Dear Apple, i have an iTunes feature request

There’s got to be a better way…Apple, please develop some sort of web based method for iTunes customers to manage their podcast subscriptions. I would envision something along the lines of “Google Reader meets del.icio.us” from a functionality perspective then sync it with my iTunes subscriptions at home automatically. Stop making me send myself emails to remind myself to subscribe to a podcast i found 8 hours earlier!

Who’s with me?!

Mac Tip: How to catch mistakes in your writing

Note: I’m not 100% certain if this works in previous versions of OSX, but it definitely works in Leopard. It can be hard to catch typos in your own writing. Your eyes tend to glaze over from looking your own text after awhile, so it can be helpful to have another set of eyes.

Having said that - In the absence of a proofreader, having your text read to you is really helpful for catching things. Here’s how to set it up, go into system preferences & then the speech / text to speech area. Create a hotkey (i used CTRL+Shift+S) and you can then simply highlight text in any application and have it read to you using your hotkey.

Pick of the week: tripit.com

So let’s say your planning a family vacation. You’ve booked your rental car, your flights, your hotel and a bunch of activities. If you’re like me you probably haven’t had much fun keeping track of all this stuff. Once you get more than a few seperate confirmation emails for your bookings it becomes a bit annoying to manage. That’s where tripit.com comes in. I read about tripit last week on Techcrunch, and thought it sounded interesting enough that i should give it a try using my upcoming honeymoon to Hawaii.

Start by booking your travel online as you already do today, and all you need to do then is forward your confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com. It matches the email address with the one you used to register and basically takes all your confirmation emails, and automatically extracts the important information and presents it in a attractive,easy to use interface. As i’m writing this, tripit already has a pretty extensive list of travel sites that they support to which they are adding & improving constantly. A minute or so later, you’ll receive an email from tripit letting you know they have received your confirmation email and it is ready for you to view on the site.

It’s all in the details
As they say, it’s all in the details and this is where tripit clinched it for me. Tripit automatically provides directions between multiple destinations using Google Maps, local weather & travel guides for the area(s) you are visiting. The travel guides are pretty weak right now as that feature is still under construction but i think it should be more useful 6-12 months from now.

The other thing i love is the iphone / ipod touch interface they developed at http://m.tripit.com. I definitely will be bringing my ipod touch along for the trip so knowing that i can jump on wifi and have up to date access to my itinerary if needed is great piece of mind. You can also subscribe to your itinerary in Google Calendar or iCal on your mac.

Share your itinerary with family & friends
If you have family or friends that you want to make sure can reach you while you are travelling, you can share your itinerary with them and they can goto your tripit page and see where you are, or find the phone number of the hotel if they need to reach you. The only drawback i can mention right now is that we booked a couple of bed & breakfasts not using major travel portals, and tripit was unable to import those confirmation emails. Not really the end of the world anyways, because you can manually add those parts of your trip.

All in all, a great useful web app. I highly recommend you check out tripit for your next vacation or business trip!

Pick of the week: Jing Project

Inspired by one of my favorite podcasts, Macbreak Weekly, i’m going to try to post a new pick each Friday. This week my pick is a great piece of software called Jing Project. There are a tonne of video / image screencap software tools out there that i have tried - Skitch, iShowU, ScreenFlow, dockdrop - the list goes on. The problem is i have my screenshot app, and my screencast app which is somewhat cumbersome and sharing my content is a little tricky sometimes, particularly for video.

This is where Jing comes in. Jing solves the problem of being able to show people what you are seeing and/or doing on your computer very quickly. It’s insanely easy to use, on the mac you invoke Jing by pressing SHIFT+Apple+1 which brings up a cropping mask that you can move & size to the area of your screen you wish to capture. Then it’s just a matter of picking your format - image or video.

Jing can then automatically upload the content to a destination of your choice (i.e Flickr for images) and a nice little touch is it will even put the URL of your content on your clipboard so you don’t have to go find it yourself. Now you just share that link with co-workers / friends / family and the whole process can take seconds quite literally. Did i mention it’s free?

How to setup a static route in OSX Leopard

I am in a situation at my office where i need a few static routes to reach external webservers. I had this working in 10.4 thanks to the tip over @ Macosxhints however after upgrading to Leopard my routes didn’t seem to get added to my routing table. I called Apple support this morning and they had no idea and actually said they don’t support this sort of thing either. Google searches came up dry however i figured out via a few terminal commands you can get it working manually. Here’s how. Pop open Terminal, and type:

su

You’ll then need to enter your root password. Strangely this didn’t work for me at first. If you have this problem too, open up Directory Utility (apps/utilities) and then click on ‘edit’ and ‘enable root user’.
Once you have root access, you can create your static routes, here is the command:

route add –net 192.168.5.0 10.0.1.5

192.168.5.0 is the network i’m trying to reach, via the gateway 10.0.1.5.

Update: Recently this stopped working for me, not sure if it was an OSX update or something with our internal network. In any case, this solved the problem for me:

sudo route add -net 192.168.5.0/24 10.0.1.5


Now this makes me want to go to Starbucks

For the technically savvy crowd with iPhones/iPod Touch’s, what a great way to add some fun to the Starbucks experience. Combined with this feature you’ll be sure to see me ordering a Tazo Chai latte on my iPod Touch in the near future.

Tragedy strikes my macbook pro!

Amazingly, this is only going to cost me $240 taxes incl to repair @ the Apple Store.

Qwest: “Macs Are Practically An Obsolete System”

Uh, Really?

Check out this post funny post on the Consumerist about how a Qwest support employee called Macs obsolete.

I thought Qwest was obsolete!

Word of mouth - the marketers holy grail?

How does Apple continue to gain momentum? Is it because they have better advertising than Dell? Is it because their email marketing is more compelling? Damn unlikely. Apple makes remarkable products, and as a result most of their sales come from the incredible word of mouth marketing they get from existing customers. Is your company doing anything remarkable? If not, why not take that advertising budget and put it into developing something worth talking about?

CUPERTINO, California—October 22, 2007—Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2007 fourth quarter ended September 29, 2007. The Company posted revenue of $6.22 billion and net quarterly profit of $904 million, or $1.01 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $4.84 billion and net quarterly profit of $542 million, or $.62 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 33.6 percent, up from 29.2 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 40 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Apple shipped 2,164,000 Macintosh® computers, representing 34 percent growth over the year-ago quarter and exceeding the previous quarterly record for Mac® shipments by 400,000. The Company sold 10,200,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 17 percent growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone™ sales were 1,119,000, bringing cumulative fiscal 2007 sales to 1,389,000.

“We are very pleased to have generated over $24 billion in revenue and $3.5 billion in net income in fiscal 2007,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re looking forward to a strong December quarter as we enter the holiday season with Apple’s best products ever.”

“Apple ended the fiscal year with $15.4 billion in cash and no debt,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the first quarter of fiscal 2008, we expect revenue of about $9.2 billion and earnings per diluted share of about $1.42.”

Crap Hosting Provider & the Ipod Touch

Site was down for a few days this week. I’ve been using http://www.mysitespace.com for website hosting, but recently they have become really unreliable. Moved over to Godaddy and got the 80 cent discount from Diggnation (thanks Kevin). Lost all my old posts as you can see.

So i’ve been playing with my Ipod Touch for the past weeks, and i gotta say this is the most amazing media player i’ve ever used - period. It’s not for everyone, it’s pricey & the 16GB storage limit might turn some people off, but the internet connectivity is unreal. I love being able to hop on any open wifi hotspot and check my email, IM, download songs from itunes music store all for FREE - no need for a hundred dollar data plan from Rogers or Bell.