iPadded my Kindle

I have so many thoughts on the iPad at this moment, and you can check a few posts below to see why I thought a netbook would have been the better option (and Steve Jobs slamming netbooks during his keynote actively shat on that idea ever materializing), so I thought I would share one specific opinion. It’s not even that complex of an idea.

Will the iPad kill the Kindle? No. First of all, “____-killers” is a buzzword just like any other designed to hype up everyone except the actual consumer (press, shareholders, etc). But most importantly, what Amazon has is a household brand name. Everyone should know what a Kindle is. Maybe it’s not the most ubiquitous of tech brands yet, if ever at all, but it’s strong enough that I don’t think Amazon has to worry. Kindle is synonymous with eBooks. I think under the right circumstances, Kindle would have been a genericized trademark just like Kleenex… although I don’t imagine that’ll happen.

What I do think Amazon should worry about is how technically advanced the iPad is, despite its branding and similarity to the iPhone and iPod Touch. If anything, Amazon should step up their game to make the Kindle a much more quality product and strengthen their brand even further.

I don’t say any of this because I have an allegiance to either product, or any other. I’ve never even held or seen an eBook reader. I do have an iPod Touch and so I can sort of triangulate the kind of experience the iPad may provide, and I do find it appealing. I think Apple has a very nice product, although I question its necessity and branding.

Twitter

Twitter is an awesome tool if you can figure out how it works best for you. I had an account for almost a year and I never used it because I found it too cumbersome to actually go to Twitter.com to stay current with who I was following, and post my own tweets.

The last few months I’ve become much more interested in it simply due to the existence of client desktop apps that you can run 24/7 and keeps you updated with all the latest tweets from your followers and allows you to tweet your own tweets. Tweet. Tweeeeet.

Ahem.

There are a number of these client apps, but the one I settled on is called Twhirl. It runs on the Adobe Air platform and works on Windows and Mac OS X. I wholly recommend giving it a whirl. Get it? Twhirl. Whirl.

Yes, I went there.

Another good Twitter client that I have tried out, but never continued using for reasons that have escaped me, is Destroy Twitter. It has a very slick UI and seems to be just as good, if not better than Twhirl.

I came across Twhirl first and I like sticking with what works, but go ahead and try out whatever you come across. The point is to get Twitter working for you, because it’s one of those things that works better and better the more people use it.

You can, of course, follow me on Twitter. Tweet you later!

Wireless Apple Mighty Mouse

I bought the Mighty Mouse yesterday, and having spent a full day with it I can say it’s a really good mouse. Much better than I expected based on the minute or two hands-on experience I’ve had whenever fondling Apple hardware at Best Buy.

Despite my love-hate relationship with OS X’s mouse acceleration, the mouse feels pretty comfortable to use. The shape was odd at first as it’s wide and a bit flat. But like most things it grows on you in time.

And if you really want to bond with a new mouse, it’s my belief that you should game with it right away. That’s real, proper gaming… not some quick little game of Bejeweled, but something like Doom. Yes, Doom. If Doom is a bit old for your tastes, then there’s Doom 3. But I’m telling you, Doom.

Once you’ve established a trust with your mouse after surviving a tense situation like being stuck in a small room with imps, cacodemons, and lost souls with only a pistol… you’ll be friends for life.

Well, its life.

The only thing that’s bothering me at the moment is when you turn off the mouse or put the Mac to sleep, it doesn’t like to connect back up right away. Maybe this has only been my experience, but it seems to take forever. Unless I click the mouse a bunch of times, then it connects. Other than that, it’s been great.

Expensive, but great.

Website image capture software for OS X.

A while back I was looking for some software that could capture and save a web page to image. I came across a piece of freeware for OS X called Paparazzi which does exactly that — it takes a screenshot of an entire web page from top to bottom and allows you to save it to JPG, PNG, PDF, or TIFF.

Unfortunately, Paparazzi looks to be a bit outdated. The last update on the site was made in 2006 and the software itself is listed as supporting OS X 10.3 and higher. However it still works great, and I won’t discount the credibility and usefulness of a piece of software just because it’s older. It does what I need it to do.

Here’s nomgeek as an example. Keep in mind Flickr shrunk the image. Paparazzi does save in full size.

If anybody knows of any free software that’s more up to date and does the same thing, I’d love to know about it.

Paintbrush for Mac OS X

There are a few things that bother me about Apple and OS X. I’ve been a Mac user for almost three years, coming from a long history of Windows use. There were certain things I was used to having in a default installation of Windows. I’m not talking about those superficial things that most OS fanboys get caught up in arguing about. I’m talking about things that should be standard across all operating systems.

It goes both ways. There are things standard in Windows that I think should definitely be in OS X, and vise versa. One of those things is a standard, simple paint application. Something you can knock out a drawing in without dropping hundreds of dollars and wasting precious system resources on bloated software you’ll never use.

If Apple aren’t going to include it, fine. Surely there’s something out there that will suffice? Well, I found it. In only a matter of seconds, too. I’m amazed I found it so quickly, because I would thought I’d have found it long ago.

Paintbrush is exactly what I think Apple should include in OS X. And it’s exactly what I was looking for. It’s simple, it’s lightweight, and best of all it’s free. I’m a bit of a software junkie when it comes to OS X, and I really love when I find free stuff. Especially free stuff that’s really awesome.

The other thing that really bothers me about OS X is that all it comes with is Chess.app as far as games go. I know that as Mac users we’re supposed to be intellectual, creative, arty farty types who’d love the smell of Einstein’s shit, but… I’m still positive there are only two Mac users in existence who actually know how to play the damn game.

And now that got on the subject of games, I might as well share a game for OS X that I found a couple months ago. It’s called Quinn. What’s Quinn? It’s “A Tetromino Game for Mac OS X.”

…that means Tetris.