BumpToChat Multilingual is a chat app for the iPhone. You can chat with classmates, friends, or anyone who bumps their iPhone with your iPhone. One of the unique features of BumpToChat Multilingual, as the app’s name indicates, is the ability to chat with people who do not speak your native language. Just lightly bump, or shake nearby, two iPhones and you will see an “Attempting to Connect” screen on both phones. The connection will automatically be established in about 5 seconds.

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Only a few of us were actually around, living our early childhood formative years, when society at large formally introduced the masses to the new “Interactive Digital Era.” If you were born after the mid 1970’s you were not welcomed into the new interactive digital era, you were born into an already existing one. If you were born before the mid 1960’s you were already older, and more than likely “set in your ways” when the new digital era and the birth of interactivity got underway. However, if you were born at exactly, precisely the right time—i.e. the late 1960’s to the early 1970’s—it is distinctly possible you were actually introduced to the “Interactive Digital Era” during your formative years, that being the first six or seven years of one’s life, the years that one’s experiences create the most profound and life-long impressions. I remember being welcomed into this new era of digital interactivity, today’s young adults had no such formal welcoming, because the genesis of digital era was old hat by the time the “Reagan Era” hit—that is the 1980’s for you youngsters.

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Sometimes bloggers will craft outlandishly-exaggerated blog titles to garner as many unique page views as possible. The headline title just above is not an example of this. Safari’s mobile version was the best mobile browser in the world, and now Atomic Web Browser is better. The Atomic Web Browser is unbelievably awesome, full stop. The incredible part is that a single developer created a web browser that is far superior to mobile Safari, in both its iPhone form and especially its iPad UI, where the app’s extra features like tabs and full screen mode really shine on the extra pixels. This app was released into the wild for the iPhone a just over a month ago, with not much fanfare—unlike the over-hyped Opera mobile browser. With the April 12 release of version 2.7, now a “universal” iPhone OS app, Atomic Web Browser provides additional significant features missing in Mobile Safari, and is now performing great on the new iPad. This app should become quite popular.

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This particular hunk of shaped acrylic and rubber can be had for anywhere between $5 and $30, depending on where you look. I had one of these laying around my house seeing little use as I did not like putting my MacBook on it, and my soon-to-be-sold Dell Mini Netbook was too small to work on this stand. In less than 5 minutes, hacksaw and Dremel in hand, I turned this mediocre laptop stand into an awesome iPad dock & stand.

The dusty, originally-overpriced piece of plastic has turned out to be a perfect iPad Stand and dock. A simple, small area cut away from the bottom of the stand instantly makes this stand iPad-friendly. I used a hacksaw for the short cuts on the side, and a Dremel to cut the longer back portion and also for smoothing out the rough edges. As you can see from my rough-cut, I was not going for aesthetics—only functionality. If I would have spent 10 minutes on this mod instead of about 4, it would look nicer. I may revisit the cut-out with the Dremel for a few more minutes if I want to up the visual appearance of the mod.

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Repost of a blog written in April of 2009. New-found relevancy with the launch of the iPad just days away… Cannot afford Apple’s new iPad? Well, Apple also has a lower-powered, pocketable, iPad Mini available for less than $200. If you thought an iPod Touch was just for music, its time you take another look at this wonderful little gadget who’s success in the marketplace most likely had a large role in the advent and production of Apple’s much-hyped iPad.

Here is the secret: The iPad is being hugely-hyped, the iPhone was massively-hyped, but the iPod Touch entered into the marketplace with little fanfare, and was largely seen as a device for kids—focused on music and games. Realistically, an iPod Touch is very much like a mini iPad, and the upcoming generation (4th) will most likely see the same, custom-made, ARM-based processor,  Apple’s A4—even if clocked at a lower speed than the iPad—which runs at 1Ghz.

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The official Digg app for the iPhone / iPod Touch became available on Wednesday in many parts of the world, but was not available in the US until approx. 11pm east coast time. It has been near half a year since Kevin Rose first publicly mentioned a Digg app for the iPhone. Presumably, the reason for the slowness in releasing the app is because Digg has been targeting their resources on a complete overhaul of the Digg.com website, focusing more on real-time information, images and “social media,” to compete with the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

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TeamViewer is a new iPhone / iPod Touch app that allows a remote connection to, and complete control of, a Mac or PC over the internet (UDP) or with a local WiFi connection. This application is $99 for professional / corporate use, however it is free for everyday individual users, yes free.

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While most folks want to have a debate between Microsoft’s Office and Apple’s iWork, I have fallen in love with the new kid on the block in the Mac-world, IBM’s Lotus Symphony. Unlike Office and iWork, Symphony is free, which is a huge plus in the new economic scenario that companies and individual users find themselves in right now. I like the clean, lightweight and straightforward interface of Lotus Symphony. While this suite of productivity applications was released for Microsoft’s Windows and Linux a bit more than 2 years ago, I believe that the (still relatively) recent release for the Mac OS X Leopard (Intel only) might be the kick-start this set of applications needs—Linux has a small market share and most people in the Windows world are imprisoned by Microsoft’s hegemony.

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There are many reviews that can give you the basic run-down of Bing’s feature set, so I am going to spare you the boring rudiments and just point out a few nuggets of information that most reviews of Bing for the iPhone have missed.

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This past article is being re-posted and continuously updated on this Wordpress-powered blog so people can post comments and questions. This article was originally published in December of 2008.

My most recent and fresh complaint with Apple has to do with an annoying clicking sound coming from the hard drive (HDD) of my early 2008 Macbook. This is not to be confused with a much louder and constant clicking sound of a soon-to-fail HDD. This is a more subtile, yet annoying click that is most obvious when the computer is not under heavy processing use. I just purchased this product directly from Apple as a refurbished unit. Although the machine is technically a refurbished unit, it is actually completely new, at least the HDD was, as that is easy to check. This “click” sound is yet another example of when a “bug” is actually considered a “feature.”

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Fall Back to a wild Halloween-night Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 Bug! Max your CPU for a full hour in the middle of the night.

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If you are having issues with your Bluetooth mouse, keyboard or BT in general on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, I recommend downloading and installing the just-released software for the new Apple Magic Mouse.

Yesterday, when I saw that piece of software posted on the internet, its size perked my interest—checking in at 64mb compressed and 149mb uncompressed for the Snow Leopard version. At that size, this software update must contain more than a mouse driver. Keep reading →

You can try out the latest update to the “Alpha” version of Google’s Chrome web browser for Mac OS X. I have been using a stable version this ultra-speedy, WebKit-based browser in Windows for months, and liking it. I was not sure what to expect when I found a handy link to the Developer version of Chrome for OS X at, of all places, the anti-Apple tech site, The Inquirer.

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Also included in this “top 10” list is one app so good it is worth the near $10 price and the inclusion in this listing. As a bonus, this article also features ten other free apps worth an honorable mention, for a total of 20 iPhone / iPod Touch must-have apps.

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Using Apple’s latest version of its web browser, Safari 4.0 beta in Microsoft Windows, one cannot help but notice the differences in font rendering philosophies (and algorithms) between Apple’s OS X and Windows. With the latest version of Safari for Windows one can switch font rendering methods on the fly–from the Mac OS X style to Window’s font rendering style.

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