Fedex delivered a shiny new iPad 64 GB with 4G into my grubby hands 5 minutes past noon time today. What you need to know:

4G… nice
Dictation…nice
Better camera…nice
Better CPU.. more Ram… fluid… like butter.
Retina Display…
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Oh I’m sorry I was distracted by the most amazing display I’ve ever seen on any device ever. Period.

You have to see it to understand. This was the way your digital photos were supposed to be viewed… on a device with a resolution capable of viewing most of your pictures pixels. It’s nothing short of stunning. Amazing. I can’t live without it. I actually now wish I could do all my work on my iPad because the resolution on my Air now looks down right sloppy.

Text on this thing is beyond crisp… it’s dare I say… perfect.

Wow. Just wow. I’l write more when I’m not so overwhlemed. If you have an iPad 2 and wondering if it’s worth it… yes. For the love of god YES!

Go get one… now.

The iOS-ification of OSX continues.

Check out a sneak peak of the next iteration of OSX.

Or better yet try out one of it’s new features Messages in beta form.

I’ll admit I was pretty late in the game to jump on the 1Password bandwagon (just last year!) but I’ve since seen the light and can’t imagine my Mac without it.

To sweeten the deal even further I found this great little trick over at Nerd Gap and had to share. If you’re not a 1Passwordaholic yet maybe single clicking a link on your bookmarks bar and having it autofill in your credentials will sway you.

Very nice!

Back from MacWorld and managed to get a chance to try out the wireless feature of the Doxie Go. Bottom line is that it works well. Basically the Doxie Go has an SD card slot in the rear of the unit that accepts an included (if you purchased the wireless version) Eye-FI wireless SD card.

The setup steps first necessitated downloading the Eye-Fi manager software from the Eye Fi site and configuring it for my network. Once that’s done I needed to change the default download location to dump the scans into the Doxie folder in my Pictures folder instead of the default. Basically now Doxie acts as a digital camera and simply dumps scans onto the SD card which in turn wirelessly transfer the scans via the Eye-Fi to my Mac. Since the Doxie software keeps track of the Doxie Eye-Fi folder it automatically populates scans directly into the Doxie application. Pretty clever way of doing this I think.

You can also setup the Eye-Fi to connect to your Mac in Direct Mode meaning you don’t need your Mac and Eye-Fi to be on the same Wi-Fi network for the scans to go through. I have yet to try this out though any issues I may have had would be Eye-Fi specific.

With the built in battery and wireless capabilities the Doxie Go has made the task of managing paper bearable and at times… border line fun

It’s here. Finally! I’ve been waiting for Doxie Go to be released and lo and behold, my first day at MacWorld and they show up right around the corner from the Printopia booth I’m helping man. (Shameless plug… if you haven’t checked out Printopia check it out now… it won an Eddy last year!) I was lucky enough to be the first one to snag one and try it out.

Doxie Go is a wireless and portable scanner that redefines portable scanning with an eye for simplicity. With tethered or wireless models you’ll no longer dread dragging out your clunky old flatbed scanner to scan in documents, receipts or photos. Once powered up (Doxie runs on USB and even has a built in battery good for about 100 scans) simply insert your document and Doxie Go will gently ingest your doc quickly and efficiently. Once you’re done scanning simply plug in Doxie into your Mac with the included USB cable and fire up the slick Doxie app to send your document off to where it needs to be. Save it locally or send it Evernote, iPhoto, Flickr or many other possible cloud based destinations.

I won’t be able to test out the WiFi scanning feature until I’m back on my home WiFi network (the hotel WiFi here doesn’t seem to like non PC devices on their network) but the WiFi model includes a 4GB Eye-Fi card that slips into a slot on the rear of the Doxie Go. I’m assuming the flow would be similar minus plugging in the Doxie Go with the USB cable but I’ll follow-up once I give it a go.

With 600 DPI resolution my scans seem to come in very clear and crisp. Photos looked very good and the included OCR capability did a very good job of converting docs with text in it to actual text.

Business cards were a different story however. I scanned in about 20 cards and about half did not auto crop correctly, usually over cropping it by about 50%. I’m hoping future updates to the software will fine tune that.

All in all though I’m very happy with the Doxie Go so far… it does what it advertises to fairly well and for anyone who just doesn’t need multi sheet capabilities or double sided scanning and is looking for a scanner that’s modern, slick, small and easy, Doxie Go delivers.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

- Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

You have no idea how much you will be missed by us all. On to the next adventure my friend.

Rant alert:

Fact: The iPhone 3Gs which is still an amazing very capable phone is now FREE with contact.

Fact: The iPhone 4 is only $99 with contract.

Just because the form factor of the iPhone 4S and the fact that it still has the “4″ nomenclature doesn’t mean that it isn’t an amazing phone. The innards for the most part are dramatically different than the iPhone 4.

So why are people complaining? Because now all their friends have an iPhone 4 and they need to have something new to tout for a month before it too loses it’s charm.

The iPhone 3Gs and on are all great devices and quite capable. I tend to think people who want an iPhone 5 don’t actually use their current iPhones productively in the first place.

Just because an iPhone 5 didn’t materialize yesterday doesn’t mean your current phone isn’t a great tool and will suddenly stop becoming a great phone.

I’m done…

Available now on the Mac App Store is a cool little Lion centric app called Yoink. Like all great little software gems, Yoink was created to scratch an itch. In this case the itch was to figure out a way to more easily drag files between spaces and the new fullscreen apps in Lion.

I won’t bother to explain how this is accomplished. Just watch the short video on the site and you’ll see just how slick it is.

The one thing I do wish it could incorporate is to also allow links and images from say Reeder or Safari to be dragged which I find myself doing every so often. A quick email exchange with the developer assured me that the next version would incorporate this… yay!

If you find yourself lost in a sea of full screen apps and spaces, for $2.99 do yourself a favor and give it a go. Recommened!

In a letter to the Apple board today Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple. Tim Cook who was the COO was named CEO and Jobs was elected chairman of the board.

Official statement here.

With the latest iteration to the MacBook Air’s that Apple released earlier this month, I now felt that the horse power and specs within this sliver of a machine was now up to my slightly more pro standards. Last Friday I picked up a maxed out 13″ Air (256MB SSD Core i7) and haven’t looked back, even for a second at my Mid 2010 15″ MacBook Pro.

My biggest concern with switching to the Air was missing the high resolution and extra real estate of my MBP. But with Lion’s new full screen mode it’s made the downgrade in extra pixels a non-issue for me. Even development in Xcode was a very pleasant experience.

The Core i7 CPU makes everything very fluid and snappy. Even running my Windows 7 virtual machine in Fusion did nothing to affect the responsiveness of my other running apps.

But the biggest change for me was the pounds of bulk I’ve shed. It was very surprising to me how much more mobile I’ve become the past few days and how much more pleasant it is to move between meetings, the road, home and back again. So much so in fact that I’m in the search for a new bag to carry my stuff in now that I don’t need to lug around the MBP.

It’s almost comical how much weight I was carrying around with the MacBook Pro and for anyone, except for the most hard core video editors, you shouldn’t hesitate to give the latest version of Apple’s svelte laptops a shot as their primary machine.