The iPhone’s second major release was oft hyped and many waited with baited breath for its release a few short weeks ago here in the summer of 2008.

So here are some random thoughts and opinions on the current state of the iPhone 2.0 software and the applications that came with it – most of which have already been said before:

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It was only a matter of time. When the iPhone app store launched just a few short weeks ago, another one of the big blog publishing software had an iPhone app.

You knew it was only a matter of time till the others followed. Now, WordPress, the software Keefer Madness runs on has an iPhone app – which I’m typing this entry on currently.

It’s pretty basic, but is definitely nice for making an occasional post on the road.

The app will also work with wordpress.com hosted blogs.

WordPress iPhone App

So here’s another example of Photoshopping hitting big media. Notice how the two middle missiles are almost completely identical, save a single black dot on the middle right one. Even more noticeable is the exact pattern in the smoke in the middle and right.

Some of the comments after the article and photos suggests it may have been done for composition purposes. I think the unaltered picture shows it was to paint a better/more successful launch than reality where it was visible that one rocket failed to launch from the mobile launch vehicle.

Propaganda comes in many shapes, forms and versions of subtly.

In an Iranian Image, a Missile Too Many

So this week’s episode of “This Week in Tech” (TWiT), a podcast I’ve never missed an episode of, talked a little about the newly released Firefox 3.  One of the guests also gushed about Flock, which is basically Firefox with a bunch of addons for different social networking sites into it’s sidebar. I’ve found it integrates well with Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube.

Plus, I’m writing this Keefer Madness blog post from within Flock. It’s not perfect, but pretty cool to integrate it all in. If you use any of the above listed, it’s a great way to run fewer apps and/or tabs.

I’ll revisit this post after a couple weeks after I’ve used Flock more both at home and at work. I’m running the beta of Flock as it uses the newer Firefox 3 engine, while the Flock stable version is for now on Firefox 2.

This is just a followup from an old post I made way back when regarding Mac users having their very own optimized versions of Firefox. It looks like that will continue with Firefox 3. There are Intel and G5 versions currently, with a G4 optimized version in the works.

Firefox 3 Optimized Builds for G5 / Intel

So we all finally got a much-needed hardware upgrade at work. I went from a PowerMac G5 single 1.8 Ghz (read: the original G5 machine) to a souped up, dual quad-core (8 freaking processors) 3.0 Ghz Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM. It was absolutely phenomenal how much faster it was! We’re talking night and day. A Photoshop document that before took me 10 minutes to open (literally – I’d go to the bathroom, get a drink, come back and it still would have a progress bar up), now opens without a hiccup or progress bar at all!

I had a hell of a time slowing this machine down. The only thing that seemed to tax it was Parallels. I didn’t play around with that much at all.

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Nice. Here’s one I’ve bookmarked and gladly will utilize often to maximize efficiency. Most of the time, I don’t use OS X’s dashboard, and it’s a pretty memory intensive hog. Here’s the quick tips at how to disable and enable the memory hog at will.

How to Turn OS X’s Dashboard Off

This concept has really piqued my interest. I think Amanda would even be a bit more supportive of this app/game than the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series.

I can’t wait to try this out and it’d be great to have the hours of rocking out actually help rocking out for real.

Guitar Rising for Real Guitar Heroes

I always love these tweaks, helping to optimize Firefox’s speed and responsiveness. Here are two links I found this morning:

Improve Firefox’s Responsiveness While a Page is Loading
Top Firefox 2 Config Tweaks

Wow, this sounds interesting. Too bad, the initial releases are PC only. I’ll have to keep my eyeballs peeled for the eventual Universal release for us OS X guys.

Filter Forge Announces Series of Free Photoshop Plug-ins