Quick Thoughts on the iPhone 2.0 and App Store

On Friday Apple released the 2.0 update for the iPhone and open the App store in iTunes. With the launch of the App store there are over 500 Apps to load on your phone and more to come. I have been downloading and playing with a lot of them over the weekend and some are really good and some make make you ask what the hell were they thinking.

2.0 Update

Not a lot has really changed with the 2.0 update for the Edge phones. There is the stuff that every one already knows like the Scientific Calculator, the support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and of course support for MobileMe. You can now save pictures from Safari to your phone by just holding your finger on the image for a few seconds.

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Review: Dropbox

I got a beta invite to Dropbox last week and have been playing with it ever since. You can think of Dropbox as a free version of Amazon’s S3 service. It allows you to sync any files from your computer, PC or Mac, to there web interface. But unlike S3, any changes make to any file in your Dropbox will will be updated on any computer that has that file. Lets dig a little deeper.

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Vista’s Bad Design

I made a post about a year ago giving my thoughts on why I think Vista was bad. I gave it the title of Vista = Shit on a Stick. Turns out that alot of people felt the same way I do and left comments on why they think Vista is shit. At the time I wrote that post Vista was still very new and SP1 was not out yet but now it is.

Now that SP1 is out and I have been using Vista again for a few months it hit me. Its just bad design. Most of the time I don’t think about this but it hit me when I was using my girlfriends Mac Mini. The User Interface is like night and day and I am not talking about the fancy stuff like Expose on the Mac or Flip 3D on Windows. Its about how many clicks of the mouse will it take to get to where I need to go. To show how it is much better on a Mac I made three videos where all I wanted to do was change the time it take for the screen to shuts off.

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Using Thunderbird and Google Calendar as one

I have never really liked Outlook, Windows Live Mail or any other email program as much as I like Thunderbird. It has to do with the same reason I only use Firefox – extensions. With extensions you can make Firefox or Thunderbird do anything you want. One thing that Thunderbird does not have from the start is a calendar but Mozilla has been working on this with a extension called Lighting. It takes there stand alone calendar program Sunbird and integrates tightly into Thunderbird.

The only problem with using a desktop email program with a calendar is what if your away from your computer? Getting your email when your away from your computer is easy. I use Google Apps for this domain and have my email setup as a imap account. So even if I check my mail from computer, my phone or even someone elses system online its always the same. But how do you keep your calendar sync up?

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Red Ring of Death caused by bad design

A year ago I posted about what I went thru when my Xbox 360 got the Red Ring of Death. At the time Microsoft would not say what the problem was other then saying it was a design issue. If you read my post about the RRoD you will see alot of comments with people having the same problem. Now it turns out that we may have the answer to what the hell is going on.

At EETimes.com they have a story about Bryan Lewis, research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner, and what he found out. It seems that the problem is the graphic chip that Microsoft designed on its own. Now why would a software company design there own graphic chip? To save millions. Of course in the end it cost them a lot more then they were tring to save but what the hell, good try.

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Disappearing Songs in iTunes

This is something that has happen to me a few times. You go to look for a file (in my case a podcast) only to find that it is missing. Just gone for no real reason because I know that I didn’t delete it. Guess it just got bored and left.

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Test Review: Forza Motorsport 2

I did not write the following. Just using it to test.
Forza 2 gameplay operates at 60 frames per second, and replays run at 30 frames per second, due to their usage of post-processing effects. A hard drive is necessary to view replays. Using multiple screens, a player can set up and utilize a 180° forward view. It is possible to network as many as five screens and Xbox 360 consoles together to form a complete in-game view around the player, and a spectator view for watching gameplay live from the replay camera views.

Most cars in Forza 2 are fully customizable and can have up to 4,100 layers of graphics which can be edited with the livery editor to allow the player to add many shapes, forms and even pictures to their car.

The game supports split-screen, System Link and Xbox Live multiplayer gaming. Split-screen allows two player head-to-head racing, while both System Link and Xbox Live allow up to eight players to participate in a single race. Using Xbox Live, players can also buy and sell in-game cars through the game’s Auction House.

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Upcoming Game – Race Driver: GRID

I was doing my daily surf around the news sites when I came across a game called Race Driver: GRID on Voodoo Extreme. Why I haven’t seen this game before I don’t know but I am glad I found out about it now because it looks awesome.

I don’t buy that many games because of two reasons. One is that I hate to pay $60 just to play it once since I am not a big multiplayer person. The other is replay value. In order for me to buy a game new it has to have a good amount of replay value and that is one of the biggest reasons I love racing games. But this game, from the footage below, gave me some more reasons that I might buy this new.

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