VNC allows you to remotely manage one computer from another. But the thing is, you usually have to be at another computer to do this.
MochaSoft has just released a Mocha VNC Lite a VNC client for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch allowing you to control another computer all from your finger tips. We tested VNC Lite with a Mac Mini and an iPhone and after enabling remote management on the Mac connecting with the iPhone was a breeze.
The app supports both portrait and wide screen modes as well as the zoom in and out gestures. Along the bottom edge you have buttons for the on screen keyboard, options and to enable/disable mouse clicks.
Screen refresh on the iPhone was a bit slow but adequate but because the iPhone/iPod Touch sole input device is your finger it was hard to do any meaningful task.
Generally, when you're using remote management software like VNC you're using a keyboard an a mouse. Without these devices, trying to administer a computer with one finger proved to be slow and awkward.
VNC Lite is a great application, but we couldn't recommend it for any type of serious administrative task.
The built in speakers that come with Apple's notebooks are fine for most basic audio tasks. And if you want better sound you could hook up a set of external speakers. But external speakers aren't always an option and that shouldn't mean that you have to give up on better sound. With Hear, you can add some slick audio processing to make your notebook speakers sound bigger than what they really are.
Hear uses digital signal processing (DSP) to shape the audio coming from your applications (iTunes or DVD player) giving them a much needed boost in equalization and reverb allowing your music or movie to sound its best with the notebook speakers.
To make things easy, Hear has packaged a variety of presents to get you going. If you're the tweaking type, you can adjust the knobs and faders till you get the sound you're after.
In our testing we found the processing fine for most audio content and really enjoyed the phantom center channel option giving a weighted anchor to all the movies we watched.
Hear isn't only for your built in speakers, it also works great with headphones or external speakers. But if all you have is the notebook built in speakers, Hear will definitely make them sound better.
If you're anything like us, your music collection is probably a mislabeled mess that you don't have the time to clean up. Getting the job done using TuneUp, which we took a look at a couple of months ago, is probably as painless as it's going to get. The application is available to the public starting today. It's easy to use, efficient, and has a great UI. There were a few kinks here and there the first time we used it. It crashed every time we tried to save the track information for a few songs, although strangely enough, it always happened with tracks we wouldn't admit to owning.
Drag up to 50 or 60 songs from your iTunes library into TuneUp and it automatically starts looking up the track information using Gracenote. You can either save the information for each song individually, or save them all in one go. TuneUp is extremely accurate, but we would definitely advise you to scan through the results as some of the more obscure singers aren't in Gracenote's database. The drawback we highlighted last time hasn't been solved. Even if two tracks appear on the same album, but also on other albums, TuneUp won't necessarily group them together. On the other hand, we were impressed with its ability to differentiate between studio and live tracks.
TuneUp will also dig up the missing cover artwork for your collection in minutes, provide links to videos on YouTube and album recommendations from Amazon depending on what you're listening to, and concert notifications from StubHub depending on what's in your library. TuneUp, despite being in its early beta stages, is already so good, it's worth the hassle of having to use a bloated program like iTunes. The free version of TuneUp limits you to fixing 500 tracks and finding 50 album covers, and an unlimited version of the program is available for an $11.95 annual subscription or a one-time payment of $19.95.
If you've been looking for a reliable way to make your iPod or iPhone work as a remote for iTunes, look no further than Apple's Remote application. Just when you thought there was no way to tie the iPod and iTunes closer together, Apple's found another way for them to intereract. And It's free!
Just pop open remote, click to add a new library, and then enter the resulting 4 digit code in iTunes to give your iPhone access to your library. Now you've got an interface that looks just like the one you use to play music on your iPod. This'll work with any iTunes equipped computer on your network, and once you've set them up, you can switch between them easily. We even set up a little ad-hoc network with just a Mac and an iPod Touch, and Remote's performance was excellent. Did we mention it's free?
The team at MixMeister wasted no time developing a scratch app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The MixMeister Scratch allows you to scratch anywhere and anytime you feel the need to.
The app comes with audio clips that you can scratch to by sliding your finger back and forth on the vinyl portion of the screen. We found the scratching fairly responsive but lacks the feel of an actual record (for obvious reasons).
If anything this is just an app to have fun with. Sounds are realistic and should impress your friends as you pretend to be the next DMC world champion.
MixMeister Scratch is free and available now at the iTunes App Store.
Apple opened the iTunes App Store today, just ahead of the Friday release of the iPhone 3G. The phone is already out in some parts of the word -- lucky Aussies and New Zealanders! -- but while North America is waiting, there's the iPhone 2.0 firmware update and a new version of iTunes to play with. If you install these updates, you don't have to wait for a new iPhone before you start buying apps! iPod Touch users, however, will apparently have to wait until tomorrow for the firmware update, which will cost $9.95 -- compared to a free update for the iPhone.
What about the apps themselves? Well, for starters, there are over 500 of them, and 25% of those are free. So far, games are leading the pack, with Sega's much-hyped Super Monkey Ball as the most downloaded app. Other hot games in the Top 10 are Enigmo, Cro-Mag Rally and Bejeweled 2. Apart from games, the most popular download thus far is OmniFocus, the powerful productivity app from Omni Group, coming in at #4.
With the announcement of the new iPhone, we figure there will be some new interest in this bit of software that's been around for a while: Do you have a computer without one of those newfangled infrared spots and a remote control? Do you still want to be able to change tracks on iTunes or pause a movie from across the room? As long as you have an iPod or an iPod Touch laying around, Signal is the app for you. Its interface is almost indistinguishable from the regular iTunes player on those devices, which makes it a breeze to use.
Here's how it works: download Signal and open it up, then input the IP address it gives you into your iPhone or iPod. Boom! You can access all your iTunes media from your device. Signal lets you change speakers, adjust volume, turn on shuffle or repeat, and pretty much anything else you could do from within iTunes.
There's a full demo, so you might want to try it out before you shell out 25 bones, but here are a couple of things to consider:. If you're going to buy a standard remote anyway (like the Apple Remote, for example), remember that Signal will work with your iPhone or iTouch from anywhere your network reaches, so you can use it to shoot around walls. Also consider that Signal has both Mac and Windows versions, where some other remotes only work with one platform.
Having an emotional moment but just can't seem to express yourself with words? Well send a TinySong and tell the World how you feel with music instead.
TinySong is a nifty new application from the folks at GrooveShark that allows you to search for a track on the GrooveShark database, then gives you a short link that you can cut and paste into into an email, instant message or add to a blog entry if you want to funk it up.
TinySong is the latest project from the folks at GrooveShark who have recently been aggressively marketing their service with dirt cheap music download offers such as their Mothers Day 49 cent download offer. TinySong links in to GrooveShark's' marketing efforts as it not only allows users to share songs, but also allows the TinySong recipient to purchase the track they are sent if they are getting into the groove.
The service has only had a soft launch, so you'll have to excuse any quirks, according to the good people at GrooveShark next steps include Twitter and Tumblr integration before a wider launch of the service.
Krix is a flashy way to browse, organize and play your music. It relies on album art to visually represent all the albums you've got in your digital collection, and it supports the Apple Remote. We don't think Krix is quite ready for the bigtime yet, though. It has a couple of drawbacks, including its reliance on iTunes for playing music (the controls you see at the top of the Krix window are just an iTunes remote) and the need to create a tiny .krix file for each song, so it knows how to organize and display it.
The obvious plus of Krix is that it has big, bright playlist buttons, and features several ways to sort your albums. Although the newest version requires OS X 1.05, Krix was started before Leopard and Coverflow. It still looks nice, but since Krix needs iTunes anyway, and Coverflow does a decent job of displaying album art on its own, we'll pass on this app for now.
Apple has announced a deal with HBO to offer some of the cable channel's premium content through the iTunes store. Normally this wouldn't be all that noteworthy, but this is no ordinary content partnership. Apple has agreed to price some of the TV shows at $2.99, which is the first time the company has been willing to deviate from its standard pricing of $0.99 per song, $1.99 per TV show, and $9.99 to $14.99 per movie.
In fact, it was a squabble over standardized pricing that led NBC to stop distributing its shows through iTunes last year. not every HBO program will cost $2.99. The network is offering up Sex and the City, The Wire, and Flight of the Conchords for $1.99 per download, while The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Rome will set you back $2.99.
The move makes sense when you consider the fact that HBO charges $50 or so for 1 season of these shows on DVD, even though there are typically fewer episodes per season of an HBO show than you get from a broadcast network program. So we're hoping this isn't going to lead to a pricing free-for-all, with networks charging more for popular shows like Lost and less for shows nobody was going to pay for anyway like 'Til Death.
TuneUP is an an application designed to help keep your iTunes library more organized. While a library of only iTunes Store music will be tidy indeed, if you have acquired music from many different sources, the ID3 tags might be a bit confusing.
TuneUP works by comparing the unique sound print of each song to a database, and if new information is available, TuneUP will fix the metadata and rename your songs. It's sort of like having a genius put your books on your shelf for you. Not only does it help with naming, but the software also is able to download album art automatically with a few clicks.
While the design of this software is superb and visually appealing, it doesn't quite deliver in the area of organization. It does indeed make more coherent ID3 tags for songs, but we had hoped that it would properly shelve everything into one album each, rather than the usual album fragments, (with track 1 and 4 in one album, 2 and 8 in another, etc). Hopefully this will be refined in the final release.
TuneUP is in private beta, but we've got 100 invites to give away. Just click the link after the jump.
There's no question that it's faster to purchase a movie from the iTunes store than your local video store -- assuming you have a speedy internet connection. But if you want to get the latest releases as son as they're out on video, you're probably better off making the trek to the video store. Or at least that's what we would have told you yesterday, when it could take weeks or months longer for movies to show up on iTunes. But now Apple has announced that many movies will be available on iTunes the same day as they are released n DVD.
Apple has reached deals with Fox, Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal, Sony, Lionsgate, Image, and First Look. That covers a lot of territory. New releases will typically set you back $14.99. The press release doesn't make it clear whether this applies to the $2.99 movie rentals, so if you want to rent a video for just a few bucks, you might still better off using Netflix or walking to a bricks and mortar store.
We'd never, ever turn down a good ghost story. Aliens, even the abducting kind (especially the abducting kind!) are incredibly cool. Still, we are pretty sure that T. Rex existed and didn't use those huge incisors for gnashing hellaciously into cantaloupes and mangoes. And we have enough acquaintances who act a little too similarly to lower primates to believe Darwin was too terribly far off.
We really dig people who can talk about the Drake Equation. We dig people who can speak articulately about science, sound extra intelligent, and still be accessible enough that we are able to follow along.
Scientific podcasts are a funny thing. There are many out there that remind us way too much of our college days when we sat for two or three hours in a hot lecture hall listening to a professor full of even hotter air drone on about weather patterns. But there are gems like The Skeptic's Guide, which feel much more like you're sitting a table in a restaurant having a conversation with your smartest friends.
And these guys (and girls!) are smart. The host, Dr. Stephen Novella, is a neurologist teaching at Yale Medical School. Rebecca Watson is the resident Skepchick on the panel, and has the unique claim to fame that there's an asteroid named after her. Jay and Robert Novella are regular contributors and leaders in the New England Skeptical Society. And the weekly guest, James Randi, is the most interesting of the bunch: He's a magician. He's a world famous escape artist. And he's ready to expose, explain, and share with the layman the very scientific explanations for the magical things that go on in the paranormal and pseudoscientific world.
The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is available from their site, or through iTunes.
The nearly unpronounceable but endlessly creative Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich turn their microscope towards the podcast with this excellent series from New York's WYNC. Tackling issues as diverse as Laughter, Sleep, Time and 'Who Am I?' these uber-geeks play on the fringes of radio documentary, journalism and sound art. Abumrad comes to the series with a pedigree that includes composing music for films and television and extensive radio documentary work while Krulwich comes to Radiolab as the much lauded Science Correspondent for the US National Public Radio network.
Radiolab takes on themes relating to science, nature or culture and examines them through a prism filtered by scientific method, social history, personal experience and sound production methods. Produced in series of 5 parts at a time, with its innovative subject matter, high quality production, creative writing and detailed research Radiolab is one of the most innovative podcasts available for download online.
Click here to subscribe to the Radio Lab RSS Feed.
P2P music community site Grooveshark has entered a new phase with the launch of Grooveshark Lite, a Web based application to allow community users to share and purchase tracks. Grooveshark differentiates itself from other music Webtailers by giving community members credits every time a fellow user purchases a track from their music library.
Grooveshark lite allows you to organize your music and build playlists or makes recommendations on top tracks from other users to build playlists if you can't be bothered to build your own. Grooveshark also lets you stream entire tracks from other users before you make your purchasing decisions.
The Web site is the latest incarnation of a service that launched in beta as a P2P application that maps your music library and then allows you to share it with fellow community users, as Download Squad wrote last year. Music that is then made available through Grooveshark can be purchased by other users, and community members are rewarded with credits each time purchases are made from their library.
VNC allows you to remotely manage one computer from another. But the thing is, you usually have to be at another computer to do this.
If you're anything like us, your music collection is probably a mislabeled mess that you don't have the time to clean up. Getting the job done using 
