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Finally having the official release of the new iOS running on my iPhone 3GS, I decided to find out more about the possibility of reading ebooks on my iPhone.

Generally, I think the screen is too small for this. It may be a different experience for owners of the new iPhone 4, but to me it’s simply to small to read a 400 pages ebook. No question though, that it will be a nice option for those long waiting times at airports for example.

But what if you really just intend to read once in a while and don’t want to spend your money on ebooks available in the iTunes store? Well, besides Winnie the Pooh, which is for free as of now, the iBooks app can read all ebooks saved in the epub format. This is great as you can add ebooks to your iTunes library and sync them with your iPhone, iPod touch and/or iPad.

One option is the Gutenberg Project, which offers a variety of ebooks in the necessary epub format for free. I just tried it and it’s working well, although files are claimed to be in an experimental status.

So simply go to the above page, download a book to your computer, add it to iTunes and sync it with your device. Enjoy reading!

Starting to work with a comprehensive software like Lightroom can be daunting at first, but it can also be annoying. I’m sure that a lot of people find it a good idea, that deleting a file will only remove it from the catalog, instead of completely wiping it off the disk. I beg to differ.

This example should show you, that Lightroom can’t do everything you may wish for and therefore keyboard shortcuts are a great alternative, if you – like me – can’t be bothered to press and click multiple buttons on order to get the result you aimed for.

Here you’ll find the shortcuts that may make your life easier – with Lightroom that is.

If you’d like a downloadable version for both Lightroom 1 and/or 2, visit this website.

While importing to Lightroom, I came across an issue that almost ruined my day: I imported files via the move button and got a failure message. After that, I could neither find the files in Lightroom nor in their old folder. Luckily, I realized that they actually were moved, but not added to Lightroom. From now on, I will only copy my photos and once they’re safely imported, delete the folder of origin.

Having made this mistake, if you want to call it that way, I found this website about other mistakes often made when working with Lightroom. Hope this will help you as well avoiding problems.

One more thing though: I don’t agree with the need for DNG files and prefer using RAW+XMP. Reasons for this will be posted here soon in a comparison of file types used for photography. My main reason for this decision though: having to backup a small XMP sidefile, rather than a multi-megabyte file when changes are made.

Sometimes I use great things like the smart playlist function and don’t tell anyone. Well, at least not publicly. Now TUAW did this for me and since I find this a useful feature to know about and use, I wanted to share it with you.
Why would you want to read that article? If you’re always short of space on your iPod and miss all the great songs from your collection when you’re on-the-go, then smart playlists will help you. That’s why.
I generally started to use things that are smart. Next to playlists there are smart folders to name just one example, which is great when you’re sorting your photos in Lightroom for example, but that’s another story.

Back when I was still using Windows, I used a program called MP3Gain to adjust the volume of my MP3 collection. If your collection, like mine, consists out of iTunes and Amazon purchases, as well as MP3s you created from CDs you bought, different volume levels aren’t news to you.

I was happy to find the same program for Mac here. On my Mac, iTunes may deliver a tool already to cover this, but whenever I listen to my music on-the-go, I still discover different volume levels. This may be because iTunes doesn’t write the information for the volume into the MP3 and therefore every player outside iTunes will ignore this ‘normalization’.

MP3Gain instead adjusts all MP3s to your preset volume and will save this into the file. This way all players will accept the information and behave accordingly. Are there any downsides? I’m sure there are and you’re warned on their web site to remember making a full backup, but it all went smoothly for me. An issue I encountered that may be annoying for people using Backblaze is, that the changed files are now considered new and Backblaze will want to back them up again. Not really a downside, but I wanted to warn you.

Good news for Windows - and Linux users: MP3Gain is available for those systems, too. The Windows version is available here, Linux here.

Using iTunes as my main – and most likely only – media player started off quite badly. Not only that I had to change every single video I have into a *.mov-file, I also found *.mp3-files that would neither play on my iPod nor within iTunes. Trying to add these files via iTune’s automatic adding function would move them to the not added folder instead.

The MP3 Validator for Mac OS X neatly solved this issue for me. Just download the software and open it, before you can simply drag-and-drop your mp3-files into the program. It will show which failure persists and repair it. Just checked my whole library and found quite a lot of failures on files which I didn’t suspect in the first place.

PS: Windows-user might be happy to read that MP3 Validator is doing the same for them.

PS:PS: Thanks to Trevin Chow for this helpful piece of information.

Since the beginning of mankind, people tried to communicate as efficently as possible and the introduction of the e-mail, which enables us to share information worldwide, sure had a massive impact on how we see and live communication today. Google intends to take it a step further and creates something new: Google Wave.

If you don’t know what Google Wave is, watching the following (unofficial) video may help:

I was happy enough to receive an invitation and currently I’m trying to understand all the features and possibilities that Google Wave offers at the moment. A nice to know information for new ‘Wavers’ is the following search:

search:public

This will enable you to find publicly written waves, as you may not know many people that have an invitation yet. This way you will get to know the features and can help to make this preview a beta soon.

If you still have no idea what Google Wave is, where it fits in between Facebook and Twitter, or if you simply would like to read more about it, you will find a good article here.

At the moment it’s quite slow and I encounter some issues once in a while. Nevertheless, this seems to be the next big thing and I’m looking forward to seeing the impact it will have on the communication over all and for me.

Just one more thing.

The so-called Web-Apps for the iPhone aren’t really newsworthy, but in regards to Google Wave it may be interesting to know that an added Google Wave home screen bookmark will not show the Safari wrapper, but look like an independent app.

Sharing appointments with others, inviting them and syncing it to your portable device are all features the Google calendar provides. When I tried to create a calendar to share information with my girlfriend though, I faced the problem of different time zones. Not happy about cluttering my calendar with additional calendars for each time zone, I was happy to find Google having thought of this already.

If you want to share a calendar crossing time zones, simply follow these steps:

0) A Google account is necessary. If you dont have one, please create one in order to follow the steps below.

1) Go to your Google calendar.

2) Visit the Settings page.

3) Mark the Display all time zones field. (Alternatively choose the country you would like to be shown and click on the additional time zone field to choose a city within the country you just selected. Skip Step 4.)

4) Choose the countries you would like to have displayed.

5) Save your settings.

6) Enjoy!

Games have come a long way. I’m about to buy the first three games of the GTA series and for everyone who knows this game series, you know what I’m talking about, for those that don’t know this game, well… I don’t know, but I doubt those actually exist. What I’m trying to say is that a few years ago a highly equipped computer was necessary to play games. Nowadays, while this partly remains the same, games are also running within browsers. A lot of people may think of small flash games, but this isn’t what I’m talking about. Games such as Quake are now playable within the browser and therefore are working with Linux and Mac.

I’m sure there are more games available but if you like MMOFPS, which stands for Massive Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter – so I learned – you will like these two:

Quake Live:

Operation 7:

Depending on where you’re from, your legal age to play these games may vary, so keep that in mind before you find yourself shooting other people’s heads of. If you know additional games, please leave a comment.

It’s pretty much safe to say that Gmail is the best thing that happened to email. I just checked and found the first message in my inbox to be already more than 4 years old. I was happy to be invited and directly sent more invitations to others. The way Google thought of organizing emails was and still is so different from others and I wish everyday at work, that Outlook could at least integrate a few features, that are standard for years now using Gmail. It features a great search, basically unlimited space and to me the best feature (next to many others) is, that an email conversation doesn’t end up in many single emails you would have to put into a folder. Instead, a conversation is created, which includes all email replies.

But onto the topic: How to organize your Gmail inbox. Although it isn’t quite the topic either, I would suggest to enable features such as Superstars and Labels, as this will make your life already a lot easier, especially when you receive emails from other accounts.

I started to use the different stars and arrows to organize my inbox, but still found it too cluttered. Then I tried to sort my mails with the labeling feature. Adding different colours and filtering my messages kept my inbox clean and I was happy ever since. To filter your messages, I would suggest using the following method:

- go to Settings and then Filters and Create a new filter

- into the Has the words field type:

from:(Friend A|Friend B) OR (to:Friend A|Friend B)

Enter the names of your friends for example to create a Friends filter. You can also enter email addresses or company names and so on, depending on the filter you would like to create.

- click Next Step and decide what should happen with new emails

- mark Add label to create a new label or choose an existent one you already created before

- make a test search or just click Also apply filter to __ conversations below.

- Create Filter to set up your new label

When you archive conversations now, it’s easier to find them, although you still have the search function. Nevertheless, if you receive a lot of emails and you don’t want to archive directly, this will help you to organize your inbox.

Shouldn’t this be sufficient, I suggest you check out this article at lifehacker.com. It will introduce you to the combination of Superstars and Multiple Inboxes to make your email experience even better.