Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

I think I’ve spent more time playing games on my iPhone than I have on my old Playstation, Playstation 2 or Wii. It simply boils down to the fact that whenever I’m standing around waiting in a line, waiting for the train or in a dentist’s office, I can pull out my phone and have a quick game of something. Having a great choice of games in your pocket means you never need to be bored again while waiting around.

Here are my 21 favorite games to wait around with. The key common features for these games are that they’re quick to start playing and that you can achieve goals quickly with available playtime of as little as a minute. There are no long drawn out strategic battles, epic adventures or quests to get absorbed into.

Read more at The Apple Blog

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

“Audio Scrobbling,” as defined by Last.fm, is the act of submitting to a central database the details of what songs you’ve been listening to (what album, by who and when you listened). Scrobbling to Last.fm is the main reason I use the service these days, especially since it made the internet radio part of it a paid subscription only service for Australia. I think that being able to easily track and visualise my listening history and share that with friends is a great example of the social internet revolution.

There are a number of ways to have your music scrobbled to Last.fm from your Mac. Which one you chose depends on which fits into your music workflow the best. Read more at The Apple Blog

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

A friend brought to my attention the site bandcamp, which is really quite an awesome site for musicians of all sizes, easy to set up tracks and maintain a clean looking page with streaming and downloading capacities. While my really older stuff is just too low quality to put up there, I’ve created an account put my more recent stuff up in an album. More will follow; for the last six months I’ve been getting itchy feet with regards to developing some more music, I have some ideas and some new tools, the pressing issue is always time. Time is something that needs to be allocated and just done. Motivation is the key and this is rising. To be continued….

• abednarz.bandcamp.com

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve had a rant building up for a few weeks. A rant about developer’s treatment at the hands of the App Store submission procedure. However unlike many rants on the topic, mine is not directed towards Apple. It is directed towards the iPhone developers who complain about the poor, unfair treatment they get, carrying their bleeding hearts in their palms while claiming Apple is bludgeoning the life out of them.

Two recent news headlines, seemingly separate, are intrinsically tied together and the synergy of them have made my eyes dislocated from the continued rolling they involuntarily perform.

Read more at The Apple Blog.

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

Recently, Elgato released EyeTV for the iPhone (AppStore Link). At a cost of $4.99, its marketing blurb offers the following functionality:

With the EyeTV app, you can watch, record, and enjoy live and recorded TV on your iPhone or iPod touch. At last, you don‘t have to leave all your great TV shows at home; the EyeTV app puts the power of award-winning EyeTV in the palm of your hand.

The EyeTV app accesses EyeTV running on your Mac at home to deliver these great features to your iPhone:

• Watch live TV and change channels anywhere (Wi-Fi connection required)
• Watch your EyeTV recordings
• Browse the comprehensive Program Guide
• Start recordings back home on your Mac immediately or schedule them for later
• View and edit your recording schedules

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

There are few iPhone games that I will immediately buy. Most of the ones I do, however, are the classic games I played as a teenager.

The iPhone/iPod touch is more than powerful enough to handle these games and it seems that there are many people like me who are keen to experience these classics again. So, here’s a roundup of modern ports of classic games. Only official ports of classic games are detailed here — clones and the like do exist but I had to draw a line in the sand. I’ve also included links to Wikipedia for those interested in the history of the games

See the list at The Apple Blog

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

Smart Playlists in iTunes have always been a powerful way to create specific playlists to meet your needs, from creating a rotating fresh playlist for syncing to an iDevice to creating a specific playlist for a party. Being able to say “give me my music that hasn’t been played in the last month, that is of at least 320kbps and is rated 5 stars” is pretty sweet.

In iTunes 8 and earlier you could create all of these multiple rules and have them applied with a ‘match operator,’ which could be ALL (all rules have to match for a track to be included) or ANY (if any of the single rules apply the track will be included).

iTunes 9 has quietly and substantially expanded the level of complexity that you can create in these rules by allowing you to create nested rules. This lets you build up substantial logic with multiple ANY and ALL match operators being applied.

Read more at The Apple Blog

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

One of the most compelling new feature in Snow Leopard is Grand Central Dispatch, which can make it easier for developers to write software taking advantage of the multiple cores in our computers. On Sept., 10 Apple released the user library component of Grand Central to the open source community.

Read more at The Apple Blog

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

The open-source project team that released Sequel Pro 0.95 three months ago has just released 0.96. The update adds polish to the application, making working with it more pleasurable — if you can ever call working with databases pleasurable.

They’ve also added some new core functionality and optimized the backend. To me, this feels like more than a 0.01 update. With every update of Sequel Pro, the open-source project continues to close the gap between itself and commercial competitors such as Querious.

Read more at The Apple Blog

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

The Apple TV, as envisioned by Apple, is truly a very niche market device. You’re basically paying money for something that lets you pay more money to buy or rent music, movies and TV shows from the iTunes store. Sure, you can also stream content from iTunes on a computer, but when trying to stream from a central generic media device, the out of the box software just doesn’t cut it.

It is, however, possible to customize your Apple TV with unauthorized third party software (much like a jailbreak for iPhones/iPod touches) to transform it into a fantastic cheap media player (with certain limitations).

Read how at The Apple Blog