By David Sparks:
Audioengine’s newest product, the W2, is perhaps the coolest iPhone gadget on the market. Have you ever wanted the ability to stream music wirelessly from iPod or iPhone to your home stereo without monkeying through a remote interface? Now you can. The W2 allows you to connect your iPod or iPhone directly to your stereo wirelessly.
With the W2 you get a wireless receiver about the size of a pack of gum that is USB powered. You can attach it with the included USB AC adapter and plug the stereo out jack to any audio device, including your home stereo. The transmitter is an even smaller device the same width as an iPhone with an iPod connector pointing out the top.
There is no software to configure. You simply plug the receiver into your stereo and the transmitter into your iPod. I took it to a friendﾕs home and played Christmas music through his stereo off my iPhone. Lets just say, hypothetically, that you have a nice collection of Yo-Yo Ma on your iPhone but your wife would prefer Duran Duran off her iPod Touch. It is easy with the W2. Speaking hypothetically, you can simply pull the transmitter out of one device and attach it to another. Marital bliss restored. Streaming music from your iPod just became stupid easy. It will work on the iPod classic, 2g Nano or later, iPod touch, and the iPhone.
This device stems from the same technology in Audioengine’s W1. It creates a 2.4GHz network that works for about 30 feet. When you get out of range, the music starts cutting out intermittently or drops all together. When you get back into range, it picks right back up. Consider it a 30 foot invisible cord. Latency is reported at less than 20 milliseconds. My high-tech test for this involved watching movies on my iPhone while streaming the soundtrack through my stereo. I did not notice any delay.
The audio quality is good. The manufacturer reports it can keep up with uncompressed CD-quality. In my tests, it did. I played high bit rate music ranging from classical to rock and did not notice any difference between the sound through the W2 and the sound transmitted over a conventional stereo cord plugged directly into my iPhone.
I found the W2 even more useful than the W1. While I still like my home entertainment system streaming through iTunes on my Mac, the ability to change playlists, tracks, and volume using the built-in iPod interface is much easier and my kind of geeky.
The W2 includes both the sender and receiver units, the USB power adapter, the 3.5mm to RCA adapter and an audio cable for $169. You can find it at AudioengineUSA.com.
By David Sparks
The Spaces feature in OS X Leopard is one of those things you either love or hate. Since I do a lot of my computing with a 13″ laptop screen, I find it very useful. The trouble is quite often I’m clueless as to which space I am actually occupying. I know I can display the number in the menubar but that just gets me more befuddled.
Hyperspaces is a small application designed around this specific problem. It allows you to set a custom wallpaper for each space. It also allows you to give each space its own specific name. So, instead of seeing “Space 3″ in my menubar, I see “Writing”, I also have spaces for OmniFocus, iCal, Mail, and a few others. You can display the label up in your menubar or even right on top of the current desktop. The application offers several ways to navigate including custom hot keys to switch directly to a certain space or add and remove spaces.
Be warned that if you are running an older machine or one without a dedicated video card. Loading up multiple wallpapers could eat into clock cycles. Fortunately the developer also allows you to configure it so it just changes color or, if you really like one specific wallpaper, you can rely on Hyperspaces other notification methods such as the menubar and on top of the desktop.
One feature this application begs for is a customizable dock. I know this is a 1.0 release, but if the developer could allow you to additionally customize your dock for each space with this single application, he will please a lot of unsatisfied Spaces users.
With the demonstration version you can customize three of your spaces. If you want more than that, you can buy a license for $13. The developer gives out his email on the application website and encourages feedback. It appears to be a well loved project with a bright future. While Hyperspaces is still a bit rough on the edges (this review is of final candidate 1.0), I see this application getting traction with Spaces power users soon. You can find it at Hyperspaces.com.
This week we look at AudioEngine’s W2 Wireless iPod Adapter, Freeware plus much more. I want to thank you for downloading and listening to the podcast. We have the best in Mac hardware, software and websites reviews. We have a lot of great folks on today’s episode with their reviews and comments on software, hardware and websites that make using the Mac special. Plus I’ll have the top freeware Mac apps of the week and much more.
You can email me at surfbits at Gmail dot Com. I love to hear from you.
Receive 25% off of all Devon-Technologies software by going to http://www.devon-technologies.com/podcasts
Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
Deeper: http://www.titanium.free
AFloat: http://infinite-labs.net
Filemailer: http://www.altomac.com
Jaback: http://www.hiteksoftware.com
Battle for Wesnoth: http://www.wesnoth.org/
YamiPod: http://www.yamipod.com
Camouflage: http://www.briksoftware.com
iTV: iTunes Link
David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and reviews:
Audioengine W2: http://www.audioengineusa.com
Gazmaz Joins us again this week to review:
Flixster : Movies
Avantar : OneTap Movies
Try the new ENHANCED version of the MacReviewCast:
And now we have the Podcast in Bit-Torrent Feeds! 
… 
You can either click on the podcast link on the left and listen to it via QT from the browser, or you can right click on the podcast link and choose to “download linked file”. That will download the mp3 and you can play it from you hard drive with iTunes.
The right link below is the URL for the podcast RSS feed. Just right click it and choose to copy the address and then paste it in your podcast reader, or ipodder, or newsreader that will download enclosures automatically.
 |
 |
 techpodcasts.com |
Technorati Tags:
software, review, mac, apple, iTunes, Mac mini, podcast, Macreviewcast, podcasting, maccompanion, OSX, iPhoto, Exposure 2
By Darren Rolfe:
Well, I’ve had my new, beautiful, shiny, black iPhone almost a month now and I’m thoroughly enjoying all the new features I now have available at my fingertips on plane, train or automobile! And that device is the reason that I’m writing this today. How do I keep my iPhone looking, new, beautiful, shiny and black?
Some people may turn their noses up at covering up such a beautiful device. But for me it’s a no brainer. Considering that I have a small child charging about the house and that it will be traveling with me, I felt it deserved that extra, little bit of protection.
In the preceding weeks before I picked up my iPhone I was determined to find exactly the right case. I’ve cracked in the past, opting instead for convenience and have usually regretted it. So this time I did hours and hours of research, paying particular attention to customer review ratings. I also did some market research in the office.
A colleague of mine has an iPhone and he is already on his second case. But now he’s considering a third, because he’s not completely happy with his current case. Ironically, his awful second case was a front runner in the research that I had done. Up to this point I was definitely leaning towards what I affectionately now refer to as a ‘lunch box’ style case. It’s the kind where your iPhone is completely encased in a thin, transparent plastic shell. His had only been installed a few short weeks but it was already looking decidedly worse for wear.
Being transparent it also showed all the crumbs, dust, hair and general crud collecting in the corners. And that just wasn’t good enough for me. So what did I get? Well, in the end I opted for the iSkin Revo2. iSkin are one of the big players in the iPod/iPhone accessory business and they have a wide range of cases for an even wider range of devices! In particular I like their incorporation of innovative design touches, but more about that later.
When you un-box the case you are presented with 3 parts. So let me tell you a little bit about each of them. The best way I can think to describe the outer material, is that it has the appearance of the Bat-suit! No, not the 1970s Adam West nylon number, I’m talking the Christian Bale Bat-suit.
The outer jacket is a matte black silicone, and it fits where it touches. Yes, you can still appreciate the beautiful curves of your iPhone. Initially, I did have concerns about the silicone material as I thought that it might get slightly tacky and pick up dust and dirt. So far this has not been the case. This may be due to the fact that the case has a special dust-proof protection built in and I must admit it works very well.
To help with grip most of the back and all of the outer edges are moulded with an intricate cross-hatch pattern. This helps a lot with handling your iPhone especially on cold, frosty British mornings.
Even though your iPhone is covered in this rubberized jacket you are still able to access the controls. The volume, power, and home button all are covered, but they are still responsive through the silicone layer. Meanwhile the headphone jack, and docking port connectors are covered with generous flaps of silicone that spring reassuringly back into position.
The camera lens and the mute rocker switch are not obscured and work perfectly whilst in the cover. And I’ve not noticed any problems with call/noise quality whilst using it in the case.
Finally, I want to tell you a bit about Microban®. Micro… what? A few years ago this germ-busting technology started appearing in cutting boards, lunch boxes and the such like. Well, now it’s in iPhone covers and iSkin were on the of the first to incorporate! What it gives you, is a degree of permanent antibacterial protection built into the silicone material.
OK, next up is the film screen protector. Firstly, I want to ask if anyone has ever managed to get one of these blasted things stuck down without a flaming air bubble! Well, I am truly in awe of your magnificent dexterity! I’ve grown to accept my own air bubble now and we get along fine.
Once you’ve adhered the screen protector it is almost invisible and I didn’t notice any negative effects on picture quality or color. It also has a very, very slight tactile texture when you touch the screen, which is not unpleasant. Finally, if you decide to part company with your screen protector, you will be pleased to know that no sticky residue will be left behind.
So, what else you could possibly need for your iPhone? Well, how about a visor which adds yet another layer of protection for your iPhone screen. This clips onto the front of the iPhone outer case and kinds of wraps around the side. The outer case is recessed so that when the visor is attached it sits completely flush.
Now I must point out that you will not be able to operate the touch screen of your iPhone with the visor attached. So, yes you will need to pop the visor off to access the screen. At first, this was a bit annoying. But I’ve kind of warmed to it, a bit like the air bubble. So what do you do with the visor once it’s popped? Well, of course, you stow it away on the back of the outer case. Remember how I mentioned iSkin’s innovative design earlier?
To be honest I have missed a few calls by fumbling around, trying to attach the visor to the back of the iPhone whilst answering a call. Personally, I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to stow it away all the time, but it is a nifty feature once you get the knack and into the habit of remembering to do it.
The iSkin Revo2 retails at US$39.99 and I purchased mine at the Apple Store for £29.99 and I think it was money well spent. I happened to choose Black, but they are also available in Red/Black, Blue/Black and Clear/Black.
Hi Everyone Gazmaz from the UK here.
So in these economical hard times I am always on the look out for great value applications. This week I got a Twitter asking me about a notes application for the iPod Touch and iPhone. The Tweet was looking for something fairly specific, and to be honest, I only use the notes app that comes from Apple on the iPod Touch, even though it doesn’t sync yet. (Come on Apple this needs to sync!)
Anyway the question got me looking through the App store for a great value notes application. At first glance it seemed that there wasn’t a great deal about, but being persistent I kept changing my search criteria slightly and came across an app called Iconic Notes. Iconic Notes was Free so I downloaded the App and took a look.
The opening screen is quite clean with a help note on your desktop, which I advise you take a quick look through, but, if like me you’re a stickler for a “clean desk” approach you can delete the Help note and recreate it at a later stage.
Now across the top you have the title bar with the name of the app and an Edit button, tap this edit button and any of the icons on your screen will start to wobble and you have the option to delete any of the note or folder icons on the screen. You can also move and arrange the notes as you can with the similar action when arranging icons on your home desktops. While the icons are also in this state you can if you double click the name just below the note or folder, rename that item, you can when renaming a folder also change the icons color if you press the icon next to the renaming box at this stage, however to change the icon of the note you have to be in the note itself to change that and other aspects. You just press done when finished and your icons will stop wobbling back to a “normal state”.
Across the bottom of the screen you have 4 options which are Quick note, Quick folder, Actions Menu and Icon Library. So you want to create a note, easy press the first icon on the bottom left and a note appears on the screen, I’m not sure why you don’t jump into the note so you can start writing away, but perhaps that’s just in case you create a note by mistake and then you’d have to back out first. Anyway, press the icon that has just appeared in front of you, now you have a blank screen with the type of note icon in the top left hand corner, this you can change but we’ll get to that later, on the top far right there is a setting’s button.
So tap in the blank area of the screen and the keyboard appears ready for your input, it’s a shame that it doesn’t roll over to landscape and only stays in portrait view but I don’t have a problem typing in this orientation. Now once you’ve typed you note you have the option, if you press the setting’s icon, to change the Font size by pressing and moving left to right on the size button. You can change the font type by flicking from left to right in the font area.
Below these you have options for different colored text and backgrounds, again here you flick the colors from left to right to see what is available. Finally at the bottom you can chose the type of icon the note will display when your back at the main screen. You have some basic options, a shopping basket info male and female or a $ icon there are a couple of others again flick left to right to view them.
Now back in the home screen, as I said early on you can also create folders to keep your notes into some sort of order. With the folders, you can change the color and of course you can have a folder within folders. While your back on the home screen there is the possibility to have another desktop so you can have lots of notes spread over a couple of screens.
But another cool option is when you have a note that you’ve been adding to and you want to email it, no problem, click on edit, press and hold the note you want to email for about a second and the option pops up to copy the note add as a template to the library, cancel and of course email note. Tapping email takes you straight to mail with the subject used as the note heading and the content of the note in the body of the mail. If you have a folder with notes inside that you want to mail, do the same with the folder.
As I said at the start, I advise that you read the help document as there are still options we here not mentioned. You can find more info on www.hoofien.com it’s currently only version 1.0 and in the App store. (New versions have since arrived)
Koingo Software would like to announce a special New Years promotion with MacZot, where they’re offering MacCleanse alongside another 10 applications from other developers for only $59! These include titles like GarageSale, DEVONthink Personal, AppZapper, Xslimmer, Media Rage and more!
Additionally, any buyers of this special MacZot promotion can visit their web site and get their Utility Package for only $29.95! This will add on an ADDITIONAL 10 applications from Koingo like Alarm Clock Pro, MacPilot 3, Librarian Pro and Data Guardian.
By Tom Piraino:
Every Mac user has probably noticed that the Address Book application that ships with your Mac has the option to show an image for each contact card. This of course holds true to the contacts application on your iPhone or your iPod touch. Getting an image for every person in your Address Book could take you a while. However, if any of your contacts use Facebook, and of course if you do also, there is a simple and free way to get their profile picture in to your Address Book. Of course if it can get into your Address Book, it can get onto your iPhone or iPod touch when you sync with iTunes, or if you use MobileMe. The Application is called AddressBookSync and the developers name is Dan Auclair.
AddressBookSync is a Mac OS X application that does one thing, and does it well; and that is to download Facebook profile pictures to Address Book cards. The only thing that holds this application back, and by no fault of the developer, is if the name in the Address Book is different from the persons Facebook account it probably won’t present you with an option to download their picture. You have the option to narrow the search to Last names only and this will help if you have people for example with the name Tom Piraino on Facebook, but in your Address Card they are Thomas Piraino. Although this helps with some contacts, it creates problems with Facebook friends with the same last name, but have no worries, AddressBookSync will prompt you and ask whether the person on FaceBook should sync with the person in your AddressBook.
Each time the application runs it presents a window that shows you the current image in your AddressBook, and the persons image on FaceBook, that way you can see if it has changed and you can choose whether or not you’d like to update the picture in your AddressBook. If you do not want to sync the image you simply “uncheck” the box beside their name.
You can find AddressBookSync over at http://danauclair.com/addressbooksync
By Gazmaz:
I’m sure there are new people coming to the Mac all the time, and of course one of the first podcasts they’ll come to is here, The MacReviewCast. I thought that I hadn’t heard this app mentioned for a while and it deserves a mention as it is one of the best monitors out there.
iStatpro is a great little Widget that allows you to monitor various details of the workings in your beloved Mac.
The widget is extremely configurable and allows you to keep an eye on your CPU. It currently monitors up to 8 cores so even the most souped up machines we have can be covered. It allows you to see the percentage of CPU time by user, and perhaps more importantly, which processes are eating up most of your valuable CPU’s time. The neat rolling graph gives you a clear indication of how the CPU is doing, oh and if you prefer a bar as opposed to a graph then you can have it.
Now the next item you may want to keep an eye on is of course memory usage, and the app does not let you down here, keeping an eye on the wired, active, inactive and free memory usage.
As a quick look iStat can also keep an eye on your mounted disks and can assist in easily see used and free disk space. OK, fancy seeing your uptime since the last time you restarted your machine? Don’t worry iStat has it covered.
As it’s gone this far, we might as well check out our network usage and the through-put both down and up, unfortunately it can only check the usage from the machine you have it running on but we can’t have everything can we?
Now you’re thinking what else can it do for me? You see your forgetting that there are all sorts of temperature sensors in your machine and again iStat will keep an eye on this for you as well.
And that fan needs to keep your Mac cool and the app will tell you just how fast that fan is spinning. Now come on, I hear you shouting there can’t be anything else that I need to check is there? Oh yes there is. What about that battery on the laptop? Well, not only telling you the charge left but iStat will tell you the health and the cycles of your battery.
So not only looking at the hardware but you can also check out your top five processes and check the percentage of CPU or Mem time that each one is taking.
So not only can the widget do all of this but you can also arrange the sections into your preferred order, or if some of the sections you find you don’t use then you don’t have to show them, if you don’t like the skin type then iStat also allows you some choices it’s just so well done.
Now you can of course check all of these processes in other apps, but I have to say that as a quick overview and easily accessible then this is the widget for your, it’s so well integrated you’d think it was part of the OS. Not only can you use the widget but if you look in your preference you have the option to set the monitors on your menu bar if you want to keep a constant eye on some of the processes, it’s all so easy.
So just how much will this highly capable application cost you? Well, it’s free, but if you find it useful, and I know you will, then you can donate easily via paypal, and the app is always in development.
p>
The website has lots of information and covers all the basis, if you need to get access to the preferences then go into your system preferences and you’ll find the icon in the “other” section of your preferences.
iStatPro comes from iSlayer.com go take a look and hey why not download it and give it a try.
Allison Sheridan here coming from podfeet.com nestled in the heart of cozy warm Southern California. Ok, that last part was just to torture Tim. I like to send him pictures of my family lounging in the back yard in late November with the awning out because the sun is too hot without it. Anyway, today I’m going to tell you about an application called Little Snapper from Real Mac Software.
I’m crazy about screen snapshot software. Seriously, I’ve run through about 25 on the Mac and 10 on Windows, always searching for that perfect application. I’ve pretty much settled in on Skitch on the Mac side, but I still use command-control-shift-4 when I need to capture a pulldown menu, or sometimes I’ll even use ScreenSteps because they’ve got a very powerful snapshot tool in there. When Tim suggested a review of Little Snapper from realmacsoftware.com, I didn’t think twice before volunteering. The competition in this space has been turning out cooler features every year that I didn’t dream I need - until I had them!
When Little Snapper first launched it gave me the option of watching some guided tours, and you know how I like that. the tours gave me a bit of the flavor of the tool, but they were curiously silent movies and a bit small to see, but I think I got the gist of what unusual and potentially useful features they’ve built in.
Little Snapper can capture full screen, a defined area or a full window, just like any other screen snapshot tool. But Little Snapper has two other options that are unusual. Have you ever wanted to capture an entire webpage? Not just the part you can see, but the entire length of the page? I’ve wanted this a bunch of times and Little Snapper can do it. You can also open the url you have current in your browser inside Little Snapper but I have no idea why you’d want to do that, if you’ve already got it open in your browser.
Little Snapper allows you to make collections of snapshots, which are essentially folders to categorize and store your snapshots, including smart collections. My use of snapshots tends to be short term use so I’m not sure I’d use this feature, but I can see how people have different needs for their snapshots and so this could be a highly useful feature.
The real value in taking snapshots is how well you can annotate them to bring out something vividly to the attention of your viewer. In my case I use these tools to make screenshots for the podcast, or to throw into an email to say “CLICK HERE YOU MORON!” No, I never say that…well unless it’s to a really close friend! Let’s see what kind of annotation options Little Snapper has to offer.
They have the typical “draw a box around it” which I actually love and use constantly so good thing it’s there. Draw the box around something, and after the fact you can change the color with a simple click on the color wheel, and change the thickness using a slider. Skitch only lets you change those options before you draw your little box, Little Snapper makes this a lot easier to control. They also have a transparent box - this one is really cool. Drag around the thing you want people to pay attention to, and everything but what’s in the box turns dark grey! Your item is brightly highlighted. If the shadowed area is too dark, simply grab the same slider that changed the thickness of the box and it changes the opacity of the darkened area. VERY cool way to highlight an area. Wanna get crazy? You can put a colored box around your highlighted area to really make it pop!
Have you ever taken a snapshot of your screen and you’re about to publish it somewhere and you realize you had a chat window open so all your buddies’ screen names will now become open to the public? Not a worry with Little Snapper - they have a blur tool. Drag across a rectangular region, and it blurs nicely. Not blurry enough for your tastes? Grab that same slider and change how blurry it is.
There’s a feature I miss from Skitch, and that’s the ability to change your crop after the fact. I never seem to get it right the first time and with Skitch you just drag the borders to trim it up nicely. I didn’t find an option to do that in Little Snapper, but perhaps I missed it.
They have arrows and they’re actually unusual, they sort of curve. It seems like a weird idea but it’s oddly pleasing. I mean, we’re not making flow diagrams here for precise process flow or anything, when we put lines on a snap we’re just saying, “Looky here!” right? I think it’s rather attractive. You’ll also be shocked to find out that that nice little slider changes the thickness and the size of the arrowhead. I really began to love that little slider, SO much easier than opening a panel or double clicking. You can see right on the spot how it’s going to look.
I mentioned earlier that Little Snapper encourages you to save your snaps and categorize them. The one thing that mystified me for a while was how to name your snaps. Naming is important even if you’re just going to ftp it somewhere, because the name you give it in Little Snapper is the name of the exported file. I tried clicking on the name, no reaction. Double clicked, and now I don’t have a name field. Tried right clicking, but no “rename” field came up. My snap was going to be forever doomed to be called Untitled, until I noticed a teeny tiny little button with an “i” on it down near the add/delete collections button. That i button opened a drawer on the right where I could rate my snap with 1-5 stars, give it tags, and set the type of screenshot. It wasn’t obvious, but i was able to click on the name Untitled on the top and NOW it lets me change the name. They really have to make that easier.
While Little Snapper does non-destructive editing (you can move effects around, overlap them, delete earlier ones and keep later edits, there’s a lot missing from this app. When you’re done editing your snap, you can only export it in its current size. I just about 100% of the time adjust the size to fit nicely on a web page or to not be huge in an email. I also miss the ability to put a shadow on an image, I think that spruces it up nicely. Skitch provides the easy resizing by dragging the corner and a nice drop shadow. I also miss how in Skitch I can name the snap easily and just drag to my destination folder or email or right into my ftp client. With Little Snapper I have to export the file, then move it to email. Little Snapper does allow you to set up servers to ftp directly so that’s a nice feature, or to Flickr or to their Little Snapper servers.
Bottom line is that Little Snapper offers some very unique and attractive annotation features that are really easy to use and very eye catching. But for $39 this application is missing too many features to be a replacement for Skitch for me. If you haven’t settled on a tool and would like some more wow to your screen snapshots, and categorizing your snaps is important to you then check out Little Snapper from realmacsoftware.com.
