Little bluetooth headsets are super cool gadgets — reason enough to get one. So I tried to figure out what the most solid unit out there was, without breaking the bank. I came up with the popular Plantronics Voyager 510 Bluetooth Headset. It works with both the iPhone and the Mac, where it provides a decent external microphone for chat or voice recording.
Instead of just being another breakout clone, Radial 50 makes things more interesting with a circular design, allowing your paddle to move all the way around the screen. There’s plenty of complexity here, but at the same time the game play is simply to reflect the ball. The design is interesting enough to keep you playing time and time again.
Manually adding pages to appear on your Safari 4 “Top Sites” page is less-than-intuitive. The + button to the left of the address field at the top of Safari lets you add the current page to your bookmarks bar or menu, and also Top Sites. Just click it and in the pop-up menu that appears inside the drop-down controller, choose Top Sites. The site will be added and automatically “pinned” to stay on your Top Sites page.
So rumors are growing stronger that Apple will come out with a tablet product later this year or next. A lot of people seem to think it will be a large-screen iPod Touch.
In a way, this makes sense. With the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store a huge success, Apple can come out with an iPod Touch that takes advantage of all of that third-party software and the whole iPhone OS with its Web browser, Mail and other apps.
What a cool device that would be. Or would it?
For instance, I’m not sure how I would such an “iPod Tablet” myself. Would it come in handy at the office? Not with my desktop Mac, or even my MacBook Pro around. Why would I setting for an iPhone OS experience when I could have a full Mac experience.
At home, I use either the MacBook Pro for bits of work, or my iPhone for something quick. The only advantage of the iPhone is that it is on my person, which gives it an advantage when the MacBook Pro is somewhere else in the house. An iPod Tablet would suffer that same drawback since it won’t fit in my pocket.
So what about when I step out of the office? Well, the iPod Tablet probably won’t come with me. I need my iPhone, because it is a phone. I can check email, check news, tweet, etc., with it. It is small enough to be in my pocket all the time. The Tablet just won’t be there when I need it.
How about on long trips — overnight excursions to conferences or on vacation? Well, for that the Tablet probably won’t be enough. I’d need to take my MacBook Pro. And my iPhone for communication. So why do I need a Tablet?
So a Tablet won’t be for someone like me. It is more likely that it will be for someone who doesn’t use either an iPhone or MacBook. I just can’t see that being a very big market.
So how could Apple make it better? Make it a real Mac. If it runs Snow Leopard, and not the iPhone OS, then it can be a successor to the MacBook Air and a competitor to the NetBooks. Make it touch screen, sure, but also make sure Bluetooth and USB keyboards and mice work with it so you can use it for real work with real apps. For that, I would ditch my MacBook.
I hope they go that route, iPhone apps are great, but they are more for communication, organization and entertainment. To compete with NetBooks, a Mac Tablet would need to run applications, not apps.
Links to products mentioned in the episode:
This was a slow Apple news week for both hard news and rumors. Predictably, the new 13-inch MacBook pros are selling well according to reports. The machine has a low price but includes high-end features.
There is a new version of Safari, 4.0.2, this week, which addresses security issues. At the same time, we are hearing rumors that Apple is already working on version 3.1 of the iPhone OS, with possible improvements to the copy and paste feature.
If you are ever reading a blog post and see a word you don’t recognize, click Ctrl+Click or right click on the word and you’ll get a contextual menu. You can choose to quickly look that word up in Mac OS X’s dictionary, or start a Google search with that word.
Been using the Vantec NexStar Hard Drive Dock beauty to quickly dock 1TB hard drives and swap them out almost like floppies. It just works well and seems to be priced well below a lot of other similar devices.
So sliding puzzle games are easy. Child’s play, really. But what if the image wasn’t just an image? What if it was a ball moving around as you tilt your iPhone? You’d need to figure out which pieces are supposed to go where before you starting putting them into place. Behold: Bedeviled.
This week’s news seems to be dominated by little problems with the iPhone 3GS. First, it seems to be out-of-stock in a lot of places, and orders from AT&T are taking more than a week to fill. Second, when people do get their iPhones, they are still reporting long delays in activation. Third, there is an overheating problem reported by many that has the phones getting so hot that the white-colored ones are already turning yellow.
But all the news isn’t bad. AT&T seems to be seeing record sales of the new iPhone and most users reporting in to MacMost love their iPhone 3GS, even while having to pay extra for the unsubsidized price.
Back at Apple, reports are that Steve Jobs is back at work, at least for several days per week. The news broke last week that Jobs actually had a liver transplant during his absence, and the procedure went well. Not much fanfare was given to Jobs’ return, but his return has been official acknowledged by Apple.
This odd game is like tower defense combined with whack-a-mole. In Knights Onrush you defend your castle by picking up and flicking the attackers with your finger. Oh, and you can sacrifice some of them to dragons, or detonate the little bombs they carry with them. Lots of fun!
When taking an international plane flight recently, I almost bought an airplane power adapter to keep my iPhone and iPod charged. Good thing I didn’t, as the plane didn’t have the outlet anyway. I found that it was cheaper and more practical to buy the Kensington Battery Pack and Charger which allows me to carry around a full charge and more for just about any USB device. It even comes with a wall-power to USB adapter as the charger, which doubles as an extra iPhone wall charger. I’ll get a lot more use out of this device on long trips or just long days away from the office.
If more than one person uses your Mac, and you have a user set up for each person, then you should enable Fast User Switching to allow you to switch between accounts without logging off and logging on each time. Go to System Preferences, Accounts and then Login Options. Turn onEnable fast user switching. Now you can switch between users using a pull-down menu on the right side of the menu bar.
