Griffin's USB Mini Cable Kit

/

One of my Christmas gifts was the Griffin USB Mini Cable Kit. The kit includes three small cables measuring about four inches long. Each features a standard USB plug for your computer on one end. One cable sports mini-USB for cameras, portable hard drives, etc. Another has micro-USB for devices that utilize that, such as Amazon’s Kindle. Finally, the third cable features a Dock connecter for your iPhone, iPod, or iPad.

These cables are very convenient for my laptop bag, and minimizes the clutter in my bag. Now I carry three small cables for quick connectivity, instead of three long cables that become a tangled mess. I highly recommend them. If you feel so inclined, buying the kit through this link gives me a little kickback.

I think I’ll post a few more short reviews over the next couple days of things I received as gifts for Christmas or acquired out of necessity last month.

Kindle's 14-Day Lending Limit

/

So the other day Amazon introduced the ability to lend Kindle books. Unfortunately, you can’t (yet) do this from an actual Kindle device or app, but you must go to the area of Amazon’s site where you manage your Kindle, and do it from there.

The terms of lending, well, suck. First, the book must be eligible for lending (the publisher sets this). If it is eligible, it can only be lent out once. Ever. Also, the lending period is 14 days.

Ben Brooks makes an observation about the 14-day period, in that, it’s hard for an average person to finish a book in 14 days. (Aside: my wife is an exemption. She can read a rather large book in a couple days. I don’t know many folks that can do this, though.)

I have to echo Ben in that it takes me quite a while to finish a book. Usually between a month or two.

So, this got me thinking about the 14-day limit and the reasoning behind it. Scenario: you recommend a book to a friend, and, even though they could get a free sample from Amazon, that locks them into buying it if it is interesting. Instead, you “lend” it, and they think that is ideal because they may be able to read a whole book for free. But, 14 days is enough for them to get well into the book, but likely not finish it. By that time, they’re hooked, and end up buying the book anyway. Rinse. Repeat.

In a way, it’s sort of ingenious.

01 01 11

/

Happy New Year. I have a feeling that twenty-eleven will be a great year for technology. One of the first things being the launch of the Mac App Store in a few days. I also think we’ll see Solid State Drives become more prominent in computers, especially portables. And I am sure some things will come to be that we haven’t even imagined possible.

One of my goals this coming year is to provide you, dear readers, with more frequent content. I spent most of twenty-ten discussing mainly Apple-related topics, but the scope of this site is technology as a whole. I want to get to that point, and diversify my topics of discussion.

Here’s a to brand new year.

Twenty-Ten

/

Another year has come to an end, but this particular year closes out not only itself, but also a decade. The past decade has been something to behold for technology, to say the least.

We have seen the culmination of the iPod, Mac OS X, the iPad, and the iconic iPhone, which was by far the largest game changer in my book. Of course, amazing technology didn’t only come out of the secret labs in Cupertino.

Broadband Internet connections went mainstream, bringing with it a richer, more vibrant World Wide Web that focused on connecting us to each other through always-on communication, photography, videos, & more. Facebook, for all of its privacy concerns, has been an amazing tool to connect, and reconnect us, to others. For me, though, the more useful tool is Twitter, which has not only connected me to many new people (cf. Facebook tends to reconnect me with people from my past), and fostered lasting friendships.

Video chat has become a crucial part of my family’s life, as we live hundreds of miles from our relatives. This has boomed in the past couple months with the advent of Apple’s FaceTime for Mac, as my wife & I can use our iPhones to see our parents, and they can in turn see us and their grandson. My son will grow up being able to see his grandparents at any given moment, and that is simply amazing.

There are so many different things to ponder about the past decade, far too many to cover here. All I know is that things are about to become even more amazing.

Happy New Year.

The Family Geek

/

As the official Family Geek™, I often find myself performing system updates and the such for computers belonging to my various family members. Admittedly, sometimes this can be a long and frustrating process, yet other things are easy. For instance, I upgraded my parents’ MacBook to 4GB of memory earlier, an easy task; whereas later I will be upgrading my mother-in-law’s MacBook pro with the latest iLife, another easy task, and then fielding questions on the new iPhoto interface, a less than easy task.

It can be difficult to remain frustration-free with less tech-savvy family members, which is why I am thankful for a couple articles I’ve read in the past 24 hours.

First, Chris Breen gives tips of how to give of yourself, explaining various things you can do for your family’s technological needs. Second, Ben Brooks’ Giving the Gift of iOS gives tips on how to interact cordially with family while teaching them to understand their gadgets and quit being afraid of them.

If you are the Family Geek™, I highly recommend you read both articles before Christmas morning.

Camera+ Returns to the App Store

/

Camera+ has returned to the App Store this evening sporting a version number of 2.0. You may remember Camera+ for the controversy it stirred with Apple when the developers unveiled a way to reassign an iPhone’s volume buttons to act as shutter triggers when running the app. It is unknown whether Apple outright pulled the app from the App Store, or if the developers pulled it to avoid banishment or something of the like.

Nonetheless, it is back with a laundry list of improvements. What I’m liking the best so far is the removal of the silly SLR interface that used to greet you upon launch. Now the app gets you from launch to taking a picture extremely quickly. Everything else, so far, seems mostly like polish, polish, polish.

To celebrate the app’s return, it’s on sale for a whopping 99¢ right now. Owners of 1.x need not fret, 2.0 is a free update.

Squarespace Releases iPad App

/

Today Squarespace announced the release of their long awaited iPad app. Squarespace is, of course, the host and CMS of this fine site. Needless to say, I’ve been waiting for an iPad app from them for some time. Naturally, I am typing this post on my iPad.

Overall, the app is very good. I’ve encountered (and reported) a couple bugs, but that is to be expected. Overall, the app is a reflowed carbon copy of the iPhone app, which surprises me that it is a separate app instead of a universal app. The main difference is the editor on the iPad is far superior (read: usable).

The editor supports undo, redo, hyperlinking, bold, italics, underline, block quote, and excerpts. It also features a marked improvement to the interface that allows you to assign categories, tags, and the publish date.

I can definitely see using the iPad to publish a post in a pinch, but most of the time I think I’ll stick with composing on my Mac.

Squarespace for iPad is a free download from the iTunes Store.

Dropbox 1.0

/

The amazing syncing utility Dropbox has finally left beta and entered the land of 1.0! I’ve been a Dropbox user for some time now, and really do love it. Dropbox, to me, is what Apple’s iDisk should be. By far, one of my favorite uses of Dropbox is the ability for apps to sync their databases to it (like the very wonderful 1Password), which is great for apps that have both Mac & iOS versions.

If you want to become a Dropbox user, please follow my referral link. By doing so, you’ll get an extra 250 MB of storage, even on a free account, and I’ll get the same little bump in storage. Now, get to syncing!

Apple Publishes Free iOS Development iBooks

/

If you have an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, and Apple’s free iBooks app, and a desire to learn about iOS programming, you may want to fire up the iBookstore and search for “Apple Developer Publications.”

The results should be six iBooks published by — you guessed it — Apple Developer Publications. The titles include:

  • Object-Oriented Programming with Objective-C
  • iOS Human Interface Guidelines
  • iOS Technology Overview
  • The Objective-C Programming Language
  • iOS Application Programming Guide
  • Cocoa Fundamentals Guide

Needless to say, these looks like great resources for a budding iOS developer, and they’re free.