Something I didn't notice before, mainly because I don't post that many movies for encoding by Posterous, but Posterous encodes movies in a way that they are viewable in your iPhone (H.264 quicktime, I guess). I only noticed it because my wife was viewing a clip on her iPhone, and that was from a posterous link I sent her earlier (see the post below for the funny movie). I thought huh, I didn't send her a youtube link.. Nope, it was Posterous!
This is just friggin' cool! And with autopost extended to vimeo, youtube etc posterous is THE gateway for everything internet.Thanks guys!
Edit: I should have checked the official posterous blog, since they just announced this.. d'oh!
The dutch apple news site MacFreak has a small news article about a new european Apple clone maker named PearC. They offer Leopard pre-installed clones in a case that looks quite similar to the MacPro cases, but not really. Their argument for creating and distributing the clones is that the Apple EULA isn't valid in europe because it cannot be read in advance (before opening the package). That's an interesting take on a legal tidbit, and I leave it up to Apple, PearC and the EU to judge if this is indeed true.
But that's not the point of my post. I discussed this with a good friend and co-geek before, and what is noticable is that there is a huge gap in the Apple line-up. Yes, what Apple needs is a mid-range computer between the iMac and MacPro. It should have more possibilities than the iMac, but should not be as extensive and expensive as the MacPro. There is the Quadcore MacPro (default config €2299,-), but that is still too expensive: personally I'd like to have a quadcore computer, with 2.93GHz cpu, 8 gigs of RAM, a 1TB harddisk and an ATI GPU. But when I configure the basic macpro like that it'll cost me €2800,-- ! The high end iMac makes it even more expensive since 8 Gig RAM in 2x4G slices is extremely expensive. So, a computer with 3 or 4 memory slots would be a great option.
For the next iteration of apple hardware updates, I hope they will leave the quadcore macpro intact, except using Intel i7 CPUs, and drop the price of the standard configuration well below €2000 (€1899 is a nice price). Still more expensive than a clone, but I'm happy to pay a little more for the design and component quality (also case). But not a lot more like currently is the case.
Until that is done, the clone makers actually have a business case that may work for them, selling quality products for better money than the Apple offerings. Maybe Apple will create new iMacs that will have 3 or 4 memory slots, that would actually convince me to get an iMac, but currently the offering is not tempting enough (I value RAM higher than raw CPU speed).
The 3rd party Push notifications have been announced two years ago, and are finally available for general use in iPhone OS 3. Apple has put up push notifications as an alternative to multitasking, mainly because multi-tasking apps running in the background would drain your battery quicker and multi-tasking would use more memory.
Well, it is a fact that the more apps you are running simultanious, the more memory is used. And yes, especially if an application is polling the network for new messages, that can consume battery life quite quickly.
So, push notifications is the solution and holy grail for iPhone users.
Now, back into real life. I installed Worldvoice, a "radio" application that uses push for notifications of new "broadcasts" and such. So I switched on the push notifications and played around with the application a bit. I then switched the app off and pretty soon, a push message was shown. Cool. I got bored with it, and switched off the individual notification settings for Worldvoice. The general Push setting remained "on" (because I forgot about it) - see screenshot.
After half a day, I noticed that my iphone battery indicator dropped significantly more than I am used to.
Did some more tests during a few days and yes, even though you're not actually receiving any push notifications, just having the push notification enabled makes that your battery drains quite a bit quicker than usual. Because the connection to the push server and phone is open constantly.
I am now wondering if this push is actually such a good idea. It drains battery, even without using it. This is with only one app, with very few updates. If you have three or four apps, with a lot of updates (say a twitter client with notifications for DMs and Mentions, and an MSN client with notifications for messages, etc), I think your battery will be gone after a few hours. That sucks, and I think is not much different than just run the apps in the background, really.
Do more people have the above experience (or not?) and willing to share their opinion?