Oliver Siodmak’s Rants & Raves

Thanks to Digg I stumbled across a really great Mac program for capturing notes, thoughts, ideas, etc. It is called Journler. The donationware program allows you to capture text, emails, images, video using a simple interface. Items can be tagged for easy retrieval. With Journler you don’t have to struggle to get all your thoughts and ideas organized. Through the use of Smart Folders, you can use the program to help filter and organize all the information you have captured. By grouping Smart Folders inside other Smart Folders you can create Smart Families (tiered filtering). The “child” folders immediately take on the filtering characteristics of the “parent” folders. By moving folders around you change the filtering criteria. It is really quite ingenious.

Since Journler is donationare (i.e., if you like it you can make a donation to the developer, Philip Dow) take a moment to download it and give it a try. To download the program or learn more about the program, check out Journler.com

Edwin Tofslie has created a very simple image that visually illustrates the evolution of Apple’s products from the Apple I to the newly announced iPhone.  Viewing all the images I find myself saying, “I owned that, used that, owned that … “.

You can check out the image at Tolfslie.com

Microsoft is changing the game .. or should I say, the table!

Check out the TABLE!

From time to time I find myself utilizing YouTube.com’s services but I have never found myself scanning its pages for user submitted gems. That may change now that Apple has upgraded AppleTV with a YouTube browse feature. The software upgrade took about 10 minutes and after a short reboot I was able to scan hundreds of videos that have been converted into Apple’s H.264 format.

What was really cool was the ability to log into my personal YouTube account from AppleTV and view all the videos I have previously marked as favorites.

I was watching episode #186 of GeekBrief.TV (Hi Cali) and she quickly mentioned that Apple’s latest photos of the iPhone now show a black cover on the bottom back portion of the unit. Earlier this week Apple announced several improvements to the iPhone including a glass panel (vs the previous plastic) on the front and longer battery life but they didn’t mention the addition of a replaceable battery. If the latest version of the phone does sport a replaceable battery I am hoping this carries over to the iPod line as a whole.