Tag Archives: Internet

picplz

Posted on by

We all have twitter accounts.

What is twitter for? It’s for sharing what you are doing right then in less than 140 characters.

picplz is similar, but it uses pictures with tags and captions instead of just text.

Sorry guys, but the app is only available on android. 🙁

So here’s how it works:

Open up the app and you are instantly greeted with the view of your phone’s camera. Tap the camera button to take a picture. If you have foursquare configured, tap the venue that you are at. You can then tap someone/something to tag them in the photo. Then you can click edit details and enter a caption and decide which services you want to post it to (twitter and foursquare). Then click post and your picture will be posted! This is great because you can see which pictures you’ve taken at different foursquare venues. Your profile will be located at picplz.com/user/username. Check mine out here!

Droid Incredible: First impressions

Posted on by

You may have read the post about me getting a new phone. Well I got it, and after about a day of use I’ve gathered some opinions. First of all, the thing is high off of a 1 ghz snapdragon processor. Even with widgets and widgets running, the thing is still extremely snappy. Another great thing is HTC sense, which allows a cool interface with some added features. HTC also packed in their own keyboard instead of the defaultandroid keyboard and it allows easier typing. Only thing I don’t like is the haptic for the keyboard because if you type really fast you have a buzzer in your hands. Another thing I love is the notification system. It makes a sound and buzzed but unlike the iPhone the notifications are at the top if the screen and you can continue doing what you are doing. Another big plus is the built in gps with turn by turn navigation. Sweet! And that adds geotagging to the 8 megapixel camera with dual led flash. It is now officially my only camera. You can also broadcast live to ustream with it.

Although there us so much good, there is one big bad. Although it’s the Droid incredible, the battery life is not so incredible. I want to get an extended battery but $80? I don’t think so. I’ve never made it a full day even with it off for most of it. The battery life is indeed a failure.

Good phone, camera, gps, and more, but not so good battery life.

Expect more in depth reviews is everything mentioned above!

P.S. I wrote this using the incredible. Sorry for typos!

Offline Pages for iPad

Posted on by

Over 1,000,000 iPads have been sold, and I just got the WiFi version. But I know many went for the 3G version because they could browse the internet anywhere (that is, if you’re in Texas of course). But what if you don’t want to pay the $30 for unlimited, or just have the WiFi version? Offline Pages is a free app that allows you to download pages and view them on your iPad even when you don’t have an internet connection.

And It’s actually quite easy. First, open the app on your iPad. The interface is simple. At the top there is a URL bar where you can browse to the page you want to save. Once you’ve found it, you can tap the button directly to the right of the URL bar (the down arrow into the box thing) to save it for viewing later. A small red badge will appear over the button to the left of the URL bar indicating that it is being saved. After the badge has disappeared, you can safely close the app and go anywhere knowing that you still have the webpage.

To view the webpage, just tap the button directly to the left of the URL bar (the box with the papers in it) and your saved pages will be listed. Tap on one to see it.

But there is one problem with this method: What if you are browsing pages in Safari with an internet connection and you find a page you want to save for when you are on the road? You’d have to copy and paste the URL, then go into Offline Pages, open the page in offline pages, and save it. Oy Vay!

But these people are amazingly smart. They know that, so they created a bookmarklet to do it for you. To install the bookmarklet, just go into the options and under general there is a selection to install the bookmarklet.

This will bring you into a webpage in safari, and amazingly you can install the bookmarklet to another iPad or computer!

Tap which ever one you want to do and it will give you step-by-step instructions to install the bookmarklet.

After you’ve done so, just browse to a page in safari, tap the bookmarklet, click save to iPad, and Voila! Just open Offline Pages and the page will be saved for offline viewing. Great if you are going on an airplane without WiFi!

Even better, the app is free and for iPod, iPhone AND iPad! Bravo! [Applaud]

Click here to be redirected to iTunes.

Calling all tech teens!

Posted on by

Are you a teen?

Are you (almost) obsessed with technology?

Then I’d like you to be in a project I’m doing.

Teens are kind of the future. When you’re not around, the teens will be: and they will probably be one of the most successful generations ever. They are also one of the smartest when it comes to technology because they’re minds are fresh and have never listened to a landline or used dial-up before (well it depends, but you get the point).

I’vew been looking around the interwebz for a technology blog only by teens. I’m currently unsuccessful, so I decided I would just start my own.

If you are interested, please email me at max@maxswisher.com. No, you don’t have to pay anything, but just some time to write blog posts every once and a while about technology (you decide the rest!).

Currently, I don’t have a name for the site until I find a good domain (I have a list, I might do a poll to see what you guys think), but I have codenamed the project teengather.

If you know any teens that are technologically skilled (more than the ability to go on facebook for 14 hours straight), please tell them about teengather.

Thanks!

Max Swisher

Announcements

Posted on by

Site Change

Just the theme, I mean. Here are the main differences:

Where are the categories and tags?

Look to the right my friend. –>

There is now a little sidebar thingy-ba-whatchamacallit where you can browse tags, categories, monthly archive,  and recent comments. Click on the folder, tag, clock, and speech bubble to navigate it.

How do I get to the RSS and twitter feeds?

Look around at the top right. See those things sticking out over there? I think you can tell which is which by their icons.

Other than that, everything is pretty much the same other than the new theme. There may be some weird error signs around but those should get sorted out soon.

maxswisher.com

Also, maxswisher.com is here! This is going to replace blog.goodmorninggeek.com, and I also have claimed the email address max@maxswisher.com. cool!

Applicational

apps.goodmorninggeek.com is here! The site is called Applicational and is less-in-depth reviews of smaller apps: iPhone apps and widgets. It is published by a friend of mine Jason Botto (jason@apps.goodmorninggeok.com) who I go to school with.

Expect that theme to change to be similar to this one soon as well.

Virtual Watercooler

If you look at the toolbar, you may notice a link called virtual watercooler.

This is a link to the blog of one of my sponsors, Oak Hill Corporation (oakhillcorporation.com).

Comments welcome!

Apple Time Capsule!

Posted on by

Sleek!

As you saw in this post, I wrote the following:

Time Machine is incredibly specific about the things it is happy about.

And I’d agree. But when you get the Time Capsule, because it is made for time machine, al of your problems disintegrate.

Wireless Networking

The Time Capsule is actually an AirPort Extreme and a 1/2TB hard drive built in. The Time Capsule has dual-band connecting 802.11g and 802.11n. On the back, you connect the Time Capsule to [ethernet] WAN and then using the AirPort Utility to configure all of your options. Then, plug in a wireless printer! To configure it, go to the Print & Fax pane in system Preferences. Click the + icon and select your printer from the list that appears. Tada! You can now wirelessly print to your USB printer! Then, in the WiFi menu in your Mac’s Menu bar select yur time capsule’s network name, enter a password and now you are connected to the internet through your Time Capsule!

Time Machine

The Time Machine Icon

Once you have configured your time capsule using the AirPort Utility you can now backup to it with Time Machine. Time Machine comes on very mac and is a functional backup tool. To start using time machine, open the time Machine preference pane in System Preferences and turn the big switch on. If a dialog doesn’t automatically appear click Select Disk…. In the dialog that appears select your Time Capsule (Usually Data on [your Time Capsule’s Name]) and click Use For Backup. It will then backup all of your data in what is called the initial backup. This one first bakup wil usually take about 3-7 hours depending on how much data you have (4-5 for 30GB in my experience). It will backup wirelessly, so feel free to move around the house while it backs up. After the initial backup is done, it will create a backup of new files every hour. DON’T WORRY! It doesn’t replace duplicate files, so the backup’s size shouldn’t change that much over the use of it unless of course you make some huge deletion or addition.

Uh-oh, you deleted that one special file[/folder]! It’s easy to get it back using using Time Capsule with Time Machine. On your mac, open a finder window where the file you deleted existed (before you deleted it, of course). Then, open the time machine APPLICAtION (NOT System Preference Pane!). The finder window will then slide up to a cool wormhole-like interface with windows going back. Each window going back is hourly into the past. You can quickly navigate using the lines on the right of the interface. You can click a window a ways back to fly over to it. Now browse  found the file you want to restore in one of the windows! Before bringing it back to life (or your hard drive) check to see if it is in any more recent backups: you probably want the latest version of it. Once you’ve found the latest version, click on it once to select it. Then, in the bottom right, click restore. The file will be”magically pulled from the past into the present” with a cool effect. Tada! your file has now been revived (or stored on your local hard drive)!

In case you have a LOT of data, you an always select particular parts of your hard drive to backup. If you are a system file experimenter (like me) you probably want to keep backups of your whole hard drive, as that will include the configuration of all of your setting etc, which when reformatting you can restore from a backup an hour before the one with the screwed over file (happened many times when messing around with system settings, I screw over one file which gets backed up, so make sure that if you had screwed a file and the hard drive hadn’t crashed you use a backup older than the most recent one!).

Just in case you have a LOT of data, you can select which folders you want to exclude in the Options… dialog in the Time Machine system preference pane. If you tend to accidentally screw with your system files and you happen to destroy your mac (or part of it) doing so, Then when reformatting you can actually reformat using a backup from your Time Capsule. If I were you, I would use a backup prior to the one that was made when your mac was screwed over (as a result of screwing with a system file) or else it will just be the exact same. OORRR, while in the reformat menu you can select restore from the Time Capsule but DESELECT SETTINGS AND CONFIGUREATION. This will put all of your applications and files back, but leave the system config files (the ones that would screw up your mac) brand new right from the disk. Smart!

Whoops, I forot to mention: If (and possible when) your Time Capsule runs out of space because of backup, it will delete older backups first instead of giving you a “Out of space, delete everything” kind of error. Once again, smart!

Network Disk

Your time machine will show up in the Shared section of the left sidebar. Click on it and authenticate using the parameters you setup with the AirPort Utility, and there will be a share called Data by default. Double-click it and if you bacup using Time MAchine, you will see a .sparsebundle there. You can now utilize that HUGE hard drive in there to save stuff on. Just click and drag any file into the Data share of your Time Capsule in finder to store it on the 1-2TB hard drive. Sweet!

The Time Capsule is available at a 1TB version for only $300 and a 2TB version for $500.

Homepage

Store Page

iChat

Posted on by

I recently started to use Adium, which was yahoo, google, and everything else known to man. But I am always interested in all of Apple’s computer products, And iChat I had tried and was not satisfied. I have a yahoo, google, and facebook IMs, and iChat only worked with AIM. So I used Adium. Then I was looking at pictures of the OS X desktop, and I saw the iChat icon in the dock. So I gave iChat another chance. I opened iChat and put in my AIM, and I was like, Okay. This works. then, I saw what other accounts I could use. I saw a Google Chat account, and I put that in. It calls it the Jabber list because that is what it uses to connect the gmail with iChat. Then, I got an iChat account, and that was awesome. It is called an Apple ID, which apparently when browsing the Apple Store your checkout will already have the info from your Apple ID put into the info. it gives you a _@mac.com username, but sadly you cannot use that as an actual email address.  I haven’t met anyone with an iChat account, but when I do I think it will come in handy. Sadly it doesn’t work with Yahoo! IM, but most of the people I know that have yahoo IMs also have AIM IMs.

The UI is very nice, and I really like the chat interface. The buddy list interface is also nice. I like using it with the spaces function so I can assign it to all of my spaces so when I switch spaces my conversation will come with me. I don’t usually like to keep my buddy list open when switching spaces, so I can just press the X button or do a Command+H, and keep my chat windows open.
I think that iChat is a great IM application, and you can be reassured with compatibility with OS X because all macs come with it.
Use iChat if you have an AIM or Google account that you want to take care of chat capabilities.