Appletell

Time Machine is Leopard’s built-in backup solution. Backing up every hour, Time Machine keeps all of your files safe on either an external FireWire/USB drive, or a networked drive like Apple’s own Time Capsule. Time Machine is a pretty limited service at the moment - you can only have it back up every hour, and it will not prevent backups from being corrupted when your laptop runs out of battery.

According to AppleInsider, Mac OS 10.5.3 is going to bring us more options and features for Time Machine. The latest build of 10.5.3 (9D29) seeded to developers shows an updated version of Time Machine which lets laptop users stop background hourly backups when using battery power. No doubt this update also includes some various “bug fixes” for Time Machine, and hopefully makes it more speedy at preparing backups. It should eliminate a lot of battery loss from backing up over a Wi-Fi connection, and incomplete backups when your battery dies.

Telefónica Europe’s Chairman and CEO, Matthew Key, made a pretty important comment the other day (Telefónica Europe is O2’s parent company).  During a conference about their 1st quarter earnings, Key said that executives from his company and some Apple execs would be announcing the 3G iPhone - get this - within weeks!  This is the first time we have actually heard confirmation of the 3G iPhone from anyone in the know.  Key refused to give an exact place, but stuck to his word that it would be in the “coming weeks”.  He also confirmed that the UK and Ireland will be getting the power of 3G soon after.

With iPhone sales headed skyward world wide, the 3G iPhone can only pump those numbers higher.

Read [http://www.9to5mac.com/02_iphone_in_weeks]

iPhone application developer Intelliborn has just released a new killer application for the iPhone called the IntelliScreen. This new application compiles weather, e-mail, SMS message, RSS feeds, news, sports and wheather widgets and displays them to your iPhone’s “Slide to Unlock Screen.”

The application allows for the display of four widgets at the same time and you can easily switch reading from one widget to another in a jiffy. 

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During tonight’s broadcast of American Idol, another Get a Mac Ad premiered.  The ad features PC in a country music- inspired outfit, singing a sad country song about Vista’s fallibility.  The howling blood hound also ads a “nice touch”, but Mac’s kind words fail again to console PC’s Vista woes.  This ad follows the release of two other ads, “Pep Rally” and “Group”. 

Recently, I have been in general disappointed with the newer ads, but this new ad ends that streak.  It is definitely up there with the likes of “Genius” (definitely my all time favorite), “Security” and of course the very first Get a Mac Ad, “Virus”. 

What do you think of the new ads?

Watch the ads
via [TUAW]

The popular Times Reader for PC is set to get its own Mac version sometime this month. The Mac beta version will get the same core set of features as its PC counterpart including, easy-to-read paginated format, offline access, seven-day archive, text search and font size adjustment. NYT is even throwing access to its Premium Crosswords, how cool is that?

Unlike its the PC version, where the Times Reader’s windows automatically adjust to render a user’s screen, Mac users would be given with four pre-set window sizes to choose from. Ironically, the Times Reader for Mac uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology to render the Times pages on the Mac Version. NYT reasons out that this was done to make the Mac Version as close as possible to the PC version of the Reader.

Additionally, the search function of the Times Reader for Mac has became more robust, now allowing full text searching of each articles in the seven day period.

As the Times Reader for Mac is still in beta stage, expect some bumps as you do your daily dose of NYT readings. NYT promises to put in more advanced features into their Mac Reader including News in Pictures and a faster synchronization time.

Via [First Look Blog]

Apple’s minor flaw in not equipping the iPhone with a video recorder is DreamCatcher’s gain, if ever its iPhone Video Recorder gets some headway with iPhone users. DreamCatcher is touting its application as having the ability to record audio and video in compressed mpeg4 format. That will practically save you some good amount of storage in your iPhone without sacrificing too much on video and audio quality.

The iPhone Video Recorder allows users to play back recorder video on their iPhone, download it to their computers or upload the videos to YouTube.

So as not to deplete the CPUs overhead and makes the user’s iPhone runs slow, this iPhone application does the video encoding at the end of the recording session. Users can pause the process anytime and then go back to at their most convenient time. DreamCatcher is also offering configuration of settings including audio input amplifier and video size mode settings. Image quality, brightness and the videos audio bit rate options can be configured to suit the users’ fancies as well.

The application is available for $19.95, and DreamCatcher assures that they will update the application to run on the 3G iPhone once it becomes available.

Product [iPhone Video Recorder]

Pixelmator, which claims to be “Image editing for the rest of us,” comes full of all sorts of different features for a relatively small price ($59.00) compared to other graphic design/image software of this nature such as Aperture and Photoshop.  If what the app contained before wasn’t enough to cause you to buy it, the new update may help.  The Pixelmator team has now released version 1.2 Draftsman of it’s beautiful, GPU powered image editor that comes as a free update for people who already use the product.  One of the key features in this update is new rulers tool.  This tool allows users to have even more control of the alignment on the layers and includes many different units such as pixels and centimeters.  This update also comes with the usual bug fixes as well as an addition of some more Automator actions.

Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team says, “Pixelmator opened the door for all users to explore their imaginative side through image creation, editing, and enhancement.  Now with powerful, but easy-to-use rulers, guides, curves, auto enhance, color balance, and polygonal lasso tools, Pixelmator provides users with an even wider range of creative opportunities.” Sounds great to me.

If you own Pixelmator and have downloaded the new version, let us know how it is.  The new features sounds extremely great and useful, and we love to hear your feedback!

Nakahara Informatic’s iGet Mobile, a nifty iPhone-Mac application that allows users to remotely access their documents on Mac through the iPhone just got a new Version 2.0 release. This new version boasts of the following new features; iPhone-specific features through the iGet Mobile web interface, an improved web server component, a redesigned user interface and other enhancements.

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We all love the iPhone as we love Google Reader. Now there’s one more reason to love using both, as Google just launched a spanking new Reader made specifically for the iPhone. The new version of the iPhone Google Reader mimics the same feel as you were using the desktop version. Google Reader users who are familiar with the list view when browsing their RSS subscription on their desktop via the Google Reader would be glad to know that the iPhone version sports the same functionality. It’s as simple as tapping the Reader links to expand and read the entire items, right on your iPhone’s display screen.

In addition to this, users could also use the other features of the regular desktop Google Reader. They can star, share and keep unread items without leaving the list view. The Reader page refreshes automatically whenever any of these three actions are performed.  That takes care of the Google Reader’s speed and ease of use on the iPhone.

What was not mentioned though was whether the Reader for the iPhone will be synchronized with the Google Reader desktop. We might as well try it out to find out for ourselves whether marking an item via the iPhone Google Reader would reflect the said mark on its desktop counterpart.

The Google Reader for the iPhone is available at this link - http://www.google.com/reader/i.

Via [The Official Google Reader Blog]

Apple is at it again with two more witty Get a Mac ads.  This time around they are entitled “Pep Rally” and “Group” and of course feature the same actors as usual.  The Group ad consists of PC announcing that he has been able to live with Vista for a while now at what appears to be a support group.  Then, a fellow PC stands up and announces he has been error free for nearly a week, but he soon starts repeating himself and needs a reboot.  Again, Mac comes out on top.  In the Pep Rally ad, PC points out that Mac is the number one notebook on college campuses and then Mac is cheered on by some cheerleaders saying, “Mac’s number 1!” PC tell them they are supposed to be cheering for him so they then chant, “PC’s number 2!” Official score comes in at Mac 2, PC 0.

Apple’s marketing department comes up with some pretty great ads that really help promote their product.  The second on of those ads come on, customers immediately know what they are advertising, which is part of the point of ads.  Let’s hope they can keep up the great works on the ads and keep producing some good content!

Watch the ads