add a piggy back case with lead indium ($25.00) or leather trim ($27.00).  So, the bag will cost you anywhere between $49.00 (with no additional options) and $99.00 if you choose all the most expensive options.  Shipping costs are additional.

Great for carrying hands free

Now, you might be wondering, “Why do you need a sleeve case if you already have your iPad in a case?” Well, that’s a good question. Certainly if you already carry a messenger bag, a backpack, or have a briefcase, you can simply slip your covered iPad in one of those and do just fine.  But, if you don’t want to carry everything with you all the time, a sleeve case would definitely lighten your load. Or, perhaps you want to take the iPad on the plane with you and you don’t want to have to stow another, bigger bag.

The Exo Sleeve is perfect for occasions when you want to carry your iPad hands free (if you get the strap, that is) or when you want an additional layer of protection for your iPad while it’s in your other bags. I carry my Exo-Sleeve along with my purse when I go to Starbucks to read or surf the Web on my iPad. I like how light the Exo-Sleeve is on my shoulder;  it allows me to have my hands free (to get my coffee, of course); it prevents my purse from assaulting my iPad when my two bags bump together.

The first thing you’ll notice about Waterfield Bags is the excellent craftsmanship and the quality.  These bags are well made and the materials they use are virtually indestructible (unless you have Labrador Retrievers—Labs can destroy anything. Believe me).

The front flap, adorned with the Waterfield logo, is constructed of heavy-duty nylon and velcro.

Flap Closure

The Exo Sleeve has one main felt-lined compartment for your iPad and an outer pocket for accessories.

Main compartment

The bottom of the case (trimmed with your choice of lead indium fabric or leather) has a pull tab you can use to assist in removing the iPad from the case. This is helpful if your iPad (in its case) fits rather snugly in the Exo Sleeve.

Bottom pull tab

If you’ve chosen a shoulder strap, it is attached securely to the sleeve by metal d-rings and lobster clasps.  The clasps attach easily using a push-spring mechanism.  Although I like this mechanism (it helps avoid pinched fingers), I also found that, given the right circumstances, the strap can become disengaged accidentally—at least I managed it whilst pulling my iPad out of my car by the shoulder strap.

Shoulder strap hardware

The outer pocket, presumably there for your accessories, does not offer much room.  If you put your power cord in it, the case bulges out, and the clean, streamlined look of the Exo Sleeve is lost.  Fortunately, the iPad has great battery life, so you may not need to carry your power cord with you.

The outer pocket with power cord inserted

But, if you find that you need more room you can opt for the “Piggy Back” case that attaches to the sleeve for your accessories.  Nevertheless, if there’s anything disappointing about the case it is the tight fit of the outer pocket.  I should’ve gotten the Piggy Back!

What’s Macgasmic:  The Waterfield iPad Exo Sleeve is a beautiful piece of workmanship.  It is a lightweight but solidly built bag that houses your iPad when it’s in another case. You can carry the Exo Sleeve by itself using the shoulder strap or you can put the Exo Sleeve in another bag.  Its streamlined shape and light weight make it ideal for travel on airplanes (and the bag is checkpoint friendly).  Waterfield offers lots of options so you can personalize the bag to your liking.  And, you are always guaranteed great service when you deal with Waterfield.

The outer pocket bulges a bit with the power cord inside

What’s Not:  My only real criticism of this bag is the tight fit for the outer pocket.  This makes the outer pocket almost useless for anything other than flat items unless you’re not bothered by a bulging bag.  The only other thing I would suggest is for Waterfield to offer more choices in fabric and leather colors for the Exo Sleeve. Some of their other bags come in a variety of colors, and it would be nice to have a splash of color for this bag too.

Waterfield’s makes some other fantastic iPad bags as well:

The iPad Ultimate Sleeve Case (starts at $55:00). This is a padded case sized for a naked iPad.

The iPad Suede Jacket (starts at $19.00). A super thin ultrasuede sleeve that protects from nicks and scratches.

The iPad Smart Case ($59.00).  A pocket case with a rigid exterior and soft, padded interior. Comes in several colors.

The iPad Slip Case ($29.00).  A soft pocket case with lined interior.

The Muzetto (10″ Portable $189.00).  A drool-worthy, multi-pocket messenger style leather bag with a variety of trim colors. These are very popular, and Waterfield’s site indicates that all Muzettos are sold out until mid-July.

S.Shek over at DeviantArt has posted his new take on the icons for the applications in Adobe’s Creative Suite. If you’re into customization, you’ll want to pounce on these beautiful 512×512 icons.

If you don’t feel like changing your icons by hand, you can use Panic’s CandyBar 3 to do all of the heavy lifting for only $29.00.

Download them for free here.

Photo Credit: S.Shek

The 2010 WWDC Keynote will be delivered by the man in the black turtleneck himself.

Apple has confirmed today that Steve Jobs will be the person on stage opening the Worldwide Developers Conference June 7th in San Francisco. Remember last year was presided over by Phil Schiller while Jobs was recovering from liver transplant surgery.

So what can we read into this? Typically WWDC has been a “launching platform” for many products within the Apple product line. Will we in-fact see the next-generation iPhone? The stars are lining up to assume that could actually happen – with all the movement happening at AT&T with the moving up of early upgrades and of course, the leaked and lost prototypes of the next iPhone.

For certain, we can expect the 4.0 release of the iPhone OS will be out; the latest beta 4 is actually very clean, very fast, and essentially free of significant bugs (now app developers need to pick up the pace and get their apps properly coded for the new functionality offered in OS v4).

We should also feel somewhat confident that there will be a technology response to the announcements made by Google at the Google I/O conference last week. Will the Apple TV get a refresh to compete with Google TV? Hope so…

From a public relations perspective, Apple is being tight-lipped thus far as to specifics about Jobs’ WWDC keynote. The company said only that the conference will feature five technology tracks, including Applications Frameworks, Internet & Web Graphics & Media, Developer Tools, and Core OS.

Are you one of the 5000 attending the sold out WWDC this year? What would you like to hear announced?

Photo Credit: acaben

iQapps recently debuted Trip Journal 5.0 (www.trip-journal.com) for iPhone. The iPhone app delivers an incredible mobile travel experience. It comes with full Facebook integration to share vacations in real-time with friends and colleagues around the world. Trip Journal 5.0 utilizes iPhone’s GPS features to geographically mark photos, videos (upcoming update), media, journal entries and more on an interactive map, which are all instantly uploaded and viewable to Facebook friends.

Friends charting a trip can comment on and interact with uploaded content, and the traveler receives instant notification of all replies. Trip Journal 5.0 also features direct uploads to Flickr, Picasa, Twitter and other social networking hubs to create the best interactive travel experience available for iPhone.

Trip Journal 5.0’s new features include:

• Live GPS-enabled trip sharing with all your Facebook friends—share your vacations around the globe right as they happen, and instantly receive feedback and comments from friends as they chart your journey with envy

• Fully interactive map, route, photo, video (launching soon), media, comment and waypoint features all tied to your Facebook profile straight from your iPhone

• The most advanced utilization of iPhone GPS for Facebook travel-sharing to date

• Upload media photo and journal entry content instantly to dozens of other sites, including Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and more directly from the application

Trip Journal can also manage several trips simultaneously, allowing multiple travelers to share their vacations from a single iPhone. Available for other smartphone platforms as well, Trip Journal creates a real-time travel sharing experience with superior versatility and convenience.

“Trip Journal 5.0 creates a whole new interactive experience for the global adventurer,” said Radu Iuhas, Product Director for iQapps. “Stream your vacation live through Facebook, right from your mobile device, from anywhere in the world to your friends at home. Tying Facebook and iPhone together through the Trip Journal offers a whole new way to share your travels.”

Trip Journal 5.0 launches in the iPhone App Store on May 22, 2010 as a free upgrade to all existing Trip Journal users. The app received a $100,000 prize from Google for innovative concept and design in December 2009. For new customers, a special promotional price of $0.99 will be available, followed by its standard price of $2.99. Trip Journal has been recognized as the #1 Google Awarded Travel Application with for the best trip tracking, recording, documenting and sharing features currently available for the iPhone.

Macgasm has three free download codes for Trip Journal 5.0.  First come, first served (codes can only be used once)!

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Google has been a “good guy” in the tech industry over the last several years. The famous “do no evil” slogan is at the heart of this when other companies slogans seem to be “make money no matter who we hurt.” However as Google has gotten larger and more successful some problems have come up. The biggest issue seems to be their data aggregation. Examples range from collecting users search history for market research and advertising to reading all emails that pass through Gmail for focused advertising, without deleting the data when the user does. So far we aren’t aware of any abuse of this information, but one has to wonder what will happen if the current leadership changes, or somehow the data leaves Google and gets into the wrong hands.

The latest one from Google appears to be innocent, but seems like a doozy. When Google was sending the VW Beatles around with the creepy bug-eye cameras they were apparently wardriving as well. And not just connecting to any open WiFi they came in radio range of to catch up on farmville, but also reading and saving all of the data. The location of these open networks is used to aid with positioning. Devices like the iPod Touch have minor positioning data available based simply on what network they are connected to, and Google set up this system by mapping networks. The problem is that they also grabbed activity logs while they were at it.

Most people don’t understand just how insecure network communication is by default. Another machine on the same network as you will have all packets fly by it, and if the connection isn’t secure (the https you see for things like your bank, paypal, or GMail) then the data just goes by as plain text. Pretty much any web browsing activity, instant messaging, etc. can be seen by perfectly legal and freely available software. One of the most popular examples is Wireshark. The software exists to help network engineers troubleshoot problems, but can also be used to collect things like what sites are being visited, or even passwords sent by unencrypted methods.

So this means Google has collected tons of data from (presumably) anywhere that has Google streetview data on file.

I can see some reason to argue that people who didn’t have their network secured are the ones at fault, but why would Google be collecting and keeping this data. Some privacy advocates aren’t too happy about this, and according to this Financial Times article, Peter Schaar, the German commissioner for data protection, wants answers from the big G.

I really appreciate Google’s continual push for technology, they have done a tremendous amount to advance technology in the last decade. However I truly only hope that events like this and the backlash from both the government and private sector can urge Google to take a step back and remember to keep ethics a top priority.
Image via rpb on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbp/4254683170/

As reported by Mashable, Chinese website Apple.pro has leaked photos of what is obviously an iPhone 4G with a white face plate. The black version is what we first saw about a month ago on Engadget, and aside from the aluminum back, it looks like a natural evolution of the iPhone. At the time of the original leak, the discussions regarding the cosmetics of the phone revolved largely around the back and the aluminum bezel of the phone and how form might impact function.

With this latest leak, however, the internet has been agog about the possibility of the phone actually launching with two different face plates, a first for the iPhone. While the notion of the whole internet fawning over an Apple product leak is nothing new, it does seem kind of silly that this one little leak should do the same. Except it should get our attention as it may provide some insight into Apple’s marketing mechanisms.

In all likelihood this is just a one-off mockup that Apple’s product marketing folks requested for consideration, despite what the designers may have intended. It is very common in the cell phone industry for such mock-ups to be created for nothing more than due diligence; Apple should be no different. Somewhere in Cupertino someone did the research that indicates that people like to have a color choice when buying an iPhone; white is certainly a color that has worked before for Apple and the iPhone.

But from an overall design perspective I am not sure this works. Even acknowledging that the finished product would look much better than what is seen in these pictures, the white face plate seems to go against Apple’s ever-evolving design principles. White polycarbonate products are white all over and are made that way to be recognizably different from the rest of the product line, which is defined by brushed aluminum and black reflective plastic. Brushed aluminum and white plastic simply do not combine to create the sleek, deep, highly evolved design that Apple has achieved with the latest MacBook Pro and iPad.

In my opinion this is just the hype machine at play to drive traffic to a website. I have been wrong before, though.

Article Via: Apple Pro
Photo Credit: Apple Pro

Heavenly news for all World of Warcraft players utilizing the Armory iPhone app! The newly released Auction House addition was announced and will soon go live!

The Armory app was updated recently and will soon feature a section for the auctioneers that will allows us to check auctions on our WoW accounts. While it will take a $3 monthly service fee to go in and create new auctions, it’s still an amazing convenience

Some people are skeptical about the $3/monthly fee, but Blizzard loyals have proven its worthy for the small price. And this is also a big step in a more mobile gaming front. While newer Apple products like the iPad or even the iPhone 3GS are unable to natively run the hugely popular MMORPG game, these little features like being able to buy, create, and check up on your auctions without logging in from your computer are a big step in the right direction.

This will be huge for people who utilize their auctions for their gold incomes as you can check on bids and even manage your auctions if somebody is trying to undercut you while you’re offline. Good luck, fellow auctioneers, and happy auctioning once this drops! Here’s to hoping your significant other isn’t mad that now WoW has officially overcome your entire life now! :)

News via WoW Armory.

A couple of months back, we speculated that Apple would be killing off the “Get A Mac” ad campaign after reading an interview with Justin Long on the AV Club website. Long speculated that Apple would be wrapping up the campaign because they hadn’t heard from Apple regarding any upcoming recording sessions.

We love the ads, but pretty much agree with Apple’s decision to pull the plug on the series. They went from being witty to smug to overkill in the last couple of months. Don’t get me wrong, we love Justin Long and John Hodgeman as much as the next Mac fan, but even we were getting a little tired of them.

The original “Get A Mac” page now forwards to a brand new “Why You’ll Love A Mac” page. Looks like Apple’s gone from having to convince users to get a Mac to having to tell them why they should love their Macs, and that’s something we can get behind—you know, being a site called Macgasm and all.

Article Via The Register