A vote for me is a vote for me not asking you to vote for me anymore
Hey guys. Thanks to you, I am now in FIRST PLACE in the iPhone contest, so thanks a lot! You guys rock!
Click above to vote for me.
However, as seemingly insurmountable as my lead looks, it is by NO MEANS a lock, so let’s not get lazy. My primary competition seems to be mounting a last-minute effort with 5 hours left to go, so I need your help. Please let everyone on the planet you have ever met know that the fate of the free world depends on me winning that iPhone. At this point, it is really almost as much about me avoiding the embarrassment of losing than actually winning. I really didn’t expect to be able to catch up so quickly in such a short time, but now that I have, it would really be kind of embarrassing to lose such a lead.
So please, tell your super popular friends, brothers and sisters to take 5 seconds out of their busy day and vote for my video. It will save me from entering a downward depression spiral which might cause me to forget where I placed all those Mac Chick of the Month entries…
Who wants to win a 2-year old, lime green iPhone?!?!
[UPDATE: Yes, I DID win, and yes, I DID get my prize, and yes, I DID pick a winner of the green iPhone, and NO, it was not you, sorry, it was faithful Macenstein reader Danielle (twitter @bookophile ) who won. Thanks for helping me out though, I am sure the 3Gs I won will bring you many months of joy in reading about it.]
[UPDATE: Hey guys, looks like I won, thanks so much for your help! I will be picking a winner of the lime green iPhone once they send me the prize, so it may be a week or two, but hold tight. Thanks again! You guys rock.
- The Doc ]
Hey guys, me again. Well, I must say I am both very proud and very touched by those of you who were nice enough to vote for my iPhone video with no thought of personal gain. In just 6 short hours we went from last place to third, an amazing feat.
Yet one that ultimately will mean nothing unless we capture first place.
I find myself wondering about the 9600 or so of my daily readers who did Not take the 10 seconds out of their lives to CLICK THIS LINK AND VOTE FOR MY VIDEO, even though it requires no registration or other effort on their part. “WTF is their problem?”, I thought.
But then it hit me… Odds are most of my readers are just like me – selfish bastards who don’t do anything nice for anyone without there being something in it for them. So to that end, I thought I might sweeten the deal by offering to reward one lucky reader who helps me get the word out about my entry with my 1st generation, Colorware-painted iPhone (if I should win, that is).
That’s right. If you’ve ever wanted 2 year old cellular technology, painted lime green, then you’re going to want to jump all over this!
Above: I have long since ruined those earbuds, but I think I have the dock somewhere too…
So, how do you get a chance to win? It’s easy! Just Twitter the following bit of text to your friends some time between now and 9:59PM pacific tome on July 31st.
“Hey guys, please vote for my good friend @drmacenstein http://rubyurl.com/HXWO and help me win an iPhone”
If I should win, I will pick one random person from all elligible Twitters and reward that person with my old iPhone. You may Twitter that message up to 10 times in order to earn extra chances to win (I’d appreciate it if you spread your Tweets out a bit throughout the day, but whatever).
Now, I won’t lie to you, this iPhone is two years old and has seen some use, but aside from 2 very small paint chips on the black bezel, the Colorware paint job looks as good as the day I got it, and the phone is in great shape. The paint job is really amazingly durable.
I paid $600 for this iPhone on launch day 2 years ago, and it is sporting a $220 paint job, so I figure that, combined with being owned by a celebrity of my stature, puts the value of the phone somewhere around $20,000 or so, so this is probably the most exciting giveaway of all time.
So thanks for you help, good luck to us all, and now get out there and Tweet like the wind!
A vote for me is a vote against crap
Attention faithful Macenstein readers. I need your help. I recently stumbled upon a contest sponsored by Sorenson (makers of the Squeeze compression utility) where users upload a video describing the one feature they’d most like to see added to the iPhone, and the video with the most votes wins an iPhone 3Gs. I noticed most entries are fairly lame, so I made a slightly less lame one, and just uploaded it.
Click above to vote for me.
We all have our own list of “missing features” on the iPhone, but for me the one that tops my list is that no other music apps are able to run as a background process on the iPhone. Apple reserves that right only for the iPod app, which means if you are listening to Slacker, Pandora or AOL radio and want to check your mail or open a web page or play a game, the music has to stop. So the feature I would most like to see added is allowing background processes for ALL music apps. When I had my iPhone jailbroken I could do this and it worked perfectly, and is probably the one thing I miss most since UNjailbreaking my iPhone for the 3.0 software, and likely the biggest reason I will REJailbreak my iPhone.
Anyway, it would be great if you could cast a vote for my video. Again, it isn’t the best thing I ever made, but I at least spent 2 hours on it, which seems like 1 hour and 58 minutes more than anyone else’s entry. My only fear is I have entered the contest too late, as I only have 1 and a half days to get enough votes to win, so I need your help. A vote for me is a vote against crap.
Thank you.
Dear Apple: Please invent something else, I am sick of writing about the iPhone
The biggest benefit to writing an Apple-related blog is that traditionally your readers are as obsessed about what you are writing as you are. If you have even a remotely interesting opinion, even wrong ones like mine, you can quickly build a loyal following of faithful readers who are dying to read about even the most irrelevant piece of minutia, as long as it is Apple-related. The biggest drawback, however, is that Apple releases only about 1 new product every 2 years, and only 1 or 2 minor updates to its existing products in that same time period. This scenario leaves you with a ravenous audience, but not much to feed them.
It’s all about the iPhone
Judging from the various online news and rumor sites, the iPhone, now a year old, is still all anyone wants to talk about. A quick check of Digg’s upcoming Apple section shows a ridiculous 90% of stories involves the iPhone. Sites such as MacRumors and AppleInsider likewise fill their pages with predominantly iPhone-related goodies. From the amount of media attention surrounding the iPhone these days, you would think more than 5.4 million people owned one. And while I could write 5 articles a day focusing on iPhone-related “news”, quite frankly I am sick of it. I am officially burnt out on writing about the iPhone. I own one, I love it, I even occasionally dress mine in my daughter’s Barbie outfits and make out with it (did I just type that?) but I’ll be damned if I want to write about it.
Not much on the horizon
Unfortunately, the future looks grim for this blogger. If Apple IS bothering to make any new hardware (aside from the next version of the iPhone) they have been able to keep the rumor sites distracted by the barrage of iPhone news and leaks. Nothing promising, innovative, or drool-worthy looks to be on the immediate horizon aside from the requisite storage/speedbumps to the MacBooks and iPods. No flying cars, Apple-branded Segways, or touchscreen digital cameras with 3D holographic displays. Just speedbumps, and an OS update that will pretty much just speed up the current OS.
So please, Apple. Invent something cool today. And if you already have something cool in your basement, let up a little on the security detail there – just a little – just enough to let some blurry pictures begin circulating on 9to5Mac. I’m DYING over here.
Random prize: Send us your local Apple Store Network screengrabs and get a free iTunes gift card
Filed under: Free Stuff, News, Slow News Day, contests, throw us a bone
Man, it’s hard to find free help these days! I wanted to check out the amount and kinds of computers on display at various Apple Stores across the country, and figured the best way would be to ask Apple Store shoppers to send me screengrabs of the “Shared” window on whatever computer they were using. A quick Google search turned up hundreds of Apple Retail Store (ars) iChat addresses, so I added a bunch to my buddy list, and patiently waited for them to come online. Unfortunately, the results of this exercise were both humbling (no one knows who Dr. Macenstein is) and frustrating (of the few people who responded to me, they were more or less all #%@heads claiming to be too busy or scared I was asking them to do something illegal).
Here’s a sample conversation: (While I admit I wasn’t the most tactful I have ever been, I had already had 12 other conversations slip away. This guy could have sent 20 grabs in the time this took him to grill me…) Read more
New “unlimited” iPhone plan has same old embarrassing SMS limits
Filed under: Not Cool, Opinion, WTF, iPhone, throw us a bone, whining
As someone with no friends, the basic 450 minute iPhone calling plan with its 200 text messages is more than adequate for my needs. However, each time I go to the movies (by myself) I notice the throngs of teens (with friends) text messaging each other, quite often texting the person sitting next to them. 
It actually seems these days that text messaging is more important in a phone than the actual ability to make a call.
Because of this, I find it odd that AT&T’s newly announced Unlimited iPhone Calling Plan offers no boost at all in the amount of monthly text messages one can send/receive each month. In fact, looking across the iPhone rate plans, spending $60 more per month gets you nothing but more minutes. You would think that paying DOUBLE the price of the basic plan might at the very least double the amount of text messages to (a still pathetic) 400 messages, but no.
Of course, they do call it the “Unlimited CALLING Plan”, so I suppose they aren’t misleading anyone into thinking they should be getting anything mother than more minutes, but it just seems like an ass-backwards plan for such an “ass frontwards” device like the iPhone.
Adobe misses its first Leopard compatibility deadline
Filed under: Opinion, Software, Updates, WTF, throw us a bone, whining
“We expect to publish free Leopard compatibility updates for the video applications in December 2007″ – Adobe
Remember back right around the time when Leopard was due to be released, Adobe put out this PDF meant to scare educate potential Leopard buyers as to possible incompatibilities between Apple’s new OS and Adobe’s CS3 Suite of apps? In it, Adobe assured us that “Thanks to close collaboration between Adobe and Apple, most of the CS3 applications and associated technologies, such as Adobe Bridge CS3, Version Cue CS3, and Device Central CS3, are compatible with Mac OS X Leopard without requiring additional updates.” Great. Because I can’t live without Version CueCS3.
But what about those OTHER apps, you know, the ones people BUY? Well, Adobe put out a timeline for when we could expect to receive full Leopard compatibility, and unfortunately, unless we see a couple releases in the next 7 hours, it looks like they missed their first self-imposed deadline. Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional was slated to be released in late January 2008, so we’ll assume Adobe’s still good to go on that front. However, Premiere Pro CS3, After Effects CS3 Professional, Encore CS3, and Soundbooth CS3 were all supposed to receive updates in “December 2007″.
So how’d they do?
Well, I suppose 2 out of 4 ain’t bad, assuming you are a user of the 2 apps that got updated (Premiere and Soundbooth). Unfortunately, as an After Effects user, I’m SOL.
Now, I don’t want to sound like an After Effects elitist here (although After Effects is the best app Adobe makes, and I am the best AE user ever born) but what’s the hold up? Why is Adobe dragging its feet on After Effects, and at the same time putting even an ounce of effort into Premiere and Soundbooth, 2 apps no one has ever used?
OK, obviously I am just venting, I am sure some Mac user has used those apps and prefers to use them their Apple equivalents (cough). However, the latest mention of a Leopard update for AE (the fabled 8.02) on the AE beta forums is dated November 27th. How about keeping us in the loop, Adobe?
Anyone have a blogads invite?
Posted by Dr. Macenstein
We hear this “internet thing” is catching on, and that in theory, people can make money from their lame sites. Or at least make enough money to keep them going. Being the type of business people we are (namely, poor starving artists), Macenstein is, as you might expect, hemorrhaging money.
Someone recently told us we should be using blogads to bring in the dough, but upon checking out their site, we see they are invitation only, meaning we’d need a current blogads site to “invite” us. I’m not sure how crazy the demand for blogads invites is, so I don’t know if anyone just gives out invites just for the sake of being awesome, but if any blogads user is reading this and wants to throw us a frickin’ bone, we’d be their BFF.
Thanks!
-The Doc
