I guess, now that a week has passed, that I should mention something about Apple’s Super Jumbo iPod Show. Sure, they replaced the iPod Nano with a fat baby version of the iPod Video and they bumped the iPod up to 80GB and 160GB versions and renamed it iPod Classic, but is the real news the iPod Touch?

Sure, its an iPhone without the phone or email parts, but all Apple could come up with was an 8GB and 16GB solid state models? They made the ultrathick iPod Classic 160GB! They can’t stick a slim 30-60GB hard drive into an iPod Touch case and make it a little thicker? Maybe its because they’re charging too much. At $300-400 each, its almost as much as an iPhone.

Oh, but wait! At the end of the Greatest Show On Earth, Jobs announced that he was killing the anemic iPhone 4GB model and cutting the 8GB model’s price by $200 to make it $399. So now the choice is either n 8GB iPod Touch or an 8GB iPhone. This certainly pissed off a lot of early adopters, though. Stock prices dropped on the announcement of the price adjustment.

That Steve Jobs is such a super smart guy!

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: Cool Tools

I’m loathe to admit it. Not because I’m a man, but because its a piece of technology. This kind of thing isn’t worthy of an emotional response, and yet I’ve been an Apple fanboy for almost as many years as Apple has been around. Unlike most pundits, however, I don’t have the funds to warrant going out and buying one (it was nearly as bad as giving birth when I bought my first and only iPod!). I, certainly like millions of others, will just have to wait until finances right themselves or God on High blesses me with one (yeah, right!).

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: Cool Tools

Here is a link to three ads on the Apple site. Nuff’ said.

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: Cool Tools

It looks like Parallels is going to get 3D acceleration into the Mac version in the upcoming Release Candidate for 3.0 in the next few weeks. Its about time! I’ve never used Bootcamp (I don’t like the idea of having 256MBs of VRAM whittled down to 64MBs just because its running Windows) and VMware’s Fusion just isn’t cutting it for me. Parallels is THE virtualization tool for the Mac. Period.

The smart guys over at Parallels have also added a sweet new feature for people like me who use Mac OS X and Windows at the same time at work, called SmartSelect. When you right click a file in either Mac or Windows and you open the Open With menu item, Parallels will populate that list with appropriate apps from both OSes! Very sweet. I’ve very, very, very pleased with Parallels.

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: Cool Tools

It looks like I might have been wrong about Palm being dead and all. Hmm. Why would I change my mind? I’m sure you’ll hear about it sooner or later, but they have just announce their new Foleo Mobile Companion. This laptop-like Linux powered device is just kick ass! Go take a look. I won’t expect you back any time soon, but in case you want some details before leaving the confines of COT for a few hours, here they are:

The unit weighs 2.4 pounds, sports a 10″ display which can run in 1024×600 and 1024×768 resolutions, it has 256MBs of RAM, likely runs some kind of ARM-based processor, has SD and CF slots for memory expansion, and has a copy of Opera 9 built in. I’ll say one thing for Opera, they’re really kicking ass and taking names (installed in loads of mobiles, Nokia’s 770 and n800, and now the Foleo).

Pricing is set at US$599 and you can get a $100 rebate if you buy early. They will start to be available in early summer, so get your pocket books ready. I can’t imagine any real reasons why you wouldn’t want this thing.

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: Cool Tools, Damn Fine Idea!, Opinion

Remember the heady days of The Talking Moose and Jared on the old 68k Macs? Man those were fun. There was also this one that barfed and some others which did really annoying things as a prank. In the later days of the Mac, as the PowerPC transition replaced older 68k macs, there was SimStapler from Freeverse. You can relive those heady days with a large collection of software from madman John Schilling.

Just to give you an idea of what you’ll find there’s MacBarfX which emits a barfing sound whenever you eject a volume. There’s EarthquakeX which makes your screen shake at random. There’s Conan The Librarian X which tells users to shut up when they get too loud. If you need something useful and aren’t out to torture your Mac pals there’s Smell-O-Mints, a nice looking table of Periodic Elements.

Most of these applets are Universal Binary and a lot of them run faceless so users can’t just quit them and stop the harassment. Have fun!

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: Cool Tools, Laugherating

So, my wife is reading Mark Gibb’s latest column to me about some new Google customized homepage thing called PageFlakes. What a stupid name, I think to myself. Mark says that it does everything that Google’s does and way, way more. The way he worded it made it sound like the service replaces Google. Yeah. Whatever, I say. Boy, was I wrong!

PageFlakes is the ROCKINGEST custom hompage service you have ever seen. Seriously. You must check it out. Once you do you will be stuck. I don’t know how they’re going to pay for it (there are no ads at all on the site) and I have no idea what their business model is (maybe they don’t have one), but it just kills, man. It just kills!

Signing up takes two seconds because you can either customize it without having to get an account (cookies, of course) or you can take the extra 15 seconds to actually sign up. Either way you can choose what goes on the pages, where it goes, and how it works. There is some work they need to do, like making the PageFlakes browser a global option and not just per Flake, but it still takes the cake, the cart it was wheeled in on, the van that brought the cart with the cake, and the pastry chef who made it!

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: Cool Tools

If you work with code of any kind on your Mac you’ve likely heard of Smultron. If you haven’t and you’ve paid for an advanced text editor (i.e., TextMate) then you need to be let in on something… Smultron. First off, this is a SourceForge project, so its open source. Second, the developer has dedicated a lot of time to improving on the application, and it really shows in 3.0.

Smultron is a very straightforward editor, but under the hood lie a wide range of features. It comes with a load of syntax highlight definitions and scads of text manipulation tools. While its no BBEdit, it does do most everything a coder would need to get work done. It also sports a nice Snippet feature, and the new 3.x line has a scalable document dock which I hope means previews in the near future.

There are three tools I use to make Church of Tyler work and one of them is Smultron. The others are CyberDuck FTP and ImageWell. In CyberDuck I can click on Toolbar button to open a document in Smultron, edit it, and click save in Smultron to upload the changes through CyberDuck. My needs are simple Oh, and Smultron is free, though I would suggest a small donation to the project.

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: Cool Tools

Fluid dynamics has never been so cool, and neither has Pong. There have only been so many variations of the classic Pong play mechanics. Sure, games like Breakout and its many iterations have been the one-player successor to Pong, but Pong itself has never seen such a cool update as it does with Plasma Pong.

The amazing aspect of this game, which you can’t see in a still, is that everything is constantly flowing in bursts of color and light. A lot of times you aren’t even sending the ball back with your paddle as much as with a stream of plasma. The two streams of plasma fight for control of the ball, and if caught just right you can make point just as the ball comes off of your opponents paddle.

Oh, and its free for the Mac (yeah, and Windows… whatever). Steve Taylor, you rock, sir!

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: Cool Tools