Wireless Connections

This one may come in handy at some time. Hold down Option and click on your wireless networks menu and you’ll see this:

Sound Control

I say sound control because when clicking on the volume control with the Option key that’s what you get; sound control. You get to choose your input and output sources for sound. Very handy as I’m always switching between speakers and headphones.

MobileMe Sync

This one is kind of neat. You can see when was the last time you synced individual items like Calendars and Contacts, as well as the option to open sync diagnostics.

Advanced menus have been around for a while, and going through your menus holding the Option key will give you all sorts of goodies. What other easter eggs have you found?

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⤶  ⌘ ⏎ ⎋

The Javascript used for this bookmarklet is super simple:
javascript:location.reload(true)

Just drag one of the bookmarklets to your bookmarks bar and you’re set.

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First of all, you now have the option of minimizing windows into the Application’s icon on the Dock. This way when you minimize several windows you don’t clog your Dock with all kinds of random things. So as far as you know, when you minimize them they no longer exist. How will you see your open windows and know if you’ve closed them or not? That’s the beauty of the new Exposé. Click and hold the Application’s Dock icon and see all of your current open windows, a subtle division, and all minimized windows below it like so:

Once in Exposé view, you can hover over your Dock and any other Applications you’ve got open will light up. Clicking on them will trigger a switch in Exposé. A beautiful transition. Snow Leopard comes out on August 28th.

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Whenever this Tablet does indeed come out I have a strong belief that it will not only revolutionize the touchscreen market, but indeed create a new market altogether. Why, you ask? Sure, there are other companies out there that have tablet-like devices out already (Kindle, anyone?), but they couldn’t be farther away from a computer. What I give to you are two examples. One, the iPod and how it revolutionized the music market. Two, the iPhone an how it created an entirely new one. Yes there have been touch screen phones for a long time, but the iPhone is not a phone. It’s a stripped down computer with phone capabilities. We can finally carry a computer in our pockets and that is actually a pleasure to use.

Apple’s Tablet, I have no doubt in my mind will be of the same calliber. I believe it will be the first step in finally moving the (western) world towards fully touchscreen computers and do away with the keyboard altogether. Just like the iPhone and the iPod touch are caninalizing sales from the other iPod models, this Tablet will eventually begin to canibalize MacBook sales.

As we can all see, touchscreens are the way of the future. The keyboard is a technology almost as old as computers themselves, and is also the one thing that has seen almost no innovation since its inception. Keyboards are on the way out, and I can’t wait.

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Not only will it find you all the meta information, it will also find the album artwork. So no more boring iTunes libraries. The only downside I’ve found to using this application is that certain tracks appear on multiple releases, as well as releases with various artists. In these cases it does a poor job at finding the correct information and artwork.

The application does have a dedicated “cover art” retriever which scans your whole library for any tracks without cover art. You can then choose which ones to apply the art to. Very nice.

TuneUp does a few other nifty things besides finding the meta info and cover art, for example it finds concert dates/prices of bands in your area that you have in your library. It also has what’s called the Tuniverse that will show you any other info it can find on the internet about the music currently playing, including YouTube videos, Ebay auctions, you name it.

The app costs $29.99 which means the larger your library is the more it’s worth it.

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I was quite surprised to see the improvement I did on my 3G S. When I first launched the app I had just under 20 mb of memory free, but after running MemoryInfo I shot up to over 54 mb. It might have been just me, but I felt that my apps were launching faster and the phone was just more responsive in general.

The app costs $.99 which is just about how much it costs for all the other stat apps. I would say give iStat a try which allows you to not only monitor your phone, you can also monitor your Mac at home by downloading some free software from their website. Kind of neat.

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Will the iPhone begin to kill off other industries? Well let’s look at the current industries that the iPhone invades:

GPS
Video Cameras
Music Players
Mobile Gaming
Everything there’s an App for

If I were to guess, the next iPod Touch will probably have a built-in camera. YouTube has already seen a 400% rise in uploads thanks to the iPhone 3GS. Apply that type of growth to the other industries (except music players, Apple already rules it) and we’ve got Flip video cameras and other small cam corders becoming irrelevant, GPS devices going obsolete, etc.

The idea isn’t really that crazy. A device that has an App “for just about anything” can become your everything device; the device of the future that everyone dreams of. That’s really the genius of the App store. The truth is that when the iPhone was first released Apple had no idea what it had in its hands; a gold mine. They didn’t supply developers with an SDK for a long time, and at first claimed that web Apps were the way to go. Obviously inaccurate.

As Apple improves on the iPhone (rumor has it the next one will have multi-cores), it will become faster, better, amazing features will be added, and perhaps that long awaited tablet will be released. In my opinion, if they ever do, it will run the iPhone OS (probably version 4, 5, or something even closer to a full OS X) and be closer to a computer than anything else. ANYWAY, my point being that yes, as the iPhone grows, as its OS is improved, as more Apps get made, the iPhone has the potential to make many electronics industries obsolete.

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Windows Vista was a failure, I think we can all agree, regardless of my personal bias toward the Mac. There were a few people that liked Vista, but the majority detested it. In fact, many switchers to the Mac chose to switch due to Vista’s failure. Ever since its release users have been wanting to actually downgrade to the much more stable and useful Windows XP. Microsoft has kept extending the time limit for users to do so, which only shows their own embarrassment with Vista.

Enter Windows 7, Microsoft’s silver bullet to the problem it created. WIth an advertising blitz that surpasses comprehension, Microsoft has promised that Windows 7 is the second coming of the operating system, and that it will fix everyone’s problems. After deeper digging, however, tech sites and critics have claimed that Windows 7 is only a marginal improvement. At Apple’s WWDC it was labeled as a second version of Vista.

Following Apple’s criticism, Windows fanatics pointed out that Snow Leopard isn’t really a whole new operating system either, and rightly so. Yes, we know, thank you. However, Snow Leopard is an improvement on the world’s most advanced operating systems, and Windows 7 is an improvement on Vista. Which brings me to my next point, the pricing.

Upgrade:
Windows 7 Home Premium: $119.99
Windows 7 Professional: $199.99
Windows 7 Ultimate: $219.99

Retail Disc:
Windows 7 Home Premium: $199.99
Windows 7 Professional: $299.99
Windows 7 Ultimate: $319.99

…

Snow Leopard: $29

The argument of whether a Mac or a Windows machine is more expensive has been around for decades, and in all honesty the Mac has always been the luxury brand. The argument, however, is becoming more and more irrelevant with Apple’s slashing of prices across their entire line, as well as their low end Mac Mini.

My point here is the fact that Microsoft really screwed over its user base with Vista, and it’s that user base that needed to be thrown a bone. It’s Windows 7 that should be priced at $29 (if not free). Honestly, what’s with the confusing pricing?

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