Stay In Touch – with you

Do you wish you’d see your friends more often?
Are you bad at staying in touch?
Could you use help organizing your social calendar?

If so, the Stay In Touch (SIT) app might be just the thing for you!
SIT helps you keep track of when you saw each friend last and reminds you when you should be getting in touch with them again.

FEATURES:
- Search functionality to find friends
- Color indicators for a quick overview
- Friends ordered by who you should see first
- Switch reminder functionality on or off for each friend individually
- Choose when you want to see the reminder for each friend individually
- Choose how many weeks there should be between appointments for each friend individually
- Add a note to your last seen appointment
- A complete history of when you saw your friends (dates + notes)
- Date when you should make a next appointment automatically calculated for you

FEATURES v1.1:
- Add friends manually, from your address book and from Facebook.

Follow the easy 4-step process in the user guide (part of the info screen) to get started!

If you’re interested in doing a review on this app, let me know and I’ll send you a promocode.

There were countless of rumors that Apple would present some features of their new OS X 10, baptized Lion. I know that Apple always tries to be innovative and bring new ideas into their products, so I was very curious to see as to what they believe would be the near future of operating systems. Turns out, their answer to this question is entirely in the name of the event “Back to the Mac”. Let me explain:

Apple started out with their Operating System for the mac (OS X). A few years ago, this evolved to the iOS for the iPhone, which then resulted in the iOS for the iPad. And now, it’s time to take everything they learned from these experiences back to the Mac.

Some concrete examples of this are:

• Launchpad: an overview screen of all the apps that are on your mac, like you have on your iPhone and iPad. You can put them into folders, on different pages, organize them in any way, …
• Full screen apps
• Auto save
• Apps resume when they are launched again.
• A Mac app store. For this feature, we don’t have to wait until the release of Lion. It will be released within 90 days for Snow Leopard. App submissions will be allowed starting November.
  As with the app store, you will have a very easy overview of new, popular, free, … apps for your mac with automatic installation (it will install on your dock) and updates.
• Multi-touch gestures
• Mission control: here you will have an overview of exposé, your dashboard, spaces, all open windows and full screen apps. One place to control all.

Lion will be released in the summer of 2011. I will be looking forward to it .

Apple also presented their new iLife ’11. I was kind of disappointed when this seemed to be it, because personally, I was looking forward to the release of iWork ’11.

iLife 11 does show some nice interesting new features, though.

• iPhoto comes in full screen mode, enhanced slideshows with 3D effects, album view, e-mailing directly from iPhoto, more beautiful and easy to create books and cards (including the new Letterpress card), …
• iMovie brings all new audio editing, colored audio wave forms that can be adjusted by dragging, sound effects, implementation of professional easy to implement video effects, people finder (comparable with faces in iPhoto) and my personal favorite: movie trailers.
  There are about 15 different very impressive and easy to use movie trailer templates available with music that was especially recorded for Apple by the London Orchestra. Seeing this demonstration, I immediately wanted to start making some of them myself.
• Garageband offers new piano and guitar lessons, the ability to see how well you played and where you missed, flex time, groove matching and more guitar amps and effects.

iLife 11 is already available in the mac store.

A new feature from Apple that did catch my attention in a positive way is FaceTime for the mac. FaceTime is already in use on the new iPod Touch and on the iPhone 4 for video calling. And now, it’s also released for the mac.

The contact list will be filled from your address book and then you can start calling any other mac, iPod Touch or iPhone 4 with FaceTime installed.

You can already download a beta version of FaceTime.

On the hardware level, Apple introduced the new Macbook Air with a 13,3″ LED backlit display and its younger brother with an 11,6″ LED backlit display. This is the first 11″ laptop that Apple introduces.

The most remarkable change is the use of flash storage in stead of a hard drive. The advantages of this are that it’s instant on, faster, more reliable, 90% smaller and lighter and completely silent in operation. The disadvantage, though, is that we are going back years in storage space, with a minimum of 64GB to a maximum of 256GB.

It has a beautiful, ultra thin and light design. I love that the resolution is relatively high. The resolution of the 13″ model is higher than the resolution of the current 15″ Macbook and the resolution of the 11″ model is higher than the resolution of the current 13″ Macbook.  The battery life also seems to be very nice with its respectively 7h and 5h and for both a standby time of 30 days.

All in all, I’m very happy with the turn that Lion is taking and FaceTime promises to be a nice-to-have gadget. I’m still a bit disappointed that they didn’t introduce iWork ’11, but I’ll just get my hopes up again at their next event . And what the Macbook Air is concerned, Apple believes that it’s the next generation of Macbooks. Me, however, I’m yet undecided.

Dropbox is available for every OS out there: OS X, Windows, Iphone, Blackberry, Android, … and they have an online interface. When you install their software on your device of choice, it creates a simple folder which you can use like any other folder on your device, with the benefit that it automatically syncs with the data online and any other device on which the software is installed. When you add/remove or alter any content, it will automatically update the content online and on other devices too. This way, you always have the same, up-to-date data anywhere you need it.

Not only can you keep your own documents in sync and have an automatic backup of your data, you can also create a shared folder where you can drop files that you want others to be able to access.

With its 2GB you get a decent amount of online space where you can work with. You can increase this volume by taking their tour, adding a second computer, inviting other people, … or of course, by buying more space.

Download dropbox here and give it a try. I’m sure you’ll love it!

So … I started looking …

Turns out, that unlike Windows where when you delete files from an external device it most of the time isn’t sent to you trash, in OSX it always ends up there.

Meaning all I had to do to get all of my 202 “spaces” back, was take a picture so there was at least one on the memory stick. Then connect it to my laptop, delete that picture from the memory card and right after empty my trash. And after both deleting and emptying unmount the digital camera.

Et vwalla …

After doing some research, I found out that this is b/c the older CD’s do not include an OSX installer, they are OS9 which isn’t supported on intel Macs. Luckely, there’s a workaround for this:
On the Blizzard site you can download the OSX Native Installer (which also includes the latest patches) and then use this to install Diablo II as well as the Lord of Destuction add on (if you have it).

Good luck and see you on the other side …

• Accident
• Angel / Devil
• Trust a mac

You can find them on their “Get a Mac” page
Just watch them, as always, they’re pretty good :d …

keynote speech

Steve Jobs started his keynote speech today at about 7pm (my time ) … and even though some great features of leopard were showcased, I was still a little disappointed that no word was uttered about the macbook pro.

What does this mean, does it mean that there will be no merom-based macbook pro in the near future or do they just don’t want to be responsible themselves for freezing the great sales this intel based notebook is bringing their way, since it’s not possible to introduce it right away ?

Initially, I had 3 reasons that held me back from buying one of these macbook pro’s. Two of them are already officially recognized by apple. These, being the noise and the battery life people were complaining of. This only leaves one issue left, the heat issue. There are a lot of rumors that this too would have improved by updates to keep the fan on longer and have it start sooner, but I haven’t found any official note on this one yet.

So, since I actually love moving around with my laptop and heat would really be an “issue” for me and this article AppleInsider features about the duo core 2 merom … I’ve decided to give it about another month before actually buying one of these … but buying I will …