In an earlier post, I asked why there weren’t more free and useful sites around like that screen test thing.

Ha! Apparently there are!

A friend of mine, Ryan, recently had to restore his iPhone and was worried about jailbreaking it again and putting in Installer.app and he texted for advice.

Well, gone are the good old days of circuitous and tedious hacking - today, for people like Ryan its just a matter of navigating to a website with your iPhone or your iPod Touch and clicking ok to installing AppSnapp for 1.1.1.

All you need do is go to

http://jailbreakme.com

Yes, it’s that easy, believe it or not.

All the instructions and cautions are there if you’re the fraidycat, but it’s just a matter of agreeing to the jailbreak and you’re on your way to the wide and wonderful and often weird world of third party apps. Coolness.

For the paranoid among us:

Those of you who’ve bit the bullet and sprung for an iPod Touch (or an iPhone) and are concerned about the screen issue that has come up (faulty rendering of blacks and all) but can’t tell if your new toy is one of the defective ones, or if you’re just worried about stuck or dead pixels like we all are, there is a free online test that you can use to detect any problems. (Would that there were more of these free and useful things around, huh?)

Just pop on over to AppleServedUp, and run the two sets of tests they offer for free.

The first tests for stuck or dead pixels, which the site accomplishes by playing a video file that runs through the gamut of colors full screen so that you can examine for offending dots. You’d be surprised at what you might discover.

The second batch for the Negative Black Problem runs you through a cycle of tests, the first showing you a boxed area with a slightly lighter shade of black over the darker background; if there is no discernible difference, you might have a problem. The second test is the Greyscale Gradient Test that shows you a couple of sets of gradients that might not be visible if you got a lemon. The third one is the Faulty Black Aura test which shows you the cover of Jay-Z’s The Black Album, which messes up if you got a crappy unit.

Try it out.

[Crossposted from Mobile Philippines]

Been using a new aluminum iMac for a couple of weeks now and been loving it.

I’ve been a Mac user for so long I’ve acquired the hard carapace of a smug veteran who doesn’t know half as much as he thinks he does, and as such, regularly doesn’t even deign to crack open a manual, thinking it’s beneath him. There are piles of immaculate, pristine, never-touched shrink-wrapped manuals from generations of Macs and iPods in a box somewhere in the house. This iMac’s is still in its big box, untouched.

I picked up a new Macworld issue the other day and was leafing through it. I found a review of the new iMac, and wondering if the writer and I had the same observations, read it. Also, I’m writing up one of my own, and was curious to see if I’d missed anything. I haven’t yet, so I was miffed to read something I did - that the new iMac can continue to charge iPods hooked up to the USB ports even if the iMac was asleep, something it couldn’t do before.

Hah. Ok. Something I would’ve know if I regularly RTFM.

So moral of the story? Read the effing manual! And, that the new iMacs can charge iPods off the USB ports even if the iMac is asleep! So there.

After giving you guys that link to core Apple apps everyone should be using, I found an aggregation of links to business applications for the Mac on theAppleBlog, and I figured it might be a nice eye-opener to what’s out there.

Using Macs isn’t all fun (and certainly not all games as well); the page shows you what’s available for Macs from time tracking and invoicing to money management, project management, contact management and more. And it being a list of business apps, most of them are shareware and commercial software, with maybe just one or two freebies thrown in there. Hey, we should be so lucky.

Check it out.

Just thought to link to this site for the Mac beginners among you - and for those experienced among you who have yet to expand your horizons and realize the full potential of the system you’ve thrown your lot in with.

bestmacsoftware.org puts in one place all the essential stuff Mac users shouldn’t be without. Each link here is a gem, and even Apple-to-the-core old fogeys like me still find something we hadn’t known about. Go, go!