Category Archives: Apple

January 4, 2010

Top 10 Snarky Apple Predictions for 2010

By Big-O

Well, it’s a new year, a new decade (according to some), and that means it’s time for the pointless predictions about what’s going to happen this year! Being a cranky Apple fan as I am, I present my list of Apple predictions for 2010.

  1. Apple will reveal a new award-winning ad campaign…Microsoft will copy it and embarrass themselves.
  2. Phil Schiller will have more face-time during keynote presentations than we want him to.
  3. Apple will reveal at least one new product that no one is expecting and that changes the world
  4. Apple will reveal at least one new product that no one is expecting and that confuses everyone and is quietly ignored or removed before the year is over.
  5. Apple will update various product lines in ways that make them harder to mod. The Mac Moders will mod them anyway.
  6. The Wall Street analysts will be wrong about Apple sales estimates and earnings.
  7. Apple will wait until a lawsuit hits class action status to issue a product recall.
  8. Kevin Rose will make press with an Apple rumor, and we’ll find out later that he was completely wrong.
  9. Apple will charge iPod Touch owners money for something iPhone owners get for free and claim that ‘the accountants made us do it’.
  10. Steve-Jobs will non-ironically use the term “greenest” in a keynote.

Come to think of it, I can probably recycle this same exact list next year as well :)

Leave a comment   |  tags: | posted in Annoyances, Apple, Tech

November 3, 2009

That's right, I'm an iPhone developer too!

By Big-O

It’s been a long process, but today my first iPhone app has officially gone on sale. This has been keeping me very busy and up late nights for a while now, and I couldn’t be happier to finally have one live! If you have iTunes you can download the app here:

http://bit.ly/bomtrivia

The app is a basic trivia game, and the topic is the Book of Mormon. I realize that that’s a rather niche market for a first app, but I’m proud of it! I’ve formed a new company for my iPhone efforts, and you can check the web site there for any new LDS games we release.

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January 9, 2007

Apple iPhone to use GPS?

By Big-O

During Steve Job’s Macworld Keynote speach today, a new ipod iphone device was accounced. Part of the demo included integrated use of Google Maps to connect you with local retail stores. The phone seemes to know where you are, so does this mean integrated GPS? If so, this could be the ultimate Geochaching device. I’m hoping they expose an api for the GPS so that I can start developing geocaching widgets for it.

[EDIT]: Sadly, it turns out this is not the case. No GPS for the iPhone. In fact, there is question now weather or not we will be able to write custom widgets of any kind for it! That would majorly suck.

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December 23, 2006

iTunes 7 annoyance

By Big-O

The more I use iTunes, the more it bugs me. I’ve been in love with the program for some time now, and it’s just now starting to wane and I see more and more little quirks that really should have been ironed out by now.

The one that I’m ranting about today has to do with iTunes’ abilities as a podcatcher. It puts me in the situation of having to constantly babysit my feeds. This happens for a number of reasons, but the most common thing that I run into is the “feature” where it automatically stops downloading episodes of a podcast if you haven’t listened to them in a while.

This really sucks because I subscribe to about 50 podcasts and I go through periods where I get pretty backed up on my listening. But this isn’t always a bad thing, especially in the context of podiobooks because when I come back to it I can have 4 or 5 episodes to listen to right in a row. But when that happens, iTunes has decided to stop downloading them so instead of having them right there waiting for me on my iPod, I have to be constantly checking the feeds in iTunes to make sure that they haven’t been stopped. If I don’t then it takes me three times as long to download the episodes because I have to grab them all at once.

Knowing my luck there is a preference to turn this off and I just haven’t noticed it, but even if that’s the case, I still find this a dumb default behavior.

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September 21, 2006

The 2 Best iTunes 7 features you never hear about

By Big-O

I’ve been enjoying iTunes 7. There are a number of things that I like a lot about this version but there are two that seem to have been over looked by the other coverage that I’ve seen.

Great feature number 1: Proper movie controls ala Quicktime. I’ve been trying to get into the whole watching-tv-on-my-laptop thing with iTunes, but it’s been annoying because there have never been any video controls in full-screen video mode. If you wanted to rewind or fast foward you had to escape from the full screen and click on the annoyingly small buttons at the top of the window. Now however, if you are in full screen mode and you move your mouse, a control area appears near the bottom of the screen that lets you do the common video control actions. Quicktime has worked like this for a while, so I’m excited that this is finally in iTunes.

Great feature number 2: Finally a download queue! I subscribe to a rediculous amount of podcasts, and managing the downloads has always been a pain. When a lot of things are queued up at the same time you ended up having to scroll up and down in the podcast screen to see what was downloading, and if you wanted to see the progress of the downloads you had to click on the rediculously small buttons at the top of the window. Now however, there is a new download screen that appears when anything is…wait for it…downloading. Is puts them all in a tidy list where you can see the progress bars of each, and if it is something you are downloading from Apple, there is even a pause button so you can resume the download later!

I can’t figure out why it took them 7 versions of the software to figure these two things out, but it’s sure making my digital life easier so far.

Leave a comment | posted in Apple, Tech