For Want of a Line of Code

The following is a guest post from Jeff Turner.  In addition to being outrageously handsome, he’s also a bonafide code monkey who will be contributing more programmy goodness in the future!

My name is Jeff Turner.  I’ve been a .net developer for over the last 5 years. This is actually how I have come to know Josh.  He sat right across from me. But it was years before our relationship blossomed into the gorgeous flower as I know it today. All it took was a podcast to get things started. I like to call it the mullet script. Corporate business up front and party in the back. The party was mostly something in tech news, sometimes the daily woot.com product, possibly a video game or movie review. I like to think that geekspodcast.com never would have been started if it weren’t for those 2 crazy kids with a microphone.

Continue reading

5 iOS Changes That Won’t Make me Punch Myself in the Dick

Let me say first that I’m not in the habit of punching myself in the dick.  I’m just illustrating a few minor changes I’d appreciate Apple making that would prevent me from spiraling down that path in frustration, reducing the possibility of my 16 planned Josh Jrs. Changes like…

Continue reading

Apple Releases iAd App to…Wait For It… Show You Ads…

Well shit on a biscuit, way to go, Apple!  I was just thinking the other day how my daily life isn’t saturated enough with advertising and then BAM! iAd Gallery App KILLS it!  Now I can literally look at an advertisement whenever I want. I mean, at first I was blown away like, WHOA I thought advertisements were supposed to be a revered commodity for people with cable television, radios, or that internet thing but now nothing can stop me from that sweet, sweet consumer euphoria.

I couldn’t be any more thrilled unless they charged me $4.99 and had a hobo punch me in the dick.

How To Enable Multi-Touch Gestures on Your iPad

If you’ve used a Mac at all you know how handy multi-touch gestures can be in a pinch (har har).  However, as it turns out there are two ways you can enable multi-touch gestures on the iPad under iOS 4.3.1.  Using one you can pay for as detailed by TUAW here, and the other method allows you to enable it for free provided you’re willing to jailbreak your device as detailed here.

Some of you may not have a huge need to do this, but I went for the free option and haven’t regretted it in the least.  Chiefly the reason I wanted multi-touch enabled was so that I could four-finger swipe left and right between iBooks and Evernote so I could take notes about what I was reading quicker.  Granted I could’ve used the ‘Note’ functionality within iBooks but I tend to use Evernote for just about everything as I have such a deep love for the application.

What about you?  Any desire for gestures or does the iPad work just fine without it?

Firefox 4 Now Available

Just in case you hadn’t heard, you can now download and install Firefox 4.  I’ve been using it for a few days now and am very pleased with it.  Previously I was using Chrome, but despite its speed some limitations in the browser for blogging had me switch back to Firefox which is now far less resource-intensive, or at least it appears that way to me.

What’s your browser of choice?

Thoughts on the iPad 2

Let me first say that I love my first gen iPad.  From meetings at work to casual browsing in my living room at home I’m a huge proponent of the device.  Now that the iPad 2 is officially here though, do I feel compelled to run out and upgrade?  No, actually.  Let me explain.

The iPad 2 has some nice incremental upgrades.  The enhanced speaker, smaller form factor, camera additions, and processor upgrade are all welcome additions.  That being said, I don’t need any of those upgrades.  I rarely have my iPad in a situation where headphones aren’t available to me and have yet to run an app that suffered due to hardware limitations in what I have.  Also, while I love that FaceTime is becoming unified across nearly every Apple product, I rarely use it on my iPhone or Mac and can’t see myself dying for the ability to use it on my iPad.

So is the iPad 2 useless?  Not at all!  My take on it is if you’ve been on the fence about an iPad for a while then now is probably a better time than ever to pick one up.  However, if you’ve already got a perfectly good 1st gen version then unless you’re a FaceTime addict I can’t really see the appeal.  Granted I’m looking at this more from a casual user standpoing than a high-powered business position, but still.

Are you looking forward to the iPad 2 or are you holding out for iPad 3?

What Does it All MEAN?! Apple Teases iTunes Announcement

Courtesy of TUAW, it looks like Apple’s toying with us again.  An obvious frontrunner would be iOS 4.2 being released, but I’d hardly call that a day I’d ‘never forget’.  Now the release of The Beatles catalog on iTunes would certainly be momentous given their warring in the past, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.  Cloud storage?  Possibly, but that seems like an awfully big development to simply be teased the day before launch.  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

What do you think Apple is planning?

Things I Like About the New Macbook Air

Apple recently revamped its Macbook Air and sheesh is it a sexy machine.  That’s not to say previously it wasn’t sleek because it certainly was.  Now however, rather than aiming at a tinier, business/design market with it’s previous price tag of $1499, you can now pick up the 11 inch version for a mere $999.99 or the 13 inch for $1199.99.   That’s still a bit steep compared to Windows netbooks you can get for a few hundred dollars, but having that first step toward a true Apple Netbook is certainly alluring.

Now for some of the other things I’m digging about the Macbook Air-

Continue reading

Fragmented vs. Integrated – Steve Jobs Weighs in on Google

Here’s a fun little excerpt I ran across today.  Apparently some audio of Steve Jobs explaining the real issue in the iPhone vs. Android debate has leaked online.  It appears to be taken from an Apple conference call accourding to Cult of Mac.

Now, I’m not here to speak to the merits an open system vs. a closed one, but I think we can all agree what category Apple falls into what with its ‘walled garden’ approach to the app store.  My bias aside, it does seem that Steve makes some interesting points about the whole open/closed debate.  Take a watch/listen below.