Here is an update about Brandon Raile’s second day at NAB, posted on View From The Dock.

NAB 2008 Day Two | Affordable Tapeless Video Capture - Not directly Mac related, but still interesting.

The National Association of Broadcasters holds an annual convention for industry professionals to see and experience the latest technology. There are also many educational seminars to attend at NAB.

I’m trying a new service called Jott. Jott converts your voice into emails, text messages, reminders, lists and appointments. It is yet another player in the organization and GTD game. Jott has a bit of a different approach, though. Jott is not a desktop application. It’s a web based app, that stores messages you send to it by calling a toll-free number. It will transcribe your voice and and list your notes in your Jott inbox. You can manually add Jotts while logged into your account, as well. Jott also allows you to set up groups and send e-mails through the service by transcribing your voice message on the toll-free number.

I tried the voice transcription service. I followed the instructions which suggested speaking clearly and slowly and to my surprise, the transcribed message in my inbox was very accurate. Jott seems like it would be useful for transcribing written pages that you don’t feel like typing. The fall-back is that Jott only allows 30 second messages; so you may have to make multiple calls.

LifeHacker posted a useful way to tie Jott’s service with Evernote. And, like Evernote, Jott is in beta testing mode right now. But unlike EverNote, you do not need an invitation. Both are free while in beta, but don’t expect that to last forever.

My brother-in-law, Brandon, is currently in Las Vegas Attending the NAB Show. The National Association of Broadcasters holds an annual convention for industry professionals to see and experience the latest technology. There are also many educational seminars to attend at NAB.

Brandon has shared a bit of information from his first day at NAB on Troy Kitch’s mac-blog, View From the Dock.

An interesting piece of information that you may not know, is that Apple dropped out of NAB this year. In February, Apple announced that it would not have a booth at NAB. Public Relations representatives from Apple are saying that Apple is participating in fewer and fewer trade shows. Apparently Apple feels that there are better ways of reaching their customers.

Choplifter was a PC video game released in 1982 by Dan Gorlin for Broderbund. The premise involves saving hostages and returning them safely to a friendly base. While flying these rescue missions, the player must fight off enemies in the hostile Bungeling Empire. There were many versions of this game, the first being the version for the Apple II. Over the years, other systems ported this game, including Nintendo and Sega. Choplifter was also released in arcades. You can view a video of the Commodore 64 version here.

Apple II Screenshot:

Good News Choplifter Fans! - Chopper is here.

There is an updated version for OS X! This version, called Chopper is published by Majic Jungle Software. Chopper is shareware and sells for a mere $15. This price is well worth the fun you’ll have! The lastest version, 1.2, features some really beautiful graphics and 3-D sound. There are 72 levels of gameplay in three difficulty levels. The game is different every time you play, because each scene is generated randomly. If you are a fan of Choplifter, you’ll be thrilled with the beautiful landscapes, graphics and sound effects in Chopper. You can download a trial version here, which will give you 60 minutes of gameplay. Somehow, I don’t think 60 minutes will quench a true Choplifter fan’s thirst; you’ll want to buy this one.

Chopper Screenshot:

I have recently started using Bean as my main text editor at home. I discovered it a few weeks ago on FreeMacWare.com. I don’t download very much from there, because I don’t trust very many apps that are truly FREE. But I must say, Bean was totally worth the download. I don’t have any complicated text editing to do at home, so what Bean provides is perfect.

Bean is a Cocoa based open-source word processing application.  The program loads very fast and is easy-to-use, efficient, and functional. It has a very clean interface, which is a big plus in my book. It is definitely a step up from TextEdit. It integrates with Apple’s Dictionary and has a handy Dictionary icon in the toolbar. There is a Get Info icon that will display all sorts of useful information about the document you’re currently working on. Plus, you can customize your toolbar, so that features you use most will be on the toolbar if you want them there.

I haven’t needed to open any other file formats in Bean, but the website says this about what it can handle:

• .doc format (MS Word ‘97, minus images, margins, and page size)
• .xml format (MS Word 2003 XML, minus images

Bean can export those formats to these formats:

• .html (web page format, minus images)
• .pdf
• .doc compatible (with images intact)
• .rtf (with images intact)

Bean can read and save to these file formats:

• .rtf format (rich text)
• .rtfd format (rich text with graphics)
• .bean format (identical to .rtfd)
• .txt format (Unicode and legacy)
• .html format (as source code)
• .webarchive format (Apple’s web archive format)

It is made clear that Bean is not a replacement for Microsoft Word. However, it is perfect for the minimal amount of text-editing I do at home.

Bean features a zoom slider, a handy inspector that allows you to adjust font, size, line spacing and more, plus there are date-stamped back-ups and autosaving, among other useful features.

It seems as though the creator of Bean, James Hoover, has done his research on creating a good word processing application. He has written a concise essay on the origins of Bean, here.

Try Bean, I think you’ll have a pleasant experience.  Requirements:  A Mac with a PPC or Intel processor running OS X 10.4+ Tiger or OS X 10.5+ Leopard.