At the risk of invoking a round of reader rage, I'll admit that I've never really been that hyped on the idea of MMS on the iPhone (and, by the way, get off my lawn). If I want to send someone a picture, I've got their email address; I'll just send them a picture. No big whoop.

I do have some friends and colleagues who 'came up' on mainline camera phones and they gleefully pop pics back and forth via MMS. I also appreciate the ability to decode the snapshots my wife sends from her Motorola RAZR, but overall I wouldn't rate it among the top iPhone features I was eager to get from AT&T (not like the ongoing lack of tethering, which is making me grind my teeth in my sleep).

That prejudicial attitude may have made me a little skeptical when I met with FunMobility's CEO Adam Lavine this week to get a preview of his company's new free app FunMail [iTunes link], which promises to leverage the Semantic Media Project and add appropriate imagery to your MMS messages, short emails, Facebook wall posts, et cetera. It's available in the US App Store as of last night.

Sure, the app is simple enough to use (once you register and accept the company's TOS, which may subject you to occasional text messages from them if you don't opt out) -- type in your message, and the system gives you the text (up to 140 characters) atop your choice of image from a list of five, sourced from FunMobility's licensed libraries along with Creative Commons remixable content from Flickr and other repositories. If you want to include a hidden search term, putting it at the end of the message with a double-hash (##) will tell FunMail to search those words without including them in the sent message. You can send it to any mobile phone number in your address book, to email recipients, or to your Facebook friends or wall via Facebook Connect. The result is a little bit inspirational office poster, a little bit LOLcat, and in some ways strangely intriguing... but not really, you know, useful.

Talk about burying the lead -- Shufflegazine did a piece on Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Hwang during a visit to Dubai recently, in which he talks about how much he and his family love their Macs, and Apple's machines add value, and in his house it's just "Mac, Mac, Mac," and OH MY GOD, what is that SITTING ON THE TABLE in front of him? OK, it's probably not definitely not an Apple tablet (yet), as there's no clear Apple logo on it, but man that's a nice looking tablet device, and even Engadget says they have no idea what it is.

The thing is, this picture just appeared with Shufflegazine's piece, and while Hwang did go on and on about how much he loves Apple stuff (and yes, the two companies have a long history of sharing some hardware), there's not word one about that tablet or anything like it in the piece, no hint of any other hardware or partnership announcement. It could be a prototype, it could be another tablet we're just not recognizing, or yes, Hwang could have just thrown it down on the table during the interview, and Shufflegazine could have just completely missed it. [They didn't. -Ed.]

Though if that last one is true, we have no idea how it happened. How do you cover Apple and their gadgets and avoid being drawn to that tablet. It's so... thin and well-designed. We'll be honest, if we were in the room, we might have licked it then and there to claim it as our own.

Thanks to Nemanja for the tip.

Flexibits has just released Cameras, an application designed to manage multiple camera hookups on your Mac. With Cameras, you can direct which programs launch when you connect any number of photo-related devices to your computer; including digital cameras, the iPhone or a digital media reader.

Cameras installs a preference pane in System Preferences. The first time you connect a new device to your Mac and start to sync it, the device will show up in the preference panel. From there, you can choose what that individual camera does when connected. It's a simple, great application for managing different cameras and keeps unwanted programs from opening when you connect them and works well when multiple devices are developed.

Cameras is a free download and requires OS X. 10.4.11 or later.

Solely for your lunchtime amusement, we bring you this classic, heartwarming picture of a young family celebrating their new addition around the holidays.

Mac is now 25, and had his first TV appearance last year after a short career as a young actor appearing on TV's Seinfeld. Tom and Beth just finished remodeling their kitchen.

[Via BuzzFeed and EatLiver.com.]

Thanks, Alex!

Have you ever been away from your Mac, then come back only to find that your co-worker has stolen your favorite Apple pen? Well, I am going to show you how to catch them in the act by creating a Mac "spy cam." For this how-to, you will need to create an Automator workflow, AppleScript, and some Mail rules. So, cue the James Bond music, and let's begin. You do need an iSight or a newer Mac with a built-in camera. (Yes, I know there are some tools prebuilt to do this -- but what's the fun in that?)

Continue reading to learn how to create the Mac spy cam.

We've been blogging Skitch, a new 'hybrid' photo editing and web services tool from plasq (makers of Comic Life), since Scott first met and fell in love with it at Macworld 07. Using the app through its development, it's clear that Skitch is going to knock people's socks off, with a well-executed blend of desktop editing and integration with web services like Plasq's new MySkitch and Flickr. For example: a major new feature in an upcoming public beta (that's right, I said 'public': join the mailing list for your chance to get a copy) includes iPhoto and Aperture integration:


Simply double-click an item from the library panel shown here to begin applying all manners of Skitch editing. Another feature that brings the 'hybrid' element to the table is Skitch's tight integration with web services. Skitch can send pics to FTP, .Mac and even Flickr accounts, but it also integrations with a new MySkitch service that will debut. MySkitch does a lot of interesting things, like giving you embed code for zoomable thumbnails (ideal for the likes of eBay and blogs with thin columns), a direct link for sending in email and even forum-friendly embed code. Skitch doesn't stop there though: you can also remove images from these web services directly from within Skitch, effectively making it a one-stop management shop for your images both local and otherwise.

That's enough blabbing about features for now though. The folks at plasq were kind enough to allow us to publish an exclusive Skitch screenshot gallery, and published we have. Check out more screenshots of Skitch's good side, and don't forget to hit up plasq's mailing list for a chance to snag your own copy when they release an upcoming public beta.

Photojojo is a community focused on photography tips, tricks, DIY projects and other kinds of picture-taking goodness. Recently, they introduced Project 365, essentially coining a(nother?) term and offering tips for those take-a-picture-a-day-for-a-year-or-three projects that broke out on the interwebs over the last year or so.

Inspired both by this Photojojo post and the recent 'snap a pic of users who commit invalid login attempts' hack, Adam Pash at Lifehacker penned a Photo projects for the New Year post in which he put together a script that can automate this process on iSight-enabled Macs, more or less taking the effort out of your own Project 365. The script can be set to run each time you login (properly, of course) or at a specific time of each day, and Adam includes instructions for tweaking them to your needs. By default, they're set up to snap the pic and save it in ~/project365/pics/, adding a timestamp to the name of each file to help you keep track of everything when you're ready to make your YouTube debut.

I think this is a fantastic idea, and now that I have an iSight in both my MacBook and iMac, I think I might actually take a crack at this myself. A big thanks to Adam for putting together such a cool script, and be sure to check out Photojojo's original Project 365 post for tips, motivation and ideas on what to do with 365 pictures of you and/or your stuff.

Fraser Speirs already released a Flickr plugin for Aperture, but what about the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users in the crowd (John Gruber has a nice piece on the ridiculousness of adding the 'Photoshop' prefix to Lightroom's name)? As it turns out, through a little trickery, Lightroom can be tweaked for uploading your images to Flickr.

This Mac OS X Hints post describes the simple setup, as well as a couple of drawbacks, to using Lightroom and the official Flickr Uploadr tool in conjunction; one simply needs to change the external editor preference to the Flickr Uploadr, then chose the Uploadr as the option from the Post-processing page during an export. Check out Mac OS X Hints though for more details and possible inspiration for asking Mr. Speirs (nicely) for a true-blue Lightroom Flickr plugin.

If you need a quick way to browse a few folders of images without starting iPhoto or some other serious photo management software, PicturePopPro just might be the Finder plugin for you. It offers right-click access to a surprisingly powerful yet slim and zippy photo browser and mini-manager. Images and directory structures can be viewed in a number of different ways, and a pop-up menu offers the ability to trash or label the image, as well as open it in its default viewer/editor (like Preview or Photoshop). This killer plugin can even be run in a full screen mode, and there are plenty of other options I haven't even explored yet. Check out its documentation page for visual demos, keyboard shortcuts and screenshots of what this plugin is capable of.

PicturePopPro is a Universal Binary and offered as donationware from setnan.org.

Sometimes randomly rotating your desktop wallpaper through the Desktop System Preferences pane is just a little overkill. Wouldn't it be nice if you had a simple drag-and-drop Automator action for setting your own wallpaper whenever your heart desired a change of pace? Then why not use this macosxhints post to make one. A few simple steps creates an action that you save as an app somewhere (I named my action 'Wallpaper') and simply link to in your Dock. For added convenience I saved it as a Finder plugin so I can right-click any picture I find to quickly chose Automator > Wallpaper from the context menu. Handy.

As an extra tip: make sure you turn off automatic wallpaper rotation in the Desktop Preferences pane if it's on. Otherwise, at least from my testing, this action won't work.

Fraser Speirs, creator of the highly useful FlickrExport and other apps, is asking for feedback on his blog as to whether users would be interested in a similar ApertureExport app. He warns that ApertureExport wouldn't be quite as well tied into Aperture as FlickrExport is to iPhoto, and this is due to the current version of Aperture (apparently) lacking a plugin API.

Still, if the idea of being able to point at a feature in your own copy of ApertureExport some day and telling your friends "that was my idea!" sounds appealing, head over to Mr. Speirs' post and toss in your $0.02.

This one slipped past us: Adobe has released a third beta of Lightroom, their Aperture-competitor for professional photographers. The release notes are in PDF (I guess HTML is old news for the company who owns both Flash and Acrobat), but overall, improvements include: enhancements to import/export options, live comparisons of image adjustments in Before and After previews, a new straightening tool and a new heavily-requested Web export module with HTML and Flash options.

The new beta can be had here by Mac users, while a beta for Windows (oddly) is yet to be seen. If, for some odd reason, you'd like to be notified when a beta is available for Windows, a sign-up notification form is here.

[thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Finally, after months of small alpha version bumps, Flock, the social web browser based on Firefox, has unleashed a 0.7 beta with a whole slew of updates, improvements and bug fixes. Along with a site re-design, check out their blog entry for a thorough rundown of what's new and what's still on the way.

This beta-worthy version has been a long time coming, and my copy is downloading as I write this. In case you aren't familiar: Flock has Firefox at its core, but includes a ton of features and capabilities built around the concept of using and interacting with the web - not just surfing it. Features like built-in blogging, uploading to/keeping tabs on Flickr and integrated del.icio.us bookmarking are all on the feature list. It's quite a slick browser if you've been looking for a solid, integrated tool for both browsing and participating in the web. Check it out.

[via Download Squad]

We hear about the occasional battery recall, and there are always the complaints that computers are getting too hot, but things went to a whole new level for a family in Minnesota. As WCCO in the Twin Cities reports, an 11 year-old boy set a running iBook down on the carpet and left the room. His mother states that they heard a popping noise, saw that the iBook had started melting the carpet and the room was filling with smoke. They quickly carried the iBook outside and remembered to bring their camera along for the show as the iBook, you can see, literally caught fire (WCCO has a video and more images).

Of course, the news outlet is making sure to pull out all the sensationalizing tricks with such quotes from the mother like "It doesn't seem real that you would have a fire in a computer. We all could have died, and the house could have burned down".

The moral of the story? Apple burns houses down. Buy a typewriter from your local office supply store.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.