7 fun ways to interact with your Foursquare account
1. 4sqmap4sqmap is a great way to visualize many different aspects of not only your own, but your friends' Foursquare activity. In addition to viewing activity, you can view a full map of nearby specials, tips, trending venues, and even use Foursquare's recently launched Explore feature on your computer, which is a feature that is lacking on the official Foursquare Web site. Make sure to visit 4sqmap if you want to see all of your check-ins, badges, and mayorships layed out over your city.Screenshot by Jason Cipriani2. GifiGifi (iTunes link) is an iPhone application that is built off of two different APIs. The first is payment service Venmo, and the second is Foursquare. Gifi allows users to leave a "gift" at a Foursquare venue for a friend or friends. A gift can either be announced, alerting all those who are eligible to claim the gift, or left as a secret, surprising the recipient on his or her next check-in at the specified venue. If the recipient doesn't have a Venmo account, the e-mail alerting that person to the gift provides instructions on how to sign up, and claim the gift. Gifi is a great way to leave a simple note and some money for a loved one or friend.Screenshot by Jason Cipriani3. DontEat.atDontEat.at is an interesting service for those located in the New York City area. Once you link your Foursquare account to the DontEat.at service, you will receive text messages if you check in at a food venue that has health code violations. The text will list the number of violations for that particular venue. Unfortunately, the service is specific to New York City at this time, but it is a great way for NYC residents to keep tabs on their favorite restaurants. Screenshot by Jason Cipriani4. FastFwdMeFastFwdMe is a fairly new Foursquare-based service, but it is growing in popularity at a fast pace. The function of FastFwdMe is to allow users to visit the Web site, either on their smartphone or computer, and precheck in to a venue that they will be at later on that day. You can then use the service to send out a tweet, alerting your friends of where you will be in said amount of time. FastFwdMe then automatically checks you in to the location you previously specified after the chosen length of time is reached (it ranges from 15 minutes to 3 hours).Screenshot by Jason Cipriani5. 4sq2go4sq2go is another new service that allows Foursquare users on an iOS device to save a specific venue search to their iDevice for offline viewing. Having a saved, offline search of Foursquare venues stored on your device can come quite in handy when you are traveling abroad and want to avoid the expensive roaming fees, or when you will be traveling somewhere with spotty coverage. Screenshot by Jason Cipriani6. 4sq Badge CrawlFoursquare has some pretty fun and interesting core badges that users can unlock while exploring their cities. While there are many Web sites with extensive lists and details on how to unlock badges, they don't provide many personalized details for you to unlock badges. Enter 4sq Badge Crawl.4sq Badge Crawl reads your Foursquare account and compares your check-ins to known badges that you don't have. It then tells you the exact venue and amount of times you need to check in to obtain a particular badge. Though this takes away from some of the gaming aspect, it is definitely a tool that can be used to earn those hard-to-unlock badges. Screenshot by Jason Cipriani7: 4squareand7yearsagoFoursquare held its first ever hack day earlier this year with the hopes of some fantastic third-party apps coming out of it. It did not disappoint. One of our favorite apps to come out of the Foursquare hack day is 4squareand7yearsago.The unique service e-mails you a daily report of where you were exactly one year ago, based on your check-ins from Foursquare. It is a lot of fun to see where you were, and who you were with, exactly one year ago. It can bring back some funny memories, or leave you puzzled as to why you checked in to the hospital at 3 a.m. All of the services listed require you to authorize each of them to access your Foursquare account. If you are a bit hesitant regarding privacy, please make sure to read through our guide on taking control of your Foursquare account privacy. If you have a favorite Foursquare service that isn't listed here, be sure to add it in the comments below!
How to convert audiobooks for use in iTunes
How to convert audiobooks for use in iTunes
Go to the iTunes' General preferences and click the "Import Settings..." button.Ensure "AAC Encoder" is selected, and then optionally set the encoding quality. The "Spoken Podcast" option should be enough for most audiobooks; however, you can use another preset or customize the settings manually if you wish.Close the preferences and select your audiobook in the iTunes window.Choose "Create AAC Version" from either the Advanced menu, or from the contextual menu by right-clicking the file.Now delete both the new and old files from the iTunes library, and when prompted be sure to move them to the Trash (do not click "Keep Files").With the files gone, go to the Trash and move the one that ends with ".m4a" to your desktop.Rename the file so it ends with ".m4b" instead of ".m4a," and then drag it to the iTunes window to re-import it.The info window in iTunes is another way to change the media type for the file.Another way to get iTunes to recognize song files as audiobooks is to use the "Options" section of the file's information window (Thanks to MacFixIt reader "Olivier" for this contribution). Select the file in iTunes and press Command-I (you can also do this with multiple songs selected), and then click the "Options" tab in the resulting information window. In this section there is a drop-down menu for "Media Kind" which you can use to select between Music, Video, Podcast, Audiobook, TV Show, iTunes U, and other options for the file. For the audiobooks, select the "Audiobook" option and the files should now show up in the Books section of iTunes as audiobooks.At this point the files should be placed in the audiobooks section in iTunes along with the rest of your audiobooks. If you use the manual conversion method and have more than one audiobook you would like to convert, first convert them all to AAC format (you can queue them up) and then delete them all at the same time so you can manage them all in the Finder in one step, instead of having to do all the steps each time for every file you want to convert.This is likely the best approach for managing audiobooks that have already been imported into your iTunes library; however, if you have books that are not already in your library then you might consider using a third-party tool for converting them before importing them into the program. Some popular options include ChapterMark ($14.95), Audiobook Builder ($9.95), and Audiobook Binder (free).Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us!Be sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.
Go to the iTunes' General preferences and click the "Import Settings..." button.Ensure "AAC Encoder" is selected, and then optionally set the encoding quality. The "Spoken Podcast" option should be enough for most audiobooks; however, you can use another preset or customize the settings manually if you wish.Close the preferences and select your audiobook in the iTunes window.Choose "Create AAC Version" from either the Advanced menu, or from the contextual menu by right-clicking the file.Now delete both the new and old files from the iTunes library, and when prompted be sure to move them to the Trash (do not click "Keep Files").With the files gone, go to the Trash and move the one that ends with ".m4a" to your desktop.Rename the file so it ends with ".m4b" instead of ".m4a," and then drag it to the iTunes window to re-import it.The info window in iTunes is another way to change the media type for the file.Another way to get iTunes to recognize song files as audiobooks is to use the "Options" section of the file's information window (Thanks to MacFixIt reader "Olivier" for this contribution). Select the file in iTunes and press Command-I (you can also do this with multiple songs selected), and then click the "Options" tab in the resulting information window. In this section there is a drop-down menu for "Media Kind" which you can use to select between Music, Video, Podcast, Audiobook, TV Show, iTunes U, and other options for the file. For the audiobooks, select the "Audiobook" option and the files should now show up in the Books section of iTunes as audiobooks.At this point the files should be placed in the audiobooks section in iTunes along with the rest of your audiobooks. If you use the manual conversion method and have more than one audiobook you would like to convert, first convert them all to AAC format (you can queue them up) and then delete them all at the same time so you can manage them all in the Finder in one step, instead of having to do all the steps each time for every file you want to convert.This is likely the best approach for managing audiobooks that have already been imported into your iTunes library; however, if you have books that are not already in your library then you might consider using a third-party tool for converting them before importing them into the program. Some popular options include ChapterMark ($14.95), Audiobook Builder ($9.95), and Audiobook Binder (free).Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us!Be sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.
5 Webby services we'd like to see on the Apple TV
5 Webby services we'd like to see on the Apple TV
I've had a love/hate relationship with Apple TV since its release. Despite yesterday's price cut, the addition of the movie rental service, and computer-free content acquisition for things like Podcasts and music tracks, to me it's still not a necessary living-room entertainment device. The big deal-killer for me is still the closed system, which, for a modern-day streaming device, continues to act as if certain file formats don't exist, despite the competition's (including Microsoft) beginning to accept them with open arms. However, the one thing that does interest me and gets me actually wanting one in my living room is the inclusion of highly specialized Web-based services. The most notable addition to come yesterday? Another big Silicon Valley service: Flickr. So now we've got four Web-based services doing their thing on the Apple TV, including YouTube, which Apple added to the device in late June, Mac picture galleries, and movie trailers from Apple's popular QuickTime site. All of these got me thinking: what other Web-enabled services would go well with the Apple TV? Short of an Apple TV SDK that would let developers build in some new functionality to the device, surely there's room for more. I've put together a list of five services I'd like to see make their way onto the Apple TV that I think would actually work, given the relatively limited remote control and a lack of a keyboard.1. RSS readerWhile an RSS reader might be a borderline Web browser (which will likely never make its way anywhere close to the Apple TV), its use for some easy reading makes a lot of sense. As we've seen with Google's Wii-optimized version of its Reader product, living room RSS can be as easy as pie with a four-way directional pad and two control buttons, which the Apple TV remote just happens to have. 2. WeatherWeather on your TV is immensely helpful, and given the inclusion of the weather widget as standard on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and on OS X since version 10.4, it would make sense to put a larger, more extensive version of the weather app on the Apple TV for folks who want to give the forecast a quick check without turning on their computer or navigating the crummy menus of their set-top cable box.3. StocksYet another widget that would be nice to have as a larger, more informative widget for wide-screen TVs. Since most ticker symbols can be looked up with three or four letters, a keyboard would be unnecessary to input your favorite companies. Along with weather, this one seems like a no-brainer.Joost4. JoostJoost may be a software service, but the Apple TV has plenty of horsepower to drive it. It'll likely never happen, but given the amount of quality content that's on there, it would make a nice addition to the lineup of podcasts both audio and video that Apple's making available with the latest software update. 5. Internet radio (Shoutcast, Pandora, Last.fm, etc.)Like Joost (above), Internet radio would make an excellent streaming extension to some of the downloadable content found via iTunes. Heck, it's already a part of the software iteration of iTunes--how hard would it be to stick those streams in there? Got any of your own? Leave them in the comments.
I've had a love/hate relationship with Apple TV since its release. Despite yesterday's price cut, the addition of the movie rental service, and computer-free content acquisition for things like Podcasts and music tracks, to me it's still not a necessary living-room entertainment device. The big deal-killer for me is still the closed system, which, for a modern-day streaming device, continues to act as if certain file formats don't exist, despite the competition's (including Microsoft) beginning to accept them with open arms. However, the one thing that does interest me and gets me actually wanting one in my living room is the inclusion of highly specialized Web-based services. The most notable addition to come yesterday? Another big Silicon Valley service: Flickr. So now we've got four Web-based services doing their thing on the Apple TV, including YouTube, which Apple added to the device in late June, Mac picture galleries, and movie trailers from Apple's popular QuickTime site. All of these got me thinking: what other Web-enabled services would go well with the Apple TV? Short of an Apple TV SDK that would let developers build in some new functionality to the device, surely there's room for more. I've put together a list of five services I'd like to see make their way onto the Apple TV that I think would actually work, given the relatively limited remote control and a lack of a keyboard.1. RSS readerWhile an RSS reader might be a borderline Web browser (which will likely never make its way anywhere close to the Apple TV), its use for some easy reading makes a lot of sense. As we've seen with Google's Wii-optimized version of its Reader product, living room RSS can be as easy as pie with a four-way directional pad and two control buttons, which the Apple TV remote just happens to have. 2. WeatherWeather on your TV is immensely helpful, and given the inclusion of the weather widget as standard on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and on OS X since version 10.4, it would make sense to put a larger, more extensive version of the weather app on the Apple TV for folks who want to give the forecast a quick check without turning on their computer or navigating the crummy menus of their set-top cable box.3. StocksYet another widget that would be nice to have as a larger, more informative widget for wide-screen TVs. Since most ticker symbols can be looked up with three or four letters, a keyboard would be unnecessary to input your favorite companies. Along with weather, this one seems like a no-brainer.Joost4. JoostJoost may be a software service, but the Apple TV has plenty of horsepower to drive it. It'll likely never happen, but given the amount of quality content that's on there, it would make a nice addition to the lineup of podcasts both audio and video that Apple's making available with the latest software update. 5. Internet radio (Shoutcast, Pandora, Last.fm, etc.)Like Joost (above), Internet radio would make an excellent streaming extension to some of the downloadable content found via iTunes. Heck, it's already a part of the software iteration of iTunes--how hard would it be to stick those streams in there? Got any of your own? Leave them in the comments.
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