Travis Reynolds

I was watching a video of the WWDC the other day, mostly to see the new applications of the 2.0 firmware for the iPhone. After watching the WWDC, I cannot wait for the 2.0 firmware, and also the release of Mobile Me. For those who do not know, I am a .Mac user, so this service will become absolutely free to me!

While I was watching the WWDC, I was also curious as how Mobile Me would be. I started watching it, and looking at the really cool amazing features. One feature that I want to talk about is in the mail service. While they were showing the mail service, I saw a feature that I didn’t think our mail applications today have. That would be the feature he used for quick reply.

All he did was click on a little button on the side of the sender, and there came up a little box for a quick reply. Steve Jobs talked about releasing a sneak peak to developers on Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”. After watching this video, I am certain that having a quick reply button in the new mail application will be available.

If this feature is available, I think it will help enhance mail even better. I love the mail application that comes in Leopard, and I have a feeling just by this little sneak peak the new application will be even better.

What other features would you like to see in the new mail application? What feature would you like them to work on?

People are always saying that Firefox is better than Safari; which one is it? This post is not going to be a debate about which one is better, it is about the use of tabs in Safari. Apple has really enhanced the flexibility, and user friendly interface of using tabs in Safari. There are some features that probably not a lot of people know about, or even use.

Merge All Windows

This is a great way to put a group of windows, all into one. The example I had was I had four windows open, and I wanted them all to be in one single window. Well, just by going to Window => Merge All Windows, they are now all in one window, in four separate tabs.

This is a great feature if you want to de-clutter your window, or even make browsing a lot more easier and faster. The next Tab feature that I want to talk about is moving your tabs.

Organize Tabs

Organizing your tabs in Safari is extremely easy, all you need to do is click and hold, then drag your tab where you want it to be. My example was that I like to have the tabs I am visiting the most, on the very left side. So if there is a site that I do not use very often, I can just drag it all the way to end, and put my more used ones on the left.

You can even drag tabs between multiple windows. So if I have one window for each subject (i.e. one for technology and one for sports), I can drag the tabs from window for window. All you need to do is take your tab, click and hold, and drag it into the other browser window. This will allow you to move tabs from one window to another.

You can also do many other things to create a new tab. You can drag the URL into the separate window to create a tab there. Not only can you use the URL, but you can also use bookmarks, or links from your bookmark menu, or even links from websites. It is really nice and simple to use.

What are your favorite features about Safari? Which ones do you use the most?

This was a very successful WWDC in my opinion. There were two main topics that were talked about during Steve Job’s keynote. Of course the much anticipated 3G iPhone was given its release date, along with the 2.0 firmware. Steve also talked about Mobile Me. Mobile Me is to take the same role as .Mac, only add a bit more features.

3G iPhone

When Steve Jobs talked about the 3G iPhone, I was very surprised, as well impressed. First, I could not believe the price would drop all the way to $199 for the 8GB. This is huge! The 3G iPhone will have 2 download speeds of two times faster than the current iPhone, GPS, longer battery life, and a new color (white).

The 3G iPhone got a new design too. It still may look the same to you, but the corners are a little different, its thinner, and the back is one solid color now.

I am really impressed, I like this iPhone better than first generation iPhone. The price is unbelievable, you get more features, and much much more.

The new iPhone will be released in the second week of July. That is when I expect firmware 2.0 to be released as well

Mobile Me

For those that do not use .Mac, you probably are not fully aware of what Mobile Me is. Let me teach you exactly about what .Mac is first. .Mac helps synchronize your computers, and holds your information on your own .Mac account. What do I mean by information? Your calendar, contacts, email, bookmarks, and many other things. So if I am at somebody else’s house, I can access all my contacts from his computer. Then if you have two computers, you can have it so when you add a contact on one computer, it will do it automatically on your other one.

Now, Mobile Me will replace .Mac, and at the same time add a few features. First, I want to talk about the email. Right now, I am currently a .Mac subscriber, meaning I have a .Mac email. Since I am, I will get both email address, .Mac & .Me. I am really excited about this. This will allow me to switch an email once my current email is filled up with spam.

Next, you will get a few more GB of space. Last time I checked, .Mac users have 8GB of space; once .Mac switches over to Mobile Me, all users will have 10GB of space. This is always nice, I am only using about 1% of my space now, but it never hurts to have more.

Mobile Me should be in full running shape sometime in early July.

My Thoughts

I believe that this was a very successful WWDC. There was also some talk about Mac OS X 10.6, code name: “Snow Leopard”. I love Leopard, I think it is much better than Tiger, and I cannot wait to see how the next update is going to be.

I have been considering selling my iPhone so I can upgrade to the 3G, but I have yet to decide. I want to see some reviews before I make that jump.

Assassin’s Creed is a game that I decided to get after I lost Oblivion. I looked online and found some good reviews about this one, so I decided to head to the game store and pick it up. This is supposedly game one of a trilogy; which I plan on getting all three. This is a great game which I spent plenty of hours on.

Gameplay

This game is one of the most realistic games that I have ever played. The characters looked incredibly real, the characters enemies are smart, and the civilians are even realistic. For instance, if I was running away from soldiers, and I ran into a civilian, I would fall over and they would fall over too.

One thing that I did not like however was the sword fighting. I will say that the sword fighting was easy to pick up, and was very realistic. The only problem is that it was too easy. I had battles of up to 10 soldiers, all by myself! I ended up beating the crap out of them without even getting a scratch. This was the only problem with gameplay that I did not like; I am sure that this will be fixed in the next game however.

Story Line

The story line was really good, my only problem was that it was all the same. Basically this this how the story goes: You are set out to assassinate a person, but first you got to get some information on them. Once you get the information, you go out and kill them. That is basically how the whole story goes.

Do not get me wrong though, the story line is great, it is really fun to play (I would play hours at a time), I just kind of wish that there would be some variety. Just like the sword fighting, I am sure that this will be fixed on in the future.

Plot

You are basically a scientific experiment in the future. A doctor is using your mind to go back in time and figure out what was going on with the templars. The only problem is, as the story goes on, the future is changing, not by much though. Only there are still people out to kill you in the future, just like you were set out to kill there leaders a millennium ago.

Rating

On a scale of 1 - 10, I would give this game a 7.5. The graphics are incredible, the story line is good, and the gameplay is good. So why would I take away 2.5 points? I mentioned it before, the game is kind of easy once you pick things up, and the store is repetitive, even though it is fun it would be much better to have a variety.

All of these I assume are going to be changed in the future games, which will make them much more enjoyable to play. My recommendation to you is to get this game now, because the next two are going to better. There is just a good possibility that you will not understand what is going on in the second game until you play the first. Do not feel that you have to play the first game, because you should, and its fun, so I am sure you will enjoy it.

If you would like some other game reviews and more games to play, check out WizzHack.

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Once again, I apologize for the lack of posts that I have had. For the past week, my internet has been really unreliable; it was mostly down. Since I have not been able to make my posts, I have been doing a lot of thinking. Right now, I am focused mostly on Apple related articles, and I realized that I am sure you guys have a lot more interest than just apple. So I decided to write more than just Apple related.

I will begin writing about games, technology news, and anything that us techies will enjoy. I am really excited about doing this, not only will I be able to learn and discover new things, but I will as well be able to write a lot more!

I want to share with you guys my schedule for the next couple of weeks. This week I am going to Texas to visit some relatives, so I will not be able to post as much. Then the week after that, it’s finals week for school (Yay!). So I will have to study a lot for that. So if I do not get the chance to post a lot, I do apologize.

So if you want to see what I am going to write about, subscribe to my RSS feed!

If you want great tips for the Mac, you should defiantly visit this website - this talks about how you can change your folder view in Leopard. Say that you are in your application folder, and you have it set to list, well then all your folders are set to list.

Maybe you want one folder in list and the rest in icon. This tip will show you exactly how you can do that.

First, choose the folder that you wish to set. Then set that folder in icon view, list view, column view or cover flow. Once you do that hit Command + J. Then lets say you have it in list view, in on the box, you want to check the checkbox at the very top. That will say always show in list view.

You do this for all the folders that you want to have customized.

iTunes is one of the greatest, if not the greatest music player for your computer. For over 7 years, iTunes has been improving itself, and having amazing features that make listening to your music so much easier and cooler. They made it really user friendly so you can do many easy things, like burn CD’s or find what song you are looking for.

Like it was said before, iTunes has some pretty amazing features; which of these features however are the most underused. You would be surprised at what exactly you can do on iTunes that you may not know you could do.

1. Browser

You may not have known that your iTunes had a browser did you? Well this is great for really finding the song you want. Maybe you want to listen to only acoustic music, and just from certain people. The browser on iTunes will sort all your music to the mood you are in.

2. Equalizer

If I ever wanted to be a DJ, I wouldn’t spend money on all that music software, I think iTunes would work just fine. With equalizer you can fully customize how your music sounds; so maybe you want to really emphasize the guitar or maybe pump up the bass.

3. Rating

Rating is really helpful when you want a good song to listen to. Some people organize their music by Artist or Song Name, but I organize it by Song Rating. This way I know where all the songs that I usually listen to are, and not the ones that I do not really listen to. If you have a lot of songs, and do not want to go through every single song, a great program that does it all for you is AutoRate. They rate your songs really accurately too.

4. Smart Playlists

Maybe you want a folder of just Frank Sinatra or the Beetles. Why should you have to add every single song at a time or whenever you add a new song to your library? When you have a Smart Playlist, it will do it all for you. You can customize the playlist for whatever you want, based off rating, how many times the song was played, you name it.

5. Album View/Cover Flow

Now, the main library should always be in List View (which it usually is); however you can spice up your library for the smaller folders and playlists. Maybe you have a playlist of many different artist, you can look through your folder in Album View or Cove Flow. Doing this will really help your library look a lot cooler.

6. MiniStore

Since iTunes has one of the largest music stores on the web, you can almost download any band and song that you want. Maybe you are getting sick of your music, and want to find new music. Well by using the mini store, you can do just that. With MiniStore, you can see what other songs are played by the Artist, what other Albums they have, and what other Artist’s people bought with the same music taste as you.

7. Change Columns

Now, I am sure you are like me, and do not care what album it is from or what genre it is. What I care about mostly is the name of the song, the artist who sings it, the rating it has, and the number of times it has been played. Now you can add many columns to your iTunes library, which will cause your library to stretch. So you can organize your columns so the most important ones are what you see first.

Let me tell you, you absolutely want to download this application. Yesterday was the hottest day of the year so far, and it is only going to get hotter. It was about 90 degrees outside, and my house has no air conditioning. My computer CPU’s should run between 10 - 30 degrees Celsius; yesterday it was around 50 degrees.

So I went online, and I found this amazing application called smcFanControl, and oh boy, did it help my computer. smcFanControl hacks into your computer, and lets you change the rate of the fan, and by doing this you can really lower your temperature. I only raised the fan speed by about a quarter, and it lowered my processor speeds by about 20 degrees, and I can still barely hear the fan!

That was the temperatures of my computer once I got home, and yesterday my fan speeds were running at about 500. So as you can see, I raised it by about 1000 RPM. Using smcFanControl is really neat, because now I do not have to keep going to dashboard to look at the temperature of my processor’s as my temperature is always displayed on the menu bar.

So when I took this picture my average CPU temperatures were at about 30 degrees Celsius with the fans running at about 1400 RPM. smcFanControl is already my new favorite application, one it is keeping my computer at a cool temperature in my hot house, then two, its got the temperature on the menu bar, and then three, it is really user friendly, which is really good.

This is how you can control your fans, you choose which fans that you wish to control, and you just raise the RPM to your desired number. This happens instantly, for a test I raised my CPU fan all the way, and just like that I instantly heard the fan pick up the pace. Then below the fan control you can customize the way you like it, like if you were on a MacBook or MacBook Pro, how you want to display temperature, and many other features.

Now you may be asking, well if you run the fan to hard won’t the fan break? Well, I hardly believe the fan will break because you are raising the speed. I do believe that it won’t last as long, but you need to remember. Replacing a fan costs about $50 max. Then to replace a CPU, that can cost anywhere to $1000!

Concluding Thoughts

So what are your thoughts of smcFanControl? How hot does your computer run without it, how hot does it run with it?

Chances are you have heard all about AppZapper, if you have not let me tell you what it is exactly. AppZapper is a really fun application that deletes your applications. You are probably asking yourself: How is deleting Applications Fun?

Well let me tell you how it works. You open AppZapper, and you will be greeted with a little box that you just drag your unwanted application to. Once you find the application, just simply drag it right into the box and you will get a cool little like zapping/shooting noise.

The only down part about AppZapper, is that it costs $12.95. Now you are probably asking yourself: Why would I pay money to delete applications when Trash is perfectly fine? The answer to that question is that AppZapper is better than Trash.

What trash does is it deletes the application, thats it. Now, what AppZapper does it deletes everything, the preferences installed into the computer, caches, and other files that are added to the computer. Let get the guys at AppZapper to better explain what it does for you.

Drag an app into your applications folder, and it’s installed. You’d think it would be that easy to delete an app — just a matter of dragging it to the trash. But it’s not. Applications install preferences, caches, and other support files throughout your computer that take up space and generate clutter. Deleting these by hand every time you delete an app is a pain.

This program is great for notebook users. That is because you are fully deleting everything that the application came with, which means that you will have more free space on your hard drive.

Concluding Thoughts

So what are your thoughts on AppZapper? Do you already have the application, if so how do you like it?

This question was asked: Should I buy an iMac with a 500GB HD now, or should I wait to buy it later when they upgrade?

The answer to this question was you should definitely buy it now. Apple just upgraded the iMac’s not to long ago, and I do not see them being updated for a while now. You also asked if you should buy it not, or wait to buy it with your student discount. Just like I said in the video, you should buy it now because no matter what you should be able to get an iMac with your student discount, not matter what the year is.

My only suggestion is that if you want to wait, you should wait for a few months, that way you can get a more powerful computer at the same price if you buy it refurbished. I usually do buy refurbished products from Mac because they are extremely cheap, and they are as good as new. So this is to everyone out there: If you want to get a more powerful computer for a cheaper price, look at the refurbished section!