In most cases I would disagree with the old adage “bigger is better,” but when it comes to screen real-estate I can’t get enough. I remember a day when I was happy with my 15 inch desktop display, tootling around in windows 95, blissfully ignorant, doing whatever it is that a 12 year-old does on an ancient machine.  However, just has my computer needs started to revolve less and less around gaming and more about getting work done efficiently, I realized one 15 inch display was not enough.

Just like that I had entered into that never-ending journey to find bigger and better displays. Mac|Life understands that people just like me, obsessed with getting bigger and better displays need guidance, so here is their guide to finding the right one:

It doesn’t seem so long ago that buying a new Mac often required buying a new display to go with it — and there were plenty to choose from. Flash forward to the present and Apple is selling more notebooks and iMacs, which has all but negated the need for a separate monitor with many users. But for the few, the proud who still need one, here’s a quick look at your options.

From the Macintosh Portrait Display introduced for desktop publishers in March, 1989 to today’s 27-inch Thunderbolt Display, Apple has kept busy producing a wide array of monitors to plug into their Mac computers over the years. But a funny thing happened 13 years ago this month — a little Bondi blue marvel called the iMac set the stage for an external display to become less important as Cupertino retreated back to the all-in-one design that made the original Macintosh so popular in 1984.

Of course, there are plenty of us who still need to get work done with an external display. Mac mini and Mac Pro users immediately spring to mind, but many MacBook Pro users also prefer to dock their laptop while at home or the office to enjoy a larger view of what they’re working on. (Never mind the power user who thinks nothing of two or even three displays for their work.)

While there is but a single choice of external display from Apple today, thankfully other manufacturers are still busy pumping out Mac-friendly monitors. Here are some tips for finding the one that fits you like a glove.

[Continue Reading Here]

Popular RSS/Feed library service Lazyfeed has been “down for maintenance” for some time now, and I hope this outage doesn’t spell the end of this service, for I quite liked it.

Their website HERE has had the following message for more than a week:

Lazyfeed is going through a maintenance.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

In fact, it’s been down for so long that Google has cached the “down for maintenance” page, and has updated the site’s meta description with the maintenance message!

I first noticed this on August 19th, and I tried to call them out on Twitter:

True to form, Lazyfeed did not respond to my tweet, in fact their Twitter page has not been updated since October of 2010. 

Alas, cool services come and go.  I wonder if this is the end of Lazyfeed.

OS X Lion was likely released download only as a means of promoting the the Mac App Store. I am all for the Mac App Store, it’s yet another step towards having an awesome cloud experience, but when it comes to a full-blown OS, I like to have a physical means of backing up my Shiz.

Thankfully, Apple has released the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, a tool that will allow Lion users to make a recovery partition on an external drive or USB key. This announcement comes after Apple released their own external drive loaded with Lion available for purchase, for about $70. If you don’t feel like having a reliable physical medium at that kind of cost, you can simply make one for yourself!

From the people of Apple, directly:

To create an external Lion Recovery, download the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant application. Insert an external drive, launch the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, select the drive where you would like to install, and follow the on screen instructions.

When the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant completes, the new partition will not be visible in the Finder or Disk Utility. To access Lion Recovery, reboot the computer while holding the Option key. Select Recovery HD from the Startup Manager.

The Recovery Disk Assistant can be downloaded HERE.

This utility is similar to the recovery utility that comes with your initial install of Lion. The reason behind having the physical medium:

[Users can] reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari. This drive can be used in the event you cannot start your computer with the built-in Recovery HD, or you have replaced the hard drive with a new one that does not have Mac OS X installed.

In conclusion, Apple had these final notes:

- If the computer shipped with Lion, the external recovery drive can only be used with the system that created it.

- If the system was upgraded from Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard to Lion, the external recovery drive can be used with other systems that were upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion.

It’s always nice to have a digital safety-net and Lion already comes pre-installed with one.  But having a second one that you can hold in your hand is even more satisfying.

Safe Travels

~Max

With Lion on the loose for just over a week now, I wanted to give my initial thoughts, as well as speculate to some degree as to what Lion will look like in the weeks ahead.

The Dashboard

I would like to be the first (or at least the first person in my circles) to say that Apple has given the widget dashboard its own space in an attempt to further unify iOS and OS X.  I am willing to bet that Apple has reserved the widget dashboard to be a place to run iOS apps and games like Angry Birds.  It’s only a matter of time before the new OS X App Store starts releasing iOS versions that run in the background on your widget dashboard ready to be used. Until then the widget space seems like a clunky addition to the very streamlined Mission Control.

Insane Scrolling

I really tried to like it, but Lion’s new scrolling has got me all confused and uncomfortable. I can understand why Apple wants to get people to switch over, given their push to unify iOS and OS X.  However, when it comes to scrolling, it is most intuitive to keep it the way it always has been. The last week has been rather difficult for me to switch between multiple computers that have different methods of scrolling. My windows machine has traditional scrolling while my newly updated iMac has the new inverted scrolling, this doesn’t make my life any easier. I will pass.

To disable inverted scrolling:
System Preferences> Mouse> Uncheck Scroll direction: natural

Other than that I am very pleased with Lion.  There are some great touches and fine-tunings that really make it feel like a much quicker and leaner OS. I am excited and ready to see some of these bigger changes, what about you? What are your thoughts on Lion, and where do you think it will head in the future?

I recently had to change cellular plans. I won’t belabor you with the details, but this miserable situation forced me to immediately ditch my iPhone 4. That hurt. Plain and simple. Despite how abysmal it might sound, this move granted me the opportunity to begin shopping for a new phone, and no, I didn’t even consider getting another iPhone 4.

In Star Wars terms, I had just shifted to the dark-side, Steve Jobs got a little bit more sick, and the ice caps melted, leaving yet another polar bear homeless.

After staying up till 3AM browsing CNET, Gizmodo, Engadget, and many other blogs I trust for product reviews, I was only further convinced that the iPhone 4 chapter of my life was completely closed. The many Android products, all newly released and boasting powerful specs, made my mouth water. The idea of exploring a new operating system and having access to a more genuine and integrated Google experience was exactly what sealed the deal for me.

I am now a very happy Android user

I have had my new phone for a couple of weeks now, I decided to hold off on writing this post, just so I could be a little bit more objective. I have found that “buyers’ glow” can often skew how I look at a new gadget.

“Buyers’ glow” aside, my Motorola Atrix is sexy and sleek, barely thicker than my old iPhone 4. Despite how tempting it was for me to buy the laptop docking station, I decided it was something I wouldn’t use enough to justify the extra expense.

I have heard people complain that Android’s interface can be a bit jumpy and kind of laggy, but not this phone, its dual-core processor ensures that. Despite some fundamental grievances I have with many of Google’s policies and practices, I really depend on their products: Gmail, Documents and Reader to name a few, are all happily situated and completely baked into my phone. This above all has to be me favorite feature. Among other things, Android’s notification system is brilliant, giving me updates on my Twitter, Facebook, email, SMS, Skype, and really anything if so pleased.

Apple are you taking notes?

Another beautiful thing is the widgets I have have access to. My calender, music player, RSS feed, email, Facebook, YouTube and Shazam sit on my home screens, ready to be used instantly, no waiting for apps to launch, just immediate feedback and I love it.

Apple has a knack for getting UI right. There is no doubt about that. Immediately after opening the box and running my new device I found Motorola’s skin over Android, called Motoblur, to be lacking in the area that Apple shines in. Though Apple’s iOS lacks widgets, there is a sense of style that I miss. However, because I am using an Android I simply got a new skin that is significantly better than Motoblur called GOlauncher. That immediately solved my problem and actually made my Android a little bit more iOS like. I love that about my Android. I found a feature I wanted to change, so I did it. Even jailbreaking an iOS device doesn’t give you the kind of control I have over my Android.

I am pretty smitten over my Motorola Atrix. This product is leaps and bounds beyond the iPhone 4 in so many ways. The one area (and its a big one) that Android is really lacking in is its app selection. Apple seems to have a monopoly on all of the good apps out there. For every 1 good app that I find in the Android market it seems that there are 10 more in the iOS app store. Everyone knows that Android will catch up to the amount of apps that iOS has, but that doesn’t mean that its not just a bunch of crap that will further bury the decent apps left.

As a new Android user I can assure you that the apps I do have I am very pleased with, I don’t want to make it sound like there aren’t great apps to be found, because there are plenty of them. In fact I have apps that make my iOS friends green with envy. It just seems that Android can take a lesson from Apple and begin to curate their apps a bit more. This would truly make Android the perfect mobile platform. Until then all I can say is this: iPhone 4 you where a great companion, but now I have a phone that knows me better, you always seemed to be in Apple’s camp and not mine, and that was always a turn off. Thanks for the good times but Android is here and all he wants to do is serve me, exactly as it should be.

When it comes to digital photography on the run, your smartphone is probably the first camera you reach for. Having your camera out and ready is half the battle, the other half is ensuring all of the universal forces that are out to get you, don’t get their way and foul your shot. There are lots of accessories available for your iPhone camera. Here, we review the “For iPhone Lens” AKA the “iPhone Telephoto Lens.”  We ordered ours from photojojo.com for $35 bucks.

The Skinny

First, let me state that at first glance, we had expected this to be a zoom lens.  It’s long, it looks like a zoom lens.  It’s not a zoom lens.

The iPhone Telephoto Lens is a fixed 8x telephoto lens.  An 8x fixed telephoto lens is nothing to sneeze at, and we were really pleased with what we saw when we started looking at it, but it’s not the variable focal-length zoom lens that we’d been hoping for.  Moving right along…

Included with The iPhone Telephoto Lens is a simple, matte black snap-on case, which is required for use, as the lens screws into a flange on the case.  You’ll need to remove whatever bumper, or 3rd party iPhone case you’re currently using.

The lens is fairly small and can easily fit in your pocket.  It comes with 2 snap-on covers to protect both ends of the lens when not in use.

Since the iPhone is limited to digital zoom, getting a close shot from a distance results in noisy images, with lots of visible grain. The advantage of having the physical lens is that it provides a shot that is 8 times closer, but without the noise associated with the digital zoom. Paired with the tripod set on a level surface or as a quasi hand-held steady-cam we were able to get great shots from far away.  Additionally, this lens can be used in conjunction with the digital zoom to get right up on your subject.

Upside:
• Get much closer to your subject without invoking the iPhone’s digital zoom function
• Use with the digital zoom to get even closer
• Sturdy tripod makes for a great light-weight steady-cam handle

Downside:
• This lens is dreadful in low-light situations.
• The focus ring on the lens is basically useless, and fights with the iPhone’s Auto-Focus system (just use the built-in auto focus)
• Having to use the included case increases assembly time – not good for quick-draw “opportunity” shots

In the box:
8x lens, the case, a tripod, cleaning chamois, a little baggie to carry everything in, and a cute little plastic toy dinosaur.

Available for order from Photojojo, are 3 versions of this product; one for iPhone 3G and 3GS, another for the AT&T iPhone 4 form factor, and one fitted to the Verizon Wireless iPhone 4 model.

Summary:
When it comes down to it, the best digital camera on the market is whichever one you have with you. For most people it’s their phone. If you happen to own an iPhone, check this product out. It’s portable and a breeze to attach when the moment is right.

Happy hunting!

Something caught my eye this morning as I was scanning my RSS feeds.  Google has launched their Chromebook product announcement page. Check it out.  It’s pretty interesting.

The skinny: Google has partnered with Acer, Samsung, and Verizon Wireless to bring us a lightweight (both in form factor and in processing power) mobile computer which is supposed to fill the gaping void that was not created when the iPad replaced the netbook.  It’s basically an interface for the Google Chrome browser and its add-ons.

Google Chromebook is “Always connected.”  Yeah, whatever.  I don’t buy it, and apparently neither does Google.

Obviously, I’m not a fan of this idea; I don’t trust the cloud enough to move my data into it, and I’m completely disinterested in working dependently on an “always-on” internet connection that I don’t believe is ready to support this sort of technology.  I’ll get into my feelings on this platform as it approaches its June 15th launch, I’m sure, but that’s not what I’m here to talk to you about today.

While I was perusing the Chromebook Features page, I noticed a wildly defensive disclaimer at the bottom.  It reads thus:

* Obviously, you’re going to need a wireless network, be willing to use it subject to the provider’s terms and conditions, and be ready to put up with its real life limitations including, for example, its speed and availability. When you do not have network access, functionality that depends on it will not be available.

Wow.  Now that’s an interesting tack for a company like Google to take.

From a customer service standpoint, this approach portends a media catfight over who’s fault it is when this thing fails.  (And it will.)

Are the geniuses at Google attempting to ward off the Apple/AT&T “Antennagate” juju before it even gets started?

Who approved the language in this disclaimer anyway?  It reads as written by a frustrated Genius Bar staffer.  Is this the tone and quality commitment we can expect from Google as Chromebook launches?

Hmmm…

Perhaps Google still needs adult supervision after all.

What do you think? Are you “ready to put up with” Chromebook’s “real life limitations?”

Comments section below.  Light it up.

Thanks

~ Chris

One of my biggest fears when I travel, is returning to my hotel room to find my camera missing.  I try not to take too many of my tech toys with me on the road, but there are some things that simply can’t be left behind.. like my laptop, my camera, my iPhoneS, battery chargers, iPad… wait.. Yeah.  I’m just begging to be robbed, aren’t I?  And chances are, so are you.  So, we can either rethink traveling light, or we can complicate matters even more by finding another one of those “you can’t live without it” applications.

I came across this great web app this morning that could potentially save you a whole lot of grief, should you find yourself with a stolen camera.   StolenCameraFinder attempts to do exactly what it says: Find a missing or stolen camera, in a very clever way.

Now there is no promise that this will work 100% of the time, because some cameras simply do not store the essential EXIF data for this process to work, nor does it guarantee that the theif has even posted the needed photos to the web .  However, what it can offer is peace of mind to those who have lost a camera.  At least they can say that the serial numbers of other photos have been crawled, and if nothing turns up, it is one less thing to feel helpless about.

Heck, if you are lucky enough to get a match, all I can say is good luck in handling that awkward conversation.

Do you have a camera (or laptop) that was stolen?  Share your story with us, and hopefully in the mean time something comes up for you. Good Luck!

Author Credit: Adam Dachis

How does it work? Many cameras save serial number information in the EXIF data of every photo you take. StolenCameraFinder extracts this data and looks for that same serial number data elsewhere on the internet. If it finds it, you can find photos taken with that camera and potentially locate the thief.

Continue Reading this article on Lifehacker.com.

ARTICLE UPDATE:
The white iPhone was released on April 28th, and quite frankly, I’m entirely tired of hearing about it.

The final word we’re going to put in about this thing, is to point to this excellent article from Fast Company, entitled The Great White iPhone: How Apple Spun A Tech Fail Into A PR Win.

It’s a great read.  Check it out HERE.

END ARTICLE UPDATE:

Rumors of Apple’s white iPhone have been circulating like mad lately.  Based on some of the evidence presented by many of the reputable sources we follow here, it’s safe to assume that the white iPhone 4 will be hitting stores very soon (perhaps even this week).  Much like any product Apple puts out, the quality and craftsmanship will be unparalleled.  However, is it worth the fuss?

Fundamentally, my grievance is not with the product itself. It is certainly a nice phone, featuring the same great specs that drew people to the black iPhone 4 when it first came out. The inherent problem, however, is where it fits in to Apple’s product cycle given the impending release of iPhone 5 and the recent injection of the Verizon iPhone 4 into the marketplace.

Once you understand what Apple’s plans are for the future of their products you will understand why we offer caution to all those in the market for a new phone.

(Credit: Engadget)

Apple’s iPhone product cycle has always been a June phenomena.  Announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (or WWDC for short), past iPhones have been easy to track and reliably announced at the conference and made available by July. This, however, is no longer the case due to Verizon’s presence on the field.

As the new player, Verizon entered the league mid-season, disrupting the very straightforward iPhone product cycle.  With the new Verizon iPhone coming out to play, just two months before the traditional announcement date, Apple has undoubtedly made a strategic move to extend the cycle, to help ensure sales are strong for the (not so) new kid on the block.

So where does that leave us?

Well, as an iPhone 4 owner myself, I have mixed feelings.  I love the idea of a white iPhone 4.  It reminds me of the Apple products of yesteryear. Gleaming white, it would please me to have a change of pace. But, I simply cannot justify the cost or the time frame in which it is delivered. Considering, the new generally accepted (though still speculated) date for the iPhone 5 release, is this coming September, I am willing to wait. But that’s just me.

With the white iPhone 4 looming over our heads we offer you caution. Buy if you must, but know that the white iPhone 4 is just a beautiful distraction. Patience will offer you a product with better, more competitive features, while also likely giving you the option of black or white.

What will you do? Tell us in the comments.

I would like to borrow the words of Apple’s executive team and show you something that changes everything… From the hands of Microsoft. I know, I am breaking some kind of rule, somewhere by associating these megaliths together, but this sweet union between Apple and Microsoft is definitely worth your time.

Microsoft Photosynth is is a new app from Microsoft (yes, Microsoft) that allows you to take 360 degree panoramic photos from a series of shots that you take with your iOS device.

Once you have downloaded this free app, available for the iPhone 3Gs and iPhone 4, the iPad 2, and the iPod Touch 4G. All you have to do is tap the screen once and the app then prompts you to move to the next shot. Each shot is surrounded by a frame, of which there are three flavors: Green which means it will shoot the picture for you, Yellow where you tap to capture your next shot and finally Red when you need to double back and wait for the green or yellow frame. If you make a mistake it’s as simple as pressing the undo button to remove each previous shot. Once done, all you have to do is press the finish button and the app will take over and stitch your pictures into a finished product and the results are phenomenal, as you can see below.

With the guided frames in this app you are able to take 360 degree shots of just about anything with incredible ease. Not only is this app a blast to play around with, it also can offer any professional a more dynamic presentation of digital content.

My largest grievance came with having to remember my ancient Windows Live account information in order to get a hold of some of the deeper sharing options offered by Photosynth.net. However, once on the inside, I found some great options to share and embed my shots, just like the panoramic shot of the FoleyPad above.

All-in-all I have had a lot of fun exploring this app. I know I will be using this one for a long time to come. I also look forward to recommending this app to the many people I know in the real-estate world, this will make the viewing of homes that much more dynamic and maybe even help them sell a home or two.