Thursday, August 23, 2007

The Apple Blog (3 сообщения)

 rss2email.ruНа что подписаться?   |   Управление подпиской 

  RSS  The Apple Blog
The Apple Blog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
http://theappleblog.com
другие подписчики этой ленты также читают >>

  • Sync 37 Signals' Highrise with Address Book

    If you haven’t heard of 37 Signals’ Highrise, it’s a web-based CRM tool and is excellent at managing relationships with clients, colleagues, vendors, etc. You can keep track of emails, notes, and tasks for people.

    Greatascent is a new plugin for Address Book that lets you synchronize your contacts with Highrise automatically. It also gives you an easy way to enter tasks or notes for a contact without even opening a browser.

    It’s in private beta now, but works great from my testing so far. You can register for the private beta by sending an email to Simon, the developer. Visit their website at greatascent.com.

    No Tags





  • What Widgets Can You Not Live Without?

    dashboard.jpgAs a former die hard Konfabulator user, it took me some time to get used to Dashboard. I fumed when I couldn’t keep widgets on my desktop at all times (without a terminal hack that is), and generally resisted it. But as time has passed (and passed, and passed) with Tiger, Dashboard has become more and more ingrained in my daily life. I find myself hitting F12 a dozen or more times a day, and get frustrated if I’m on a mac that doesn’t have the widgets I’m accustomed to.

    So that leads me to ask, what widgets can you not live without? Here are some of mine:

    tada.jpg

    Ta-da List

    With everything I’ve got going on, to-do lists are essential for me. It seems that no matter how on top of things I am, I always forget something. The great folks at 37signals have created Ta-da List, a free online aplication that you can use to create to-do lists. It’s a great app, but sometimes navigating to my lists in the browser is just too much work. Fortunately, Keegan Jones has created the Ta-da Lists Widget to save me the trouble.

    mint.jpg

    Junior Mint

    I love looking the stats for my other blog, and Shaun Inman’s Mint is the tops in my book. But most of the time I’m just interested in page views and unique visits, so looking at the entire Mint interface can be a bit of an overload. Having Junior Mint (you’ll need to login with your Mint credentials to download) on my Dashboard gives me just the info I want. Plus, if your traffic sucks for one day, you can be a bit more positive and look at the big picture.
    whooppee.jpg

    Whooppee Cushion Widget

    Sometimes when it’s quiet in the office, I have to break the silence. Or better yet, when a nearby project manager is sweating it out on the phone with a displeased client, I need to make the situation more bearable. At those times I crank up my volume, go to Jacob Rath’s Whooppee Cushion Widget, and rip a wonderful fart sound through the office. It may be juvenile, but there’s no replacement for toilet humor!

    So what about you guys? What widgets can you not live without?

    ,





  • Would Apple's Remote Deny Proper Gaming?

    remoteMy Apple TV is looking for more work to do. Yes, it’s happy to be playing songs and the occasional show from my iTunes library, and surfing YouTube, but I get the sense it’s bored. Meanwhile, next to it, my Nintendo Wii is running interactive video games, downloading classic arcade titles over the Internet, and doesn’t mind being dominated through a pair of wireless game controllers. It seems to me, with a little work, the Apple TV would itself present a good platform for video games on the TV set, but there is a big stumbling block in a small package - the Apple Remote, which isn’t flexible enough to act as a serious game controller.

    The iPod has a set of simple arcade games available for download from iTunes. The Apple TV has a hard drive and a network connection, capable of downloading firmware updates. It doesn’t seem too far-fetched that I could navigate my Apple TV at some future point and pull down the equivalents of Tetris, BeJeweled, Brick Breaker, or other games, through a channel parallel to that of YouTube. But even if Apple were to extend games from the iPod and iPhone to the Apple TV, for projection on attached wide screen TVs, the effort to enforce minimalism on the Apple Remote wouldn’t leave many options open for developers or game enthusiasts more comfortable with with multi-button controllers.

    I’ve grown used to the Apple Remote as a great navigational tool for Apple TV, but all it offers are directional keys, a play/pause button and the Menu key. Even the addition of an iPod-like scroll wheel would be better for games than this. While I laud the intent of Steve Jobs and Apple to deliver a small, easy to handle remote for one function, it is missing the capability to expand, should the Apple TV ever graduate from a “hobby” to a real product line that Apple takes seriously. A great start to making us early adopters believe that Apple wants to move beyond the hobby stage would be to add games to the Apple TV and offer a new remote.

    , ,







rss2email.ru       отписаться: http://www.rss2email.ru/unsubscribe.asp?c=6893&u=24004&r=311667163
управлять всей подпиской: http://www.rss2email.ru/manage.asp
читать наш блог: http://www.olevarty.ru