Removing the Vertical Buttons from iTunes 10
One of the first things I noticed about iTunes 10 was those ridiculously awful vertical buttons. Seriously, what were they thinking? And as a fellow developer pointed out, that even violates Apples own Human Interface Guidelines… Not to mention it’s a crime against humanity.
Someone much craftier than I figured out that all you need to do to restore those buttons back to their horizontial counterparts is open up a Terminal window and enter the following:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1
Press Enter, close Terminal and restart or open iTunes. You should see things are now back to normal.
Alternative iTunes 10 Icon (OS X)
If you’re like me, you might not be sold on this new icon for iTunes. Don’t get me wrong, I love that they killed off the CD, but the new icon looks a little Windows 7ish in my dock.
This morning I noticed this new icon from Chris Carlozzi floating around on Twitter, which looks pretty sweet.
So I downloaded it and converted it to a .rsrc file so you can replace your iTunes icon with it on OS X.
You can download the .rsrc file as a .zip here. After it’s downloaded, extract the icon file and right click on it a select Get Info.
Next, navigate to your Applications folder and right click on the iTunes icon and select Get Info.
You should now have both Info windows next to each other. In the iTunes 10.rsrc window, click once on the small icon in the upper left hand corner (should now be highlighted). Then press Command+C.
In the iTunes Info window, click once on the icon in the upper left hand corner and press Command+V. You should now see the same icon in both windows.
Close out the open windows and start iTunes, and you should see the new icon in your dock. Enjoy!
iPad 3G Data Usage for August
Seems like my data consumption is averaging out a bit, last month I used 22.4GB, this month 27.4 so the mid-20GB range seems to be the sweet spot.
I’d still like to break 40GBs in a month, just to stick to AT&T, but I’m not going out of my way to make that happen.
New iPods? Yes please.
Apple just finished live streaming their latest press event, which for starters is pretty awesome that they finally live streamed it! Outside of announcing the expected new iPod touch, they also announced a new Shuffle and a new Nano.
For me, the new iPod touch is the most interesting. Retina display, front and rear facing cameras, HD video recording, A4 chip. All the things you’d expect after the iPhone 4, but it’s nice to see that Apple actually include all those updates in one refresh. 8GB model is $229, 32GB for $299, 64GB for $399.
I don’t really care about the Shuffle, but I do think it’s interesting that Steve had to concede and bring buttons back to please the users. New 2GB version of the Shuffle is $49.
Nano looks pretty slick, loses the video camera and click-wheel and moves to a nice square touchscreen and adds a clip on the back. 8GB for $149, 16GB for $179.
iOS 4.1 is dropping next week for the iPhone / iPod touch bringing HDR camera mode, Game Center, TV show rentals, and general bug fixes to the table. But better yet, iOS 4.2 hits in November for iPhone / iPad / iPod touch with wireless printing being the big feature of interest to me.
90+ Days Without Voice Service
It’s been well over 90 days since I last paid AT&T for voice service on my cell phone and started using an iPad SIM and a SIP solution to make calls from my iPhone. Things have been good, great in fact., that is until I recently ran into a major issue with my setup. A brief recap, I use Google Voice for my phone number, I then have a SIP number setup with IPKall which is connected to my pbxes.com account, which in turn is setup with Acrobits Softphone on my iPhone.
Last week, for whatever reason, IPKall let someone else register the same number as me. So randomly my phone wouldn’t ring through, or if I didn’t pick up when someone called, the caller would ring through to this other guy. Kind of a major issue.
After some back and forth with IPKall, I got a notification from Google Voice that someone using the same number as me had successfully added it to their Google Voice account. Great.
At this point instead of trying to resolve things with the folks at IPKall who were being less than helpful, I called up the guy who had registered my number and explained the situation. Oddly enough he used my own tutorial to setup his account, in the end he was very understanding and we eventually got the number transfered back to me. I should note that the number I registered in the tutorial is not actually the number I’ve been using from IPKall, so this guy had no way of purposely registering the same number as me.
Now I’m looking for a more reliable SIP number provider, even if I have to pay a few bucks a month I think it’d be worth it to ensure that my number doesn’t randomly get handed out to someone else. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know in the comments.
Tablets Are the New Netbook
Remember when the iPad was announced and people said “meh…”? And now, less than a year later, it’s a huge bread winner for Apple. Everyone else appears to be noticing as well, in the past few weeks more and more tablet rumors have popped up with the vast majority of big name players in the industry on board.
Don’t believe me? Let’s review…
- The long rumored Notion Ink Adam has pricing, and is expected to launch between November 2010 and January 2011.
- HP confirmed internally a webOS tablet, then confirmed publicly both a Windows and webOS based tablets for 2011.
- Bloomberg reported recently that RIM is working on a poorly named tablet, dubbed “BlackPad”, which is supposedly going to launch in November.
- ASUS was quick to announce the Eee Pad, but it likely won’t ship until March of 2011.
- LG has confirmed their own tablets are in the works, including a Windows 7 based model and Optimus, an Android tablet. Promised ship date is Q4 2010.
- Kmart is selling a cheapo Android tablet and even though it has terrible specs they seem to be selling like hotcakes, with Kmart barely able to keep them in stock.
- Acer teased an Android tablet back in May, but apparently put it on hold until it can ship with Android 3.0 Gingerbread.
- Toshiba just shipped, and promptly sold out of, a limited run of its dual-screen Libretto tablet.
- Also from Toshiba is a rumored Android tablet, hitting the streets in September or October.
- And of course Google and Verizon are supposedly prepping a Chrome OS tablet of their for launch next yet.
While I did go outside the scope of the past few weeks, you get the idea. I’m also probably leaving out a ton of other tablets, like the failed JooJoo tablet for example.
This whole jumping on the tablet bandwagon seems to me to closely resemble when ASUS first launched the Eee PC and the netbook revolution took off, people were a little skeptical at first and then realized it was a great idea. Now I’m not saying tablets will kill off netbooks, but they seem to be the flavor of the month for the foreseeable future. And reportedly the iPad by itself has caused a decline in netbook sales for ASUS.
Bottom line, I love the iPad, but I really am excited to see cheaper (and hopefully better) tablet solutions from companies besides Apple.
Portal 2: Release date announced
We won’t have to wait too much longer, as Valve announced Wed morning Portal 2′s release date to be February 9th of next year. Being a huge fan of the original, I’ll definitely be putting this one on my list. Inherently, I’ll be opting for the PC or Mac version, as a game like Portal, in my humble opinion, is best played with a mouse. They’re also releasing for PS3 and Xbox 360.
There’s some awesome new elements they’re rolling out with this one, including Wheatley, a friendly British robot that will accompany you, voiced by Stephen Merchant (writer for both versions of The Office, and also starred in a few episodes of the US version).
They’ve also added features, among others, like Repulsion and Propulsion Gel, an Excursion Funnel, the Pneumatic Diversity Vent, the Aerial Faith Plate, and a Thermal Discouragement Beam. For trailers showcasing these features and more, check out Portal’s official teaser site here.
For the latest news, keep an eye on gameinformer.
Replacing a laptop with an iPad
Depending on who you talk to they say it’s entirely reasonable to replace a laptop with an iPad. But is that really the case?
Last week I went out of town for seven days and made the decision not to bring my MacBook Pro, perfect opportunity to put my iPad to the test.
First, I loaded up some additional software for my trip, since most of what I’d need access to would be work related things. The extra few apps I installed were:
