Jason Poole

I guess it has been almost a year ago that Mac Heist 3 took place (I think it started in January and ended in March) and it is a great bundle of apps for a very low price. If you have a Mac, make sure to visit the Mac Heist site and sign up for the newsletter…  you don’t want to to miss out on the great deal.

Anyway, this is really not about Mac Heist…   it kind of is in a round about way. In the bundle of great applications that was in Mac Heist 3, there was a great tool called BoinxTV. With this application, you can make broadcast quality video transitions and effects that will rival multi-million dollar studios. This software is somewhat expensive with a sponsor edition costing $199 and a full version costing $499. Back to Mac Heist for a moment to let you know what a deal I got, I paid $37 for 13 applications, with one of them being BoinxTV.

I don’t know about your financial situation, but $499 is not in the budget for a hobby item, let alone $199. So where does the common hobbyist go to find an affordable solution to video production? Well, while looking through the documentation on the Boinx site about streaming to the internet (link), I found a pretty good solution with CamTwist.

This is a very cool application with a very cool price point…  free. You can do just about anything that a big production studio can do right on you Mac.  I am using is with a 3 year old MacBook Pro and it works very well. In the above picture, you can see a guy named Benjamin Higginbotha who does an excellent podcast call Space Vidcast, and he does some great screencasts of how to use CamTwist Studio.

I played around with the application for a few hours last night and I was totally blown away. I kept asking myself, how could you give this away for free. I will be producing a show over the next couple of days and I will use CamTwist for video switching and effects. It can make an amateur look like a pro.

While listening to the TWIT #225 (This Week in Tech) podcast Jason Calacanis of www.mahalo.com mentioned a new service that is similar to Four Square. Basically, these site allow people, using there GPS enabled phone, like the iPhone or Droid, and update their location in hopes to meet up with similar interest people. They also let you earn special achievements for checking in at certain locations and how often you check in. That is the very simplified explanation of the services.

One of the issues with Four Square is that you need to be in a location that is listed in their city list. This is great for people that are in a metro area like San Fransisco, Los Angeles and New York, but what about people outside of the metro area. This is where Gowalla really differs. Gowalla does not require you to be in a city area. In fact, you can really be anywhere.

Gowalla allows you to mark your location and you can earn rewards for visiting other’s spots. There is a possibility to earn special stamps for visiting certain locations or completing certain check-in tasks. Check out the site by clicking the logo and explore.  It could be a lot of fun.

NOTE: Those of you that are familiar with the Pack Rat collection game on Facebook will notice that the look of Gowalla is very reminiscent. That is because it is from the same developers of the Facebook game, Alamofire. As with the Pack Rat game, this is somewhat of a collection games as well. If you like Pack Rat, you should like Gowalla.

I purchased the Droid on December 1st, 2009 and I had very high expectations of this phone (handheld computer with built in phone). I was replacing my Blackberry Storm which was only 9 months old, but I was very disappointed in the performance of the Storm, even with the OS upgrade to 5.0. After having the Droid for about 3 weeks, I can honestly say that this is the best phone I have ever owned.

The first thing that you notice about this phone is the screen. You need to see the screen for yourself in real life, because words cannot do it justice. It is beautiful and I was very impressed. Google maps looks incredible and Google’s navigation system is better than my standalone GPS.

Another thing that really impressed me was the Google search feature, more to the point, the voice recognition search. It is rare for the system to get words wrong and usually if does, the search is close enough to find what I am looking for. It does a phone and Google search, so if you are looking for a number in your phone book, you can just say call (say name).

Ok, so what’s not to like about this phone. My biggest complain is that it only has three screens for quick launch icons or widgets. The screens are split up into a grid of 4 x 4 boxes, each icon taking a box.  Most widget take up more than one box, like the Google search, for instance, takes up 4 boxes. Three custom screens is just not enough. Also, scrolling from one screen to the next is choppy and a little slow. This slowness does no take away from the phone experience, but takes a little getting use to.

I was a little concerned when I heard that the phone only had 256MB for applications. All I could remember form the advertisements was that the phone cam with a 16GB memory card, that that 16GB is use mainly for videos and music. I think that the concern for space was all for not.  I have loaded up my phone with quite a few apps and I still have over 160MB free.

All-in-all, I love this phone and being on the Verizon network makes it even better. Sure, the iPhone is a better phone (not by much), but AT&T is a horrible provider. I traveled to Cupertino, California for business and I had great service from Verizon, but I had a few iPhone owners that dropped calls or just could not get service. If the iPhone would have been on Verizon, I would probably have one, but if I were to come out now for Verizon, I would stick with my Droid.