iMessage for the Mac

Apple is working on a new Operation System which will be released in summer 2012. The name of the new System will have the name OS X Mountain Lion and one of the new features will be iMessage. Other features such as the Reminder, the Notification Center as well as the Game Center will sound familiar for those who use iDevices such as the iPhone, iPad or the iPod Touch. I personally wished for iMessage on the Mac after the release of iOS 5. For me it was kind of a logical step to have iMessage on the Mac as a chat system that will combine the world of the Mac with the mobile world.

Having a chat function on a computer isn’t that new and text messages is also something we are familiar with. Many of us might have used already some online service to send a text message online.

Well and after Apple released iOS 5 with the iMessage I had a deep feeling that it will come to the MAC as well and I am glad that I was right. For those of you who want to get a sneak peak Apple released a BETA which you can download today to test the new iMessage on your MAC.

What you might need will be of course an iClod account, but if you have many Apple products you may have an iCloud account already. So download it, enter your Apple ID and test iMessage. I did it and it is working just fine.

If you are interested here is the link:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/messages-beta/

I did test the new feature and must admit I enjoyed it very much to use my computer to send messages to my friends. For me it is a great feature and you should at least check it out.

iOS 5.0.1 Update

This was the first time I updated my iPhone via the internet, without having a computer attached to it. I admit that I was a bit nervous, since this was the first time I did it. So I plugged my phone to my Mac to have a backup, just in case. Well and than I started the update. Without any problems my iPhone 3GS downloaded the update from the Apple server, installed it and did a restart, just as if it would be connected to a computer. But without any cable? Well not really. Apple did recommend to connect the device to a power source during the update to secure that nothing goes wrong. But to be honest the update wasn’t big, so I would have probably been fine if I would have not connected my two year old iPhone 3GS to a power source.

Please find here what the changes are:

• Fixes bugs affecting battery life
• Adds Multitask Gesture for original iPad
• Resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud
• Improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation

Something that I would like to recommend to Apple is to notify the user about those updates. I only knew that I needed to update my iPhone because I connected it to my Mac. Don’t know if there are any notifications I didn’t noticed. It is possible that I was “lucky” and got the update notification from iTunes when I connected my iPhone to my Mac and admit I didn’t gave the iPhone not enough time to inform me about this update, but in case there are no notification I would say that Apple need to do that otherwise we don’t know when a new version will be available, right

What do you think? How did you experienced your update? Didi you updated your iPhone, iPod or iPad to the IOS 5.0.1 version already? Please leave a comment.

iPhone 5 release date October 4th, 2011?

Apple was presenting last June the new stuff they were working on. One was, at the time, the new OS Lion. I was writing about the new OS and also wrote a little “first impression” post, which you can find here. But Apple also announced some more cool things, like the new iOS 5, a system called iCloud and this was leading, in my opinion, to many speculation about the iPhone 5 release date as well as the new MacBook Pro design changes. I was reading many articles, comments and rumours about the two devices. Some were just fantasy, some had great and logical arguments but all of them were nothing but rumours. I liked the story about an Apple employee who lost his new iPhone 5 in a coffee shop and also the debates on various forums when the new MacBook Pro will come. Maybe late 2011, early 2012 or maybe summer 2012?

Apple – 2011 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference

Last weekend I had some time to watch the almost 2h long – 2011 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference – video on YouTube and in that video Apple announced lots of amazing things. The first part was of course about the new Mac OS X, called Lion. Based on Apples announcement Lion will have 250 new features, but in the video they mentioned just the 10 key features. Understandable, because they wanted to talk about the new iOS 5 and iCloud as well.

Skype for iPhone with push notification

We all like Skype, but Skype on the iPhone, without push notification never made sense to me. “Why don’t they have at least a push notification for the chat function?”, I always asked myself. It bothered me, especially because I have two Skype accounts. One I use as the IT Manager for INTERNeX and another one I use to stay in contact with family and friends. True it is possible to connect a “private” account with a business account, but I wanted to keep that separate for many reasons. So there I had the dilemma that I had to choose which account I am using on my Mac, because having Skype on the iPhone, at this time, didn’t made any sense… Again because there was no push notification…

Yesterday I updated a couple application on my iPhone, one of this application was Skype. I haven’t used it for a long time, but never deleted it as well. So I thought I will check out what’s new and was wondering that I had to reenter my password. Well I haven’t used Skype on my iPhone for quite a while so I reentered my password. On my Mac, because I was logged in with my INTERNeX account, I saw that I came online with my second account and on the site I noticed a new symbol.

The symbol looks like a little phone and I thought… Well that’s cool, Skype realized that I am logged in with my phone… After a while my phone went to the sleep mode and I still saw myself “online” on Skype.

Well for all of you who don’t have two accounts or simply never paid attention to that little fact, but it takes a while until Skype updates the status. So I wasn’t surprised that I saw myself still as “online”. But I stayed online and after a few minutes I thought I just send myself a little chat message… Seconds later I had that message on my iPhone, like a Text Message.

“Woohooo… that’s so cool. Finally a Skype update that make Skype really useful on the iPhone”, I thought, “Something that was missing for a long time.”

But it was getting better. Not only that you can send someone a chat/text message… No… You as well can “call” someone and even if your iPhone went to the sleep mode you still get the typical Skype ringing and can easily answer that call.

With that new update I am very happy with having Skype on my iPhone. Thank you Skype for that very useful update. Now I can stay online with my INTERNeX Skype account on my Mac and with my second account on my iPhone.

There is just one thing I would like to recommend. I tested the new Skype version on an iPod touch and unfortunately it seems that the push notification doesn’t work with an iPod. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that very useful feature on an iPod as well?