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Apple filed a patent that revolves around delivery of mobile location based content to mobile users. This is a technology that I have long waited for and has the ability to change the world. First of all the idea of being able to walk into a store or restaurant and order what you want from your device, pay for it and be notified when it is ready is an awesome concept in and of itself.

The bigger deal comes when everything is wired. You walk into a bar and they know your favorite drink. You are also connected to the local matchmaking system at the the bar. You are then notified about the people in the bar that meet your criteria and that you meet theirs. How will that change the world?

What about the airport. You walk in and are instantly checked in. You are then free to walk around the airport and be notified that it is time to board. Lets say that you are on standby. You are notified if there is a slot available to you. The person that might be waiting to pick you up at your destination is kept abreast of flight status and your status so they know when they need to be at the airport and where your bags are going to be.

Now lets imagine that you check into a hotel. The hotel can make special offers to you, let you book spa packages, schedule a tour or order room service all from your phone. This will allow the hospitality industry to take service to the next level.

There are some downsides as well. This will allow more detailed tracking of your likes, dislikes, movements and habits. The question that we need to answer is if it is worth it. From my point of view, I think we are being tracked anyway so we might as well get some use out of it. What are your thoughts?

 

 
Apple released the iPhone SDK today. They also announced some pretty awesome technology to be in the next update of the iPhone software. I am really excited about this. This means that we can start working on community developed apps in a central location that will auto update!This means I am going to teach myself cocoa so that I can develop apps. I do not think I will be doing really advanced apps, but I want to learn. So the question is does anyone know of any good sites to help me out?I really would like to see kismet, nmap, aircrack and metasploit ported over to the iPhone.

Today I was looking around the Apple download site and found something interesting. This looks like iPhone apps are already out!!Does anyone know if there are more out?

I am so glad that we now have this update. Here is a list of some of the major points.

• Back to my Mac for third-party routers
• Dashboard widget performance improvement
• Stacks fix! List view, Folder view, and updated background for Grid Vid View
• Menubar transparency disabling
• Less translucent menus
• Several iCal recurring meetings supports, bug fixes overall
• iChat Bugfixes
• iSync support added for Samsung D600E and D900i phones
• Finder bugfixes
• Mail bugfixes
• AFP network volume hanging fixed
• RAW support improved
• Preview bugfixes
• Time Machine bugfixes (some external drives not being recognized)

I just wanted to make a quick comment on the data loss issues with OS X. This is very un-Apple like. Why have we not seen a fix or at least an official announcement? Lets get this stright, I am a huge Apple fan. That being said, the issues they are having recently with bugs in there code not be addressed does not give me a warm and fuzzy.

Apple has a real shot at taking the home user away from Microsoft, but they are failing to execute. They need to get off there rear ends and do something about this. If they have ever wanted to be more then just a tiny player they need to move now.

I do not fault them for some of the hardware issues, as that can happen to anyone. They do need to take contractual measures with there venders to ensure that it does not spread to fast and they can make the necessary recalls. If not they are going to wind up to be another Packard-Hell! We really expect more from you Apple.

For the last few days I have noticed that the fans on my MacBook Pro have been running really fast most of the time. I have also been having some applications not function properly. This has lead me to start paying attention to what is going on with this system.

What I noticed was that the Quick Look Server process was pegged. When this happened it would cause my laptop to get hot and some apps to stop responding. This mostly happened after the screen saver was on.

Now before you just start bashing because it is a Mac. remember that other new release of operating systems have had more serious issues then this. Nevertheless I hope Apple releases a patch…. and SOON!!!

I come from a Linux and Windows background and got used to always being able to lock my desktop when I got up. Well if you use a Mac you know that the operating system does not natively support this. The closest thing you can get to it is when you use a hot corner and then hover over the corner your machine will activate the screen saver and that can be set to require a password to get it to turn off. This is unacceptable in some cases. I found this cool little application that when used with quicksilver can lock your desktop with a hot key. Pretty cool!

As many Mac users where, I was extremely excited when EA started releasing games for the Mac. The other day I was at an Apple store and decided to pick up a copy of BattleField 2142. It installed fine, but when I went to run it the game crashed. I started trying to trouble shoot what was going wrong and noticed something strange. EA is using wine or more to the point Transgaming’s version of wine.

The first place I noticed it was in the config file on the Library directory.

WINE REGISTRY Version 2 [Drive C] “Path” = “@BUNDLEPATHRESOURCE@/transgaming/c_drive” “Type” = “hd” “Label” = “Dos Drive” “Filesystem” = “win95″ [Drive D] “Path” = “${HOME}” “Type” = “hd” “Label” = “My Home” “Filesystem” = “win95″ [Drive E] “Path” = “/tmp” “Type” = “hd” “Label” = “tmp” “Filesystem” = “win95″ [Drive G] “path” = “@BUNDLEPATHRESOURCE@/transgaming/g_drive” “Type” = “cdrom” “Label” = “cdrom” “Filesystem” = “win95″ [Drive P] “Path” = “@USERPREFS@/p_drive” “Type” = “hd” “Label” = “Dos Drive 2″ “Filesystem” = “win95″ [wine] “Windows” = “c:\\windows” “System” = “c:\\windows\\system32\\” “Temp” = “e:\\” “Path” = “c:\\windows\\;c:\\windows\\system32\\” “GraphicsDriver” = “sdldrv”

If you have ever played games on linux this will be familiar to you. After discovering this I started poking around. I decided to look into the Battlefield 2142.app directory under applications. This is what I found.

I personally feel that this is a good thing for the open source community. What bothers me is I have not heard anything announcing this. So does this mean they are doing it on the down low? Do they really want the word to get out? With there resources why did they not just rewrite the game? These are just a few of the questions I would like answered.