My Plantronics .Audio 910 completes me. I cannot say enough about this magical little device. I’ve owned nice headsets before, but all have been wired. If I had known the joyous sense of freedom a Bluetooth headset provides, I would have gotten one a long time ago.
The .Audio 910 is so light weight I forget I’m wearing it. And in my humble opinion, it has a much sexier form factor than most of the Bluetooth headsets out there. And if the flashing blue light makes you feel more like a dork than a power-user, there is a setting that will turn it off.
Perhaps most importantly, this single ear piece does the work of two: the .Audio 910 will sync with both your computer and your Bluetooth enabled phone, letting you switch channels between the two with the touch of a button. According to the manual, it lasts for 6 hours of talk time, which may be ample for a typical user, especially if you are primarily using it to talk on your mobile. However in a perfect world, I’d like a longer battery, since I enjoy listening to various streaming media from my computer through the day. To remedy this problem, I intend to purchase another and alternate charging the two.
Why? Because this headset completes me. I would have it surgically implanted if I could, and perhaps it could draw bio-energy from caffeine consumed. Attention Plantronics: if you happen to be looking for human test subjects, I’d happily volunteer to be transformed into the first Bluetooth Bionic Woman. But until science opens the door to cyborg-dom, the current off-the-shelf version of the Plantronics .Audio 910 makes my world a better place to live and play. You can pick yourself up one for an MSRP of 150 dollars, but with only minimal cyber-sleuthing you can bag one for under $100.
My friend Dave Taylor posted his list of critical Mac software at his blog today. While I like his choices of Firefox and SnapzPro, and agree that the rest are all useful, my list would be quite different.
First, I wouldn’t recommend Microsoft Office to anyone, unless they had a critical need for something that was 100% compatible with other Office users. Otherwise, iWork is far cheaper and will get you where you need to go. Office is $400, which is a lot to spend for the casual Mac user.
Dave recommeds 1Password, and I hear good things about it, but I have been using Password Retriever for years and love it.
GraphicConverter makes a lot of people’s lists, but it always seemed a little buggy to me. For a little more money, I’d get PhotoShop Elements.
My favorite FTP program is Transmit. It works well with another critical piece of software for me: BBEdit. But more casual users may want to get TextWrangler instead.
I still use StuffIt as my main compression tool.
Dave seems to be much more into IM and Twitter than I am, so iChat and Twitter’s Web interface are fine for me.
But I’ll have to add Audacity to my list as an audio editor, and a free one at that. Also, I love VoodooPad, a small but powerful Wiki application that allows me to take notes and keep track of things in ways that calendars and to-do lists can’t.
Each Friday, you may notice Twitter gets quite a bit greener. No, not Al Gore green, but pea green! Many Twitter users incorporate peas into their avatar in honor of Frozen Pea Fridays, and to raise awareness for the Frozen Pea Fund.
It all started when Susan Renyolds, who is currently fighting breast cancer, wrote a touching blog post involving the comfort of frozen peas. Now she maintains a blog entitled Boobs on Ice, about her battle with the disease, where you can stay in touch with her progress.
The Frozen Pea has raised over $8,000 towards its goal of $25,000. The fundraiser benefits the American Cancer Society’s breast cancer research programs. The effort has spread through most other social networks as well, and the story has been covered by several mainstream media outlets as an outstanding example of social media community and activism. You can receive regular updates regarding the Frozen Pea Fund by following the user PEAple on twitter.
If you’d like to contribute, you can donate the cost of a package or two of frozen peas to The Frozen Pea Fund. And at no cost, you can also help raise awareness by simply adding peas to your social media avatars each Friday! Then the next time you’re in a fancy restaurant and you get chided for texting again (I know you’re a Twitter addict), just reply “ahem, I’m just doing my part to fight breast cancer!”
For example: D-list web-lebrity and Twitter user GeekGirlTV:
and D-list web-lebrity and Twitter user GeekGirlTV on Fridays:
Okay, say you’re NOT an Idol fan, but you’re a Mac fan, Why should you care that the iTunes store is selling the performances from this years American Idol?
It means there are going to be about a bazillion PC users that are going to be installing iTunes and Quicktime on their PCs. And they will be setting up purchasing accounts in iTunes And after they’ve purchased and downloaded all their favorite performances. They are going to be buying a lot more music in iTunes. in other words Idol is going to be the Gateway drug to iTunes, iPods and eventually all things Apple.
It means the stock will go up and the reality distortion field will widen and we’ll have iTablets in no time.
It means that iTunes could become the Tivo in the Cloud, where people will drop their cable subscriptions and get all their TV shows ala carte on iTunes.
It means that rabid Idol fans are going to mob Apple stores demanding more Apple TVs, So they can keep the next Carrie Underwood’s performance immortalized in HD.
It means that Simon and Steve will be Kings of the world!
Okay, I’m blowing this out of proportion but isn’t that the stuff that dreams are made of, just like American Idol.
Maybe it it’s the geek in me, But I like dials, gauges, graphs, and blinking lights. Whether it’s my car or my computer I like to pretend I know what’s going on with it.
I like deciphering the blinking lights of my OBDII reader to learn that, yes, I am going to have to buy an O2 sensor for my car soon. That’s why I like The Activity Monitor on my Macs.
I’ve read in a few places how the “Xbox 360 Live Vision Camera” might be a good replacement for the no-longer-sold stand-alone iSight camera. With Leopard (and Tiger 10.4.9) you can now use a variety of standards-based Web cameras with Macs. Just plug-and-play. And at $33 at Amazon.com, this Xbox camera seems like a bargain, and people are reporting excellent quality.
But after getting one, I was very disappointed. First off, the camera is manual focus. That puts it down a step from most other Web cameras. It is 1600×1200, which is nice, but the resulting quality at 640×480 is poor compared to the built-in iSight in iMacs and MacBooks.
It does plug-and-play, but I couldn’t get it to work with iMovie or PhotoBooth, as it only wanted to use the built-in iSight. I did get it to work with WireCast and QuickTime Pro.
The big show-stopped for me was the color quality. Very poor. The color was way off and no amount of lighting seemed to fix it.
So, this might be a good, cheap Web camera for chatting or having fun, but not for making any video.
The Web browser market is starting to look like the stock market. Currently Firefox’s stock seems to be going down and Safari’s is going up. Opera seems to just hang in there and IE for Mac is trading as a penny stock.
It’s got to the point that I have both Safari and Firefox open most of the time, just so I can navigate sites that don’t support one or the other. Maybe, I’ll have to have yet another browser open now. Flock is a new web Browser whose raison d’être is to consolidate your Web 2.0 rock and roll lifestyle.
Flock uses tabs to keep tabs on your various social networking sites. Your Facebook ,Twitter , Flickr, and You Tube friends and timelines are all under the People tab and your Flickr, Photo Bucket and You Tube photos and videos are under the Media tab, and You can sort all of your RSS and other feeds under the Feeds tab. Other cool features in Flock are an accounts tab to keep track of all your web accounts and passwords, and you can post to your blogs and upload photos all within the browsers interface.
All this stuff is cool, but maybe it’s just shyness, but I’m not quite ready to make Flock my default Web browser… yet.
First, it takes about an hour just to configure the thing to work with all your sites and once you’re done with the ordeal, you kind of wonder if you could have done the same thing in Firefox with tabs and an add-on. Secondly, I’ve got to put it through it’s paces as a plain ol’ web browser to see how compatible and fast it is before I trust it as my main browser.
I have run into one snafu trying to get it to log onto my blogs to post, but I want to figure it out a bit before I declare it a bug.
If you are heavily social networked, Flock may be your new browser, Saving you time logging onto all those sites, so that you can waste more time networking.
Flock is available as a free download at flock.com.
Okay, I usually don’t blatantly promote software. Nor would I usually steer you to another Mac site. But this is too good of a deal to pass up, if you are at all interested in DJ software.
There are several good DJ mixing applications out there, the big three are Tracktor DJ Studio, Ultramixer and DJay. Of the three, Tracktor is the big-boy Pro app but at $280US list price, it’s definitely beyond the budget of the casual DJ. UltraMixer Pro has most of the features of Tracktor and goes for $230US and while I like UltraMixer’s interface better than Tracktor’s in most aspects, UltraMixer is obviously a cross platform port, There is nothing Mac-like about it’s interface or menus. Finally there is the little engine that could. If you like spinning with two turntables and a microphone DJay is the app for you! It has a cool two deck interface and all the controls are Mac-like and intuitive, and at $50 US its a bargain.
So here’s the deal For today only (February 20, 2008) Djay is available as promo deal on MacUdate.com for $24.99.
Even if don’t catch today’s deal, if you have any interest in DJ software you should check out the trial download of DJay at the DJay website.
It seemed like “never” was when Neverwinter Nights 2 for Mac would be released. First it was November, then December, then January, then March. But now it looks like we’ll get it a bit earlier than March as Feb. 26 has been set as the date.
Neverwinter Nights is the successor to the Baldur’s Gate series of games and both are directly related to real Dungeons and Dragons, which means a little nostalgia thrown in with good RPG play. You can also create your own adventures, which for some RPG-obsessed people like me, is even more fun than playing.
I loved the Baldur’s Gate games on Mac years ago. I couldn’t wait for the original Neverwinter Nights to come out on Mac, so I bought it for Windows. I regretted that decision, since my main computers are Macs it meant that it was too much of a bother to switch to a PC to play. So I didn’t get my money’s worth out of it. Now with Boot Camp and Parallels, it was tempting to get the Windows version of Neverwinter Nights 2 many months ago, but I’ve been holding out as to not make the same mistake.
You might think that the staff of a big Mac site like MacMost would get all the new Apple products for free. I only wish it were so. So in the grand scheme of the tech ecosystem, I have to decide how much of my paycheck I’m going to recycle into Apple products and I have to decide which product I should be saving my pennies for next. Here is my current thinking.
I’m not much of a cell phone guy, but I do like the idea of the internet in my pocket, so the iPod Touch seems like it would be a really cool thing that I would use all the time, and I could even pretend I had an iPhone, and look cool, without the monthly commitment. On the down side is that it only has WiFi access (read, no driving and surfing) and my wife would probably take it and then I’d have to buy another one.
Our G3 iceBook is all but dead, it gets a case of the blue screen about a minute after booting, So it’s time to replace the iBook with a MacBook. I’m not much of a traveler, but when I do, I need my computer. Or rather, my wife needs my computer. This is because the entire social network of Second Life will falter if my wife is away from it for more than 24 hours. So iPod internet will not do, we need to be able to run Second Life. Downside to buying an MacBook? First is I know the day I buy one, the NEW MacBooks will be released, Actually that’s why the new ones aren’t out, Steve is waiting to see my purchase order for the current model before he releases the new one. Oh, and if I buy the MacBook, that blows my budget for the year and my wife would probably take it and then I’d have to buy another one.
Finally There is the Logic Studio, Logic studio had half the features, was harder to use and cost twice as much a year ago. Now it’s half the price, has tons of new features, includes Soundtrack Pro 2, a bazillion new Appleloops, and most of all, it got a new intuitive interface that mortal musicians can understand. The downside is that my wife can’t use it and therefore probably wont approve the purchase.
And finally I could just buy my wife the new iMac to replace her G5 and bask in the warmth of a happy wife and wait till next year for the next version of Logic studio.
Apple announced that they had dropped the price of the 1 Gig iPod Shuffle to $49. $50 is the price point that technology essentially becomes affordable to anyone. That means that kids are going to get real iPods for their birthdays instead of cheap knockoffs from companies like Creative and SanDisk. That in itself is going to be a huge market.
Adobe announced Director 11, which is the software that allows developers to make Shockwave content. Shockwave is the browser plug-in that is used in multimedia and gaming. It is considered more powerful than Flash, mostly because of its 3D engine that uses OpenGL on the Mac to present real 3D — the type you see in big games.
But for a while, Shockwave really hasn’t been available on the Mac. Shockwave 10, the current version, was released in 2004 and does not work on Intel machines. You could get it to work by setting either Safari or Firefox into Rosetta mode, forcing them to work like PowerPC applications on Intel machines. But most people didn’t bother.
With the release of Director 11 in March should come Shockwave 11, which will work on Intel Macs. So Shockwave will be back. You can see lots of example of Shockwave content at the free online games site GameScene.com.
So I’ve got Leopard and so I have Boot camp, and I bought a copy of Parallels to run Windows on my Mac Mini. The only thing I haven’t bought is the Windows OS. I want to get XP Pro But I’m having a hard time finding a boxed copy for less than $130, the same price as Leopard. Vista Ultimate is more like $250 new. Hmm… only one flavor of Leopard, which is pretty much ultimate by nature. Since Microsoft has announced that they will end production of XP on June 30, I’m faced with the choice of buying a soon to be obsolete (in Microsoft’s own words) OS or one that is rather buggy and tends to break hardware (hence it’s nickname Hasta La Vista).
Infoworld is circulating a petition for Microsoft to continue XP production, but what Microsoft needs to do is make a smarter, leaner single flavor of Vista that is the same price as Leopard (Yeah Right!)
While the Vista sucking issue is bringing users to Mac OSX and various flavors of Linux in droves, I need to get Windows just to run some obscure Windows only shareware apps. In fact, come to think of it I might even be able to get by with XP Home edition, that should cost less than Leopard.
