I purchased these speakers about a year ago and finally decided to give them an honest review.

Design

These speakers are matte black all around. They are about 9.5 inches tall and weigh two pounds, for both. The main speaker consists of a power button and volume control wheel. It also has a 3.5mm headphone jack in case you don’t want to disturb others. The speakers on both units cover most of the front side of the units themselves. And of course, the GE logo is at the bottom in white.

Setup

Setup is fairly easy. The main speaker consists of two cords. One cord is to connect the second speaker, and the other is to connect to a power outlet. The cables are as long as 7 feet, so you will get some extra slack when you have these setup.

Quality

This category will be based on the built quality and sound quality. So my first impressions of these when i first held them was, “Wow these are extremely cheap!” I was pretty mad at first because the plastic felt cheap, and they felt extremely fragile as well. So that kind of brought my hopes down.

But once I set them up, I was very surprised. The sound quality is beautiful. You can feel the bass if you have the sound to a pretty high level. And my favorite thing about these speakers is the surround sound. Some speakers I have experienced don’t give you the full effect of a surround sound. But these speakers, however, sound great in terms of treble and bass.

Pricing. Are they worth it?

For $17.99, I say they are DEFINITELY worth it. When I purchased them, they cost $29.99. You can easily find these at your local Target, Bestbuy, or Amazon.

Drawbacks

I have one drawback for these speakers. The wires. They feel cheap and I can tell after a while, they will start to break and open up. And the wire that goes into the 3.5m headphone jack is very sensitive. So if you turn it one way, you will only get sound out of one speaker. Sometimes you have to keep turning it until sound is coming out of both speakers.

Overall Impression

I honestly recommend you go buy these speakers. These are obviously not as good as Bose or any other high-end speaker company. But if your looking for some that are less than $30 or $20, these are right for you. I give them a perfect 5/5.

What Makes This So Special?

Think about it, an interface were you can group tabs and these tabs can help you find a good vacation spot, or a camera to take pictures of that vacation spot, pretty cool, huh? If you have tried Google Wave then most likely you have shared a document or a picture, but what about a webpage, or a group of them at this matter? This problem or situation is solved by Tab Candy. Along with many others mentioned in the video preview of Tab Candy!

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Expenditure

Expenditure is a simple, yet powerful financing application for you iPhone or iPod touch. With features allowing you to keep track of purchases, and income, it’s a fast way to see if you can afford that shiny new Apple product that everybody wants, I mean responsible purchase. In the back of all of out check books there are those log sheets that by the time your done looks like you just spilled ink on it, and aren’t very attractive. Also, if your like me, your always wanting to buy the newest technology or the newest piece of software, but aren’t really sure if your going to need that money somewhere else! If you have either or both of those worries, Expenditure is what you need!

Tutorial and Usage

Expenditure, on first open displays a “Thank You” page the first time you launch the application, from there you are guided through the features of the app, which are pretty self explanatory. After that you are brought to the main “Balance” page. Which depending on your balance can be your friend or your enemy . You can add either an Income or and Expense to your balance simply by tapping the, green, new transaction button at the bottom of the application. Leading you deeper into the simple and modern interface.(Left) From here you can choose the amount of the transaction and if you either gave of received the specified amount. After clicking “OK” you are presented with the screen to the right were you able to tweak the specifics of the transaction including adding images, notes (lower left), dates, the category, and if it is a recurring transaction. After hitting the green “Save Transaction”  button you are put back to the main balance screen were you will notice the amount has adjusted to the new amount you either added or subtracted to your balance. Also on the home screen you are able to access the settings panel were you can toggle applications sounds and re-experience the guide as well as adjust details like currency. Going back to the home screen, if you look at the bottom you are able to access your transactions in a event layout also you are able to view the events that you have on repeat.

Summary and Improvements

Over all Expenditure is a very sleek and functional application from your finances. The only feature that is missing is the ability to sync to a desktop financial application either one made by Shape or one made by a third party, also to be able to sync between devices. On the subject of other devices , there is no iPad compatibility for this application, as of now. If you would like to download this app go to http://www.shapehq.com/work/expenditure

The Mozilla team is always busy designing, scripting, and planning their next browser. A couple weeks ago they opened their public doors to the next generation of Firefox, Firefox 4 Beta 1. Firefox sports a new, “more aero enabled” theme and a similar feel to Google Chrome. On that note the tabs are now closer to the top of the window. Also they have added a “Firefox” button that gives you quick access to things the would be found in, the now disabled by default, menu bar which can be seen in the picture below.

The New Interface

The new interface is a total over haul of the interface seen in previous versions of Firefox 3 and below. So, what about speed? The theme isn’t the only thing that feels like Chrome, the browser not only loads faster but is now seeing faster browsing speeds. Now with any application you are going to bog it down if you add too many add-ons especially if used in excess. Now with two simple add-ons No Script and AdBlock Plus, I have found no slow down once so ever!

Remember it’s a BETA

They don’t put the word beta in the title for nothing! There are still some glitches and add-on compatibility issues in the browser, so unless you know what you are doing Firefox 4 isn’t for you just yet, for the everyday user its better to just stick with the current “stable” version for now, and let the team work their magic to get it ready for you!

Marc Billow

Tech Cores Administrator

“Bumpers 4 All”

(Pun Intended) The solution handed down by many blogging sites is to simply give each and every iPhone 4 owner a free bumper for there iPhone. The Apple Bumpers have gotten great reviews overall and in my opinion work great and feel even better in your hand. But that is A LOT of bumpers, and not every body wants to have one just to be able to call somebody.

The following quote from consumer reports writer Mike Gikas is the concluding partition on the report and the quote that really finishes their “Not Recommended” review.

“If you want an iPhone that works well without a masking-tape fix, we continue to recommend an older model, the 3G S.”

Marc Billow

Tech Cores Administrator

When I switched over to the Mac early February of this year, I was really loving everything about OS X, or in my case, Snow Leopard. I loved how fast Mail was, how it had threaded messaging support (which is a bit hidden), and even how it combined all my mailboxes all in one nice inbox. But the thing is, I was never too happy with the search features until I found Rocketbox.

Thankfully to Twitter, I tweeted out one day on my Twitter account (I know… I know… shameless plug!) that my only gripe about Mail was that the search features were too simple. @Rocketbox tweeted out to me about their piece of software called Rocketbox by Central Atomics After checking out their website, I was quite impressed with it’s search features. I posed a question if I could review it on Tech Cores, and without no hesitation, they sent me a evaluation key for Rocketbox… now that’s what I call fast support!

It has been said before that Mail does have some more “advanced” features out of the box. The thing is with this, is that basically, it’s not user friendly. Rocketbox, on the other hand, let’s you do much more and all within a GUI.

Want to hear more about Rocketbox? Read the full review below.

Design

It’s without a doubt that the designers of Rocketbox spent quite a bit of time to make the design user friendly and also very elegant. I have to say, I’m really loving this design.

When you search for something in the Rocketbox window, it’ll highlight the text and even give you a very nice list of all of your emails relating to your search topic.

On the two-column window, on the very left is your flags, accounts, and mailboxes to narrow down your search query even more. And to the right, is of course, your list of emails relating to that search topic.

It couldn’t get any easier… and of course, I need to say that they have an amazing icon design. They really did an amazing job on the shadowing and the glossiness of the icon.

Speed

It’s certain that Rocketbox really delievers a better Mail experience for users like me who receive and and even send many emails a day. You don’t know how many times I was spending minutes searching for something with the basic search engine built into Mail.

Now that Rocketbox has those flags as seen in the above screenshot, I’m able to easily find my important emails, which typically has some attachment, in a breeze using Rocketbox’s advanced search features.

From their “Learn More” page, I was able to compute that Rocketbox is about 207x faster than the basic Mail’s search engine. You may ask, how is it that much faster? That’s easy… basically, what Rocketbox does is index your email when it first loads and allows Rocketbox to search through that index whether than searching through every mailbox like Mail’s basic search feature does.

When you simply search for a keyword, Rocketbox will pull up its elegant keyword list for you to select. I gotta say, I love that feature. It’s fast and it works well.

Different Ways to Search

You may ask to yourself, okay, big deal… all it does is give me some keyword lists and a couple of flags. Wrong! Rocketbox allows you to search almost the same way on how Google’s search features work.

Taken from their website, they offer quite a bit of different queries you can use to really find exactly what you’re looking for.

With that, it allows you to find emails from a specified person containing a keyword. I have to say, I love that!

Not only that, but Rocketbox allows you to sort by the date, relevance, and even specify a time range. With all of these search features combined, I’m sure you can find that one message out of 100,000 messages in a blast with Rocketbox.

Some Gripes

Rocketbox is for sure near perfect. But some of the things I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t strip some the of the HTML tags, especially <br/>. Having raw HTML tags showing up in your searches isn’t very pretty to see to the regular user. I know what it is because I’m in fact a web developer, but still, no one wants to see it.

While searching for a topic that has multiple results, Rocketbox loads twenty messages and saves the rest for when you press that “Load More Results” button in the bottom right corner of the window. What would be nice is that once the user gets down to the very bottom of the results page, it’ll load the next twenty results automatically. If you want to search like as fast as a rocket, that’ll for sure help users out a lot.

And my last gripe about Rocketbox is something I honestly wish to see in the newer versions. As of right now, Rocketbox does allow for search queries, but nothing like a feature to search those queries via the Rocketbox window. It would be nice to type in the keywords, body, or even from queries in some form in Rocketbox’s window. Memorizing some of those queries could be difficult for some users, so having all of that built right into a form will help many users, including myself. I know, it’s not hard to memorize “body” or “from”, but having it in a form will really spice up the search features available in Rocketbox.

Rocketbox is taking Mail’s search features and putting it on steroids; it really adds so much to an already great mail application. If you’re wanting to read more about Rocketbox, feel free to check out their website to make your Mail experience better!

http://www.getrocketbox.com/

I have to give a thanks to Matt over at Central Atomics for letting me review this powerful Mail search application. It’ll make my Mail experience much better now that I can search as fast as a rocket!

In this day and age, as mobile phones become more integral to out everyday lives, text entry has become important. Not only a phone could make phone calls, but sometimes, you got to get your work done. It’s usually email, typing quick notes, and texting. So, which keyboard is better than another?

Hardware keyboards

Let’s start of with most common keyboard, the portrait keyboard. Portrait keyboards are usually common on BlackBerries. These phones are a prime example of how portrait keyboards are designed. What does a portrait keyboard must have?  In a portrait keyboard, it’s crucial to have decent spacing and domed keys. The advantage of portrait keyboards are that they are good with one had usability. By all means, typing on a portrait keyboard is excellent, but there are drawbacks. When typing on a portrait keyboard, it might be a little cramped and people with large thumbs are out of luck.

Next up, landscape keyboards. Just like portrait keyboards, they must have good spacing and domed keys. But, landscape keyboards has to be slightly different due to ergonomics. They would have to be off-set, such as the HTC Touch Pro 2 or a standard computer keyboard. As you can see the Droid on the left, the keyboard is laid out in a grid, which is harder to type.

Overall, the most important thing about keyboards in general is about the tactile feedback. That’s a great advantage of physical keyboards, you can actually feel the keys pushing down.

Virtual Keyboards

For those looking for a thinner phone, there are a wide variety of touchscreen keyboards out there. The phone that made touchscreen keyboards usable is the iPhone. Today, the iPhone is still the king in touchscreen keyboards to date. What’s making it so good? Multi-touch. Multi-touch is a technology that Apple engineered, which allows you to have two fingers on a screen and will register those two fingers. Also, you can just tap the screen instead of pushing keys. This helps when you are typing quickly. That’s probably why virtual keyboards are my personal favorite. Now, not all touchscreen phones will have multitouch and those phones usually has resistive touch screens. Now, with all touchscreen phones, you get predictive text while typing. The phone will pop up a suggestion of a word that you misspelled. One thing that’s bad about these kind of keyboards is the lack of tactile feedback. Sure, there’s haptic feedback, but for some people, it’s not enough.

Conclusion

Having good text entry is necessary on any modern smartphone. There are some good options available. Some people require a hardware keyboard, while others are just as efficient on the touchscreen version. As virtual keyboards have become more usable and smarter, more people have migrated in that direction, but there is clearly still a market for the physical variety. Physical keyboards have the tactility, but cost in weight and thickness. Touchscreens can be highly adaptable, but inaccurate if poorly implemented. What do you think is the best method of text entry on a mobile device?

Don’t believe us? Check out this exclusive video below!

This app costs $10 and is almost every penny! In this app, you write articles for all the top blogging sites like, WordPress, Blogger, and more!

ALL WORDPRESS ONLY USERS: The offical WordPress app (Which is free) is much better for just WordPress blogs, I like this app because I have a Blogger and WordPress blog.

Cons-

• It looks really plain
• You cannot post pictures to blogger (this feature is coming in iBlogger 2)
• You can only add one picture to a post
• You cannot add video or html to a post
• When adding a picture, it auto crops to a square

Pros-

• The ability to post to blogger (I could not find any other app that let me do that)
• Being able to manage mutiple blogs hosted by different sites
• Ability to edit old posts and erase old posts
• Ability to add links

Visit my Website

Download the app here

The Good Stuff!

If you have ever used Pandora, you know what the web interface looks like, the iPad version looks very similar to that “famous” interface. Playlists on the left, music controls on the top with the album artwork in the center. But with the new iPad “iPod.app” look. With the iPad you get the biography of the artist who song is currently playing. As well as a photo of the artist in the lower left hand corner. You can also sort your playlists  by date created of in alphabetical order. Now lets take a flash-forward into the future when iOS 4 is released on the iPad and, without a jailbreak, close the app and the music will continue to play without the app open, in the background!

Have you ever wanted a game that is not only challenging and fun? If you answered “Yes” to that question then you need the “free” Harbor Master by Imangi Studios, LLC! Harbor Master is a trade boat simulator that allows you draw paths of the boats avoiding the seemingly inevitable crash. With more paid maps available you can only add to the fun of this app!

Game Play

When you fist start the game you will be presented with a blank ocean/lake figure with 3 cargo transfer units, from there boats will start arriving and you will have to draw line from the boat to the closest dock the corresponds with the color of the cargo.  If the boats are not given a path they will wonder until they find a corresponding colored dock, greatly increasing the percent of chance of hitting one another. If a boat does inevitably hit another the game is over and you are able to play again trying to beat your highest score. This game will keep you on your brains edge trying to keep track of the new paths of new boats or the exit paths of emptied boats. When two boats have collided and you have lost you are given a pop-up saying your amount of “received cargo”. From this menu you are given the option to replay and try it again, post your results to Twitter or post your results to the online leader board! Now here comes the test of if you really are a Harbor Master, after you get around 40 packs of cargo successfully delivered to the docks,  you will start to see larger cargo ships with both yellow and purple cargo. These boats have to go to both color docks in order for it to be fully unloaded and for you to keep playing. All of this is happening while you still have other, smaller, normal boats to dock. As you can see this game can get complicated, and it can do it fast. Now for some of us who think we’re cool and are better than “master” you can go into the settings/options and speed the game up to your liking, not for me (well not yet).

Look what were have here… Aqueduct! Aqueduct, created by Kieffer Bros., is a one of those games that you just cannot set down. When it comes to mind games like this, like sudoku or anything that makes you think, they can be very addictive sometimes; in this case, so is Aqueduct. And trust me, I was even addicted to playing Aqueduct when I was testing out the entire game!

In the words of the people over at Kieffer Bros.:

Introducing Aqueduct—a world of jumbled waterways and mixed-up pipelines. It’s up to you to rearrange the tracks and restore the flow.

The idea of Aqueduct is to, in the long run, get the water to flow through the pipes. Way back in my Windows Mobile days, I played a game just like this one. But the thing is, no one has really, up to this point, taken that basic pipe idea and turned it into something original… except for Kieffer Bros., because that’s exactly what they did!

Want to hear more about this addicting pipe game? Read the full review below.

Levels

Aqueduct Menu Screen

Along with any mind game you may set your fingers upon, there are always some type of level system in the game to get you to keep on thinking. In Aqueduct, it has six uniquely different levels of difficulty.

In every level, there are many puzzles for you to complete. With all of these puzzles there is one new strategy they’re introducing to you. Whether that’s a portal, a gate, or even a conveyor belt, every new aspect of the game has a tiny footnote telling you what that is and even how it is used.

When it comes to the level difficulty, I haven’t experienced anything too hard just yet. As I am only on the fifteenth puzzle of level two, I do realize things are going to get quite a bit harder.

As I progress through the levels of Aqueduct, I’ll be sure to determine if more puzzles need to be added. Speaking about the number of puzzles, there’s 140 unique puzzles packed into this small game! So all that means is you better fix those pipes quickly!

The Game Itself

As you can easily see from above, there are quite a bit of feautures in Aqueduct. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe I’ve addressed every different feature in the game in the images above.

In the very beginning of the game, a good portion of what you’re going to be seeing in the progressing levels is shown to you. As you advance to the next level, things become just a tad bit more difficult.  In the third screenshot above, you see all those portals. Don’t let that scare you; they’re really not that challenging!

Because of all of the different elements and things you need to do to connect the faucet and the drain together, it can get very challenging. It’s not like other games where all you need to do is rotate the pipes; in this one, you need to do everything you can do to get that water to flow!

But from the screenshots provided by Kieffer Bros. in the later levels, I don’t see any new features. What more can they add like the portals, conveyer belts, and other things like that to make the game more enjoyable? Leave your comment below! What I think might be a neat feature is if they somehow made the pipes invisible and only unlockable by doing certain things, whether that’s pushing on a button or such. That’s one thing I can think of that would add a lot. Who knows, it could be in there already! Seems to be I need to play a bit more…

Settings and Sound

There’s really no need for a lot of settings in this game. But I am happy that you’re able to turn off the music and/or the sound effects.

One thing that does get me just a bit is why they didn’t make it so that you can easily listen to your own music. If you play any song and then start the game with the music on, the game will simply fade out your music and start playing theirs. It would be nice if the game detects that and mutes their own music.

Don’t get me wrong, if you turn the music off before, it’ll work just fine, even with the sound effects, but it would be nice if that was added. I have to say, I would love to hear more of that intro music!

Replay Value

It’s certain that Kieffer Bros. spent a lot of time making Aqueduct fun and entertaining during gameplay. The music fits the game perfectly and every single thing in the game just makes you want to come back.

But the replay value of the game, in my honest opinion, could be quite a bit higher. If you unlock a new level, you simply get to go on. Wouldn’t it be nice if OpenFeint, or another game service like Plus+, was added into the game? Without a doubt this is a very fun game, and it really gets you to start thinking in different ways, but it would be nice if there was some way to make the user to really want to come back to play it again.

One way I think Kieffer Bros. could achieve this would be to add in a different gameplay, a time based gameplay, so you can try to complete that level as fast as you can. With that, they would be able to give a silver, gold, or even a bronze metal or something similar from your achievement. That’s what would make Aqueduct such a fun game; to keep on trying to get a better score.

Graphics

I really cannot give my word to Kieffer Bros. at how well they designed Aqueducts. They take the basic aspects of iOS and really incorporate those aspects in their own game. All of their on-off sliders, back buttons, and even menu buttons are all custom graphics and boy, don’t they look awesome!

For example, on the main menu screen, you can still slide you finger across the below section to view the unlocked and locked levels, but it’s great that they added their own slider bar in at the bottom. Even in the top left and top right of the screen, where the info button and the settings button is, it’s all their own custom graphics.

Things like this really give any game a great touch other than using those basic UIKit elements. I really appreciate them doing that.

Overall

Overall, I really think think that Aqueduct is a fun and addicting game that’s easily able to play for hours on end. All of their graphics are easily state-of the art and  every piece of their music in the game is well composed to fit the game.

Aqueduct features many levels of gameplay to get you attached for hours and it even offers many puzzles in that level.

But one thing in Aqueduct that could be improved is getting the user to come back to the game. There’s no way to beat your best time currently. If that was added, it would add in quite a bit more replay value.

More Games Like Aqueduct

If you think Aqueduct is amazing, be sure to check out their other games like Orba and Abca.

And of course, if you want to take a look at Aqueduct or even purchase that, you can do that at the below link:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aqueduct/id377544857?mt=8

I have to give my appreciate to the guys over at Kieffer Bros. for letting me review Aqueduct! I really have to say you guys without a doubt create the most unique pipe connection game available!

I have not experienced any freezing or glitching ever since i got 4.0. In 3.1.2 and below, I always got freezing moments and random lag. Multitasking is a charm as well. I will admit that after I have about six different applications running, it will begin to slow down, obviously. Another great feature I love is folders. Before this feature, it took me forever to find a game or app. Now with organizing all my apps and games in folders, I have went from eight pages down to two pages. Backgrounds is nothing new to me because I used to have Winterboard. With backgrounds, I have deleted Winterboard because I don’t care about customized icons and widgets. I just need a background so I don’t have to look into the boring black screen every time.

Now people will ask, “Will the jailbreak make it slower” or “will it reduce battery life?” My answer to those questions are no. There is absolutely no difference whatsoever. I had 4.0 without the jailbreak for about four days until I decided to pwn my device. Not to mention, if you think the battery life gets slower when you jailbreak, it doesn’t. The battery life sucks anyways right when you turn it on for the first time.

Is jailbreaking  iOS 4.0 worth it? Absolutely. If all you’re going to do is get apps illegally, then don’t do it. Just buy your apps PEOPLE! But if you are going to use Winterboard, or get custom carriers, or you just want the third party apps, then go for it. If you don’t like it, then just restore it back to regular firmware. This is Scotty giving you my thoughts on iOS 4 – jailbroken.

(THIS IS NOT INTENDED TO BE A POST, JUST AN UPDATE)

Samsung has finally done it! They will now have the Samsung Galaxy S on all four major U.S. cellular networks. There are no pictures of the Fascinate but it is going to look like the original Galaxy S with a piano black finish and chrome decals.

Fascinate’s Spec list

-1 GHz Hummingbird processor

-4” Screen, 480×800

-AMOLED Screen

-512 MB RAM

-8 or 16 GB internal Storage

-3.5 mm audio jack

-5 MP camera

-720p HD recording

-VGA Front Facing Camera (still unknown)

-WiFi

-Bluetooth

-Android (unknown version)

Twitter- http://twitter.com/androidphilip

.apt http://www.mediafire.com/?2ejmryjjif4

.apk http://www.mediafire.com/?my0hnndkuy3

This is still in beta and does not support landscape. Verizon 1.0 coming soon!

  All of us at Tech Cores follows Apple and iOS4 all the way from the beginning, so I am glad to have the honor to sum most of the changes up into this post! Ok so it started with the keynote(click for post), massive amounts of people watched and people anted it then, so when it was released massive amounts of people downloaded it, including me. So here we go!

Wallpapers:

Now the first thing that you notice is the wallpaper. This was a feature they introduced in iOS3.2 for the iPad, and now they have brought it to the iPhone and iPod touch. You have the ability to set  the wallpaper to either one of your photos or the various default Apple iOS wallpapers. With the change of the iOS dock in combination to the wallpapers that they also added it give the Home Screen more customization, which was a highly suggested feature.

Folders:

The next thing I would like to cover is the addition of Folders to iOS. Folders, just like on your Mac, Linux, or Windows based PC, allows you to group multiple items in to one icon then on command open the folder and choose your application. This allows for a more organized environment for the user. This also makes it easier to find what you are looking for, by grouping “Social” apps like facebook®, twitter®, and Skype® you are able to find those apps all in one location, hence for quicker access to them all. Another handy feature is notifiers, being able to know if any of your “Social” or “Store” applications have updates, at a glance, is much faster than the previous method.

Multi-Tasking:

The Next topic is Multi-Tasking. Among, if not, the most requested addition it sticks true to Apple’s statement of “Were not the first to the party, but we’re going to be the best”! Apple created a simple yet powerful way to run multiple applications at the same time, as well as adding more integration feature to developers. One fine example of this integrations is Pandora®. Before iOS4 the app was just like every other music application, you opened it used it, and when you closed it the music stopped. Now with the update you can open it, and use it, but when you close it, the music doesn’t stop! Also as you see the right it was also integrated to the new music controls and orientation lock menu!

Mail:

Mail has seen many changes of its years, but in iOS4 it got some what of an overhaul of features. Apple added unified inboxes were you can view multiply email addresses into one unified inbox as well as separately. Now beyond that they also added more integration for mail services like Gmail by Google. Now you are able to sync Calendars and Notes in addition to the norm of just Mail. They also added the alias feature for MobileMe. Another feature you will see to your left in the addition of a picture of the sender of the email, provided you have them in your contacts and their contact info has a picture attached.

Others…

Changed Music/iPod Album View

Bing Added As A Search Option

iBooks

Web Search Options Added In Spot Light

Everybody has those moments were they just want to have something to do, now there are apps for our iDevices that can keep us “awake” during those times. Today I am going to be going over an app that I think fits that purpose perfectly, SoundDrop.

SoundDrop is an application were you are able to create music out of random sounds made when a ball hits a line. Bundled with a simple “easy on the eyes” GIU it is a great way to pass some time, or just enjoy. When you launch SoundDrop you will be greeted with a white on black interface, extremely simple, were you can choose Play, among many other options. After tapping Play you are taken to a screen that only has on link a white circle, and for lack of a better explanation, with balls coming out of it. It doesn’t seem like much right now. The only thing that you can do with that “ball dropper” it mode it around (tap and drag). So now lets get creative, you can now draw lines, I know its amazing(!), now the cool part, and the main point of this application is that when a ball hits a line it makes a noise. One line is boring, you know, bong, bong, bong. When you get bunches of lines that’s when it gets fun, creating your own music with balls and lines.

I have created a nice example that Taylor is probably going to print and hang on his wall!

When I first started out learning HTML, I was using Notepad on Windows XP. Yes, that’s not Notepad++, that’s Notepad! Notepad was in fact a great start mainly because it forces the user to code by hand, which will help you learn the aspects of code other than using an application like Dreamweaver to do it all for you.

Years after that, guess what I switched to… Dreamweaver. I sticked with Dreamweaver for about two years until I switched over to the ever so famous, Notepad++. Notepad++ is one of my favorite hand coding editors out there mainly because it’s just so versatile in many ways. After that, I switched over to the Mac for iPhone programming. And yes, you’re probably thinking… “dude, how many programming languages do you know?” Well, I’ll just say I know a good portion of ‘em.

After my switch to the Mac, I went back to Dreamweaver because I already had a copy of it for the Mac. I used Dreamweaver on the Mac for about a month until I needed to do some serious work. At that point, I remembered why I switched to Notepad++. Dreamweaver’s interface is just so old and really needs a redesign. I did download Dreamweaver CS5 to give it a try, but honestly, it’s not that much different from its previous builds. At that point, I decided I was going to end my affiliation of Dreamweaver.

I was on a hunt… a hunt for the best web-developing tool for the Mac available to the masses. Guess what I found, Espresso!

Espresso has tons of features to cover. Here’s my input on MacRabbit’s Espresso:

Projects:

Throughout many of my web-dev projects (which I didn’t add most of them into Espresso just yet), it sometimes can be hard to manage all of their FTP passwords, usernames, and even all of the code associated with that site. I’ve built sites with many pages down to sites without only one page. For Espresso’s organization of them, it organizes it into projects. In these projects are always a project file that contains things like server data. And also, in the project folder, it’ll contain your local files managed on your machine.

I really love Espresso’s way of organizing. I think it’s project files are a very nice way to keep things sorted like all your FTP data. Of course with the project, there comes a project icon. This icon can be customized to a value of different settings and an infinite amount of project images (that’s laid on top of the icon).

One thing that this is lacking is that you can only change it to five colors (blue, purple, red, orange, and green). Being an avid programmer myself, I know it’s possible for them to make that an infinite amount of colors by simply changing the hue of the projects icon. That’s one thing I would like to see in the later builds.

Editor:

Espresso’s editor is for sure a work of art. The main theme, which you can see above in the CSS code, is so pleasant to the eye. One of my favorite things about the editor is code folding support. Code folding is so handy in many cases, that it’s sad if an editor doesn’t have it.

Espresso’s auto-completion works great, for the most part. If you let Espresso auto-complete a div tag, for example, and press enter, it’ll complete it with the ID (why not that class?) and also close the tag for you. If you press tab after that, it’ll let you advance your cursor, without touching the mouse, to the ID. If you press tab again, it’ll be in-between the div tags.

Now one thing I don’t like about it’s auto-completion is that it doesn’t work in PHP. If you watch the attached video to this review, you’ll find out why. It would be nice to have auto-completion in PHP. Don’t get me wrong, it still auto-completes the functions and it even informs you of what values that needs to be passed to that function, but it just doesn’t work when using starting or closing a bracket ({ or }).

Other than that, I really have to say I love the way Espresso auto-completes the code. It works well, it’s fast, and the best part of all, it’s even fun to do!

Code Navigator:

The code navigator is easily one of my favorite features about Espresso. If you’re like me, you’re always trying to organize your code and make it easily readable by anyone. But sometimes, when you have so much code (1,000+ lines), it gets a little hard to manage everything. Having this code navigator helps quite a bit. Not only does it look great, but it provides large functionality to the program. You’re able to view every CSS property, view PHP code, look at some of your comments, and even see the layout of your code all within this navigator.

I believe any web-developer will love the way MacRabbit coded and designed this navigator because I for sure do.

Menu Items/Features:

Espresso really offers a variety of features that you can do to your code. It offers features like code balancing, convert to entities, many PHP snippets, formatting options to insert a new tag, comment feature to comment out all of your code (and yes, it does work with the universal command-/ shortcut), and even sorting!

Some of the features that I do have to point out is code sorting. I was a bit suprised to see this in the beginning, but I think MacRabbit can improve on this even more. For example, when I select a whole bunch of CSS, wouldn’t it be nice to sort all of your classes, IDs, and properties within the classes and IDs? That would be an amazing feature to have and it’s one thing I would use all the time. As of right now, I use some online services to do that to my CSS. If that can be built right into Espresso, that was be fantastic!

One feature I was surprised to not see after seeing the convert to entities feature is that it didn’t have anything to convert RGB colors to HEX colors or even a color picker in that case like Dreamweaver has. Granted, that’s a bit more visual than hand coding it yourself, but it would be a amazing feature to add into an application. And if they want to take it even further, it would be great that every time you type in a color, it’ll add it into a color palette so you can use the same colors over and over again. Now that would be a great feature to have in Espresso.

Customizability:

Espresso’s customizability is for sure excellent. You can customize things like permissions for new files and folders for FTP, tell how to let Espresso start and how to open up documents, customize how large the workspace to be,  changing the font used (if you want a guide on the best programming fonts, read this), telling how many spaces a tab enters, and some other advanced options.

One of my  favorite features is theming support. Now, the themes are very like CSS files, but for the editor’s code colors. I wish that there was some easier way to theme, like via a GUI, but that probably wouldn’t be too hard to write an app for that.

Overall, I really love the fact that it supports themes. I just wish it came with some more themes than the default one that’s installed.

Conclusion:

Overall I have to say that Espresso is a great web-development application for that Mac. I’ve used many  applications to do this type of thing and it’s certain that Espresso has so many strong points. But of course, it does have some weaker points that I’ve stated in this review that will hopefully help the guys over at MacRabbit to improve on Espresso.

Video:

If you’re not too tired from reading all of this, give this video a look through. I will warn you it’s a very in-depth video. The thing is, there’s really no video out there that covers all of the features in Espresso. This video covers every point of the application and really walks you through everything. I really tried to give you a hands-on look at Espresso to see if you’re willing to purchase it or not. So here’s the video below.

So what do you think of MacRabbit’s Espresso? Personally, I think it’s a great we-developer application and even great for people who are beginning to learn how to code.

If you would like to read or even purchase Espresso, there’s more information on the below link:

http://macrabbit.com/espresso/

The graphics in the game are easily of the 21st century; they’re unbelievable! If you ever play Crysis, which is only a Windows (PC) game, you’ll realize that the graphics are ever so stunning. People have compared some real life graphics next to the game graphics, and they look very identical (like this amazing image) to the real thing.

But wait, I’m not only a Crysis fan; I’m a fan of Steam also! And you know what’s great when you combine them together, discounts!

Yes, that’s right, Crysis is 50% off on Steam! If you don’t know, Crysis is a FPS game set in the future and it’s just truly amazing. I would highly suggest you look at some YouTube videos on it, because it’s just one of the best FPS games I’ve every played.

So hit it up on Steam right now for you major discounts; even I’m tempted to pick up a copy!

http://store.steampowered.com/sale/ea_week

However, the feature I miss most of all is wallpapers. I honestly can’t figure out why they couldn’t have put wallpapers on your home screen on the iPod touch. I hope this is in the final version but I heavily doubt it.

Overall, the folders are a nice change and a lot of new little things around the iOs are nice, and it is a welcome upgrade. I just wished they put more into it.

When it comes to a lot of those Mac applications out there, sometimes you just don’t know what to get exactly. The time when I first got my my, I already knew of all of the popular Mac applications mainly for the fact that I read so much on the internet.

The very first application I ever install would have to be my IM client, in this case, Adium (or Pidgin on the Linux/Windows side of things). Adium is very needed for me because I have many friends who live exactly halfway across the world from where I live. Because of that exact reason, it’s hard to call them (because prices are out of their whits when it comes to international phone bills; I know I could use Skype, but sometimes that internet connect isn’t the best out there either) or even e-mail them mainly because of the time differences. So any IM client is needed for me. I always need to be in contact with all of my friends worldwide; Adium is that important.

But when you think about it, what about the paid applications? Throughout my whole computer-savvy career, I’ve bought so many applications including games, tune-up apps, management apps, and even apps that help me multitask. Granted, I get a lot of my applications from programs like MacHeist or even the MacUpdate promo. I know my way around to get deals on the web.

My main question to every Mac (please, just Mac this time) owners out there is what’s your favorite or most needed piece of shareware for the Mac? For me, because I’m very into web development, I cannot stress enough on how much I like Panic’s Coda. But I realize this might be hard for some people to fork out one application they like most, so what’s your favorite multimedia, development, internet related, utilities, and even favorite game.

For me, here’s my favorites:

Multimedia: Easily Adobe Photoshop on this one. I always have that app open because I’m always working on some design work.

Development: Without a doubt, Panic’s Coda. Granted, it doesn’t serve for iPhone development, but I do love everything about it. And of course for iPhone development, I use Xcode on that one. I actually haven’t created any app for OS X yet.

Internet Related: Tweetie! Seriously, this is one of the best designed Twitter apps of all time. I would pay Twitter to make this their web interface!

Utilities: I was actually just talking about this on Twitter. My favorite Mac utility would have to be MacPaw’s CleanMyMac. Now I haven’t bought this one just yet, but I am very close to buying it.

So those are all of my favorite Mac apps! How about you share yours and maybe, just maybe, add in a few more categories than I did? I’m probably not going to buy any Mac application for quite a while now because I just forked out quite a bit of money for Coda, but I’m always willing to try new apps.

And please remember, these are for paid Mac applications. I can name so many free ones, it’s not even funny. But hopefully, with your help, we’ll get a nice list going here so people know what to buy if they want to switch over to a Mac.

A lot of people use Skype to communicate with family and friends hundreds and thousands of miles away. Skype uses a “service” called VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) to help maintain long distance relationships of all kinds. Up until this point you were only able to video with a maximum of one person at a single instance, but with the new Beta 5 you can now chat with multiple friends, co-workers, family, ext. Now you have to keep in mind that it is still in beta and that its not going to be “as stable” as currently released versions of Skype 4. There, besides multi-video chatting, has been some other updates like the “on a call” GUI has changed to have a blue and black gradient just like the video chat has. Smaller things like a different GUI for screen sharing , upon many other small but noticeable changes have been made. If you would like to try out the beta go to http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/get-skype/on-your-computer/windows/beta/ and download and install it.

New Features

Apple says that this new version of the iPhone OS has 100+ features. But, I’m going to cover the major ones.

1. The first major new feature is multitasking. Everyone, including me, wanted multitasking since OS 2.0 and finally, Apple delivered it. To activate multitasking, double press the home button 2 times and a list of open apps will slide up. The way how Apple implement multitasking is excellent and it preserves battery life. In order for them to preserve battery, the applications do not actually run in the background continuously. Instead, it actually pauses the app in the background. Now in the SDK, there are 7 multitasking services like Background VoIP for Skype, Background audio for Pandora, etc. There’s also another neat feature inside the multitasking window. If you swipe to the left, you will get iPod controls and an orientation lock.  The orientation lock is only on portrait for some odd reason. Overall, multitasking is excellent on OS4.

2. The second major new feature is home screen wallpapers, a jailbreak favorite. Before iPhone OS 4, you were stuck with a black background and a plain looking dock. Now in OS 4, you can have backgrounds in the home screen and has an improved dock with reflections. Also, it seems like Apple has tweaked some of the icons. The most noticeable change is the Calculator icon, which looks a lot cleaner and nicer.

3. The third major new feature is a unified mailbox. Back in 3.0 or below, this was a major complaint that I had in the Mail app, but Apple fixed it with the iPhone OS 4. Looking that the picture, you see my Gmail and Tech Cores accounts and right above it is “All Inboxes”. I did not open that for a number of reasons, but trust me, it has both my Tech Cores and Gmail inboxes in one screen.

4. The fourth major feature is folders, which is another jailbreak favorite. Folders in the iPhone OS is simple, yet elegant. If you want to create a folder, press down on one icon, simply drag an icon over another, and bam, a folder has been created. The folders system has an intelligent auto-name system. For example, if I drag App Box Pro and Free Memory, it will auto-name it to Utilities. If you use folders, you can have 2,160 apps, which is a lot.

5. (iPhone Only) The fifth major feature is 5x digital zoom in the camera app. Zoom on the iPhone is a great feature, but zooming too much can make the pictures pixelated and ugly. To activate zooming, touch the screen and a slider would pop up. Once the slider is popped up, you can drag the slider from right to left, or press the + or – signs to zoom.

Performance

Since I have the iPhone 3GS, performance with OS 3.1.3 was great. In OS 4, I’ve noticed a slight performance bump. Boot up/ Shut down is quicker, transitions are buttery smooth, loading web pages and launching apps are quicker.

Conclusion

Overall, I think the iPhone OS is back in the game because of these new features. Are there any complaints? For me, yes, but it’s only one thing. That thing is a better way to handle notifications.  Some times, a blue window popping up in a middle of a video can get really annoying or what ever you are doing with the phone. iPhone OS 4 will be released in the summer and will be compatible with the iPod touch 3rd generation 32/64GB or the iPhone 3GS 16/32GB. OS4 will still be compatible with the iPod touch 2nd generation 8/16GB, and the iPhone 3G, but they will not have multitasking due to the hardware.

The last time a new iPod was released was back in September of 2009. When it comes to what Apple is going to do to their new iPod touch 4G, or the fourth generation device. This next iPod touch has quite a bit of speculations going towards it.

The question is, what’s going to happen or what things might happen with the next device. From what Apple has done in the past, it’s a guarantee that Apple will be releasing it in September of this year, or at least around that time frame. What we do know is that it’ll come in about four months, or 1/3 of a year.

So the wait is on; it always helps to talk about a new device and try to guess what may happen.

From what I believe, there’s some main things that’ll happen with the next device.

• A new processor, the A4, is a huge possibility. Jeffrey wrote a blog post about the A4, Apple’s “revolutionary” processor in the next iPhone. Because of this, it’s almost a guarantee Apple will add this technology into the next iPod touch. If it’s already in the iPad and the iPhone, I’m sure that’s one thing that’s going to happen.
• With that A4 processor, which will probably happen, we’ll for sure see a boost in graphics, or the OpenGL technology. Because of the faster processor, they’ll be able to do more 3D effects with all those 3D racing games. This will for sure make the next iPod touch faster.
• And from what we know, it’s for sure that iPhone OS 4 will be on the device. With this, the next iPhone OS will open a new world to folders and even social networking while gaming, which is the game center. So that’ll be a cool thing. And of course, everything else that’s in the next iPhone OS.
• One of the biggest rumors of the touch is that if it’s going to get a camera or not. To be fully honest, I doubt Apple will ever do this. Steve Jobs, the owner of Apple, said himself that he’s going to keep the iPod touch as a gaming device. I highly doubt a camera will ever be in the device, but who knows, they could surprise us.

So what do you think will be in the next iPod touch 4G? For me, I really hope that it’s not going to get out of support as quickly like the iPod touch 1G did.