OS X Software

If you’re a fan of Apple products then you’ll know just how expensive they can be. It can be really disappointing if you can’t afford to keep up with the latest hardware and software innovations, which is why we’ve come up with a way to help.

The suggestion we have for Apple fans is this – why not try online bingo? Playing these online games can net you real cash prizes and some bingo sites occasionally give away hundreds of pounds in iTunes vouchers and the latest iPhone and iPod models. You could even win the holy grail of all the brand’s innovations – the Apple iPad 2.

As well as having the chance to win great prizes and huge cash sums, you might also find that you really enjoy yourself playing online bingo. It’s really fun, and sites like mecca bingo have created a great community of like-minded players. Whether you share top bingo tips or just generally have a laugh in these chat rooms, you’ll be surprised at how much this interaction adds to your whole bingo experience.

So, head over to mecca bingo now to start playing – the site is currently giving away £250,000 so you don’t want to miss out!

Apple has make a huge market by launching iPad & iPhones and world is just going crazy about applications. However, it costs a lot of money to download paid apps and if you have a voucher, you probably can use it to get some of good apps.

you can find voucher codes online or sometimes it’s there in newspapers.

iTunes have a big market share and people love to download apps. Having a voucher will always help you download some good apps.

Sometimes Apple does special offers wherein when you buy a product, you can get  a certain amount of credit to be used in iTunes, so keep an eye over it.

The iPhone has had a lot of features missing in the past.

From Copying and Pasting to Multitasking, the iPhone has had its fair share of issues. Now Copy and Pasting has been added to the mix, will multitasking be next on the cards?

Rumours of an iPhone OS4 seem to suggest that multitasking may be added thanks to a large user interest, however with the amount of research and effort they put into making the iPhones Push Notification system, it makes you wonder if multitasking will be add at all.

If a new iPhone is not released this year, a big Operating System update maybe the solution to bridging the gap.

Thats right, the official store release date for the brand spanking new iPad is April the 3rd!

The wifi iPad will be officially available from this date with shipping available from the 12th (high demand reasons it seems).

The wifi+3g combination still seems to be in the works with an estimated shipping date of late April.

The wifi iPad comes with a range of accessories (not free!) including the stand and mini keyboard, which seem like essentials for desktop use.

If you are in the UK, you will have to wait a little longer! The estimated date is late April with no specific date yet.

We will keep you informed!

With a lot of news being dominated by the iPad, will we see a new iPhone this year?

If naming conventions are anything to go by, it would suggest that the nexy iPhone will be the 4g. However this begs an interesting question. Will the new iPhone actually make use of 4g services? With 4g coverage incredibly small or non existant at the moment it would point to a new iphone not being in the pipeline until the networks catch up. However if the new iPhone in June rumours are true then it could mean that we would see a yet improved version, most likely being named the iPhone 3GSS, SS for Super Speed!

Or maybe not.

It seems the iPad has caused a lot of companies to release an early look at what developers are creating with the Apple SDK (Development kit). Early impressions indicate that the apps are mainly enlarged versions of the iPhone counterparts. The popular game, Plants vs Zombies, seems to now have a HD tag, implying that the resolution has been increased specially for the iPad.

With this in mind, it would seem the rest of app development teams will be developing alternative versions of their apps for sale on the new iPad market.

Still no news on a release date, although it’s still said to be late March or April with the 3g following.

Now the iPad is announced, the world is anticipating it’s release. With a 3g coming later after the initial launch, it’s hard to predict when the magic date will arrive.

The iPad has caused a lot of sites to go mental with news and the hype levels are starting to grow. Although many are of the opinion that the device isn’t as good of a product as Apples other flagship products, the iPad is still sure to sell out.

For the casual users that won’t quick access to the internet and to check mail. It seems the perfect “cheap” solution to that sort of market.

There are quite a few ways to achieve DVD Duplication.

The first is the easiest method, which is to use Apples built in DVD Burning facilities. You can take the contents of any DVD and store them to your Hard drive and then create a new DVD template, copying across the data.

Obviously this doesn’t help if you are duplicating DVDs which aren’t strictly data based. For this you will need 3rd party software and I recommend a program like Toast.

Toast has easy wizards for you to follow. It will allow you to create new DVDs, duplicate DVDs using 2 DVD burners or using 1 burner and your hard drive.

It’s not free, but it is generally regarded as the best solution for any general burning task and can also carry out the more advanced and complication burning such as video encoding.

You can also contact other businesses which specialize in duplicating and replicating your CDs and DVDs. For large duplications such as music band releases and software releases, using a company to sort out the problem will most likely be less hassle and will acheive a more professional result. There is a lot of competition in this market so keep your eyes open for the good deals and you will find yourself inundated with duplicated DVDs!

If you didn’t know this existed then you are living well in the past.

SMS messaging has been incredibly popular for a number of years now and still continues to grow each year.
Networks are flooded with text messages per hour and we have often seen big events such as the world cup and other such things clog up networks with texts, so much so infact, that sometimes it bring the network to a halt causing long delays in sending and receiving messages.

If you are the sort of person that isn’t so good at typing on your mobile phone on text speak, so you can quite easily find services free and payed for that allow you to send text messages to other peoples Mobile phones from your PC.

Something like SMS from PC will do the trick to allow you to keep in contact with friends and family without using your phone.

You may also find that your network provided gives you a certain number of free online texts to send, for example, O2 has an online feature to send text messages from your existing plan for free to other Phone users.

Give it a try if you haven’t, it’s a lot quicker than using your phone!

This a follow on from the previous post regarding the email services I have been reviewing.

A few faults of mail chimp that I have found is that sometimes it can feel abit too user friendly.

It’s not really a problem, infact it’s a sign the editor might be a bit too good in the sense that the editor now doesn’t allow enough flexibility in the way it deals with HTML code.

The other issue is that it can take a long while and a lot of time getting an email template that looks just right.

Sometimes one just considers a professional to make one and sort out your Direct Mail Marketing.
This way you are going to save a lot of time and most likely a lot of grief as well.

If your budget allows it, I would probably just go this route in the future. As simple as using a service like mail chimp is, the money lost in spending time in making your own newsletter is probably greater than the cost of a professional creating the email for you.

That said, if you are a beginner at HTML and would like to learn more about creating emails, then doing it yourself would be good practise.

If you were wanting to send out 1000 newsletters, where would you go to?

I think I would go to mail chimp. Reason why?

I think this is the only service that I have actually seen advertised around the websites I generally visit. I don’t know whether I’ve been targetted really well for these adverts or it might just be that mail chimp spends A LOT of money on website advertising.

Either way, they seem decent enough to use, and their website looks pretty, which is never a bad thing. Theres something about a monkey dressed up as a postman.

You could just find a company that focusses on getting you new customers like these guys that do Business email lists.

Your other option is to just do them yourself. Becareful not to send many emails out at once though. Your ISP probably won’t take too kindly to sending out 5000 emails in one big go.

Write a script of some kind to send 50 every hour or something, or even 15 over an hour and leave your machine on for a long while.

It’s gonna take a long time, but atleast you won’t get flagged for spam!

With the whole you must be green theme going on in the world at the moment, I thought it would be interesting to see how green Apple are being.

After looking into bits of information, it is good to see Apple using recyclable parts in their laptops and iPods and also them promoting “their greenest Apple Macbooks yet”.

I’m assuming by that they mean, the laptop is mostly recycable and the energy usage is kept to the minimum whilst still trying to remain performence.

This plays a part when you are wanting a Display Energy Certificates (DEC) for your home, every little counts. Hey, atleast your energy bills will now be lower in the process!

Does anyone measure how much power their home uses these days? I still don’t. If I get a big bill one month I’ll look into it maybe, but thats about it. I could be getting conned by British Gas without knowing!

Going back to before, Microsoft might be doing more “Green” work, but if they are I haven’t heard about it. They could probably benefit from advertising their charity effects to a more mass market incorperating their be green campaigns and what not.

At the moment it only seems Apple is doing something with the amount of advertising they do around it.

Following the article from the other day, I was looking into the issue at hand in to some more detail and came accross a few interesting products.

Perhaps you are a small office based business and don’t have the income as of yet to afford a complete data centre solution for your in house email etc etc.

Putting fire risks a side, what do you do about security issues apart from the usual locked rooms. This got me thinking about what sort of security system you would install and stumbled accross these guys that do Home Security Systems.

If you had the full CCTV package in your server room along with the usual tightly locked rooms, you’d be pretty safe against anyone that might think to steal your data / equipment in there.

I once heard a story of a group of people that drove through an office server room wall to rack up the equipment in the back of a van and do a runner. It didn’t mention whether they ever caught the guys, but you would of thought having CCTV would massively help the outcome of the theft.

In a nutshell, if you are worried about your equipment or data, then I’m guessing the value of them is nothing compared to the cost of buying a decent security system.

I ended up doing some research on Apple based servers the other day. This company exclusively used them over the standard unix boxes. There was a good picture that I have since lost sorry or the section of the data centre that is just completely silver / chrome looking. Thats the best way to know if your servers are Mac OS X Servers.

Even though the server racks looked all shiney and not the usual mass of black boxes with wires hanging, doesn’t mean that they are also fire proof. I came accross an article which had seen a fire in the data centre and luckily had a fire sprinkler systems in place. Not the spray water kind though. It was a fancier type! It basically sprayed Argon in to the room, I think to starve the room of oxygen to put out the fire?

Either way it worked pretty damn well, and I think the only damage was the initial problem child server that casued the problem in the first place. (No idea how a server can set on fire)

To summarise this addition, I guess the people in my example learnt that spending the extra money on a decent data centre were worthwhile.

I recently came accross some iPhone apps that do the craziest of things.

One app is a spirit level. Much like a real spirit level tool it usesthe accelerometer in the iPhone to see if a surface is level or not. Much like a Laser Marking tool.

The app is free and is worth getting. You’d be surprised how often you might actually use it when your rummaging through your garage and just so happen to need to level a surface!

I suppose if you actually needed a Laser Marker, then this app probably wouldn’t be accurate enough, but even still, what if you forget your marker! What then!

Yes thats right, you would need to get out your trusty iPhone, the one you bought just to buy the surface levelling tool!
Never again shall your pictures be at a slant, those slanty days are over. Remember the time where that picture fell on your head because you didn’t have an iphone to measure it out properly. Yes, those days are now dead and buried.

So yes, go get some of the latest free iPhone apps and remember that in iPhone OS 3 you get more spring dock pages for more free apps.