One of the three recently introduced iPhone commercials about car shopping. It has been added to The Daily iLife podcast today, which you can subscribe to in iTunes or watch here.

Say your out shopping for a car, and the salesman says, “This is the best deal in town, guaranteed”. But lets say you want a second opinion- thats when having the entire internet on your phone sounds even better.

A reader asked (a little too long ago) a couple questions about Time Machine. Here are some answers.

The answer for this is quite simple. At first you might think that deleting a file from Time Machine is redundant, but when you have multiple copies of files that are very large- your disk space is precious! When you enter Time Machine, simply highlight the file (or folder) you want to delete from backups and click on the Gear menu item. An option “Delete file from all backups” will be present, and this is what you want! To prevent it happening in future backups, you may want to go into the Time Machine System Preferences pane and click on the Options. From there, you can specify what you don’t want Time Machine to backup. Be it your Final Cut project file, or Movies folder.

Apple does not provide a solution to this issue, but you can use TimeMachineScheduler, which will allow you to specify a 1-12 hour period for backups and a slew of other options for customizing Time Machine backups. This should do the trick.

If you or someone you know have any questions for theiLife, feel free to Contact Us!

Right now, the iPhone is one of the best phones on the market. Apple wants to sell more than 10 million of them by the end of the year- but can the SDK bring these numbers?

With the announcement of this Thursdays iPhone SDK event in Cupertino, February has left us without any details being publicly available. No one quite knows why it is being delivered late- Jobs did announce it in October! But at this point, no one is counting the days- they just want the SDK!

Since that day in October, we have heard very little about the SDK, except for small rumblings and speculation about it’s distribution within iTunes. The iPhone SDK could mean big things for the iPhone- as the closed platform is the largest complaint with the iPhone, besides EDGE speeds. While Apple’s included applications are great, the iPhone lacks user customizability.

At WWDC 2007, Jobs revealed that iPhone applications could be developed through Safari- in “Web 2.0 Applications”. This was met with much disappointment from developers and consumers who wanted to take advantage of the full potential in the iPhone. Native Applications could be seal the deal for the iPhone. Lets not forget about the original Macintosh, introduced in January 1984. While far ahead of its time, the major flaw and ultimate result for poor sales was due to the lack of developers!

While the current situation with the iPhone is slightly different, developers are begging to develop for the iPhone and so far, Apple has kept the platform closed. By opening it up we might see a surge in iPhone sales as developers put the hardware to all kinds of creative uses. I hope to be pleasantly surprised with Thursdays announcement and sincerely hope that Apple has learned their lesson from the past. The iPhone has an unbelievable potential!

It has been a rough month for us- February has come and gone with no iPhone SDK. Last week, we saw an update to the aging Apple laptop line- with multi-touch! The SDK missed its late February target, announced by Jobs in October, but will be detailed this Thursday, March 6th in Cupertino. We should expect to see the applications approved by Apple and distributed through iTunes. As for theiLife, we have been slowly coming back to life after our two week absence. I have to apologize, but with one person writing the majority of content, it becomes hard to do daily when I have to do lots of other things. We will definitely see more content this week, again, sorry for the empty site.

What does all the recent breaks in Apple announcements, from Macworld to the model numbers to new laptops indicate about Apple in 2008?

Apple used to pride itself on its secrecy. To this date, they are one of the best examples of companies with excellent control over itself- however over the past year I have noticed more and more breaks in secrecy and more accurate predictions from the rumor mills. Could this be an indicator of the company beginning to get too large?

This leads me to question, what has happened to Apple’s extreme secrecy regarding new products? As Apple is gaining market share and growing as a company, it must be becoming harder to maintain the extremely tight security and structure within the company it once retained. As more rumor sites appear, it only adds fuel to the existing hype always surrounding Apple.

Looking back upon 2007, we saw countless photos of unreleased products that turned out to be the real thing. In context, for Apple, this is almost unheard of! A typical Apple ‘slip-up’ used to be something like an empty reference on their website or a change from within the Apple Store itself (like shipping times). I cannot honestly recall from years past, the last time I witnessed a product spy shot of an Apple product that turned out to be the real thing!

It could just be my memory failing me but the fact is 2007 saw more breaks in Apple secrecy than ever before. To me, this screams that something has changed within Apple. Maybe because it is getting bigger, maybe because the attention surrounding the company is at an all time high but- either way I don’t think it is a good sign. Apple is slipping on something that it used to have a tight grip on.

If it is true, it is clearly demonstrating that something within Apple has changed, and evidently Apple is having a hard time coping with it- because they must notice! This could be very early indications that Apple is growing into an uber large, Microsoft type company. While Apple’s growth is great for Apple users, investors and, the technology world- if Apple’s growth exceeds control, it could end up hurting the company in other more serious ways. Will we see new MacBooks today? Will the iPhone SDK be delayed until March?

We’re back again! After our two week absence, we will be back to our normal posting methods. This week is the last week in February- in fact March begins on Saturday! Everyone has been anticipating the release of the iPhone SDK, which is looking like it will be delayed until March; didn’t I say “Late February” was a give away?! We are also expecting some kind of announcement tomorrow, most are speculating MacBook Pros (with Multi-Touch trackpads). Apple has made a consistent record of releases every Tuesday since Macworld so I don’t know what to make of it (if anything). As for theiLife, I will be traveling to Trenton later this week, so Sidney and I might shoot for an audio podcast- look out for it coming late this week, maybe even the weekend. Enjoy your week!

With the recent victory of Blu-Ray as the next-gen format, and with Apple belonging to the Blu-Ray disc camp since 2005, it is only natural that we should start to see Blu-Ray in Apple products.

Apple has long been known to bring new standards to the table. Take USB, or the floppy drive for example: When the original iMac was introduced with just USB, hardware manufactures scrambled to make peripherals, even though PC’s had been shipping with USB for years. While the switch was annoying for the early buyers, the iMac is credited for making USB what it is today — and for killing off the floppy.

Others, and myself, speculated for the past 3 years that we would soon see the introduction of Blu-Ray drives into Apple products — particularly as a build-to-order (BTO) option! However, over these past few years the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray battle rocked us all, and that could be the reason behind the inaction. Was Apple waiting for a clear winner? Is Blu-Ray still too expensive, even for BTO?! After all, Steve Jobs said that 2005 was the year of High-Def! We are almost three months into 2008!

What that reason was, or is, we will find out soon. I get the feeling that this year, we will see Blu-Ray drives in Macs, possibly standard but most likely BTO. Also, conveniently, with the AppleTV and iTunes shift into the living room, we could see another possible collaboration between Apple and Blu-Ray. It is also good to keep in mind that Steve Jobs is the largest shareholder in Disney, which supported the Blu-Ray camp since the beginning. Be it a free digital download with purchase of a Blu-Ray disc, a hardware upgrade to the Apple TV or something else, time can only tell. The future is Blu.

Okay, its been a very long time! I have to say, we are sorry! Over the course of the last two weeks, I have been incredibly busy, working on a 5 foot, 120 pound robot for the 2008 FIRST Robotics Competition. Every year, we get a new game and 6 weeks to build a robot during the “Build Season”, which ended on the 19th. Now, for the next 6 weeks, my team will be going to various competitions to play against teams from across the world. All this robot building has severely hindered content on theiLife.com, and I have to apologize for the lack of it during my absence. We will resume regular work tomorrow and will be in full swing next week. Thanks for sticking with us- feel free to contact us anytime.

Thursday night I went to the Tibet Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall, hosted by Philip Glass. It was a great musical experience, featuring Sufjan Stevens, Marisa Monte and Band of Horses and many, many others. The performances were incredible, with Sufjan Stevens’ reworking of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Nawang Khechog, a Tibetan multi-instrumentalist, doing “The Last Stand of the Wild Yaks” with drums and a mini-didgeridoo. There was also Ashley MacIsaac and Phamie Gow playing a very catchy piece on fiddle and harp, respectively. To bring down the house, they had Ray Davies of Kinks’ fame play two classics, “Lola” and “All of the Day and All of the Night”.

It was a great night for such a prestigious and historical venue like Carnegie Hall, except I was decidedly unfulfilled. The artists were still making the speakers pop when they plugged and unplugged their instruments, and numerous times the performers had to ask a tech to help them get sound out of their amps. All the technical difficulties got me thinking about how just because society might have fancy new phones and computers, the art of performance hasn’t really come as far as it should in the past twenty years.

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The iLife Podcast – Epoisode #4: Macworld Closure

Show notes coming soon.