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.

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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.

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.

I’ve always found that buying a scanner has been a real pain. As previously blogged, scanning can be a problem when using Apple software, however I think I have found a cool alternative to the whole finding a scanner problem.

Prizmo is a piece of software written to take photos from your digital camera and tries to convert a selected area of one of your photos into a image that looks like it has been properly scanned.

For example, you take a picture of a restaurant bill whilst you are out. You then get home and using the software can pinpoint the bill from the photo and scan it out, giving you a receipt to print which looks like the original.

The scan won’t be an exact representation of your original item, but for a piece of software using digital camera images it’s pretty good. If you wanted a proper representation you would be using profressional document scanning like these guys anyway.

The software works on OS X 10.5.6 and higher and unfortently is only available as a trial unless you purchase it for 40$. I can think of a few places I could use this, so the price might be justified in the grand scheme of things.

After the recent dodgy goings on with itunes gift vouchers I thought I would review the good things about them for a change.

For those that don’t know, a group of people managed to crack the code the Apple store uses to generate gift vouchers out to people.
This resulted in a mass flooding of 100$ gift vouchers that supposively worked for a small period of time.

However, if you buy these gift vouchers directly from the Apple store I’m assuming you will still be safe and won’t end up with a dodgy voucher some random person put together with some crayons and glue.

So assuming thats all in the past, I was going to write about why they are generally a good thing!

If you recieve a gift voucher for your birthday for example, you always think, doh, how am I going to spend this much in some random shop no one goes in. The advantage of an itunes gift voucher is that I’m pretty sure anyone could find 10$ of songs they like or tv shows or anything like that. They also make great Business Gifts. Inexpensive and covers a big range of people working at your company. How many people do you know that don’t like music? None, exactly.