Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

Thanks to a patent application that Apple filed recently, we now have details on the next Gen iPod, perhaps even an iPhone Nano too. The one thing I gathered immediately from it is that it looks like it’s going to be a lot less thumb controlled. I don’t know about you, but right now I use my thumb to control everything on my iPod.

That won’t be the case with the next gen version because now both sides will have functionality.  Right now the back of my iPod is just a catch-all for a bunch of scratches, but now it appears as though there will be a separate touch surface on the back.

Now why would they put a touch surface on the back? Well, it would mean that you could view your iPod or iPhone Nano in full screen! When you touch the activated back side of the device, transparent controls will appear on the front of the iPod.  You could have controls such as an alphanumeric keypad if you’re dialing a phone, a QWERTY keyboard, your song list, etc.

All of this will allow for smaller versions of both the iPhone and the iPod, and full screen viewing, although I’m not sure how small you’d want to make a phone. Right now I’m picturing a phone the size of the iPod Nano and that just doesn’t seem right. How small will they go?

Just in case you want details, below is an excerpt from the patent application:

“A hand-held electronic device, comprising: a first surface having a display element coupled thereto; a second surface having a touch-surface coupled thereto, the second surface not coplanar with the first surface, the touch-surface adapted to detect a location on the touch-surface contacted by an object and an activation force applied to the touch-surface by the object; and control means for–displaying on the display element first information, control elements, and mark representing the contact’s location on the touch-surface, determining when the mark is spatially coincident with one of the control elements, determining the activation force is greater than a specified threshold, and activating a function associated with the one control element.”

“The method includes displaying first information appropriate to the device’s function on a display element on a top surface of the electronic device (e.g., video, graphic or textual information), displaying one or more control elements and a cursor on the display element (e.g., numeric or alphanumeric keys, buttons, sliders and control wheels), adjusting the cursor’s displayed position in response to an object contacting a force-sensitive touch-surface on the device’s bottom surface, and activating or executing a function associated with one of the control elements when the cursor is positioned “over” the control element and a force is applied to the force-sensitive touch-surface at a position corresponding to the cursor. In a preferred embodiment, the control elements are displayed transparently so that the first information is not totally occluded by the display of the control elements. A program implementing the method may be stored in any media that is readable and executable by a computer processor.”

Source: Unwired View

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

The biggest reasons that I hear as to why people don’t perform backups is that they are either too lazy to set them up, or there just isn’t a good time to schedule them. The later excuse is often because they don’t want to “waste” their computer’s processing power and memory performing a backup when they are actually trying to use their computer. Sure they could leave it on overnight, but that just seems silly to leave a computer on for an extra 8 hours when all you need is 20 or 30 minutes to perform an incremental backup.

If you use one of those two excuses I’m hoping that the free Windows application I’m going to show you today will solve both of them. The solution is called IdleBackup, and as the name implies it can be used to backup important files and folders on your computer. The thing that really makes this unique is that it will check to see if the computer has been idle for at least one minute before performing a backup.

Once you get IdleBackup installed on your computer you’ll be presented with a window that looks like this:

(Click to Enlarge)

As you can see it is a pretty simple program without an over abundant amount of things to confuse you. All you have to do is check the box(es) corresponding to the areas on your computer that you want to backup. Each folder that you designate will be listed below the selection area for easy viewing.

The next thing that you’ll want to configure is the destination location for the backup files. This can be a location on the current hard drive, an external drive (memory card, USB drive, etc…), or another computer on the network:

And lastly you’ll want to set how often the files should be backed up. Check the Automatic on box if you want IdleBackup to stay on a set interval, otherwise backups will only be performed when you manually start them. If you do decide to enable the automatic backups you’ll want to specify how often the program should check to see whether the files have changed or not.

Backups, unless manually started, will only begin once the computer is idle for one minute regardless of whether the timer has hit the magic number you specified. That means if you schedule a backup for every 15 minutes, but use your computer for four straight hours the backup won’t begin until after you’ve finished.

The countdown area will show how long you have to wait before another backup is performed, but if you see it “stuck” on 60 seconds (like in the screenshot to the right) it’s because the computer is not idle. Once there is no activity on the machine the countdown will wait 60 seconds to ensure that the computer is idle, and then it will begin the backup process.

By default the IdleBackup will check keyboard/mouse usage and CPU activity to determine whether the computer is idle. I’m not sure how low the CPU usage needs to get before being considered “idle,” but if you find that backups are never being performed it might be good to disable the Cpu activity check feature.

There are some things that would be nice to configure, such as the amount of time the PC has to be idle before initializing a backup. However, that is a tradeoff you have to make for getting an application that is extremely simple to use.

Note: The first time that you run a backup it may take awhile depending on how many things need to be transferred. After that it will only copy changed files, and will never delete a file from the destination even if it is deleted from the source.

Get IdleBackup

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

DRM-free music will be coming your way soon! Apple and EMI (an independent music company based in London) have just announced their plans to sell songs that are DRM free to iTunes customers starting in May. EMI is taking their entire catalog of digital music and removing the DRM restrictions, giving iTunes the first opportunity to sell the music.

Not only will the music be free of the digital rights management, it will also be a better sound quality which will gives users an overall better experience.Could this be the start of the end for DRM restrictions? This issue has frustrated people for a long time because DRM places so many restrictions on what users are able to do with the songs that they’ve purchased.

Come May, iTunes will be selling each of the songs from the EMI catalog minus the DRM for $1.29 which is just 30 cents more than music with the DRM hold on them.  You’ll find songs from big names like The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Keith Urban, and many others.

Another incentive that Apple will be offering is that if you’ve purchased EMI content on iTunes before, you will be able to upgrade all of your songs for 30 cents each.  This also will include music videos.

—New Poll!—

This leads us to our next poll — Is DRM-free music worth the extra cost? People have wanted this option but are they willing to pay for it?

I think it’s great that this will be an option, not only because it gives people freedom to listen to songs on multiple devices that they own, but also because the music will be at a higher quality that was previously not available. And hopefully it will open the door to other groups willing to offer their music sans DRM as well.

Give us your vote in the left side-bar. Are you willing to pay an extra 30 cents more per song?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

I have heard a lot of criticism about Windows Vista, which has caused a lot of people to second guess whether they should make the upgrade. I have had both visitors of the site, family, and friends all ask me whether they should upgrade to Vista…and my response each time is “will you benefit from it?”

Personally I have made the upgrade because there are a lot of things in Vista, such as the Desktop Window Manager and search indexing, that made the upgrade worth it for me. I’m always keen on testing out the latest software and developments, so in order to do that I needed to make the upgrade to Vista.

Most of the time I tell people that it isn’t necessary for them to rush out and upgrade their operating system unless they are really adamant about getting it. In that case I try to caution people that they might have some software that doesn’t work quite right or possibly even some hardware troubles, but in the end things tend to go smoothly.

Last night I was reading a rather interesting post by Nik Cubrilovic, who is the CEO of Omnidrive and a writer on TechCrunch, about his experiences with Vista. For an entire year he was using Mac OS X for his primary operating system until all of a sudden he just couldn’t get it to boot. Then came the ultimate plunge…he decided to give Vista a shot:

I have been using Mac OS X as my primary OS for almost a year now, but last night I switched back [to Windows] … I can’t believe I didn’t switch back sooner, the main difference is that the interface is much much smoother and neater and despite popular belief performance is actually fantastic. I was used to waiting on Mac OS X while my standards apps would open up – Quicksilver, Firefox, Skype, etc. but Vista goes almost straight into the desktop and most apps boot very quickly.

I didn’t expect it to be like this, I didn’t want Vista to be this good – I was expecting to boot back into OS X and live happily ever after, but damn, this is one fast, slick and nice operating system. If you are a Mac user try it yourself, install boot camp and Vista and it will feel like you just added another CPU and doubled your RAM – I can’t see any evidence for any of the reports of Vista being slow or power-hungry.

…

In the past 15 years I have gone from DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Linux, OpenBSD, Windows 98, Windows 2000 (a nice OS for the time), XP, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and now Vista and working with Vista this weekend reminds me of the first time I ran an early preview of Mac OS X and spent an hour running my mouse across the dock (back in 2000).

He then dives deeper into the Mac OS X vs. Vista comparison pointing out the differences in Media Center/Frontrow, transferring settings, and handling media. This was a refreshing view on Vista after having read dozens of articles detailing why one should switch to Mac OS X, and in a comment on Nik’s site he mentioned why he wanted to write the article:

What actually spurred me into writing this is that I had read so much about Vista and most of those posts were negative, and I made the same mistake many others did and didn’t even try it out – it is by no means perfect but it is pretty damn good.

Paul Thurrott (a Windows guru) did make a good point though, and that is how Nik was running a year-old copy of Mac OS X and comparing that to a fresh install of Vista. After a fresh install nearly any operating system will probably seem to run lightning fast when comparing it to another that has gotten bogged down with a year’s worth of junk.

In another article by Paul he talks about the status of Vista after the first 100 days. In that article he covers both Vista sales and compatibility, and one paragraph really hit home for me:

What’s interesting is that Microsoft is caught in a Catch-22 in some ways. Customers want the company to innovate, but often don’t like the side effects of that work. For example, to make Windows Vista more visually exciting, Microsoft changed the graphics architecture, but then some users complained that their video cards were no longer compatible.

I hear complaints all the time about Microsoft not doing enough to “reinvent” the operating system, but the biggest concern for most customers is compatibility. Some say that Microsoft should scrap everything that they have and just start from scratch, but at the same time they want all of the previous applications and hardware to work perfectly. I often compare this kind of thing to gas mileage in cars where people want to get hundreds of miles to the gallon, but they don’t want to pay for the upgrades to receive the benefits.

I’m not trying to be a Windows evangelist here, but having used Vista for over a year (I tested Beta versions) now I can say that it is much better than XP. If you have tried Vista yourself how does it stack up to the other operating systems that you have used?

Read our complete Windows Vista review

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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It’s going to be a slow news day today, folks. Everybody is caught up with the iPhone, and as as result, well, the only news out there is about the iPhone. Here’s CyberNet’s very last iPhone news round-up.

All for one, one for all:

Steve Jobs put on his Santa hat yesterday during a Town-Hall meeting with Apple employees to tell them that every single full-time U.S. employee and any part-time employee that has been with Apple for a year would be receiving a brand new 8GB iPhone!

I liked Engadget’s title, “Jobs pulls an Oprah.” In their article, they point out that Apple has over 17,000 employees, so that’s a total of over $12,091,414 (retail price) that Jobs just forked out for his employees. I bet those temp employees who haven’t been there are year are feeling a little left out today.

Thanks for the tip Oliver!

EDGE speeds improving?

On Wednesday when the first big reviews came out, the one thing that was said was that the Edge Internet on the iPhone is “excruciatingly slow.” Current AT&T customers who have been using the EDGE Internet have been reporting “dramatic increases in throughput” over the last day.

Engadget got an EDGE handset to run their own tests and while they said it was inconsistent, they did manage to get some speed tests that ran over 200kpbs. For the sake of all the soon-to-be iPhone owners, hopefully those speeds keep up!

Google Reader on iPhone, cool!

A developer decided he wanted to come up with a solution for those who wanted to use Google reader on their iPhone. Just follow these steps if you’d like Google Reader on your phone:

1. Visit his site and drag the bookmarklet into Safari 3
2. Visit Google Reader and click on the bookmarklet
3. The look now changes using Javascript so that you have an iPhone-sized interface.

Source: Mashable

Full Resolution iPhone Interface Images

If by chance you’re not standing in line somewhere and you’d like to get an idea of what the iPhone interface looks like, ThinkSecret has some great full resolution interface shots.

That’s all for today! Come 6 PM, the iPhone will finally have a chance to prove whether it was worth all the hype, and the money. If it’s successful, it could really change the cellphone industry as we know it today. Happy iDay (as the day has been labeled by Apple fans)!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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