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Scorpions & Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra – Rock You Like a Hurricane ((tag:music, video)

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Movies I’ve seen: Vacancy 2: The First Cut (2009)

Time for some horror, as I was home alone and had the TV all to myself. Hadn't seen the sequel to Vacancy – aptly named Vacancy 2 - which I thoroughly enjoyed. Alas I can't say the same for its sequel. While it isn't half bad, it isn't able to create the same atmosphere and suspense as the first one did.

IMDB / Rotten Tomatoes 

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Movies I’ve seen: Vacancy 2: The First Cut (2009)

Time for some horror, as I was home alone and had the TV all to myself. Hadn't seen the sequel to Vacancy – aptly named Vacancy 2 - which I thoroughly enjoyed. Alas I can't say the same for its sequel. While it isn't half bad, it isn't able to create the same atmosphere and suspense as the first one did.

IMDB / Rotten Tomatoes 

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Movies I’ve seen: The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) ((movies))

Saw it this afternoon. A so – so movie, nothing to get excited about. Careful viewers will spot the plugs for Microsoft products: both Vista as well as Surface are clearly visible.

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Google Labs updated the Gmail Multiple Inbox feature

I stopped using the Multiple Inbox feature in Gmail some time ago, as I felt that it wasn't quite there yet. Just now, I discovered some interesting changes have been rolled out that make this feature much more usable that it was.

You can now name your inboxes: the search query can be replaced by a custom panel title.

Empty inboxes appear completely "folded", they no longer take up unnecessary screen space.

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Latest App Store purchase: PCalc (on sale!)

Created by James Thomson, PCalc is a calculator on steroids. James describes it in a more professional way:

PCalc is ideal for scientists, engineers, students, programmers, or indeed anybody looking for a feature-rich calculator for the iPhone or iPod Touch. 

It includes an extensive set of unit conversions, a paper tape, an RPN mode, engineering and scientific notation, as well as support for hexadecimal, octal and binary calculations.

If you’re a cheapskate like me, you’re in luck: PCalc is available now for half the regular price! And if that isn’t enough to convince you, try PCalc Lite. It’s completely free of charge (for now) and has many useful features. Great for a testdrive.

Why are you still reading this? Get over to the App Store  and buy this gem!

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Latest App Store purchase: Air Sharing Pro

History

Probably long after everyone else heard about it, I got wind that Air Sharing Pro had been released by the good people at Avatron. I’ve always preferred Air Sharing (the regular version), feeling that other file sharing applications just fell short. 

Take for instance File Magnet: this is one of the first apps of this kind (correct me if I’m mistaken), but it made the error of forcing the end-user to install a desktop program to be able to send and retrieve documents to/from the iPhone. When the product was just released only a Mac client was available. In my opinion, Air Sharing felt the most robust of all. 

What’s new?

The only problem I had with the regular version is that it used the built-in iPhone PDF viewer, which is clearly not designed to open large, resource-intensive PDF files. Product manuals weighing several megabytes caused a few problems from time to time. Not so with the Pro version: Avatron has created an in-house developed PDF version, which can easily handle such documents (although there’s only so much it can do with a limited amount of memory of course). But that’s far from the only change between the regular and the Pro version. Here’s a small list of things that are new or have been improved:

• Email files (uploads to free drop.io server)
• Print documents
• Basic file operations (rename, delete, create folder, …)
• Access to remote volumes (MobileMe iDisk, FilesAnywhere, MyDisk.se, Generic WebDAV servers)
• Zipping and unzipping of files
• Supports password-protected and encrypted PDFs
• Advanced auto-detection of character encoding in text files
• Easy file sharing between Air Sharing users on the same WiFi network

Nobody’s perfect

Everyone makes mistakes, and bugs are prone to happen. Such is the case with version 2.0, where I’ve been able to spot two bugs:

1. PDFs are rendered incorrectly if the first page of your PDF has different dimensions than the rest of your document (e.g. the book’s cover as an image). This can be solved by removing the first page.
2. The “Sort by kind” setting in the File Browser is ignored.

The bugs have already been reported to the developers and a fix should be available in the next release.

Pro version? Why?

Some users are a bit upset that they have to pay twice to get the additional features that differentiate the Pro from the regular version. CEO Dave Howell has been kind enough to explain the reasoning behind it:

We love our early adopters, whether they got Air Sharing for free, as over 80% did, or bought it. You guys are awesome! And your suggestions and enhancement requests are extremely valuable, which is why we have this suggestions forum. 

Soon after releasing Air Sharing, we planned to have two versions: Air Sharing and Air Sharing Pro. Air Sharing would feature a file server and a file viewer. Pro would add Printing, Emailing, access to remote file servers, a custom PDF viewer, zip & unzip, and a host of other features. And we planned to price them at $5 and $10. 

But we also wanted to offer a $5 paid upgrade for Air Sharing users. Unfortunately, Apple has not yet added a mechanism for paid upgrades to the App Store. So we decided to simulate such a mechanism, by offering Air Sharing Pro for only $5 for a brief period. It’s something of a blunt instrument, this method, because we have to offer everybody the $5 price, not just current Air Sharing users. But that’s okay. If a universal discount is what it takes to reward our customers, that’s what we’re doing! 

So in effect, if you bought Air Sharing for $5, you can get Air Sharing Pro for $10, which is its regular price. If you got the classic version for free, you get Pro for $5, a Right Bargain. If you bought Air Sharing for $7, you’ll have paid a total of $12 for Pro. 

I hope this clarifies things. One other point: we also fixed some bugs in Air Sharing Pro that we do plan to fix in Air Sharing. For example, we made enhancements to the UI, made the PDF viewer much more stable, added support for viewing iWork ‘09 documents (as long as they’re saved With Preview), Our intent is NOT to make people pay for bug fixes. We absolutely plan to roll those bug fixes back into the classic version of Air Sharing as soon as possible. This would already have happened had we not gotten ensnared by the sudden requirement to support iPhone OS 3.0 before Apple will approve apps. But it will happen soon. 

Best regards, and thanks for your support.

Dave Howell 
Avatron Software, Inc.

Conclusion

It’s great. ‘Nuff said

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Tipping the scale

While I’m aware that tipping customs are culturally bound, I’ve been asking myself just how many tipping applications iPhone users actually require. Is it really that hard calculating the amount to leave behind as a tip? Surely you don’t need complex calculations and slider controls to work this out? It isn’t exactly rocket science.

The Belgian App Store contains no less than 15 such apps, which makes up for 25% of the Finance applications. Meanwhile, I’m still looking for a decent expense application that will sync with my desktop.

Ok, rant is over, I’m feeling all better now. Thank you for listening!

Little Firefox gems

I didn’t immediately fall for Firefox the first time I saw it, but when I discovered the power of add-ons (also known as extensions), there was no turning back. Perhaps by introducing the add-ons I’m using, you can make browsing even more fun!

System Proxy [Mac OS X]

System Proxy is an extension that enables Firefox and Thunderbird to read proxy settings from the Mac OS X System Preferences and be aware of network location changes.

This add-on will eliminate having to manually change the proxy settings in Firefox each time you’re in a different location. Just configure the Locations in Mac OS X, and Firefox will pick up on the changes. A real time-saver!

Better series

Gina Trapani is a tech writer and web developer based in San Diego, California by way of Brooklyn, New York. She has created quite a lot of Firefox addons, most designed to improve functionality of popular websites. I use the ones created for Google:

• Better Gmail: adds useful extra features and skins to Gmail, like hierarchical labels, macros, file attachment icons, and more.
• Better GReader: preview web pages inline in Google Reader, collapse the header and sidebar for more reading area, get a Mac OS X like skin, add favicons to feed subscriptions and more with Better GReader
• Better GCal: adds collapsible header and sidebar, event title text wrap, coloured weekend days, week numbers, and skins to Google Calendar.

As I’m an avid user of Google’s applications, these add-ons really are great to have and really make a difference. They are created from individual Greasemonkey scripts, making it easier for you to install and configure them. If you’re using Google, even just casually, then you should have a look at these add-ons. Be sure to check out Gina’s other add-ons as well!

Safari View [Mac OS X]

Safari View has a right click menu item to open a page in Safari and a list of sites to always open in Safari. It can close tabs automatically and you can select other browser. Safari View is a Mac version of IE View Lite by Grayson Mixon. All the same features are there, but only works on Mac OS X.

RIP (Remove It Permanently)

RIP provides the ability to point at and remove permanently any item you can select. It provide a flexible and easily configurable solution to removing unwanted content from a web page.

If the content that you want to remove is not an add or you don’t like running something like Adblock Plus (see below), then this add-on might be something for you. Now you can really customize the look of your favourite sites. Focus on what you really want to see, and remove anything else! More information is available on ripWiki. gHacks has a small review of RIP; Lifehacker has a tip for Firefox 3.0.1 users..

Veteran add-ons

These are add-ons that have earned their mark and immensely popular. I won’t elaborate too much, but if you haven’t used them before, these are really worth checking out.

• NoScript (homepage): This is really one of my favourite add-ons, effectively blocking all JavaScript unless you allow it (either permanently or temporarily). While this might not be for everyone, if you want to take control of your browsing experience, this is a must have. NoScript has received an antagonist: YesScript. More information can be found on gHacks.
  
• Adblock Plus (homepage): Get rid of those pesky ads!
• Greasemonkey (homepage; scripts can be found here)

In closing

This post is certainly not an attempt to list all the extensions I’m using.If you’d like to see what else is available, then these sites will certainly appeal:

• Firefox Add-ons
• Mozdev.org

And of course, if you have a favourite add-on that you’d like to share, let us know in the comment section!