Counting Down the Days to the New iPhone!

I am excited about the new iPhone 3G. Lots of new features and 3rd party applications. Should be amazing.

Found a few interesting new things this week.

SOFTWARE

Apple awarded 3rd party software developers at the recent WWDC. I checked out several of the award winners and found two that I have been playing with.

ScreenFlow

ScreenFlow captures in video anything on your computer monitor. After capturing, it has a great list of export functions to create QuickTime clips of many sizes. It uses the camera built into your monitor to capture audio and video of you as well. Great for adding audio to Keynote slide shows.
Timeline

Just as it's name suggests this software creates stunning timelines. The 3D time line is amazing.
Blurb

I want to put in another good word for Blurb, the online book publishing site. I used their free software to design and publish two books this weekend for my family. The software works great. The books and photos uploaded easily. I should see the books in 5 days. I will follow up and write about the quality of the books when I receive them.

Fun Outside

Have you ever heard of Geocaching? If not you are missing out. We started doing it in 2004 but had not done it until our visit to NYC over the three day weekend. Once you start you will never look at the world in the same way again. To do it you need to visit the official Geocaching web site and buy a hand held GPS. Per the site:

Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.

Caches exist all over the world and come in a complete range of sizes. To find caches near you all you do is type in your zip code. If you sign up for a free account you can see our profile and the caches we have logged. There are many more caches than there were in 2004. This map shows some along the Back Bay trail in Newport Beach.These are photos of the caches we found this weekend.If you don't have a GPS unit Garmin makes a great one called the eTrex Legend HCx.It has a built in map of the world although not detailed it works. There are a couple of things I like about this unit. The interface works well and is easy to use. Its small and compact. The best part is it can be connected to your Mac via USB so you can upload cache coordinates directly from the Geocaching web site. Garmin provides the free software to make it work. It also has a micro sd card slot so you can add more detailed road and topo maps.

HARDWARE

Fastmac External Battery Charger

I ran across this useful device on one of the Mac news sites. If you have several batteries for your laptop you can use this device to charge your batteries outside the laptop. Very useful for travel. Check out the stand-alone charger at FastMac.