Technology Bay

LG launched three news handsets, Cookie Plus, Cookie Fresh and Cookie Pep. All the three Cookies come with full touchscreen display and are expected to be available for purchase in 50 countries at the end of this month.

The LG Cookie Plus, iced in 16 colours, is a mid-range phone and it will come with all the standard features you can expect nowadays from such a device. It will have a 3-megapixel camera (with the option to scribble on photos before sending them), widgets and apps, push email and Web browsing, a speed-dial home screen, cartoon-style interface and LiveSquare social networking capabilities, which assigns avatars to your friends and gathers all their twitterings into one place. The phone plays MPEG-4 video and supports MP3 playback and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Besides, it will come with 3G connectivity and support for playback and FM tuner.

The LG Cookie Fresh, a follow-up to the pretty Cookie Plus, will have more of an emphasis on style baked in coming in 16 rubber-trimmed colours, but it will only come with a less impressive 2.0-megapixel camera. This will be a huge disadvantage for the Fresh, as mobile phone companies manufacture phones with larger and larger cameras into mobile phones (for instance, Sony Ericsson C905, Samsung SPH-V8200, Samsung i8510 all with an 8 megapixel snapper). However, the main reason the original LG Cookie has been so popular over the last couple of years is not the number of camera’s megapixels, but the fact that it offers a full touchscreen experience at a relative low price. And the LG Cookie Fresh is set to take that appeal even further. It offers S-Class interface, FM radio and 3.5mm headphone jack, email capability and built-in social networking applications. It does not support 3G and it will be hitting Europe at around €120/£100.

The LG Cookie Pep, bearing model number GD510, has already been launched in India, aiming the youth. “The all new LG Cookie Pep is in line with our strategy of introducing innovative gadgets and connecting with the youth through relatable propositions. As the name suggests, the phone will enable our young mobile users to have an unordinary fun experience. It delivers all the essentials in communication, multimedia and entertainment in a delightfully compact form. Cookie Pep will be actively marketed through a 360° plan and this will be our biggest campaign till date. I am positive that this phone will be an instant hit with the youngsters”, said Mr. Sudhin Mathur, Business Head, Mobile Communications, LG Electronics India Pvt. Ltd.
It has a 7.62 cm Full Touch Screen, One Touch Social Networking Apps (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa), a 3 megapixel camera, MP3 player, Livesquare, Motion Silent, FM radio, video capture and audio recording, GSM / GPRS / EDGE / WAP / Bluetooth and an internal memory of 42 MB.
Prices for all three new Cookies are yet to be confirmed.

ReclaiMe is a data recovery program which can be used to recover your lost data in case of accidental deletion, computer crash or even virus infection. The program is really easy to use and can be used to recover data from various types of media which includes Hard Drives, USB Drives, Memory cards, mp3 players, mobile phones, PDAs etc. It also supports a wide variety of file system including FAT, exFAT, NTFS file systems and it can also recover data from HFS, HFS+ and UFS file systems.

The program is very simple to use and you don’t have to be a technical genius to recover the data. On running the program, the main window will list the disk drives and other storage devices that are attached to your Computer and contains data that can be recovered. Just select the drive from which you want to recover the data and hit the ‘Start’ button. It is advised not to install the program on the drive in which you want to install the data. After hitting the ‘Start’ button, data recovery will start. All the files and folders will be listed in a tree like structure. It will keep on finding the files and you can save the files that have been already recovered. The recovered folders will be marked with a ‘X’ mark.

Once the recovery process starts, the folder tree will appear and you can start browsing for files that you want to recover. For each of the object that it finds, it will give you information about the file name, the extension, file size and the file status. When you select the file, you can even preview its contents in the Preview pane. The program has preview support for a variety of image as well as text files. The recovery time period will depend on the size of the disk that you are recovering data from. If you are looking for a particular file, you can use the search feature to find the specific file that you want to recover. You can search for normal as well as normal and deleted data and you can even specify the minimum and maximum size. After you have found the or folder that you want to recover, just select the folder and hit the ‘Save’ button. you can then save the whole folder or only a particular file if you want. The program is also pretty quick compared to other programs that i have tried in this category.

So whether you are looking to recover a whole drive due to an accidental format or you are looking a particular file that you deleted by mistake, you can give ReclaiMe a try. The program works on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 as well as Windows Server 2003 and 2008. The trial version of the program only allows you to preview the data so you can find out beforehand if it can recover the data or not. The basic license of the application starts at $19.75.

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Recover Deleted Data with ReclaiMe

This week we look at PulpMotion, Shady, Quicken Essentials, RocketBox, iCasual, O’Reilly, Freeware plus much more. I want to thank you for downloading and listening to the podcast. We have the best in Mac hardware, software and websites reviews. We have a lot of great folks on today’s episode with their reviews and comments on software, hardware and websites that make using the Mac special. Plus I’ll have the top freeware Mac apps of the week and much more.
You can email me at surfbits at Gmail dot Com. I love to hear from you.

Get DropBox Free and Get an extra 250 Megs too!

Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
The New O’Reilly Media eBook Give-Away coming next week!: http://oreilly.com
The Winners for O’Reilly eBook were:
Angela Bautista, Joe Cosentino, Edward Lindquist

Rivet can be found at: http://thelittleappfactory.com/rivet
SimpleCap: http://xcatsan.com/simplecap-en
Click: http://customsolutionsofmaryland.50megs.com/click.htm
Nambu: http://www.nambu.com
Mutools: http://mutools.com/products.html
Fraise: http://github.com/jfmoy/Fraise

Michelle Lopez joins us today from the The Portable Gamer and iCasual Report to review the iPhone/iPod Touch game:
Zombie Farm
Developer: The Play Forge
Price: Free
Michelle then reviews: Quicken Essentials from Intuit

Gazmaz Joins us again this week to review:
Shady for Mac: http://instinctivecode.com/shady

Allison Sheridan from the NosillaCast Podcast looks at:
Pulp Motion 3: http://www.aquafadas.com

David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and reviews:
Rocketbox: http://www.getrocketbox.com

Try the new ENHANCED version of the MacReviewCast:
And now we have the Podcast in Bit-Torrent Feeds!
…
You can either click on the podcast link on the left and listen to it via QT from the browser, or you can right click on the podcast link and choose to “download linked file”. That will download the mp3 and you can play it from you hard drive with iTunes.
The right link below is the URL for the podcast RSS feed. Just right click it and choose to copy the address and then paste it in your podcast reader, or ipodder, or newsreader that will download enclosures automatically.

techpodcasts.com

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software, review, mac, apple, iTunes, Mac mini, podcast, Macreviewcast, podcasting, maccompanion, OSX, iPhoto, Exposure 2

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In December I purchased a new MacBook Pro. I am using it at the office 9 hours a day and then for any travel I do or as on a casual basis at home. I wanted it to be mobile so I ordered the 13 inch model. I wanted it to be powerful enough to run the applications I needed it to run. I purchased the 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo model with 4 gigs of ram. But I wanted more. So instead of purchasing a 7200 RPM hard Drive to speed it up, I took the leap of faith and purchased the 256 gig Apple SSD (Solid State Drive).

It was not cheap, if I recall it added $800 to the price of the laptop and to be honest, if the company I work for didn’t pay for a percent of the purchase, I would have probably not made that decision.

After four months of using the MacBook Pro day in and day out, the one thing about the Mac that surfaces in every conversation is the speed and silence of my SSD drive. It is the one option I could have purchased with my Mac that made the biggest impact on my Mac, period. I am now in the process of deciding the best path to take to upgrade my Mac Pro to SSD. I believe that with that one upgrade, I can prolong the effective life of my Mac Pro at least two more years.

I hear you screaming over your Mac right now, “That type of money doesn’t just grow on trees Tim, wake up already!”

I understand your concern and let me explain. First of all, let’s look at why I believe that the answer to my Holy Grail of computing speed is the Solid State Drive. All of you with a laptop, especially a MacBook or older MacBook Pro, will understand when I say that booting up a laptop is a slow and sometimes painful process. Plus, launching apps can be slow and the noise from your hard drive is noticeable to say the least. My MBP with the SSD boots up in 19 seconds flat. That includes all the apps that are loaded at start up, my Remote Desktop app, Textexpander, Dropbox, SecondBar, Quiet Read, WeatherVane, Carbonite and iStat Menu. That was 19 seconds.

Next is the speed of the drive itself. Here is a screen grab from a free benchmarking application called Xbench. Download it and run it on your Mac for comparison. You’ll see the speed in my drive.

Keep in mind that these numbers are from an older, slower SSD then what is now available by companies such as OCZ, and Intel. Plus, the prices have fallen a bit, especially for the smaller sizes. You can buy a 60 gig OCZ at the link above for $169.00. That’s on sale, but it shows that SSD prices will be falling and if the price is not in your range now, it soon will be.

So the next question I get asked is how can I live with such a small hard drive. If you can afford a 256 gig SSD, you’ll find it’s more room then you may actually need. As I write this article, I have 66 items in my applications folder and I am using 23.45 GB of storage with 210 GB free. What about those of us that need more storage for our iTunes library, iPhoto library, iMovie library or any other storage monster you have hiding on your Mac?

You have several options, one was fully explained by my friend Don McAllister on his members only screencast number SCO0224: Solid State Drives and Optibay. Rather then rehash it, just check out the links above and you’ll get the step by step instructions you’ll need to increase your laptop storage. The Optibay is a great solution for turning your DVD drive bay into another storage option, and it comes with an external USB drive enclosure for your DVD drive.

For my Mac Pro, it has 4 drive bays in it already. I have 3 TB of storage in it and if I replaced the 500 gig HDD that’s in it with a 60 gig SSD, I really would not miss the storage space and I have to believe that the increased speed would make the Mac Pro seem like a new machine. I would just use one of the drives in my Mac Pro for keeping my iTunes, photos, movies and documents stored. The SSD would be for the operating system and applications.

I have pretty much talked myself into upgrading my Mac Pro to SSD, the logistical part of this still needs to be tweaked. As always, I will keep you informed and I’d love to hear your feedback too.

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I would not be surprised if everyone reading this post already have their own Dropbox account. But if you’ve not had the chance to download and use Dropbox, you’re missing a wonderful application that makes your computer time so much more enjoyable. With Dropbox you can share files, and preference settings between all your computers whether they’re Macs or PC’.s You can also share files with other users and friends just by sharing folders.

So why are we talking about Dropbox now? If you sign up for your free Dropbox account, you’ll get an extra 250 megs of storage which brings your total storage to 2.25 gigs. It also means I receive a free 250 megs of storage on my account too. That’s good for you and good for me and did I mention it’s free?

Head over to the Dropbox Web site and take a look at what it has to offer. We love it on the MacReviewCast and Surfbits and I think you will too.
Here is my referral link to sign up. DropBox Referral

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Take Your Best Shot
Tim Grey Tackles Your Digital Darkroom Questions

Tim’s work combines several of his greatest passions: technology, teaching, photography, writing, and travel. All of these have been part of his life in some way for as long as he can remember, and became a major focus starting in high school. He has been focused on digital photography and imaging for over 10 years.

Tim has written more than a dozen books and hundreds of magazine articles on photography and imaging. He publishes the digital darkroom Questions email newsletter, as well as the Digital Darkroom Quarterly print newsletter. Tim teaches through workshops, seminars, and appearances at major events, and is a member of the photoshop World dream team of instructors.

This book is really one question after another Tim answered over the years, arranged in an order that makes sense and explains how to get the best picture possible from your digital camera. Chapter headings are:
Digital Fundamentals
Digital Cameras and Tools
Digital Capture
Digital Darkroom
Color Management
Optimizing in Photoshop
Creative Effects
Image Problem-Solving
Printing
Digital Sharing

Each of these chapters contain 5-10 questions and the answers that Tim gave to them. They all are interesting and the type of questions that anyone interested in Digital photography would ask.

Grey then adds his Pet Peeves and his final decision to many of the questions that he answered in the past. There are example photos that illustrate a point the author tries to make and he talks about current and specific lens and cameras.

Let me give you a question in the book and Grey’s answer to it. You’ll see what I mean.

I have heard a lot about how RAW capture is so much better than JPEG, but I don’t understand what RAW is exactly. Can you explain?

This book is not a missing manual type book, it’s not a “how to” type book as much as it’s a book that answers questions, and I found that most of the questions it answers were ones that I had. It’s a great read for anyone starting into Digital photography. I recommend it.

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This week we look at Fujitsu S1300, iFrogz CS-40, iCasual, O’Reilly, Freeware plus much more. I want to thank you for downloading and listening to the podcast. We have the best in Mac hardware, software and websites reviews. We have a lot of great folks on today’s episode with their reviews and comments on software, hardware and websites that make using the Mac special. Plus I’ll have the top freeware Mac apps of the week and much more.
You can email me at surfbits at Gmail dot Com. I love to hear from you.

Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
The New O’Reilly Media eBook Give-Away coming next week!: http://oreilly.com
The Winners for O’Reilly eBook were:
Larry Jackson, Chris Davies, Dwight Sperry

Fujitsu S1300 Scanner: http://www.Fujitsu.Com
iFrogz CS-40: http://www.iFrogz.Com
Quiet Read: http://bambooapps.com/free
Menuless: http://createlivelove.com
iRunTrains: http://www.iruntrains.com
PhotoTools and PhotFrame: http://www.ononesoftware.com
AtMonitor: http://www.atpurpose.com/atMonitor
Hobiconer: http://www.kodlian.com/en/application
Artwork Gofer: http://objectstack.com/artwork-gofer

Michelle Lopez joins us today from the The Portable Gamer and iCasual Report to review the iPhone/iPod Touch game:
Title: Supermarket Management
Developer: G5 Entertainment
Price: $2.99

Try the new ENHANCED version of the MacReviewCast:
And now we have the Podcast in Bit-Torrent Feeds!
…
You can either click on the podcast link on the left and listen to it via QT from the browser, or you can right click on the podcast link and choose to “download linked file”. That will download the mp3 and you can play it from you hard drive with iTunes.
The right link below is the URL for the podcast RSS feed. Just right click it and choose to copy the address and then paste it in your podcast reader, or ipodder, or newsreader that will download enclosures automatically.

techpodcasts.com

Technorati Tags:
software, review, mac, apple, iTunes, Mac mini, podcast, Macreviewcast, podcasting, maccompanion, OSX, iPhoto, Exposure 2

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By Gazmaz:
Some while ago I was having a conversation with my friend Mike Potter from the formaceyesonly podcast about the awful way iTunes imports Audiobooks that I own on CD, or rather doesn’t import in a way that is useable.

After both agreeing that iTunes doesn’t do a very good job, he pointed me to a product that I have used a lot since AudioBook Builder. Since my girls have a number of audiobooks all on CD, they still want to listen to them but on their iPods.

If you’ve never tried importing an audio book into iTunes, you haven’t experienced the way it seems to randomly name the files or if it doesn’t randomly name them, it doesn’t seem to put them in the correct order, and even if it puts them in order it then sees them as music. Guess what iTunes does every time you play music? Yep, you got it, it starts at the very beginning, now as Julie Andrews said in the sound of Music, it’s a very good place to start, but not when you want to listen to a book where you left off.

Some of you maybe shouting at me right now saying, “yeah, but you can make adjustments in iTunes”, but I can assure you, I have tried and it didn’t always work.

OK, so what did we do? Well, nothing, until I was pointed to AudioBook Builder that is. I think this has been on the MacReviewCast in the past but not for some time, and we all need reminding at times about really useful software.

Once you’ve installed the application the welcome screen gives you 3 options, these being, Create a new project, open an existing project or help. To start off with you’ll be interested only in Create new Project of course. When you click on Create a new project the app asks you to name a file and asks you where to save it to. Audiobook Builder defaults to an audiobook builder folder within your Music folder in your home directory. This is where I placed the files as who needs an argument.

The next part is to enter a title for the book an Author, and finally a Genre, although I only see Audiobooks under that option when first starting off. You can also drag Artwork here as well but in fact you can come back and drag artwork here at any time before you finish the project, you can also rename prior to finishing off as well, so don’t worry at this stage too much about the naming conventions.
At the bottom of the window you’ll see Cover which is where we start but also Chapters and Finish.

Once you have popped your CD in your machine, click onto Chapters and click on import CD, you can also import the current iTunes highlighted item or choose from files on your system. My main use was to import CD’s though. Once the CD has been imported you’re then able to name the Chapter or chapters and then of course if it’s a long book you need to import the other CD’s to complete the book.
Now once you have all your CD’s imported this is where you have to decide how many splits in iTunes you’d like, as you can combine all of those CD’s or spit each of the tracks or even chapters within the book.

Let me tell you what I did for my daughter. She had recently asked if I could put “An Unfortunate Series of Events” onto her iPod. I imported all 13 books which had, at least 3 CD’s per book and sometimes 5. I decided to import all of the CD’s as one book, you have the facility to join and split the files you import in AudioBook Builder. Sometimes moving the files around took a bit of thinking and fiddling but if you do it all in order you’ll have no issues. Now having mentioned that, I did find that after I’d completed the book I had recorded 1 CD and added it at the start of a book and at the end of that same book, but I found it easy to rectify as I’d kept the audiobook file after exporting to iTunes, I re-recorded the correct CD and added it into the correct place within the files, I of course deleted the duplicate file.

I did rename some of the files, but actually I only really had to rename the top file, difficult to explain here but Audiobook Builder gives you a main file into which you have each of the CD’s for an individual book. Once I had finished, and it didn’t take to long, although at first it does seem that the copying process is taking some time, however it seems to suddenly speed up and you’ll soon have all those CD’s copied. So now I had 13 books all with the separate CD’s within the whole series of books. Now it was time to export to iTunes, click on finish and here you have 2 options, they are ‘build book’ and ‘build options’. First click on the build options and here you can adjust the quality of the recording. This impacts the size of the file you end up with, you can change the format from the default M4B which is book markable or M4A. You also have the options to break between files or break between chapters, have equal length or have it split per chapter, this is the option I used. You can experiment here to see how it exports into iTunes and what you’d prefer. The finish window also tells you the title you have given the books or book, the author, genre, also the length, chapters, quality and the destination. You’ll also see the artwork that you’ve used.

So I now have a neatly created book in my audiobooks section of iTunes. Job Done, the only slight glitch I came across was occasionally the application didn’t see a CD I had popped into the disc drive, although it could be seen in iTunes or Finder, however a quick eject and after the CD being pushed back in, the software then saw the CD. Not a big problem, but don’t panic if it happens to you.

The cost of AudioBook Builder is $9.95, £6.99 or €7.72, there are also family packs available at currently at $14.95, £10.50 or €11.60.

You can find the software over at www.splasm.com/audiobookbuilder

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