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As I mentioned last time, the Genius feature finally improved to a point that I can use it regularly. It’s still not perfect, but at least it works not only for my English-language songs but also some Chinese-language songs as well. The Newest addition last year was Genius Mix, which was cool at first but quickly fall out of favor. The main complaint was that you can’t control it at all! not how many songs in the mix, not what is in the mix, or even how …

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Another year, another Apple Store opening in Manhattan.  I went to the 5th Ave Store opening a while back, but missed the Meatpacking District Store because of work.  This time the opening was on a Saturday, naturally I went despite have to get up early on a Saturday!  Most people don’t get what is the big deal.  To me it’s the energy and the atmosphere that drew me to it.  The enthusiasm is not just from the staffs – they definitely are all pumped up because come on, 220 out …

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From the moment it was announced, I knew I have to get my hands on the Magic Mouse! Well, to be fair I would love to get my hands on every single hardware that was announced by Apple on that same day, especially the 27″ iMac! But for now, Magic Mouse is the easiest target!
It was available for people to play with in the Apple Store immediately but none of them actually have it in stock for you to buy until this week. Today I finally got one from …

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Last time I talked about Twitter Apps, I used Tweetie on the desktop while Twitterrific 2 for the iPhone.  This week I switched to Tweetie 2 for the iPhone once it came out!  There’s no free version on the iPhone, unlike the desktop, so why would I want to pay 3 bucks for a Twitter app when there’s a million free ones out there?  It all started with when the one person developer of Tweetie announced that Tweetie 2 will not be a free upgrade but a paid app.  (yes, …

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A few years back I was tagged to show my desktop, that was when I was still using my Powerbook G4 as my main computer.  It’s fun to show off the desktop because it also preserved a piece of your own computer history.  Anyway, lately I found this site called Minimal Mac and was extremely impressed by ways to simplify your desktop to look good, I followed some advice there and clean up my desktop a bit.  Now many on that site go to the extreme end to have absolutely …

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The new Genius function in iTunes 9 surprises me, but first, a little bit of history:
When the Genius Playlist function come out last year in iTunes 8, it was an alright feature for me.  The selection from Genius at first wasn’t too good, but improved over time.  But there’s always a problem I have with it is the lack of support of Chinese songs.  Granted there’s no Chinese iTunes Music Store, so there’s technically no songs in the iTunes Store that has Chinese character, hence there shouldn’t be able to …

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When the App Store opened a year ago, apps were fairly easy to impress their audiences. I remember I was showing around the shake the roulette feature of UrbanSpoons because it was cool. Now more than a year later, an app need to be even more fun and appealing in not only the presentation but content as well. A recent discovery is an another restaurants app by the site UrbanDaddy called The Next Move. The presentation is top notch! Just like UrbanSpoons it also has a …

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Upgrading to Snow Leopard was suppose to be the easiest, most pain-free upgrade in the history of OSX, and yet it is the first time I encounter an upgrade error since I have my first mac back in the Panther era (Spring of 2005). There’s no 100% pain-free upgrade, there bound to be a few unlucky individuals that will encounter some hiccups, it’s just I didn’t expect I would be the one after two previous completely smooth OS upgrades when there was a lot more people encountering problems back …

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The biggest feature about the iPhone 3G S is performance.  Everything seems to come up instantly in comparison to my first-gen iPhone.  3G network performance though, various from street to street.  In some places it doesn’t feel any bit better than the EDGE on my old iPhone.  In most cases it’s better, the location apps pick up info and load much faster, so is the map.  Games loaded way better in terms of performance, especially the 3D and driving ones.
Real feature-wise, spotlight search and copy-cut-paste are welcoming additions to the …

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Now how can I have a new gadget and not have unboxing pictures? Even though technically it was already open in the Apple Store during the activation process, but my awesome personal shopper was extremely careful and handle everything in the box as little as possible, so it’s in mint condition even for the machine itself since the cover plastic is still on the screen.

Here are the unboxing pictures, notice the last one is taken by the iPhone 3GS at my old first-gen iPhone…