Is over innovating a possibility? If so, the new Apple Remote is a victim of it. Apple’s Last remote was perfect. Simple, stylish, and functional. Yet Apple managed to completely ruin the svelt feel of the Apple Remote by introducing this new overly designed product.

It starts out at the same price point, $19 so I can’t complain. But other than the price there isn’t much else to love. It features the same 5 buttons, but this time they made it look like there are three buttons instead of two. The remote itself is just as thin and a bit taller and longer than its predecessor. A silver matte finish coats the entire device except for the buttons which have a black matte finish.

Not digging the new remote either? Well head to your local Apple store and stock up as it seems they haven’t pulled the old ones yet.

Fancy this one? you can pick it up online @ the Apple Store.

Adobe’s new iPhone/iPod Touch app allows you to edit and share your photos on the go. A free photoshop.com account is required. However, signing up allows you to store 2GBs of images online to be edited and/or shared.

Editing Features Include:

• Basic: Crop, Rotate, and Flip
• Color: Exposure, Saturation, Tint, Black and White
• Filters: Sketch and Soft Focus
• Effects: Vibrant, Pop, Border, Vignette Blur, Warm Vintage, Rainbow, White Glow, Soft Black and White

Find out more by going to mobile.photoshop.com/iphone/

Via Smoking Apples Blog.

“For night owls like myself, having a super bright display is one curse. We can never use a bright white wallpaper, and turning down the brightness only helps so much. Opening up a web page usually involves some amount of eye tear. Okay maybe I’m exaggerating, but this is a common experience, especially with the larger displays of the iMacs or perhaps even a dual 30” monitor setup.

So far the only app I’ve known to reduce brightness below the point allowed by system hardware, is ScreenShade. But the problem—which wasn’t evident at the time—was that it dims the entire screen, which isn’t the ideal way to go about things. I’ve just stumbled upon this brilliant app Blackout from BravoBug Software, and it brings a unique twist to the tale of night lighting.”

The dock is an amazing feature of OS X, so why settle for just one? Utilize the full potential of your mac by setting up specialized docks for the various aspects of your life. Have a dock for when you’re working, when you’re gaming, or when you’re looking to be creative.

iDock 9.0 lets you reduce the clutter of your existing dock by adding additional on demand docks to your desktop.

What’s New in this Version:
- New Metal Theme
- New Opacity Setting for Dock Menu
- Live Preferences updating
- New icon
- New dock menu
- New Preferences panel
- New Dock options controls
- New Toggle 2D Dock option
- New Toggle Active Dock option
- Re-designed menu
- New delete dock menu
- New application drop onto dock menu

Learn more about iDock here.

Operating system aside, the one thing that draws me to a mac more than anything else is it’s minimal yet creative design. From a Mini to an iMac, all of Apple’s products get high marks when it comes to functional design. From day one Apple has produced an all in one computer such as the eMac and iMac. These computers usually get the most creative freedom when it comes to design. The G4 iMac (pictured right) is, in my opinion, the most well designed mac ever. Second only to the beautiful Mirrored Drive Door PowerMac G4.

With this attachment to design, we mac users sometimes lose out on nifty new features. I speak now of the 2008-2009 MacBook (aluminum body) which sports a pathetic array of ports.

• 2xUSB
• 1xEthernet
• 1xMini Display
• Audio in&out

That’s it! No FireWire, No SD Card Reader, Not even an ExpressCard slot! In all honesty, throw out that second USB port and give me my FireWire. Aesthetically however, this model is also practically perfect. The magnetic closing mechanism is ingenious and down right slick. The recessed, crumb resistant keyboard is also a solid performer. And the aluminum unibody enclosure is beautiful yet strong.

Alas, the point I am trying to make is that I feel like Apple is becoming less and less revolutionary. They always used to be the first kid on the block with new technology. Yet in the last couple of years Apple has really strayed away. Blu-ray has been commercially available for over six years now and still not one Apple ships with a Blu-ray drive or Blu-ray playback support. To me, that is simply un-acceptable. In comparison Apple’s PowerBook G3 (1999) Picked up 802.11b less than two years after initial consumer inception and FireWire and DVD four years after. Get your game together Apple and let me see you introduce something new with your next mac.

If your addicted to Apple’s app store and you’re looking for a PMP (Portable Media Player) stop reading. However, if your down with a touch screen media player that just handles movies, music, pictures, and e-books, keep reading.

All of the following PMP’s are OS X compatible.

We start out with Mach Speed’s TRIO TCH843. – $89
The TRIO TCH843 is an 8GB touch screen beauty. It features a touch responsive 4.3″ TFT LCD which is almost a full inch bigger then the iPod Touch’s 3.5″ Display. The TRIO also sport a MicroSD slot which allows you to double your storage for less then $20 with an 8GB MicroSD card. It’s also less then 1/2 an inch thick.

Here are the detailed specs:

• 480×272 Resolution
• Supported Video Formats: AVI,FLV,RM,RMVB,AVI,DAT
• Supported Audio Formats: Mp3,WMA,FLAC,APE
• Supported Image Formats: JPG,BMP,GIF
• Two Headphone Jacks
• Mic in Jack
• E-Book Reader

Read the rest of this entry »

Arranging your apps shouldn’t take all day, at least not if Jeff Stieler has anything to say about it.

Jeff recently released a great new app called Movement.

It’s primary function is to greatly simplify the process of organizing and rearranging your mobile applications. It does this by using a unique OS X app that simulates your iPhone/iPod Touch layout. Once your iPhone/iPod Touch is synced with your Mac the application takes in all the apps you have and allows you to rearrange the simply by dragging and dropping.

You can download the app here. movementapp.com
Requires OS X 10.5 and a Jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch.

The day is upon us and Snow Leopard has made it’s debut. You may notice however, that it’s not all that different.  Well it is, but its hard to notice at first. To help you get the most out of the great new features that Snow Leopard offers.

• The Finder has been completely rewritten in Cocoa to take advantage of all the modern technologies in Mac OS X, including 64-bit support and Grand Central Dispatch.
• Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors.
• Exposé is refined and more convenient. It’s now integrated in the Dock, so you can just click and hold an application icon in the Dock and all the windows for that application will unshuffle so you can quickly change to another one.
• Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 7GB for you — enough for about 1,750 more songs3 or a few thousand more photos.
• OpenCL in Snow Leopard is a technology that makes it possible for developers to tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently in the graphics processor and use it for any application.

Macrumors recently received what appears to be legitimate pictures of the retail packaging for OS X Snow Leopard. (click on the pic to see the rest of the pics and read the full story at Macrumors.com)

For guitar players, live performers, and all musicians who record, edit, and mix their own music, the new Logic Studio is a huge leap forward. Advanced production tools take the work out of editing timing and tempo. An expansive collection of vintage and modern amps, cabinets, and stompboxes make you sound like you’re playing through legendary gear. And new live performance plug-ins let you record loops and trigger backing tracks when you’re on stage.

New features:

• Amp Designer – Build your dream rig by mixing and matching 25 amps, 25 speaker cabinets, and 3 mics
• Flex Tool - Push audio around with your mouse by clicking and dragging anywhere on the waveform — forget all that tedious splicing and editing
• Move your music – Logic Studio can import your GarageBand files so you can pick up where you left off, this time with more power and freedom.
• Pedal Board – Fire up 30 stompboxes that deliver lush effects like Overdrive, Distortion, Fuzz, Delay, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Tremolo, Treble Boost, and Wah.

System Requirements:

• Mac computer with an Intel processor
• 1GB of RAM (2GB or more highly recommended)
• Mac OS X v10.5.7 or later
• 9GBs of free disc space / 38GBs free disc space for all loops, samples, etc.