After recently watching Iron Man, I remembered once again how much I missed the world of comics. The last movie that was able to do this was the first Spiderman film. I can only report positive things about the movie as there weren't too many things to fuss about. It stuck to the story line pretty well, and managed to keep me interested all throughout the movie - In other words, there weren't any boring parts (at least not that I found any). The special effects were pretty amazing for a movie like this, and I was a bit worried about how it was going to turn out.

What I am most excited about right now is Marvel's announcement of more movies likes Iron Man 2, Thor, The Avengers, Captain American, and The Incredible Hulk (which we already knew about). If a movie made by Marvel is of such quality, I don't doubt that the rest of them will be just as good, or possibly better! All they have to do is choose the right director for the films, the proper actors, and so forth. Visit Marvel's website here and check it all out.

It's be a harsh few weeks but I finally got around the upgrading my WordPress installation. It's the first time I did it so I was a little worried that I'd do something wrong and kill my installation, but all went well. I must thank the WordPress developers for making the upgrade process so easy. I've been anticipating the redesign dashboard, and so far, I'm loving it! Everything is right where it needs to be, easily and quickly accessible.

As I am quite impressed with the new look, I plan to put together some kind of an analysis regarding interfaces. Look out for that! =)

Most people don't realize how important feedback is to develop worthy software. Whether the feedback is to report a bug, or to ask for software features and enhancements, they all serve a valuable purpose. I am promoting the idea of giving feedback because I have good experiences with it. Because of my 2 minutes that I took to ask for a certain feature or bug fix, they have been addressed accordingly, and I (amongst many others) are happy.

The main reason why I am writing this post is because iPhone Safari has been getting on my nerves all too much. Ever since the release day of the iPhone, Safari was never able to maintain browsing multiple websites at once without all the pages resetting and having to reload. This is very aggravating especially when I'm chatting. I can't ever click a link and browse around for a couple of minutes without my BeeJive website blanking out and having to reload. More after the jump...

It was recently reported over at Wired.com that Amazon is suing New York over a new law that requires online companies to collect taxes from customers. Being a New York resident, it sucks to find this out since I do shop at places like Amazon and Newegg.com. Amazon is arguing that it's unfair and against the commerce law of the constitution, while New York is saying that it closes a loophole. Personally, I think this was done to insure residents of New York (and other states) to pay taxes and not report purchases made online when it's that time of the year.

I guess having family or friends in a nearby state won't be doing you any good for much longer. I'd hope that the suing does result in New York pulling back the law that was passed, but I doubt it would go that way. Government officials want taxes saying that they fund city-wide projects and such, but I have to yet to see any improvements worth mentioning. With the possible $50 Million gain in taxes for New York, I expect it to be put into good use like cleaning up the city and improving the environment. What can I say? I have high hopes.

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 month of May has reached its point of presence on our calendars, and with it brings warm weather, summer vacation, and more. To me, May is the time of the year where things start to calm down and pick up speed all at the time same. The school semester at the University is coming to an end, and my schedule becomes free for me to do the things I have planned.

With this free time, I hope to pursue more freelance gigs and work on some of my web projects that I have planned. I will also be concentrating on my photography, along with getting into video related work a bit more - The fact that I now have Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, I can hopefully create some good material.

For the remainder of this year, I want to continue crossing things out from my New Year's Resolution list. I want to travel to at least 2 locations that I've never been to, read a couple of books, get some needed accessories for my camera, and put more effort into writing creative tutorials using Adobe software. My Reflective Metallic Text tutorial received a lot of attention all over the web, and I hope to do the same with my upcoming tutorials. I hope to not disappoint. =)

Every since the Master Collection was announced by Adobe, I told myself that I just HAD to have it, and now, I do! Every application that comes with this master suite, I will try to learn and use to their fullest extent. I've been meaning to get into video editing and production for the longest time, as I have a high end HDR camera at my disposal. I think After Effects would be pretty awesome alongside video and flash animations.

There are a lot of new features in the whole CS3 suite that have intrigued me to make the grand purchase. Just the fact alone that I can work so easily between all the applications seamlessly makes it worth it for me. On top of that, performance improvements from CS2 to CS3 running on Intel Macs is great, too!

I always hear from people that Fireworks is a good alternative to Photoshop for creating web templates and layouts, and now that it's even more powerful, I'm stoked to give it a shot! Dreamweaver's new features supporting advanced WYSIWYG, CSS, and Javascript functions look promising and I'd love to discover the all the possibilities. I have a feeling I'm going to be spending A LOT of times with my new toy this summer.

I am a frequent customer of the New York MTA subway system, and lately, I've been pretty observant as to what's been going on. How can things be improved to make traveling via the MTA a more pleasurable and (most importantly) desirable experience? I figured I'd be a bit productive on the train instead of just listening to my music or watching my podcasts. This is the list of things I've come up with that could possibly reshape the MTA into something amazing!

Before reading, I just wanted to say that I do realize that some of these might be a lot to ask for, but as time goes by, and as the MTA piles up on their multi-million dollar surplus, it would be easier to achieve them - eventually. Would you like these improvements in your city, too?