So head over now and check out what is fresh and new as I keep it updated with up to date information!!

It will be the third anniversary of the iPhone since the 1st Gen (America Only) was released in 2007, and two years since the worldwide release of the 3G iPhone. To me this means one thing! All of the customers – worldwide – who purchased the 3G and in doing so signed up for a 24 month contract, are coming up to the expiry of their contract. What this means is that Apple will need to have something on offer to all of these customers with expiring contracts otherwise they will see people jumping ship to other recently released iPhone competitors.

Hardware wants…

I would love to see a front facing camera in the iPhone. I think that this is something that has been lacking since the introduction of the device. Just look at that awesome large screen, this is a perfect device for video calling either over a cellular network call or via a VOIP service like Skype.

A revised design. While the style of the iPhone is now almost iconic. The look of the phone itself has almost (in my opinion) started to date a little in comparison to some of the other smart-phones that have been released lately. I know that they have already done the phone with the metal back on it. But wouldn’t it be really nice to see an iPhone that utilised the unibody aluminium design like in the Macbook Pro’s – even though I know they ditched the old aluminium design for signal quality issues, but I can still want it right??

I would expect to see a newer, higher resolution screen on the device also. Technology has come a long way since the phone was originally released, and I can only imagine it would be inevitable for a new version of the phone to possess a better screen.

It would also be nice to see a refinement in the quality of the few buttons that they use on the device. To me the side buttons feel a little cheap, and not only that, I know of cases where both the flip switch between normal and silent modes has gone bung as well as where the ‘home’ key gets used so much that it also goes into a state of non-responsivness.

Software wants…

As far as software goes, the first thing on my list here is a big cry out to Apple. Please, please, please fix the damn Mail app. This program is so clunky and painful to use if you have any more than one email account. The way it expects you to have a separate inbox for each and every mail account is certainly not elegant, nor is the four of five finger taps it takes to get between two accounts. They need to simplify this and give you the ability to have one main inbox like they do in the Mail app for the Mac.

Ringtones are no problem on the iPhone, its simply a matter of either forking over a dollar or two and buying the ability to make one through the iTunes store. Or if you have a few more moments spare you can make you own either through Garageband for Macs, or through iTunes for PC. However I really think that it is time they opened up the ability to either buy additional SMS & Alarm alerts, or to give the ability to make them like it is done with ringtones.

One of the last things that I would love to see added to the software capabilities of the iPhone is the ability to have badges for apps like Mail, Messages, Phone appear on the ‘unlock’ screen after you have just woken your phone up so you don’t have to physically unlock you’re phone just to see whether you have new mail or have missed a call.

These are just a few of the things that I would love to see in the next revision of the phone and its software. Its a matter of a few months yet before we will even know. I’m just wishing and hoping *fingers crossed*

Luke

This is only one of a few stories like this recently. The other most notable one in recent times is that of the battle between Finnish company Nokia and computer company Apple. The contention here was similar in nature to that of Kodak in that Nokia is claiming that Apple is infringing their patents in many of the ways that the iPhone works such as multi-touch technologies. Apple true to form have of course counter sued Nokia claiming that in fact Nokia is exploiting up to 13 patents that Apple holds.

I do understand the importance of companies in such highly competitive markets to protect their competitive advantages however it almost seems as though the ‘underdog’ company, in these cases Nokia & Kodak are suing to help bump up their incomes.

Would it not prove more productive for them to put the energy and money into developing products that have increased appeal to the consumer? I would certainly prefer to see companies pouring their resources into developing some compelling offerings rather than into senseless efforts to gain a quick buck. Not only that, but what what does all of this legal action mean for the end price that the customer needs to pay ? Well when a company is paying out big bucks for lawsuits and lawyers it must get factored into the pricing of their products some how.

Unfortunately it does seem to be part and parcel of operating a business in todays litigious environment so in a way I suppose we will see this more and more as it becomes more important to protect your intellectual property and the things that you have that give you an advantage over your competitors.

It really has become apparent to me that before you even consider illegally downloading a movie or song the Music & Movie industries already have you labeled as a thief and a criminal, otherwise why would they show the same rotten message at the beginning of every movie. In my opinion these industries are petrified of being left behind as new media overtakes them with more modern distribution methods leaving them with no means of income.

It is truly disgusting that after you go to the cinemas and pay anywhere between $15 to $30 dollars for a ticket and some overpriced food you then get accused of being a pirate with this message they continue to press on with. Does this seem a little wrong to anybody else? Shouldn’t these ignorant companies start moving forward with the rest of us in seeing that adding copy protection to absolutely everything isn’t actually helping any cause. Pirates know how to get around copy protection, and copy protection is only a major pain in the proverbial behind to all honest citizens of the world.

I say that its a pain for all honest citizens in that content we have legitimately purchased is so laden with copy protection that it is almost impossible without some level of technical knowledge to actually transfer a movie that you own from a DVD to your iPod to view on the go. These companies are actually game enough to expect us to go and purchase another electronic copy to achieve this same end result.

This plain insanity on the music & movie industries behalf became really apparent to me today when I came across this article Woman arrested for trying to record ‘Twilight’ on digital camera from American newspaper Chicago Sun Times. Essentially the gist of this story is that the Woman was holding a surprise birthday party in a Cinema, and legitimately enough was taking a video recording of the party on her camcorder. The insane theatre manager then decided to go on a rampage after seeing her video recording and call the police who proceeded to search the tape and arrest the woman because there happened to be footage of the Twilight movie ‘New Moon’. Which had been captured accidentally.

This is all a little over the top if you ask me and it might be about time for these industries to wake up to themselves and realise that trying to act like anti-piracy God’s isn’t going to get them anywhere fast. They need to accept that things change and innovate new ways of delivering their content while treating their paying customers like humans rather than assuming off the bat that they are criminals.

]]> http://lukeandmelissah.com/were-all-criminals-according-to-music-movie-industries/feed 0 http://lukeandmelissah.com/google-chrome-for-the-mac-is-here http://lukeandmelissah.com/google-chrome-for-the-mac-is-here#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:23:22 +0000 Luke http://lukeandmelissah.com/?p=425 It was back in January of 2008 when Google first released their very own web browser by the name of Chrome, since that time it had only ever been available to people running windows as their operating system. Unfortunately for those of us who run either Mac or Linux as our main operating systems we weren’t able to get in on the action of this new browser. Ever since the launch however Google had said that there were plans for a Mac and Linux based version of the browser which has now arrived.

I downloaded it late last night and thought I would have a quick browse around with it. I almost always use Safari on the Mac which I consider to be a very fast web browser and on par with Firefox, but upon opening up Chrome and using it for a little while you do notice the speed in which web pages load. Speed is always something that we are looking for in a web browser because we all want the fastest load times possible and Chrome certainly doesn’t disappoint here.

As far as appearance goes, if you have used the Windows version of Chrome at all you will notice that it is all very similar but with a more…Mac’ish feel to it, the colour scheme has been adapted to better fit within the OS X environment. Although Google have equipped Chrome with a host of different themes that can be added to it as well to change up the look. It does offer the now expected feature of tabbed browsing, however it does so in a different manner to what we are all used to. As mac users if you remember back to when the beta version of Safari 4 was released the behaviour of the tabs was to sit above the address bar? Well this is the same way that tabs are implemented in Chrome – I really like this way of setting out the tabs as it maximises your viewing area which can be especially valuable if you are on a laptop and it is something that I wish had been kept in Safari.

The other neat thing that you will notice is that you lose the search bar that we have come to expect, it is no longer a separate box to type your search into. Google Chrome integrates the address bar and search box all into one and they call it the Omnibox. Therefore if you know the URL go ahead and type it in, but if your not sure use the same box and do a Google (or other specified search engine) search.

One of the other things that has become standard in all modern browsers is the ability to browse the web in ‘private’ mode, Chrome also has this functionality which they call Incognito. Essentially meaning that there will be no cookies or web history saved from sites you visit while ‘incognito’ this is a very good feature if you are using a public computer and would like to further increase your safety while doing internet banking or shopping. I do however like the rather humorous explanation that Google gives about the Incognito function.

All in all this is a very capable browser and I like it a lot! I’m glad it is finally available on the Mac and Linux platforms for all to utilise. Google Chrome is available for download here: http://www.google.com/chrome

And further information about the browser is available here: http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/features_mac.html

This all made me think a little about what actual purpose the ‘Record’ store actually serves in the current world that we live in. One of the biggest differences between the two and reason that I think that online music stores have been so successful is not so much the ease of purchase but more so the ability to pick and choose exactly what songs you want. No longer do you have to spend $30 for an album where you only get two or three songs that you actually want to listen to. It think this is the major appeal, but what about pricing?

While albums available for online purchase all come in at different prices depending on the number of tracks, when comparing their prices to purchasing a CD from a store there is a significant price saving.

I have a feeling that the preference to purchase music on a form of media like a CD may also be a bit of a generational thing as well. Given the fact that in the past people have always had a very tangible experience when purchasing music and movies, essentially they would walk into a store, hand over their hard earned cash and physically get something for it. From what I can see it seems that those generations of people still want that tangible experience. However for the younger generations that are used to the more intangible experience of handling their media I think we will slowly see the need and want to have a physical copy of a movie or music slowly fade, and with it will the need for bricks and mortar record stores. Just the way I see it anyway. What do you think? Let us know in the poll below!!

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In recent times LCD panel makers have been investing a lot of time in LED backlit displays to help improve contrast which was always one of the downsides of LCD televisions, and we are continuously seeing thinner and thinner displays.

As a personal preference I do prefer the picture that plasma television screens give off, they have deeper blacks and better viewing angles and all up I feel they have a superior picture. Whereas LCD has always battled (although they are almost on par now) problems with contrast, ghosting and the ability to view on wide angles.

Panasonic has just released their next generation of Plasma television panels to be included in certain models, this technology has been named NeoPDP. One of the big selling points of this new technology is that the new panels consume less power than previous plasma’s – another reason for people choosing to purchase LCD instead. However the NeoPDP also boasts full 1080 HD resolution with improved analysis of the picture data to supposedly improve the image quality in fast moving images on the screen.

The contrast on the panels have also been improved and they are now boasting 2,000,000+:1 Dynamic Contrast. This is intended to produce blacker blacks while maintaining the proper balance of darks and lights to help reproduce the picture the way it was intended. This is combined with richer graduation technology to help ensure colours are reproduced and even the delicate shades of colours in an image are reproduced accurately.

I’m happy to see that at least one television manufacturer is putting effort into ensuring there is a future for the plasma television so that we can continue to enjoy the benefits that this type of display provides. Below is Panasonic’s latest commercial advertising the new technology.

DNS stands for Domain Name System, and what does this mean? Well the main purpose of a domain name service is to turn domain names (the address or URL of a website) into something meaningful to humans. Essentially the internet is a massive number of computers which all connect to one another and every computer that has access to the internet has a number the usual format is something like 111.222.3.44. The way you access websites is by telling your computer to go and get information off another computer using a given number. Due to the fact that the internet would be largely unusable to us if we had to remember these numbers each time we wanted to visit a site, we have domain names. each domain name is an easy way of presenting the string of numbers the computers use to talk to each other.

Normally when you type in an internet address you’re computer speaks with your internet service provider who then gets the page your looking for. However services such as OpenDNS allow you to direct your internet traffic through their data centres rather than through that of your own internet service provider. This is achieved by either re-directing at each of the computers on your network or you can tell your router to control this allowing easy set up for all computers on your network.

If for nothing else the benefit of using a service like this enables a good speed boost to your web browsing experience. On some of my tests I noticed that sites were loading around 2 seconds quicker than they previously were through my ISP’s service.

I feel that all households should make use of a service like this in large for the security features that they offer. If you have children it may be of interest to know that you have the ability to specifically blacklist websites that you want to restrict access to. This is often more effective than the built in parental controls on the computer itself becuase it is being controlled by a third party service externally, therefore it is not possible for them to work around this. There are presets provided by OpenDNS which allow you to quickly and very easily filter your web access the presets include:

• None: no restriction to your browsing, you may select this if you’re not using the service for security
• Minimal: protects you against phishing websites and attacks
• Low: protects you against limited adult material & phishing attacks
• Moderate: protects against all adult material & illegal material & previously mentioned items
• High: restricts all adult material, illegal activity, social networking, video sharing, general time wasters plus previously mentioned items.

If you run a business you may find the high level of protection suitable to protect you and your employees from accessing unwanted websites and material. To further add to the offering, if you are so inclined down the big-brother kind of path you can enable stats. This logs all websites that are visited and makes them available for you to view, this can of course be turned on or off.

One of my favourite uses of this service is mainly because I’m lazy, and this is the shortcuts feature. Once you have set this up within the dashboard on your OpenDNS login you simply add a website to the list and give it a shortcut. For example I have it set so that when I type ‘fb’ into my address bar, it will automatically direct me to facebook.com. Pretty handy if you can remember your shortcuts. There is always bookmarks in your browser of course. To add to this is the auto correct feature, this means that if I type facebook.cmo by mistake it recognises this and redirects me to facebook.com instead of giving me a 404 page not found error.

One of the last things that I will mention here for personal users is the ability for the service to redirect when you come accross a site that either no longer exists or you have entered incorrectly and isn’t able to be auto corrected. What happens is that if I am to try and go to fabebook.com, this is obviously spelt wrong but instead of my browser giving me the very annoying 404 page not found error, OpenDNS spits up a page which politely says why you weren’t taken to the page and gives you a list of alternatives or you can do what looks to be a google search.

These are some of the reasons why I feel that this is a service that all homes should be using, and the best part is that for the basic account which gives you all of the things I have mentioned here it is all free! No theres no catches all free. If you’re a business and want some of the more advanced features that this kind of service can provide you do pay a fee. So even if for nothing else but a bit of a speed boost to your browsing head over to OpenDNS.com