iPhone App Store

Finally after 2 weeks of waiting, my new iPhone 3G finally was delivered.  I got a black 16GB model.

As far as service plans go, there aren’t many options to choose from.  I got the plan with 450 anytime minutes, 5000 night and weekend minutes, & unlimited data.  I also added in 500 texts for an extra $5 a month.

There are so many cool things about the new iPhone.  It has built in GPS that is compatible with Google maps, a decent camera, push email, full web browsing capabilities on Safari, a full featured iPod touch with video, and video voicemail.

My favorite new thing with the iPhone 3G has to be the App Store.  I’ve been trying out and downloading new apps all day yesterday and today.  Here are some of my favorites.

 

ShoZu - ShoZu enables one-click uploading of camera phone videos and pictures to over 30 online social networks, blogs, photo sites and other popular web destinations.

I have been using this to upload pics I’ve taken with the iPhone to Flickr.  It is so easy to do and the results are great.  It is so much easier than texting each individual pic . Shozu is a free app.

 

Twitterrific - Twitterrific is a fun application that lets you both read and publish posts or “tweets” to the Twitter community website.

The application’s user interface is clean, concise and designed to take up a minimum of real estate on your iPhone.  

I’ve never really been into Twitter, since my blog doesn’t support the widget.  I may start using it more. Twitterrific is a free app.

 

Pandora Radio - I’ve written about Pandora in a previous entry, so I won’t go into too much detail.  Basically, you can create your own radio station and stream music onto your iPhone.

I actually have it up right now on my iMac, while I’m writing this post.  In my opinion, this will be THE killer app for the iPhone.

Now I can listen to commercial free radio, personalized to my preferences while driving in my car over Edge or 3G.  The coolness of this can not overstated.  Pandora is a free app.

 

Midomi - Gives you the ultimate music search fast, easy, & naturally.  You can either sing it, say it, type it or grab it.  

Midomi will find the song in it’s 17 million song database.  It will then give the name and artist, as well the option to purchase the song in iTunes.  

I’ve even tried humming a song for 10 seconds and Midomi identified it correctly.  Very cool.   Midomi is a free app.

 

Comic Touch - With Comic Touch you can immediately add a comic element to the photo you have just taken with your iPhone camera or from your photo library.

With a tap of your finger you can enter ‘Share mode’ where you can quickly and easily email your comic to your best friend or upload it to Flickr.

You can even bend and distort your pics with special effects.  Choose from either Bulge, Dent, Squeeze, Light or Stretch.  

It took a little getting used to, but Comic Touch is a really fun app.  Comic Touch cost $4.99.

Some of the other apps I’ve installed are Break, Tap Tap Revenge, YPmobile, & Mobile Banking.

iTunes releases new apps every day, so I’ll be sure to post if any future apps are also really good.

GiANT BoMB

About a month or so ago, I noticed a new podcast featured on the front page of iTunes.  It was the Giant Bombcast, a weekly podcast that features content revolving primarily around video games.  

It has a very simple format of 4 guys sitting around their studio talking about games, movies, energy drinks, throwing in the occasional interview.  I quickly became hooked and found myself downloading each new episode on Tuesdays.  

The creators of the podcast are Jeff Gerstmann & Ryan Davis, both formerly of GameSpot.  Gertsmann was fired from GameSpot last fall, which many believe revolved around the review he did for Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.  The other two guys on the podcast are also former GameSpot editors, Brad Shoemaker and Vinny Caravella.

You have to respect the fact that these guys left GameSpot because of the principle of Gerstmann firing.  Since he left, GameSpot has lost any shred of credibility with me.

Through the podcast, I also discovered the Giant Bomb site.  It was a very simple blog-style formatted site with info about new releases, videos, and game reviews.  Last week, Giant Bomb unveiled their all new site and it rocks!!!

The new site is very community focused.  Users of the site have the ability to create entries and add content to the site wiki-style.  In the beginning, users will have to go through moderation to make edits or add content, but eventually will gain enough “points” that they no longer have to go into that queue.

Eventually the Giant Bomb database will be the go-to site for anything video game related!!!!  I think I may just have to create a page for Beyond Good & Evil, since nobody has written one yet.

The Dark Knight in IMAX

Let me preface this post by saying that I DO NOT go to the movies.  The last movie I saw in theaters was Pirates of the Caribbean – Dead Man’s Chest in the summer of 2006.  I much prefer to wait a few months and watch it on Blu-ray on my big screen TV in the comfort of my own living room.

I really wanted to see The Dark Knight, but did not want to go through all the hassles of seeing it in a megaplex.  The movie has been selling out all week and I just can’t take sitting in a packed theater with people in front of me blocking part of the screen.

While watching AOTS last week, they mentioned that the best way to see The Dark Knight was in an IMAX theater.  The movie was partially shot in IMAX and the quality of the picture and sound just can’t be compared to a regular movie theater.

I did a seacrh on IMAX.com for the closest IMAX to my house and found one only 15 minutes away in Harrisburg at the Whitaker Center for the Science and the Arts.  I (luckily) pre-bought my tickets over the phone the day before for the 12:15 show and got there about 30 minutes early.

I can not rave enough about this movie experience.

The best part was that this was true stadium seating with seats that went up higher than your head.  I sat behind a very tall man and I had to look down to see the top of his head.  There is no way that you will ever be obstructed from seeing the screen.

The screen had to have been over 60 feet high.  Imagine seeing the movie projected onto a side of a 6 story building.  That’s what it was like, although your seat is at eye level to the middle of the screen.  The sound was also amazing, totally surrounding and immersing you.

The only thing that I found odd was that parts of the movie took up the entire screen and other parts were letterboxed, cutting off the top and bottom 10%.  It wasn’t something that you noticed until it switched to full screen in the outdoor scene at the hospital and it never detracted from the movie.

For the $13 price, I still think this was a bargain.  Not having to worry about sitting behind people and being truly immersed in the movie makes this one of the best movie going experiences ever.  

Oh yeah, the movie was awesome too.  I would highly recommend seeing The Dark Knight, just make sure it’s in IMAX.

Pandora

While browsing the new iPhone app store I discovered probably the coolest site I’ve ever seen. It’s called Pandora.

Pandora is basically an internet radio station, but it is customized to your specific personalized tastes.  It is run off of the database created from the Music Genome Project.

All you have to do is just drop the name of one of your favorite songs or artists into Pandora and let the Genome Project go to work.  

It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings – new and old, well known and completely obscure – to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice.  Then sit back and enjoy as it creates a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs for you.  

I did a test and created two stations.  One in English and one in Spanish.  The english language band that I put in was Hootie and the Blowfish.  In the 30 minutes that I listened to that station, I heard a couple of songs by Hootie, Counting Crows, Jack Johnson, Gin Blossoms, & Del Amitri.  

For the spanish language group, I put in RBD.  I heard some great music from RBD, Juanes, Shakira, Mana, & Laura Pausini.  In both examples, Pandora matched my personal preferences perfectly with similar music, some of which I hadn’t even heard before.

What’s even cooler is that once you set up an account on your computer, you can stream the stations on your iPhone.  It’s like having an iPod with millions of songs preloaded that will shuffle exactly to your music tastes and preferences.

Oh yeah, here’s the best part …. Pandora is FREE!!!!

Now stop reading this and go set up your Pandora account now.

Transmission

I just finished watching Battlestar Galactica Season 3 on DVD. Season 4 has already aired half it’s season on Sci-Fi and only the last 3 episodes are available online.

How am I supposed to catch up without waiting for a season 4 DVD release? BitTorrents of course.

According to Wikipedia:
“BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware, hosting, and bandwidth resources. Instead, when data is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, each recipient supplies pieces of the data to newer recipients, reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source, providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence on the original distributor.”

To put it in plain English – BitTorrent is the main way to get pirated movies, music, and TV shows. Everyone has seen the PSA at the beginning of every DVD that goes like:

BitTorrents is what that PSA is referring to.  There are many different BitTorrent programs that you can use to download the torrents.  I was looking for one that was simple, clean, and mac compatible.

I chose Transmission.  Transmission has been built from the ground up to be a lightweight, yet powerful BitTorrent client.

It’s simple, intuitive interface is designed to integrate tightly with whatever computing environment you choose to use. Transmission strikes a balance between providing useful functionality without feature bloat. Furthermore, it is free for anyone to use or modify.

Now I have all 10 episodes of Battlestar Galactica Season 4 on my iPod touch and I can catch up before the mid-season premiere this fall!!!

Email to King’s Dominion

Here’s a copy of the email that I sent to Guest Services at King’s Dominion about my visit on Sunday.