Ipod Touch

My newest toy has been the iPod touch. You may ask, why not just get a iPhone? I've had smart phones before and they just do not work for me. I am very bad about charging devices and a phone is a very important device. I prefer to have a phone that can stay alive for long periods of time on a single charge.

As a PDA the iPod is wonderful. Except for the ocasional safari crash, the applications are all wonderful. One thing that has was hard to get used to was the idea of paying for applications. I've lived in an open source world for a very long time and had forgotten the windows days of paying for even simple utilies. Now that I have just accepted this as reality (still no jailbreak for ipod 2g) I realize how good the iPod development platform is for potential developers.

Apple has made the purchasing and installing of applications as evilly simple as purchasing a song on iTunes. Open the app store app on the iPod find a neat app tap the install button twice and voilà your credit card is charged and an application is wirelessly downloaded to your device. I say evilly because this is the enemy of the impulse buyer but the wet dream of both publishers (apple) and developers. This takes away all of the nasties of paying for pc applications online. Couple all this with the fact that apple takes a very small margin from sales and it makes writing applications for the iPod a very lucrative oppertunity.

The only sad part to this whole story is apple only offers it's iPod sdk for apple computers. Hopefully they will port the sdk to other platforms so I too can become an iPod developer.

This was written on the free wordpress app on the iPod. I love technology!

Macbook Air

The big story today is Apple has released their new notebook. The Macbook Air. Acording to the official apple store these thin machines are starting at 1,799 USD. Coming in a whopping 3 pounds this seems like the ideal laptop for the person on the go. Not the most impressive tech specs 1.6ghz core 2 duo BUT it does come with 2 gig of ddr2 sdram. I personally have sworn off notebooks once my Sony Vaio kicks the bucket I will be buying a nice heavy desktop with the biggest monitor I can afford.