Draft

Aug 26 2010

NetFlix instant streaming movies to your iPhone …awesomeness?

17200v1 max 450x4501 NetFlix instant streaming movies to your iPhone …awesomeness?The Mac web, or more specifically, the iPhone web is buzzing about Netflix for iPhone today. This is huge for NetFlix subscribers who find themselves in need of on-demand entertainment as it allows them to instantly watch movies and TV shows from the service’s vast selection of titles streamed from their servers directly to the iPhone’s screen.

Since I’m in Canada and still awaiting the arrival of the promised NetFlix service, I have to go by second-hand accounts. Mel Martin from TUAW says…

The new iPhone version has excellent image quality, supports fast forwarding and rewinding of the video stream, and like other incarnations of Netflix, allows you to pick up where you left off if you stop a movie and restart it. As Netflix members will appreciate, you can pause a movie you are watching on a Netflix device at home, and start the movie on the iPhone app and it will resume at the same place.

GeekSugar has a very helpful word of warning: make sure you use the app when you’re connected to wifi or expect a huge cell phone bill.

Like I said, I can’t try the app—I wish I could. Just based on the buzz and the strong potential for a service like this in the marketplace, I have to assume this is awesomeness.

By RickMacMerc • apps, iPhone, News • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 18 2010

Dial back your iPhone 3G or 3GS to a previous iOS

As mentioned before, iOS 4.0 on the 3G iPhone is not awesome—it’s slow, over heated, quickly drains the battery and is generally unstable. And though Apple is apparently aware of the problems and is working on fixing the situation, the rest of us need to get stuff done in the meantime.

My friend, Mike Bjorndal ( @mbjorndal ) pointed me to this iHackintosh article that allowed me to put my iPhone in DFU mode, restore an older firmware and boot back out of DFU mode again. After restoring my apps and settings in iTunes, I was back in business with a faster 3G iPhone experience running an older firmware.

Keep in mind, many of the apps you may be running now might require iOS 4.x and will be inaccessible from an older version of the OS. I take no responsibility for any lost data. Backup and then backup again…and then reconsider doing this hack.

By RickMacMerc • News • 4 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 10 2010

Flipboard + Twitter Lists

In this video, I’m taking a look at a little known fact within a little known fact about the free media consumption app for the iPad, Flipboard:

1) You can add each of your Twitter Lists to Flipboard as a separate Sections and…

2) You can add people to your Twitter Lists that you don’t actually follow on Twitter

    This means that you can group together dozens of Twitter feeds in a single list that would otherwise bog down your Twitter stream and add the list to Flipboard and read them all in Flipboard’s magazine-style format. It also means that, since most website post links to their latest articles on Twitter, you can read any such website in Flipboard as if it had its own Section simply by giving it its own list in Twitter. This can also come in handy for people who post a lot of content to Twitter, but so much so that it floods your feed and makes it overwhelming—don’t follow them, add them to a list and make them a Section of Flipboard.

    No Flash? No problem—click here!»

    I don’t think I’ll be reading my main Twitter stream on Flipboard as much as I’ll be using it to consume these other sources of content—the ones I don’t actually follow.

    How do you use Flipboard? Found any cool tricks? Leave a comment and let me know!!

    By RickMacMerc • apps, Featured, iPad, macmerc, MacMerc.TV, Mini Video, Social Networking • 4 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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