It’s been a while since I last came across a new application that blew me away like Acrylic’s Times. Created by young developer, Dustin MacDonald, this is a new and surprisingly pleasurable way of keeping up with the latest news from your favorite websites! I’ve been playing with the trial version for a little while now and I can only give positive remarks. The amount of detail that went into this application is very impressive. Basing its ground on Mac OS X technologies like Core Animation, navigating through the fluid interface is simple and delightful.

Get the trial & Enter to win!
You can head over to the Times homepage and get yourself a trial copy of the application. You can also win 1 of 5 copies of this program - Desktop Vibes is holding a giveaway so don’t forget to enter! If you truly care about a new and efficient way of checking your RSS feeds, I think you’ll find this quite handy.

The worldly renowned Word Wide Developer’s Conference by Apple is right around the corner. Beginning on June 9th and extending through the 13th, there will be a lot of things going down in the Apple world. The iPhone 2.0 software is due for release alongside the App Store, and judging from what we saw from the iPhone Software Roadmap, things are looking pretty bright!

I’ve been an iPhone owner since day one, and I don’t think I would ever settle for anything less if I were to change phones. For my interests in the software and all things creative, I started working on an iPhone related web project. I can’t say too much about it at the moment, but I’ll be talking more about it as it develops. I am sure many people will find it a very helpful resource, and hopefully a nice place to hang around. Stay tuned for more info! =)

Illegal downloading of applications is probably just an inevitable as the sunrise every morning. No matter what companies do to protect against it, hackers always tend to find a way around it - at times, rather quickly. Is this something that should be taken lightly, or seriously by the companies and law makers?

After conversing with a number of people regarding this issue, it seems like the most common excuse was the following: “If I’m not a professional and won’t be making any money from it, why should I pay for it for only playing around with it?” Technically speaking, this is a pretty valid response, but what about people who do make money off of it?

Without a doubt, Photoshop (or any other application package from Adobe) isn’t exactly the most affordable. There are a lot of people out there in the world (pros and non-pros) running cracked versions of software of all different types. A lot of these people have it just for the sake of having it, while others actually make money from them by offering professional services to those in need. This is my primary issue. More after the jump…

The recent buzz around the blogosphere has been about ISPs capping bandwidth and charging by the Gigabyte. To some, this is a complete disaster while others couldn’t care less. The idea of capping bandwidth is not new as companies around the world have been practicing this method of service delivery (like Australia).

With the recent advancements in transfer speeds alongside things like online HD movie rentals and video communication, these people decide to introduce the cap now, when they’re supposed to be doing quite the opposite! Imagine how quickly an average internet user will suck through 30 to 40GB of bandwidth in one month - HD movie rentals, international video conferencing, browsing high bandwidth web content (Youtube!), and so forth.

I just don’t understand why ISP companies want to be greedy and make more money this way now. They know that people will go above their capped limits and the easy money will flow right into their pockets. Eventually, I believe that internet access will reach a point where it’ll be so cheap, companies will be forced to just have one monthly rate. More after the jump…