As I promised ear­lier, I would write a review about TOMTOM. I have had the device now a couple of months, although I find the device the eas­i­est to use cur­rently avail­able in the indus­try, I have some real com­plaints, actu­ally I only have two. On the hard­ware side the bat­tery life, which is really shame­ful! I know I can charge the device with my cig­a­rette lighter but thats not really the point of a portable device. With modern Lithium-​Ion bat­ter­ies nowa­days you can expect bat­tery life of 5 hours or more. While it charges quickly, after less than two hours on the road the little bat­tery indi­ca­tor at the lower right would start to flash yellow… bugger. My second com­plaint is about the soft­ware, I would rather see TOMTOM write a native Cocoa appli­ca­tion, JAVA tech­nol­ogy is okay, but one way or an other, JAVA pro­gram­mers seem only to be able to pro­gram buggy and crappy pro­grams, that’s at least my expe­ri­ence. I have tried mul­ti­ple times using the TOMTOM Home soft­ware, it can brick your TOMTOM (the famous blink­ing red cross)! Luck­ily I had backed-​up my device so it wasn’t a prob­lem. I can repro­duce it every time. The soft­ware really sucks balls big time! SO should you buy a TOMTOM? I would say yes, it’s always right in find­ing my loca­tions, traf­fic infor­ma­tion, is really easy to use and when I buy a new car I don’t have to migrate or redo all my data or settings.

Due to the nature of Adobe Flash plugin, Adobe’s pro­pri­etary soft­ware would need to be recom­piled and opti­mized for the ARM archi­tec­ture for run­ning on mobile devices like the iPhone/iPod Touch, so is stated by many web­sites. Quick­time wasn’t build from the ground up to sup­port these devices either (power and memory con­sump­tion wise). But not all QuickTime’s codec’s are sup­ported only H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-​Complexity ver­sion of the H.264 Base­line Profile…(see iPhone Specs for more infor­ma­tion). My ques­tion is: IS THIS TRUE? Adobe is oper­at­ing on Apple’s play­ground (Format Wars). HD-​DVD has left the build­ing in favor of BR-​DVD. But the dig­i­tal format for video isn’t decided yet! H.264, Win­dows Media or Adobe Flash. Adobe has an install base of 90%> it even comes bun­dled with Mac OS X. Quick­Time is installed on every com­puter with iTunes (Apple’s Trojan Horse) and every Mac. Apple and Adobe are com­peti­tors busi­ness wise: Final Cut Pro isn’t one of Adobe’s favorite appli­ca­tions. Apple is expand­ing hor­i­zon­tal in the soft­ware market. Rumors even point to trou­ble in the mar­riage of Apple/Adobe when Apple released iPhoto. Apple had to down­grade iPhoto’s fea­tures. When Adobe bought Macro­me­dia, there was no com­peti­tor left in the market and com­pe­ti­tion is always good! Either Apple will solve our prob­lem or Adobe will the market demands a solu­tion. I am not a big Flash fan as you prob­a­bly know so I am not cheer­ing on Adobe side.

iTunes (Music) (Games) (Movies) Store hence the name! iTunes already left it’s origin a long time ago. Apple should work out some­thing (iMedia Store or what­ever). iTunes is a strong brand, but it doesn’t cover it’s orig­i­nal propo­si­tion any­more! Apple lost the Com­puter in it’s name to state: more then just com­put­ers. The iTunes brand has to be updated! It’s an online store where the con­sumer can buy music, games, movies, audio­books etc. not just music! If I’ve under­stood cor­rectly Apple’s is going to offer soft­ware in it’s line-​up. The iPhone/iPod Touch are the first to receive it’s apps through iTunes.

Online ser­vices are the next big evo­lu­tion­ary thing after Web 2.0. You already see some com­pa­nies making the shift, like Adobe with it’s Adobe Pho­to­shop Online (PSX), Adobe even branded the Pho­to­shop line with a new very much dis­cussed (Web 2.0 Aquaish) logo. Google is also exper­i­ment­ing with online apps (Cal­en­dar, Docs, Talk etc.) and Apple already has it’s .Mac ser­vices for years (thanks to WebOb­jects). I think and pre­dict that a lot of com­pa­nies will offer these kind of ser­vices in the future and see a tighter inte­gra­tion between web-​based appli­ca­tions and desktop-​based appli­ca­tions, maybe even elim­i­nat­ing their desk­top cousins and trans­form into a sub­scrip­tion based model.

As of taday I’m intro­duc­ing hardware/software reviews of dig­i­tal lifestyle prod­ucts. We will eval­u­ate form, func­tion, design, usabil­ity, sup­port etc. We will be very Black & White: either it’s Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down! No throw­ing in stars or mices
Today a “new kid on the block”, an appli­ca­tion from one of my favorite soft­ware devel­op­ers: Panic. Panic is the devel­oper of the best FTP appli­ca­tion there is, called: Trans­mit.
Coda is a Single Window User inter­face (SWUI) web devel­op­ment tool. Which let’s you manage, design, edit and pre­view all in one appli­ca­tion. Forgot that pesky stylesheet name? Coda to the rescue! Coda includes free eBooks within the appli­ca­tion. Coda keeps it simple and basic and that’s it’s strenght! It’s not a full fea­tured texte­d­i­tor like BBEdit or Text­Mate but who cares if you don’t use all the bells and whis­tles? I’ll give Coda the Thumbs Up!

Ahu­u­u­uha, Red Alert!!! A virus wasn’t detected!!! Some­one posted a file on MacRu​mors.com and said it were screen­shots of Mac OS 10.5 (code­name Leop­ard). The file is a com­pressed pro­gram with an icon to make it look like a JPEG file. Safari actu­ally warns you that “Name of the file” may con­tain an appli­ca­tion. The safety of this file cannot be deter­mined. Are you sure you want to down­load “Name of the file”? After you agree, Safari will down­load the file and if in Safari’s Gen­eral Pref­er­ence Pane the option “Open “safe” files after downloading” is turned on, it will expand the file auto­mat­i­cally to your chosen loca­tion. So if you want to be “super” secure, turn this option off.
Most users are admin­is­tra­tor on their machines, so if you double click the exe­cutable it will auto­mat­i­cally install itself in ~/Library/InputManagers and deletes all files from this folder. So if you want to be more secure create a stan­dard user and use this one as your default account. More details on OSX.Leap.A at Syman­tec.
The anti-​virus com­pa­nies are call­ing it some­thing worse than it actu­ally is. The “Trojan Horse” isn’t as dan­ger­ous as virus com­pa­nies claim, but hey they do got to sell soft­ware, don’t they?Update: There is some con­fu­sion if the new Oompa-​Loompa Trojan really a Trojan is, if you lookup the def­i­n­i­tion at Wikipedia: “a stand­alone pro­gram that mas­quer­ades as some­thing else, like a game or image file”.

Adobe today released a new appli­ca­tion called Adobe Light­room. It will com­pete with Apple’s Aper­ture on many fronts, though it’s still in beta stage it looks like a lean, mean and clean appli­ca­tion. It’s avail­able now for testing!

Aper­ture, a rel­a­tive new appli­ca­tion was added recently to the pro line-​up. I have already devel­oped a love-​hate rela­tion­ship with this new Apple pro appli­ca­tion! I should con­cider it just a 1.0 release and hope that this poten­tially great appli­ca­tion will evolve grad­u­ally in time. Hope­fully Apple will sup­port my Canon EOS 350D soon! In the mean time I’ll have to do with the Raw.plist hack or just shoot in JPEG.