Here are some more apps that I have found fun, useful or interesting.
If you have a Facebook account, you can download the Facebook app that will allow you to quickly update your status, check mail, send pictures, chat etc from your iPhone. It is different than the iphone.facebook.com web page. I have both on the phone but mainly use the Facebook app. The webpage is more thorough but for quick updates I like the app.
Air Sharing is a program that allows you to access your iPhone as a portable wireless hard drive. Works pretty slick but I think it only works over Wireless networks (not 3G or Edge). It gives your phone an IP address which you can access from a Mac or PC on the current network and transfer files to and from your phone using a sevure username and password. It sets up a partition for file sharing, so you don't have access to all of your music, photos and videos on the phone this way....only the files you've transferred with Air Sharing. Pretty cool.
I've been looking for a fre or inexpensive IM program that will work with Windows Live. So far the only one that is free that gets any decent reviews is one called Palringo. I installed it and set it up this morning so I haven't had a lot of time to mess around with it but so far it works....and it works fast. I sat at my computer logged in as one user and on my iPhone as another cnd chatted with myself to see how quickly it would respond. It was intantaneous. I have read reviews of peolpe having trouble adding Google Chat accounts, but I have only tried MSN and it works fine.
Cannon Game is a great game app. It is from Discovery Channel and and gives you access to a Non-Line-Of-Sight cannon and you must use elevation and velocity to catapult your projectile over mountains to destroy your targets. I haven't found a way to mute the sound yet, so it's not good for secret playing while in a boring meeting.
Not actually an app, but I did find a third party A/V cable that allows you to connect your iPhone to a TV or stereo so you can play your music or videos/photos on the TV. Haven't had any problems with it until yesterday when I plugged it in it indicated that it was not an Apple approved product and may not work properly. I did get a little bit of noise through the speakers while playing Pandora Radio but quickly went away. The cable also has USB on it so you can charge your phone too. $30....not bad at all.
More to come later!!
Friday, September 12, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
iPhone Apps
This is a list of the Apps I've downloaded and think are very cool and useful. Everything is this is free.
-Jott is a great little app for voice recording and transcription. It allows you to record up to 10 seconds (I think) then transmits the recording to the Jott server. The server trascribes the recording and keeps it on the website which then sends it to your phone as a note. Great way to make a to-do list while on the go without needing to stop and type. (It does require free registration on Jott.com)
-Pandora is a free custom radio station (much like Yahoo! Launchcast) which allows you to create stations based on you favorite artists. It will then play music similar to your favorites and let you rate it with a thumbs up or thumbs down.
-Simplify Media lets you stream music from your iTunes library on your home computer directly to your iPhone. This gives you access to your entire iTunes library (or music folder) which may be 50GB in size without taking up space on your phone. ( I have the 8GB version of the phone and have to be selective of what I put on it) I was driving down the freeway today listening to music that wasn't even on my phone. This program also requires you register for free and also makes you install a small 'server' program on your computer. Only issue is you always need to have your computer on to make this work....iTunes does not have to be running. I should also note that for best results, your host computer should be on an ethernet cable instead of a crappy Lynksys USB Wi-Fi adaptor. Mine keeps falling off the network.
-Bible Reader by Olive Tree puts the entire bible at your fingertips in nine translations! This program installs everything on the phone so you don't even need a data connection to make it work. This means you can put your phone in 'Airplane mode' and use it in church without the worry of receiving phone calls or text messages.
-GPS Tracker is a program that will track your phone and post the data on a website that you can share with friends and family. They can track your progess while you're on a trip giving them your location, altitude and speed at any track point. The only problems with this program is that is has to be in the front to work, you can't start it and then listen to iTunes. It's also a huge battery hog. You can however launch the program to get a reading, then close it after a few minutes just to give the website random points if you want beople to know where you are at a certain time. (other programs I've read about use SMS which is a problem if you don't have unlimited texting)
There are TONS of other apps available that I'm sure are gems, but these are the ones I've come accros so far and find useful.
-Jott is a great little app for voice recording and transcription. It allows you to record up to 10 seconds (I think) then transmits the recording to the Jott server. The server trascribes the recording and keeps it on the website which then sends it to your phone as a note. Great way to make a to-do list while on the go without needing to stop and type. (It does require free registration on Jott.com)
-Pandora is a free custom radio station (much like Yahoo! Launchcast) which allows you to create stations based on you favorite artists. It will then play music similar to your favorites and let you rate it with a thumbs up or thumbs down.
-Simplify Media lets you stream music from your iTunes library on your home computer directly to your iPhone. This gives you access to your entire iTunes library (or music folder) which may be 50GB in size without taking up space on your phone. ( I have the 8GB version of the phone and have to be selective of what I put on it) I was driving down the freeway today listening to music that wasn't even on my phone. This program also requires you register for free and also makes you install a small 'server' program on your computer. Only issue is you always need to have your computer on to make this work....iTunes does not have to be running. I should also note that for best results, your host computer should be on an ethernet cable instead of a crappy Lynksys USB Wi-Fi adaptor. Mine keeps falling off the network.
-Bible Reader by Olive Tree puts the entire bible at your fingertips in nine translations! This program installs everything on the phone so you don't even need a data connection to make it work. This means you can put your phone in 'Airplane mode' and use it in church without the worry of receiving phone calls or text messages.
-GPS Tracker is a program that will track your phone and post the data on a website that you can share with friends and family. They can track your progess while you're on a trip giving them your location, altitude and speed at any track point. The only problems with this program is that is has to be in the front to work, you can't start it and then listen to iTunes. It's also a huge battery hog. You can however launch the program to get a reading, then close it after a few minutes just to give the website random points if you want beople to know where you are at a certain time. (other programs I've read about use SMS which is a problem if you don't have unlimited texting)
There are TONS of other apps available that I'm sure are gems, but these are the ones I've come accros so far and find useful.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Apple iPhone
Ive been one of those Anti-Apple guys for quite some time. I don't like the endless proprietary cables, plugs, and power supplies that Apple incorporates into everything they do, making you spend even more money on things you need and can only get through Apple. However, as I began researching the options of getting a new cel phone (with data connectivity) and possibly replacing my tried and true every day usable Palm TX, I began looking into the iPhone. Most of the people at my work have them and absolutely love them.
I made a list of all the things I use my Palm TX for and compared it with what is available for the Apple iPhone as included programs or free 'apps' to install. What I found was that I could do everything I do now plus a ton more by using the iPhone. It wasn't anything to enter into lightly as the monthly cost was pretty high as well as the initial cost of purchasing the phone and activating it and such. Since the monthly cost of what we are already paying for cel service for a family shared plan was the same as a single plan for the iPhone, I thought it wouldn't be too big of a strecth. Granted we will now be butting T*** on a pay-as-you-go type of plan that will hopefully not cost very much at all to maintain for the amount of time she actually will use it.
Needless to say, I bought one less than a week ago and really like it. One of the things I was really excited about was the GPS functionality. It's not what I'm used to and not quite as good as what I had with the EMTAC Navigator and Palm TX. The iPhone currently doesn't have real time turn by turn directions, but it does give directions as you would find on Google Maps and print out, has constantly updated maps, and current traffic conditions. To make it most useful, you'd want to have someone with you reading off the directions to you...but the ability to have current maps, Points of Interest via Google, and current traffic conditions make it worth while (until someone makes better software for it). Downside to this system is that it always needs a data connection to work. So when I went to Mt Rainier last weekend, as soon as I was out of the AT&T data service, my map went away. The Palm TX was my copilot for that trip and worked like a charm.
I also really like having my email always with me. There are times when I will be wiating for an email and constantly tethered to the computer waiting for a response...this way I can get email anytime all the time. Our mail server at work will also 'push' the email to my phone so as soon as the server gets the mail it alerts me....I don't have to wait for it. Standard POP3 email uses a 'fetch' schedule that will check for mail every 15, 30 or 60 minutes. Push and frequent fetching drains the battery faster than if you didn't have it on...but when you need your mail, it's there.
I have had to charge the phone everyday as opposed to my once a week charge on my old phone. I assume the battery wil last longer once the novelty of this device goes away and I stop playing with it so much, but even then it's not a huge deal since it will charge from any computer or as long as I keep the AC 'cube' with me.
I'll write more another time about all the cool things you can do with the iPhone and free apps. For now I'll say that I really really like my new phone and do think it's the future of mobile connectivity. I am impressed that my standard headphones work and the power charger is basically the USB cable that plugs either into your computer or the proprietary AC 'cube' that comes with it. The bummer is you can't use your standard car adaptor with the USB plug in the same scenario. I've purchased a car charger from Meritline.com that will be arriving this week ($5)...hopefully that will work.
More to come.
I made a list of all the things I use my Palm TX for and compared it with what is available for the Apple iPhone as included programs or free 'apps' to install. What I found was that I could do everything I do now plus a ton more by using the iPhone. It wasn't anything to enter into lightly as the monthly cost was pretty high as well as the initial cost of purchasing the phone and activating it and such. Since the monthly cost of what we are already paying for cel service for a family shared plan was the same as a single plan for the iPhone, I thought it wouldn't be too big of a strecth. Granted we will now be butting T*** on a pay-as-you-go type of plan that will hopefully not cost very much at all to maintain for the amount of time she actually will use it.
Needless to say, I bought one less than a week ago and really like it. One of the things I was really excited about was the GPS functionality. It's not what I'm used to and not quite as good as what I had with the EMTAC Navigator and Palm TX. The iPhone currently doesn't have real time turn by turn directions, but it does give directions as you would find on Google Maps and print out, has constantly updated maps, and current traffic conditions. To make it most useful, you'd want to have someone with you reading off the directions to you...but the ability to have current maps, Points of Interest via Google, and current traffic conditions make it worth while (until someone makes better software for it). Downside to this system is that it always needs a data connection to work. So when I went to Mt Rainier last weekend, as soon as I was out of the AT&T data service, my map went away. The Palm TX was my copilot for that trip and worked like a charm.
I also really like having my email always with me. There are times when I will be wiating for an email and constantly tethered to the computer waiting for a response...this way I can get email anytime all the time. Our mail server at work will also 'push' the email to my phone so as soon as the server gets the mail it alerts me....I don't have to wait for it. Standard POP3 email uses a 'fetch' schedule that will check for mail every 15, 30 or 60 minutes. Push and frequent fetching drains the battery faster than if you didn't have it on...but when you need your mail, it's there.
I have had to charge the phone everyday as opposed to my once a week charge on my old phone. I assume the battery wil last longer once the novelty of this device goes away and I stop playing with it so much, but even then it's not a huge deal since it will charge from any computer or as long as I keep the AC 'cube' with me.
I'll write more another time about all the cool things you can do with the iPhone and free apps. For now I'll say that I really really like my new phone and do think it's the future of mobile connectivity. I am impressed that my standard headphones work and the power charger is basically the USB cable that plugs either into your computer or the proprietary AC 'cube' that comes with it. The bummer is you can't use your standard car adaptor with the USB plug in the same scenario. I've purchased a car charger from Meritline.com that will be arriving this week ($5)...hopefully that will work.
More to come.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Picasa 2
I have always been one to use Photoshop any time I had to do anything picture related. Even simple straightening and cropping of photos. Recently I've been scanning in several pictures to put to a video slideshow for a memorial service and was NOT looking forward to taking every image into Photoshop to crop and straighten. In my quest to find a free simple program that would do such things I remembered about Google's free photo program called Picasa. I already had it installed on my computer but never really used it. So I updated to the latest version and opened it up to see what I could do. I love it!!! For simple tasks it is the fastest and easiest ever! SO much easier than Photoshop because there are both 'straighten' and 'crop' tools. You straighten (and adjust) a bunch of photos, then when you're done, you can save your changes. Picasa will save your original unaltered file in a hidden folder and replace your adjusted picture in place of the original. That made it super easy to straighten, crop, and color correct pictures without the hassle of opening them all in Photoshop and doing them manually one by one.
The final slideshow turned out really nice. I did it in Adobe ENcore DVD which has a nice 'automatic' slideshow feature. Although I did have revert back to CS2 to make it work. The program kept crashing when I would try to build the final project and burn a DVD using Encore DVD CS3. I almost had to revert to using Microsoft Photo Story 3 or Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder. Each are nice and easy, but quality is not nearly as good as Encore DVD.
The final slideshow turned out really nice. I did it in Adobe ENcore DVD which has a nice 'automatic' slideshow feature. Although I did have revert back to CS2 to make it work. The program kept crashing when I would try to build the final project and burn a DVD using Encore DVD CS3. I almost had to revert to using Microsoft Photo Story 3 or Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder. Each are nice and easy, but quality is not nearly as good as Encore DVD.
Friday, May 09, 2008
Windows Vista
A while ago I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my new fast computer. I installed Vista on a separate internal SATA hard drive separate from my XP drive (IDE). In order to swap between operating systems I do have to go into the system BIOS and tell it to use the SATA (Vista) or IDE (XP) drive to boot from instead of putting both on the same drive and using the startup manager to switch. I don't know what is safer....but so far this seems to be working. I'm a little paranoid about putting both operating systems on the same drive but I suppose eventually that would keep the computer cooler having fewer drives inside.
There are things I really like about Vista and things I really don't like. The graphics are great. My games play very smoothly on the Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz processor in conjunction with the nVidia 8500GT running DirectX 10. I think it looks better than the same hardware on Windows XP using DirectX 9.0c. I've been playing Call of Duty 4, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Microsoft Flight Simulator X. All look really good. Might look better on a better graphics card, but not worth the extra $150 to me for as little as I get to play.
Other things I like about Vista are pretty minor but cool. A search within the start menu is nice. If you're looking to launch a program that isn't in the 'START' menu, instead of doing the old Start:All Programs then hunting around for it, you can actually type in the name of the program you're looking for and it'll show up. Nice! Also when you want to rename a file in the finder, you can click on it and instead of it highlighting the entire name including the file extension, it only highlights the name....not the extension. Makes renaming files a lot faster and easier...and safer!
Vista has a much faster install time than Windows XP, and a much faster repair time as well. In my attempts to resurrect my XP system drive, I corrupted something on my Vista drive and it wouldn't boot. I was able to 'repair' by booting off the Vista install CD and the repair went very quickly unlike a repair in XP which basically reinstalls the OS.
Things that are really annoying are the lame administrator security alerts. "You need administrator rights to do this, click here to continue". So you click there and it does what it was supposed to. The problem is that I only have one user account on the computer....and it's an administrator. So I already HAVE administrator privileges. Annoying. I haven't done much research into this but maybe there is a way to disable these alerts...probably not but it would be nice!
I'm using the Windows Vista Aero 'theme' since my system is beefy enough to handle it. It looks great and all the windows have these zoom.fade effects which look nice when windows open or close. The Alt+Tab interface is cool, instead of having tiny thumbnails of the open windows to switch between, the sample windows are pretty big so you can actually see what you are choosing. Also when you mouse over the open windows down in the task bar, a decent sized thumbnail shows up down there too. Makes it a little easier to see what window you are about to open.
I haven't explored all the features in Vista and probably should go through the "what's new" or even the "welcome to Vista" stuff.....eventually I will. But for now, these are the things I noticed right off the bat.
There are things I really like about Vista and things I really don't like. The graphics are great. My games play very smoothly on the Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz processor in conjunction with the nVidia 8500GT running DirectX 10. I think it looks better than the same hardware on Windows XP using DirectX 9.0c. I've been playing Call of Duty 4, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Microsoft Flight Simulator X. All look really good. Might look better on a better graphics card, but not worth the extra $150 to me for as little as I get to play.
Other things I like about Vista are pretty minor but cool. A search within the start menu is nice. If you're looking to launch a program that isn't in the 'START' menu, instead of doing the old Start:All Programs then hunting around for it, you can actually type in the name of the program you're looking for and it'll show up. Nice! Also when you want to rename a file in the finder, you can click on it and instead of it highlighting the entire name including the file extension, it only highlights the name....not the extension. Makes renaming files a lot faster and easier...and safer!
Vista has a much faster install time than Windows XP, and a much faster repair time as well. In my attempts to resurrect my XP system drive, I corrupted something on my Vista drive and it wouldn't boot. I was able to 'repair' by booting off the Vista install CD and the repair went very quickly unlike a repair in XP which basically reinstalls the OS.
Things that are really annoying are the lame administrator security alerts. "You need administrator rights to do this, click here to continue". So you click there and it does what it was supposed to. The problem is that I only have one user account on the computer....and it's an administrator. So I already HAVE administrator privileges. Annoying. I haven't done much research into this but maybe there is a way to disable these alerts...probably not but it would be nice!
I'm using the Windows Vista Aero 'theme' since my system is beefy enough to handle it. It looks great and all the windows have these zoom.fade effects which look nice when windows open or close. The Alt+Tab interface is cool, instead of having tiny thumbnails of the open windows to switch between, the sample windows are pretty big so you can actually see what you are choosing. Also when you mouse over the open windows down in the task bar, a decent sized thumbnail shows up down there too. Makes it a little easier to see what window you are about to open.
I haven't explored all the features in Vista and probably should go through the "what's new" or even the "welcome to Vista" stuff.....eventually I will. But for now, these are the things I noticed right off the bat.
NEW issues
My system drive for Windows XP on my new computer (old hard drive) died earlier this week. I've been working on it here and there as I get time trying to resurrect the drive so I didn't have to reinstall everything from scratch. I had a feeling it was a partition table issue from past problems with this drive so I bought a program from a company called Easeus that was supposed to repair Master Boot Records, Partition Tables, and Boot Sectors. After several attempts, I could not get it to come back to life. I did a 'surface test' and discovered it did indeed have some bad sectors so I counted it a loss and started over from scratch.
I didn't lose any of my important data since I use a program called GoodSync to backup all my important stuff on other drives. I'm getting pretty good and fast at installing Windows XP and all my programs in the right order...I've done it a lot the past several months. I am now down to the last batch of programs to install and activate (Adobe CS3 Production Studio) then I'll use a utility that came with my motherboard to backup my entire system drive. It's supped to back up the entire drive in a way that will make it easily recoverable in the event of catastrophic system failure....except if your drive physically goes bad.
One of the things I've been looking into is setting up a RAID1 (mirrored volume) for all my data (not programs or operating system). However, I've learned that you can't do that on Windows XP. So I'm again using GoodSync to back up one of my data drives to another identical drive so in the event of one drive failing, I'll have a backup immediately available. It takes a little more work to do it this way, but since I can't do a RAID1, this will have to do.
That's all for now. The computer has been running very well until this recent drive failure and I am very happy with my purchase and computer building success. I've been seeing some increased performance with games when plying using the Windows Vista operating system...I'll talk about that next time.
I didn't lose any of my important data since I use a program called GoodSync to backup all my important stuff on other drives. I'm getting pretty good and fast at installing Windows XP and all my programs in the right order...I've done it a lot the past several months. I am now down to the last batch of programs to install and activate (Adobe CS3 Production Studio) then I'll use a utility that came with my motherboard to backup my entire system drive. It's supped to back up the entire drive in a way that will make it easily recoverable in the event of catastrophic system failure....except if your drive physically goes bad.
One of the things I've been looking into is setting up a RAID1 (mirrored volume) for all my data (not programs or operating system). However, I've learned that you can't do that on Windows XP. So I'm again using GoodSync to back up one of my data drives to another identical drive so in the event of one drive failing, I'll have a backup immediately available. It takes a little more work to do it this way, but since I can't do a RAID1, this will have to do.
That's all for now. The computer has been running very well until this recent drive failure and I am very happy with my purchase and computer building success. I've been seeing some increased performance with games when plying using the Windows Vista operating system...I'll talk about that next time.
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