JimD's blog

AT&T has just acquired T-Mobile USA for $39 billion. Lawmakers will have to approve the deal, but if they do it will move AT&T past Verizon as the largest US carrier.

Apple stands to gain a lot with the deal, potentially increasing its possible customer base to over 130 million customers.

When you talk about search on the Internet, you're probably talking about Google. Sure, Bing is slowly creeping-in to the discussion, but it's an outsider at best. The problem with searching on Google is relevant results. You don't always get them.

Google is pretty good at bringing you accurate search results, but those results are often times tainted by the fact that people who create web pages have gotten much better about their SEO efforts over the years, thus littering the search results with historical clutter. If you're searching for pages on a particularly recent subject matter that happens to have a long history on the web, you're likely to be presented with results that can be years old mixed-in with the pages that were just created yesterday.

Enter NowRelevant.com - where no matter what you search for, only the last two weeks worth of pages are shown in the results. If you're searching for historical data, this probably won't interest you. But if you're looking for current information and trending topics, NowRelevant offers a mighty attractive alternative to Google and Bing.

I've played around with NowRelevant for a week or two and found it to be quite useful. The results are accurate, timely and presented in an uncluttered manner.

Google's Advanced Search allows you to limit the number of results by date as well, but to give you an idea of the difference between the two, you need only search for a popular topic. For my testing purposes, I did a search for "iTunes." I chose iTunes because I knew how popular it was and that there would likely be tons of results.

Google turned up over 75 MILLION results in the last 24-hours. NowRelevant turns up 784,808 results. While even that sounds crazy for only a 24-hour period, Google's 75 million is clearly out of whack.

NowRelevant certainly poses no threat to Google or even Bing. But if you're looking for more recent search results, give NowRelevant a try.

With the recent announcement of Creative Suite 5 by Adobe this past week, and the subsequent complaining that always seems to accompany such an announcement, I thought I would type-up a quick complaint letter that interested people can copy & paste into an email and send off to Adobe. Perhaps if those of you who aren’t happy with the direction Adobe is going in send this letter to them, they’ll completely toss 20+ years of successful software into the bin and start over from scratch!

Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone provides users a simple way to view photos with full-screen previews and edit images with gesture-based editing. You can transform your photos with basic editing tools like crop, rotate and flip; as well as adjust color with saturation and tint tools, enhance exposure and vibrancy and convert images to black and white.

You can read more about it here.

While I can't say that there's a huge desire by any designer to do photo editing for client work on their iPhone or iPod Touch, it's nice to see even basic editing arrive on our favorite Apple pocket device!

Download here: http://mobile.photoshop.com/iphone/

XtraLean Software is pleased to announce its fifth annual Father's Day Sale, offering Mac Dads a chance to treat themselves to two fantastic Mac OSX applications that make life on the Web a little easier at half price.

From June 19 to June 21, users can get ShutterBug and/or ImageWell for a 50% discount using the special links below, no fussy coupon codes to enter!

• ShutterBug, $19.95 (reg. $39.95) CAD, is a website creation tool that helps users create and publish custom built websites easily through a WYSIWYG interface. Requires OSX 10.3.9 or higher.
  
  
• ImageWell, $9.95 (reg. $19.95) CAD, is an image editor that lets users quickly and easily edit, crop, and resize with the click of a button. Requires OSX 10.4 or higher.

I've been a long-time user of ImageWell for its ease-of-use and one-click uploading of my edited images to servers (FTP, SFTP, MobileMe, Flickr, SmugMug or ImageShack). The developers are quick to respond to questions and suggestions via the support forums, and the software runs smoothly on any supported Mac. Visa, Mastercard, AmEx and PayPal are accepted, and demos are available.

It's time for another Graphic Mac Rant. Back in February, I went off on Apple's lack of menu bar customization. Today, just one day after Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), I have a whole new dump truck to unload on you - covering the cry-baby, booger-eating, Apple complainers flooding the interwebs about everything released and announced at WWDC. You can read the rant here.

It seems Apple just can't win with some people!

There's nothing funnier than hearing someone singing a song and clearly getting the lyrics wrong. Friends don't let friends sing out-loud to begin with, but they kick you in the throat if you sing it wrong!

iClip Lyrics is a fantastic little application that won't prevent the loss of your friends, but will prevent them from kicking you in the throat.

iClip works seamlessly with iTunes on the Mac. Once installed, you simply open both iClip Lyrics and iTunes. You can hide iClip Lyrics if you wish, because it works its magic behind the scenes with no user intervention necessary in most cases. As you play songs in iTunes, iClip Lyrics searches for and downloads the lyrics to the currently playing song, copies them to the clipboard, and pastes them into the ID tags of the currently playing song in iTunes. Because the lyrics are stored in the MP3 file itself, you may wish to consider backing up your songs so you don't have to go through the process again.

While iClip Lyrics found the lyrics for almost all my music, including ones where I edited the filename of the song with (LIVE) for obvious reasons. There were a few songs it simply couldn't find the lyrics to. However all is not lost. iClip Lyrics offers a search button that uses Google to try to find the missing lyrics. Once found, you can copy the lyrics from the main window, activate the clipboard slide-out panel, and click the past button to have it automatically past the lyrics into iTunes.

You can set iClip Lyrics to always be the top-most window on your screen, if you're the type that likes to sing-along.

iClip Lyrics is free, and works with OSX 10.4 or 10.5 and iTunes 7 and up.

For more nifty application reviews, visit The Graphic Mac.

Today has brought a host of application updates that have kept me busy throughout the day.

Apple this morning released Safari 4 beta, the next generation Web browser for Mac OSX. I won't go into the details here, you can read my full review of Safari 4 beta at The Graphic Mac..

Needless to say, it's wicked-fast with the new Nitro Javascript engine. Gmail loads instantly, and every site I visit that uses Javascript seems much faster. The new features and GUI enhancements take some getting used to, but are a nice addition to an already great browser.

Not to be shown-up, Adobe has also released an update for Adobe InDesign CS4, bring the version to 6.0.1. The following is a partial list of bugs fixed with the update:

• Exporting to Digital Editions fails with an error in the Italian and French version.
• InDesign unexpectedly quits when joining two points with the pen tool.
• InDesign unexpectedly quits when Shift-Cmd-double-clicking to override a master page text frame containing text.
• InDesign unexpectedly quits when user clicks in the Links panel.
• InDesign documents with a large number of placed InDesign files may fail to update the links to the placed InDesign files.
• Page turns are incorrect for right-to-left bound documents exported to SWF.
• When exporting a document to .SWF, “mailto:” links have “http://” appended to them making them inoperable.
• InDesign document with very large images with a high effective resolution fails to export to PDF.
• Photoshop clipping paths drop out for certain placed EPS’s unless “Read Embedded OPI Image Links” is chosen in Import options.
• Master Page Items from a placed InDesign document are dropped when exporting to PDF.
• InDesign CS3 documents converted to InDesign CS4 reflow unexpectedly due to hyphenation limits.

Also updated was Adobe InCopy to version 6.0.1. While not a great many designers use the InDesign companion product, I thought it worth mentioning.

If you check your Adobe Updater app in your Utilities folder, you'll also likely find a few more minor updates as well.

This is just horrible. Take a look at this logo re-design over at BrandNew. And this is from Pentagram, no less.

Linotype today released FontExplorer X Pro, the long-awaited update to their free font manager.

Unfortunately, it's no longer free. Linoptype has stepped-up the competition in the professional font management arena with this latest release, offering the standard desktop client, as well as a server version for larger shops.

I'm sure many people aren't going to be too happy about the fact that it's not only no longer free, but costs nearly as much as the much more mature Suitcase Fusion2 by Extensis. The free version is still available for download, but will no longer be updated or supported - nor will it work with the new server version.