Rumor: 3G iPhone to sell for US$199 | The Apple Core | ZDNet.com

If this rumor doesn't end up being even remotely close to reality I'm going to be totally bummed...

Rumor: 3G iPhone to sell for US$199 | The Apple Core | ZDNet.com

we'll see, but if it's at that price point, I'm buying TWO!

Livescribe Smartpen

This just popped up on the radar on the IxDA List:

Livescribe - Pulse Smartpen

It looks pretty awesome, and almost magical if it lives up to its marketing description...

echominder: a home run from Intuit (and it's free!)

Being an ex-Intuit employee, I always like to keep tabs on stuff that they've been researching.

One of the coolest services that has come out of their research group is Echominder:

echominder

Here's a[n edited] description from the echominder site of how the service works:

scenario

you've got a flight tomorrow and just remembered you need to pick up your dry cleaning and set your out of office message. you're driving to work and can't stop to write it down, but echominder is in your speed dial:

• as you're driving home, call echominder and instruct it to have your cell phone ring at 4:30pm with a reminder to pick-up the dry cleaning.
• leave another message to call you at 8:00am tomorrow morning to remind you to turn on your out of office message on your computer before you shut down and leave for the airport.
• your phone rings right on time and you get the important things done.

I had actually been using a similar system before signing up for echominder: I'd call my voice mail at work to remind me to do certain things, but I would have to actually be in the office and then log into my voice mail to get the message.

Now that I've used echominder a few times, I've found it to be invaluable since it takes out the variables that caused my older methodology to break down:

1. Location: I don't have to be in the office, because echominder calls me wherever I am.
2. Timing: echominder calls me at the time I specify; I don't have to get a message and then remember to act on it at a particular time, or enter it into Outlook to remind me.
   

Great service. I just hope it doesn't get Zipingoed.

DomQuery for Windows Forms in .NET

Seems like it would be useful to be able to say, "Give me all the controls on this Windows Form that are check boxes," or add other critera and have the system return a collection of those objects that one could act upon.

Anyone know if such functionality exists?

Once again the last person on earth to hear about a cool application

How did Apple's Quartz Composer never come up on my radar? I had to find out about it from this post on CreateDigitalMusic.com:

Lily: Browser Beatboxes and the Rebirth of Max-Like Patching

...and that was posted in August of last year.

Anyway, here's the official Apple intro page for it, and QC looks very interesting.

Working with Quartz Composer

Additionally, it comes free with Apple's development tools on Mac OS X, so that makes it even better!

Here's a quote from CDM that I particularly liked:

First, Apple quietly acquired the developer of a little-known live visual/VJ app called Pixelshox, transformed it into a new app called Quartz Composer, made it part of the Mac OS X developer tools, and made it central to their UI efforts. One day, a tiny VJ app with a cult following, the next, central to Cupertino’s OS strategy? Interesting.

Mac OS X - Keyboard Shortcuts for Screen Captures

I had recalled that there were keyboard shortcuts for doing screen captures (instead of always using Grab). The following is from the Apple Help that describes how to do it. The important part is holding down the Control key so that the image goes to the clipboard instead of as a file on the desktop...

Shortcuts for taking pictures of the screen

Use these shortcuts to take pictures of the screen in Mac OS X.

• {Command}-Shift-3

Take a picture of part of the screen

• {Command}-Shift-4, then drag to select the area you want in the picture.
• To cancel, press Escape.

To Take a picture of a window, a menu, the menu bar, or the Dock.

• Press {Command}-Shift-4, then press the Space bar. Move the pointer over the area you want so that it's highlighted, then click.
• To drag to select the area instead, press the Space bar again.
• To cancel, press Escape.

Screen shots are saved as files on the desktop. If you want to put the screen shot in the Clipboard, rather than create a file, hold down the Control key when you press the other keys. You can then paste the picture into a document.

I just needed this in a convenient spot that I could reference later (i.e. here).

Dilbert goes Agile!

Dilbert - November 26, 2007