From the Blog: Gowalla

At first glance, you may think that Gowalla is nothing more than a mere replicate of Foursquare, but in reality, it’s much, much more. Now for both iPad and iPhone, Gowalla is a multi-platform, real life game where you check in from place to place. The more places you check into, the more items you get and the more pins you receive. From there, you can go onto your computer and check on Gowalla’s website exactly how you’re doing. Oh, did I mention you could also keep your friends (and stalkers) up to date with where you are, but text doesn’t do Gowalla justice. How about some pictures?

iPhone

When you look at the iPhone version of Gowalla, you see a neat, clean user interface. You get to see anything you want on your Gowalla account: pins, friends, nearby spots, etc. and even get push notifications of when your friends check in. Here are a few (a bunch) of screenshots:

Pins

Passport

Friends

Spots You've Been To

Nearby Spots

iPad

While the iPhone version of Gowalla looks nice, the iPad version is amazing. You can rotate it either way, but in the pictures below, I showed them in landscape mode:

Pins

Passport

Friends

Spots You've Been To

Nearby Spots

Website

Last but not least, is the website that gives you a beautiful look of what you have on Gowalla. I’ll post one screenshot because this post is starting to get long

Passport Online

All in all, Gowalla is a pretty nice app. And it’s free, which makes it even better. So why not download it?

Jailbreak for iPad 3.2 and iPhone OS 3.1.3

Yes, it’s true. The iPad jailbreak has finally been released. After days of teasing people, @comex released the Spirit jailbreak on http://www.spiritjb.com. I personally have to say, I am impressed and please with what he released. It’s a literally fool proof jailbreak with no IPSW files needed. Here’s a quick look at the program itself:

Spirit Jailbreak

Yeah, that’s it. You press the button and do absolutely nothing else. Which brings up the question, why do people have tutorials for this?

Anyway, once you jailbreak, you get a nice little Cydia icon. You open it up and you see the iPad version (pretty much beta) of Cydia. Right now, it doesn’t tell you what SHSH blobs you have backed up due to the recent load of requests from all the jailbreakers. You can still browse Cydia like on your iPhone, but a multitude of things aren’t iPad ready (such as Winterboard which is in the works). Give it some time though, and I believe that you may be pleasantly surprised. Check out these screenshots:

Cydia on iPad

Cydia

Sections

Changes

Manage

Search (Kinda sexy)

-Remy

Cloud App: Beautifully Simple

1. Find content
2. Drop in menu bar
3. Paste and Share

That’s about it. Simple? Yes. It’s one of those apps that makes you say: “That was easy!”

The Pitch

In an age of instant gratification and the sharing of just about everything, CloudApp comes to the rescue. This desktop / Web-App tag team makes sharing images, links, music, videos and files as easy as pie.

The app sits in your Menu Bar, off to the right hand corner, click it and see the recent uploaded files and have access to the web interface. The website is intricately crafted, really impressive. Has a nice, dashboard like interface.

The app basically takes away all the finding and uploading your screenshots too. You can set it up to auto upload the screenshots of the app, and have the fancy shortened URL waiting for you on the keyboard, perfect for sharing.

Add-ons called Raindrops allow CloudApp to interact with your favorite apps like Chrome, Aperture, and Spotify. After downloading the iPhoto raindrop, for instance, I can press the CloudApp hotkey and it will automatically upload the selected pictures. I can see some cool uses for this in the future; Developers, get on it!

The Pro version (avalible soon) will be ad-free. They just launched today (4/1/10) so there are still some features yet to be rolled out. Give it a try here: http://www.getcloudapp.com/

iPad. Enough Said

The iPad. It’s no the iPhone or the Macbook, but a cross between the two, like a mutated 3rd twin! Behind the reality distortion feild that was ever so present, i took some time to think about the iPad and it’s future:

Quite simply, the only difference between the iPhone/ iPod Touch and the new iPad is the Apple A4 processor. (Apple bought chip manufacturer PA Semi a little while ago and its interesting that they made their one chip instead of Intel.

Besides the hardware, the iPad is running an exact replica of the iPhone software, with only minor changes to key apps, such as the Calendar, Mail, iWork suite (Apple’s answer to Microsoft Office: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) and of course the iBook app.

I happen to love what Apple did to the key apps, especially the Calendar app, but what interests me the most is the iBooks app. I think that the ebook market is where Apple wants to really focus on. The hardware itself isn’t what Apple is selling, their selling they key to a bigger picture, reading on the device. (This is similar to the iPod using iTunes). It’s not just books: think magazines and newspapers, things the Kindle or the B&N Nook can’t handle. With the color screen and the touch screen interface, the possibilities are endless. Imagine this: Resultants using it as an interactive menu (pictures and video of the food, nutritional info, calorie calculator, food pairings) With this new platform for developers to work with, i cant wait to see what the smart people of the dev. community come out with.

Last night I was thinking and it hit me; I really don’t need this. I have an iPhone and an iMac. I also have a laptop (my next one will be a Macbook). This is just an oversized iPhone. There is NO new technology. A laptop can do everything this can do and MORE.

You have to start to think, what demographic is this being marketed to? I thought, “Well, it reads textbooks, so college students!” but after talking to some of the Seniors in my school, they all agree that it doesn’t make sense to carry around this device, the laptop is so much more fitting. We’ll have to see when the numbers come out who is actually going to buy this, besides the Apple faithful who are still hypnotized by seeing Steve himself.

What about the future? Apple is starting to move into the cloud computing space with Mobile Me (me.com) and we can all see more and more integration with that service into all of Apple’s products. However I think we as consumers are a long way from adopting that technology. And even when we do, I don’t think AT&T will be  (And yes, without opening another can of worms; AT&T has the power not to suck, they have the capitol to fix the problem. Their just a bunch of greedy…. /*cue tangent*/)

So we move to cloud computing. Sadly, Free Public Wifi, let alone OPEN wifi, will never happen, at least city wide. We’ve seen projects fail for many reasons. It’s not just monetary but technological. WiFi is not meant to span a city, let alone a small mansion.

The solution: WiMAX (A new technology from Sprint and Clearwire) They have a new WiMAX network in Las Vegas and Seattle. WiMAX would be the solution to city wide internet and could enable a cloud based computing society, but you still face monetary problems.

That’s my wrap up, a long one in deed (heres a great collection of links for more info)

oooohhhh, SHINY (Chrome OS)

The hype machine has never been spinning this fast. With Google’s announcement of Chrome OS, people are claiming that this is yeat another step for Google to dominate your every day life. What’s next, Google Toilet paper. That will never happen!

Update: I stand corrected: Google Toilet Paper

Pushing the hype to the side, What Is Google Chrome OS??

From what we can tell right now, Chrome OS is a new light weight operating system targeted at the web and constructed to run on SSD (Solid State Drive) netbooks. Like Chrome (the browser) Chrome OS is designed to strip out all of the clutter and unnecessary processes that come standard with a normal machine and create a streamlined bare-bones environment. That cuts the boot time to a remarkable 7-10 seconds. So in basically 20 seconds (logging in) your ready to type in any url you please. Compare that to even a fast booting Mac: 20 seconds in, i still have a grey screen with an Apple logo.

Drinking the Koolaid, I decided to try out this revolutionary new product myself. The cool guys at GDGT have a download link posted and some instructions on how to get this thing up and running here.

Download the file and drop it Virtual Box (or VM Ware Fusion on Mac) and you’ve just successfully installed Chrome OS on your computer. It was that easy. (if you have an Easy Button, hit it now)

My synopsis: It’s slow. Yes, it is running in a VM, and i had a video streaming in the background, and it’s an early (VERY) dev build, but it’s still sluggish. Maybe I’m being a little to hard on the new Google Baby. Nah. Now that I’m on a roll, the things pretty ugly too. If Google want’s this thing to succeed, they need to at least pretend like they hired a capable designer to pretty it up.

Once you have it running, we want to hear your opinoin:

What do you think of Google Chrome OS?

(and the real question on everyones mind) What makes this different from Android?

Want A Wave Invite???

Heres the deal:
You want Google Wave invites??

We got em. 20 invites precisely NOW DOWN TO 5

And because your a reader of this blog, we want to give them to you. FOR FREE

Heres how you get them:

1. TWEET ABOUT THE GIVEAWAY!! Tell your friends about The Blog About Mac’s.  Click Here to Tweet About It!!
2. Get Them To RT it.
3. Sit back and wait. Go check out or review of WaveBoard (an AWESOME Wave desktop client!)
4. ONE LUCKY WINNER WILL BE CHOSEN RANDOMLY EACH DAY STARTING TODAY!

Waveboard: Just A Wave Client?

Thats what it is. A Google Wave client. But for lazy people like me who don’t want to waste precious tab space for Wave, WaveBoard is perfect. And, as a little bonus, it does a little more:

• Handy Growl notifications for new waves
• Native Shortcuts for easy access
• Opens New “ wave: <id>”
• and more

I really like it because its lightweight and gets the jobs done. The developer also seems to be pushing out updates quite frequently so stay tuned here for new features and fixes. Also, this app really has a lot of potential to integrate itself with the Google Wave API.

Need A Wave Invite??

Check out our page on how to get your own personal Wave invite.

Finding The Right Mac

When you walk into an Apple store, you get that feeling. That tinkly feeling. Maybe it’s the Reality Distortion Field Kicking in, or that sweet smell 100′s of teens packed into a small room taking awkward pictures of themselves with Photobooth. Or even better, making a music video. And then you look around. The multitude of creations the higer ups at Apple have graced us with.

But theres so many things! There everywhere! So the question becomes, What to get??

1. The Macbook: The MacBook has to be the best overall Mac out there. Some even claim that its the best Windows machine for the job too! I would recommend the MacBook for any situation, especially college.
2. The iMac: I recently picked up the 24′ monster for my own use and I’m loving it! The first time I turned it on I was kind of mesmerized. Belive me, 24″ is HUGE. Anyway, this Mac is a great one for home usage, but so is the Macbook. Again, I would recommend the MacBook unless you need:
   • A bigger hard drive
   • More RAM
   • A huge screen to gaze at
3. The Mac Mini: After 4 long years of enduring the slow, underpowered, machine, I wouldn’t want anyone else to make the same mistake I did. I would ONLY recommend this machine to a little kid. It’s basically comparable to a netbook (how powerful it is). It was a PAIN to use: Dont even TRY to open up more than one app at a time but 3!! Three apps would crash finder. Bottom Line: Dont get this. Its low price may be deceiving, but you are truly paying for what your get.
4. The Pro Line: The MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro are truly for the professionals. The cinematographers, the artists, the musicians. The People that need the processing power and the hard drive space. The way I see it: Unless you know you need it, don’t go spending a fortune on a true powerhouse.

If you still cant decide, check out Apple’s site
Now let’s be honest: In the end, it doesn’t matter what Mac you choose, they’re all better than PC’s

Tweet My Mac

Have you ever been away from your Mac and wanted to remotely control it with your Twitter account.

Yah, me either. But an interesting utility called Tweet My Mac lets you do exactly that.

Tweet My Mac lets you get screenshots, iSight snapshots, and your IP address from your Mac just by
sending a direct message to your specially setup Mac controlling account. You can start torrents remotely, shutdown your Mac and more.

But as soon as I found out about this app, I realized all of the uses it could be put to.

• Someone stealing your Mac? Remotely take a picture of them!
• Need that Ubuntu install when you get home, use Tweet My Mac to start a “legal” torrent
• Want to spook your friends (or the burglar that stole your Mac)? Use Tweet My Mac to have your Mac read any text you enter, up to 140 characters of course.
• Forget to lock your Mac and are worrying about your significant other (or burglar for that matter) looking at your confidential files? Use Tweet My Mac to remotely lock your Mac!

How does this life saving service work? All you have to do is make a new Twitter account and name it something like @myimac. Then, follow your main account you use on Twitter.

Note: Make sure you DONT follow anyone else on that account, they will have control over your Mac!

Once you do that, your done! You can enjoy sending tweets to your mac, and even have it respond to you. (You’ll know what I mean when your try it)

Socialite: Your social life, all in one place

Event Box, bask in its beauty

Ugh, another twitter client? That’s what it seems these days. One after the other, duplicating functionality. There’s so many of them. But there are some that stand out.  I do have to say I favor the uber-sleek Tweetie from our friends over at Atebits. I loved using Tweeite; it was just such a beautifully crafted product. If I solely used twitter, I would be sitting pretty happy With Tweetie. However, I wanted more. So, I went to Event Box (Now, Socialite.)

The Pitch: You social life in one place. Or at least thats how i see it.

I have my basics, Facebook and Twitter. Then it gets interesting: Google Reader, Digg and Reddit. And if that wasn’t enough for your liking: Flickr support too. So you have literally ALL of the aspects of the social web in one place. But is that really enough? See, anyone could pile all of those services into a crappy app, push it out to its users and charge $50 bucks for it. When your using Event Box, you feel like someone Hand-Crafted it just for you. It’s truly stunning. It has the iTunes like interface on the side, ingenuously organizing the multitude of services it offers. It has the iChat like badges on its dock icon, pleasantly reminding you of the new items in your social life. And to top it all off: Its own Heads Up Display. Think of it like a more powerful Growl: it still has the minimal look on the side but allows you to access a lot more information at your fingertips.

But Socialite isnt just about the blockbuster features. Sometimes its the little things that matter, that really make a product. One of the many examples of that is when you drag a picture into the window, it automatically uploads it to TwitPic and alerts you with a link, already pasted to your clipboard for instant sharing. Thats just pure genius.

This app feels like it was created by Apple. There, is said it.  You cant say that about many apps. Real Mac Software made the right move when the acquired Event Box a couple days ago. Hopefully this bigger company gan give the little app a some more press than it has right now, it truly deserves more.

So how do you get it? Right now you cant buy it because of their recent acquisition. However, you can sign up for a Socialite’s beta invite at their site

So, in short if your using twitter and are looking for a little more, check out Socalite.