Macgasm

Some people have been noticing that the iPhone 4S battery isn’t performing better than the iPhone 4 at this point, despite the face that the iPhone 4S battery is supposed to be better. Everyone seems to be talking about it, and for what it’s worth, there are reports that Apple has begun contacting people to find out what exactly is going on with their phones according to The Guardian.

There are a number of things you can do to ensure that your phone, both iPhone 4S and the iPhones preceding it, get the most out its battery. The short answer is turning things off that you’re not using.

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Well, look what turned up in our Macgasm Flickr pool! The Apple that started it all. I think I might need to take a work trip to Sydney to visit this in person. Thank you Eriks Remess for sharing this with us.

Photo Credit: Eriks Remess

Do you want to be a photographer or just play one on the web? Here’s your chance! Join Macgasm’s Flickr group and upload all your beauty shots of your Apple gear. Each week we select one lucky participant to be featured on Flickr Find Friday. Go join our Flickr Group now. Get creative. Upload up to 7 pics a day. Tune in on Fridays (like you ever miss a post, right?) and see if you have what it takes to be featured. Good luck and happy snapping.

Apple has released the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) into the wild today by making the codec open source and giving it an Apache license. The codec works on all iOS devices and is bit-for-fit identical to the original uncompressed audio file that is being converted.

Apple Lossless is usually stored in M4A containers much like its AAC codec. Apple claims that the Lossless Audio Codec only uses about half of the storage space that would be needed for a raw, uncompressed audio encoding. The codec also works with Apple’s AirPlay technologies, which may be part of the reason that Apple has decided to make the codec open source today.

It’s not the sexiest of news articles, but it is a pretty large move for the company. Developers can now get their hands on the codec source code over at Mac OS forge.

Hopefully we’ll see FaceTime released into the Open Source world as well, considering Apple claimed it would be Open Source during the the keynote where it was announced. We’d be a little more excited about that news, but any time Apple releases stuff to the public (Webkit) we get pretty excited about it.

Image Credit: juanpol

Right, night vision goggles at the ready, because Jurassic Park, the latest adventure game from Telltale Games, has been given a release date. Do you really need to be told what Jurassic Park is? Whether you’re familiar with the Michael Crichton novel or the spectacular Spielberg screen adaptation, the popular dinosaur tale touches down on Mac on November 15.

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There are a number of reasons you’d want to keep track of your time spent on a project or an article, although all of them seem to be for financial gain. We love financial gain, so we thought it might be appropriate to both fill you in on what Timecop does, as well as give away a copy of it so we can help people make some more money.

Timecop is a nifty little application that sits in your menubar and lets you track your time on multiple tasks as well as projects, making invoicing a lot simpler. Sure, applications like Billings does this as well (along with a lot of other stuff), but Timecop is only $4.99 on the Mac App Store, which is a lot cheaper than many of the alternatives.

Pretty simple stuff, but it’s also the stuff that helps you invoice just a little more accurately. Heck, you don’t even need to use it for invoicing. You could use it for tracking the time you spend on a school project, time you spend writing an article, or any other activity that you’re curious about. I was going to track the time I spend on Macgasm on a weekly basis, but man, I’m not sure if the app can even count that high.

Get the giveaway details

We’ve all been speculating about Steve Jobs’ cryptic comment to Walter Isaacson about how he “cracked” television. Pretty much everyone has taken this comment to mean that a full-fledged Apple Television is in the works. But Nick Bilton over at the New York Times has provided a slightly different interpretation of this quote. According to Bilton, the secret ingredient that Jobs is referring to in this quote is none other than the newest addition to the Apple iOS family: Siri. Looking back at the quote, this could certainly be “the simplest user interface” that Jobs referenced. What could be easier than turning on your television and asking Siri to put on the show you want to watch?

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Yes, we know. Siri has been hot news for the past three weeks. The reviews have all been for positive, too — until now. MercuryNews was told by the San Jose Police Department that using Siri while driving is illegal. And that’s just odd.

“It’s legal to talk to Siri, as long as the phone’s not in your hand,” says San Jose police Lt. Chris Monahan. “But if you have to push the phone to activate her, or if you ask for directions and she puts them up on her screen for you to read, then California’s hands-free law says you’re breaking the law.”

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Let me just say that Richard Stallman is a brilliant man with some ideas that challenge the status quo, and he reminds us that there’s more to computing than what you can buy off the shelf at the local box store.

And, in case you can’t tell from the wild eyes and cascading neckbeard, he’s also pants-on-head crazy.

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