iPhone

Sep 6 2010

Watts battery maintenance and calibration

So, in my last video, I showed you the test that Mac service techs run to determine whether a battery has failed or not and, sure enough, mine had. It was covered under warranty which was good news and the new battery arrived the next day, so it all was rather painless.

Now that I have a brand spankin’ new battery, I’d like to try to give it a better chance for survival than my previous one, so I’m going to be running Watts to keep me on schedule for regular charging and draining of the battery so that it gets some regular use. Batteries need to be used, not just charged and will deteriorate faster if they are left constantly tethered to an AC adapter.1

What Watts does is keeps you on a schedule of charges and discharges of you battery to give it a good run once in a while and allow your Mac to see how much charge it actually holds so that it can more efficiently and accurately use and display its capacity.

No Flash?»

Watts sells for just $6.95, which makes it a desktop application at an iPhone app price. You could save that money and just set up some iCal alarms but, who are we kidding, you’re just going to ignore those anyway. Paying a little money is almost like betting yourself $6.95 that this time you’re not going to burn out your battery through improper use.

  1. and really, what’s the point of having a Mac portable with wireless internet f you’re just going to keep it tied to a wall like a watchdog on a chain—let it free!! [↩]

By RickMacMerc • MacMerc.TV, Mini Video, RickMacMerc, troubleshooting • 2 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 31 2010

Photographer skins his iPhone 4 as a Leica M9

4946299399 a0cee67139 318x211 Photographer skins his iPhone 4 as a Leica M9

San Francisco photographer, Joey Celis ( @joeyjoeyjoey ) has turned his iPhone 4 into a Leica M9 with this ingenious skin. I had to look this up, not being a photography geek, but the M9 is “the world’s most compact full-format digital camera system” according to Leica. So, I would imagine that this skin would be highly sought after by every iPhone-4-using Leica fan.

With this skin, the photographic “business end” of the iPhone 4 is quite convincing as the compact M9 at a passing glance and can actually take pictures…although, not from the Leica’s lens. If you follow along with Celis’ iPhone 4 Leica M9 conversion photo set on Flickr, you’ll see how it looks in the wild as well as its humble beginnings as a Photoshop document.

While, at first, Celis had no plans to produce the skin for sale, response has been so positive that he posted this along with the picture you see above hinting that ordering information would be on the way soon:

Been getting lots of emails on when I’ll be taking orders for the Leica M9 skin and I think I finally settled on how I would like to release this and it will be in the form of donations to NF1 .

I’ll post information here and here once I skin the other phone.

Stay tuned and thanks for the support!

  1. Neurofibromatosis [↩]

By RickMacMerc • elsewhere, Geek News, Graphics News, iPhone, News, photography • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 30 2010

Mover Lite …transfer pics and contacts between iPhone, iPad and Mac

Mover Lite is the FREE version of Infinite Labs’ Mover+.1

The app runs on the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and allows you to transfer contacts and photos between your iDevices over wifi. With a 99¢ add-on to the Lite app, you can also transfer those files to your desktop Mac running Mover Connect.

If you want to be able to transfer files between your devices when they’re not connected to wifi, Mover+ allows for connectivity and transfer over Bluetooth for $1.99.

I’ve found that the app runs very well between two devices, but can get a bit confused when you have three devices, like a Mac, an iPad and an iPhone, all connected as I show in the video. It works, but confusion is a possibility.

Mover has come in handy for me many times when I just wanted to transfer a photo and I don’t want to have to go through the trouble of emailing it to myself or some other such procedure.

No Flash? No problem—click here!»

As mentioned in the video, the iPad stand I’m using is the BookArc for iPad from Twelve South. It’s a nice sturdy metal stand that securely holds the iPad in either landscape or portrait2 orientations. It sells for around $45.

Mover Lite …transfer pics and contacts between iPhone, iPad and Mac
  1. I’m actually using Mover+ in the video, but I’m pushing Mover Lite here since it’s the FREE introductory app [↩]
  2. or even diagonal, if that’s how you roll [↩]

By RickMacMerc • Featured, gadgets, iOS, iPad, iPhone, iPod, MacMerc.TV, Mini Video, productivity • 1 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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