Are you tired of being distracted by the internet? Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Google Earth could all be considered "distractions" or "time wasters." So, if you're looking to get some work done without physically un-pluging from the internet then Freedom might be what you need.

Freedom allows you to set a time limit for internet access. For instance, if I need to set aside 30 minutes for a project that doesn't require internet access, I could tell Freedom to block internet access for those 30 minutes, Freedom will then disable WiFi and ethernet access for 30 minutes. After the 30 minutes are over your WiFi and ethernet access will be restored.

You can download Freedom for free (donations accepted) from the developers website or from MacUpdate.

Linkinus is the preferred IRC client for a lot of our readers, I know (personally I tend towards Colloquy, but only because I'm a cheapskate and it's donationware), and they kindly dropped us a note to let us know they'd updated to version 1.3. The new build includes the ability to split chat windows (as seen above), in addition to a revamped UI, "major" performance upgrades, plaintext and Spotlight support for logging, and a whole slew of fun things to play around with, including, we're told, a "Whisper" style that will actually embed images, audio files, and YouTube and Google videos right into your chat windows (a la Campfire). Apparently IRC isn't just text anymore.

In fact, at $20 for all these features, Linkinus really is a steal for anyone who spends any amount of time in an IRC channel. Colloquy still does everything I need it to when I jump into IRC periodically, but if you want to chat like a pro in there, Linkinus is a great choice.

Thinking about starting a video blog? Good luck. But if you're sure about this, the cool folks over at Google Mac have created an extremely useful tool to help you get your very own DIY reality show started.

Vidnik (0.13.0 beta) is an Apache-licensed app that allows you to record video from your iSight and upload it directly to YouTube. You can title, tag, categorize and add a description to the videos right from within the app itself. Above you can see why I don't vidblog. Nobody wants to look at that.

Keeping with the "self-built apps," I'm going to show you how to build your own YouTube downloader. Sure you could use applications like TubeSock, but where's the fun in that? This application will download the YouTube flash video from a pasted link, and all with a little AppleScript.


Continue reading to learn how to build the YouTube downloader.

It would seem that the Mac OS X development spectrum is bursting with excellent freeware applications. TubeTV is one such freeware application that fills a void that many Mac-YouTube users have -- saving videos in a Mac compatible format for later viewing (there are some paid alternatives out there, such as Tubesock but TubeTV is free, and offers up some additional features).

TubeTV features a built-in web browser that allows you to surf over to your favorite video sharing websites. When you are viewing the video you want to download for later, just click the little download button in the toolbar. The video will begin downloading and then covert to your specified format on-the-fly. TubeTV uses the free Perian to convert the videos to either iPod, AppleTV, iPhone, or a standard phone format. When I used it, the software was spot-on. It downloaded the video very quickly and converted a 3 minute video to iPod format in well under a minute. The great thing about TubeTV is that you aren't limited to using only YouTube, you can use it with other flash-based video sites as well. I tried it with Viddler, and it worked as advertised. The video quality is also excellent.

TubeTV can be downloaded from the developers website for $0.00 in all currencies (however, donations are accepted).

TUAW reader Mauro writes that after running the 1.1.2 jailbreak, YouTube no longer works. He asks: "Any idea how to solve this problem?" Here is a simple guide from Ging of the South that will help.

The guide walks you through editing a particular property list to add a device certificate that authorizes your iPhone or iPod touch. The Ging page provides the certificate text for you to paste into Property List Editor. If you're not on a Mac, you can use my plutil utility to convert the file to XML format and then edit it with your favorite text editor.

Thanks Drudge

Before you say anything, I know - YouTube is the last thing you need to have lying around at the flick of a mouse or stroke of a key. I just couldn't stop myself from blogging this because it shot to the top of Apple's popular Dashboard widgets chart, and it really is well done. The YouTube Dashboard widget allows for searching YouTube, displaying Just Added, Most Discussed, Featured and Most Viewed videos, and you can even condense it for those times when you want to at least appear like you might be getting work done. Clicking a video opens a larger window in the Dashboard to watch it, and therein lies one catch. For some odd reason you aren't presented with YouTube's video controller; just a pause/play button. Another bummer is that you can't log into your own account to rate or mark videos as favorites, but if you're just looking for a quick window into YouTube that's easy to show and hide, this YouTube widget just might be your answer.

Apple has released another iPhone ad unofficially titled either "All These Years" or "How?" I say 'unofficially' titled because it hasn't appeared at Apple's iPhone ads page as of this writing yet, but a copy is already on YouTube. This time around, Apple's giving a shout out to the business users, asking how they could have gone all these years without "email like this" or "stock updates like this" in their pocket. Personally, I'm glad they wrote the ad this way, because I would probably have spit out my beer if the voiceover would have said "without email like this... in your pants."

But seriously: I worry about how well this particular ad is going to do. The iPhone is receiving a lot of criticism from the business sector, much of it understandable, for not working with Exchange Servers. While I don't wear a suit to work every day (or pretty much any day), word on the street is that Exchange support is the major hurdle keeping the iPhone from storming corporate purchase receipts. If the iPhone is primarily targeted at consumers, that's great. But if Apple wants to truly go after business users, they need to play by that industry's rules and offer the software support those folks need.

That said, it is a bold ad that certainly highlights the iPhone's gorgeous UI in a business setting. I'll update this post with a link once Apple publishes the official ad.

[Update: There are actually two new ads, and Apple has updated their site with both - All These Years is the one I caught here, but another new one is All the Parts. Just like the first ad, I question their approach because the ad isn't entirely accurate. One major 'part' of the internet the iPhone lacks is Flash. While I personally would be happy as a camper if Flash never arrives on the iPhone, I understand that it's something many users want. Either way, the lack of Flash is certainly a glaring hole in their particular wording with this second ad.]

[via iPhone Alley]

Now that you have a usable snippet of the music from the iPhone commercials with which to start making your spoofs, how about a default set of contacts so you don't post anyone's private information for the whole world to see? Thanks to a clever reader by the name of Stephen Kenny, TUAW is now hosting this copy of the 60 phony contacts set up in the demo iPhones in Apple Stores. In case you're wondering, yes: this means you too can have John Appleseed in your iPhone!

The primary idea here is that you can simply sync these contacts perhaps as a group (or the only group) to your iPhone and only use those when demoing making fun of any of its features. Adding them all to a specific group in Address Book will help you keep things organized (both on and off screen), and you can easily delete them once you get all those spoofs uploaded to YouTube. Plus, your friends and coworkers will thank you for not putting their phone number or home address in too public of a place.

Without further adieu, here is the 5.2MB zip file containing 60 contacts that won't mind being spotlighted in your iPhone spoof ads. This zip file contains a vCard file, ripe for importing into Address Book (and possibly Entourage/Outlook as well) and synching with your iPhone.

I own a Wii, and i installed Windows Vista in Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro primarily so I could play Half Life 2 and catch up with some of the other rockin' games coming out for PCs (buying Vista at OEM prices via a local computer shop numbed some of the pain). With all this rockin' gaming I have going on, however, I am still admittedly a sucker for a good Breakout-style game, and Ricochet Lost Worlds is just such a game. Yes I know Breakout is one of the traditional jokes about Mac gaming, but those stereotypical days are disappearing anyway. Cool powerups and some unique challenges in Ricochet caught my attention, and a today-only sale at MacZOT for $10.95 instead of its regular $19.95 in the Mac Game Store just netted a PayPal purchase from me. If you're looking for some basic gaming that doesn't take an hour just for the warmup, Ricochet Lost Worlds is a good choice.

Content creators have a right to make money from what they produce, I don't think anyone argues that. As a content creator myself I feel for those that have their copyrights infringed, though I think that only happens because the big media companies are afraid of digital distribution and treat their customers like criminals.

Anyway, the latest copyright infringement story has just popped up over on NewsBlog. It would seem that some of Bob Tur's work has been illegally uploaded to YouTube, and he isn't happy. He has filed suit against YouTube already, but now he thinks he has a case against Apple. Why? Because the YouTube app on the iPhone plays his copyrighted material (please, no one tell him about the AppleTV, Macs, or PCs, all of which can play YouTube content too. He might start going after everyone with a net connection and access to YouTube).

Bob is 'disappointed' in Apple for creating an app capable of distributing copyrighted material and thinks he can name Apple as a secondary copyright infringer. Now, I'm no lawyer but this is just dumb (that's the technical term, I think). It is like suing Sony because their TVs and DVD players allow me to watch a bootleged DVD (not that I would do that). Here's hoping Mr. Tur comes to his senses and doesn't clog an already overworked legal system with ridiculous cases.

[via Hello_World]

Activation

• Readers at TUAW and across the web are reporting all sorts of activation problems, and I'm truly sorry to hear about it, but I might have some tips that could help get your iPhone on its feet. As I recall, iTunes gave me an error message during the activation process, but the iPhone still kicked me back out to the home screen once it was done, and I received the standard 'your phone is activated' email a couple minutes later. I immediately was able to receive a phone call, and SMS and make an outbound call. I was also an existing AT&T customer, so all I had to do was add the $20 iPhone Data Plan during the process. I'm not trying to brag here, just provide context; by my rough calculations, existing AT&T customers seem to be having less problems than those who are first signing up or porting over service, as those operations probably entail a bit more work in the back-end on AT&T's part.
• There are a couple tricks that might help here: First, some owners are reporting that simply soft resetting the iPhone (hold the power button at the top of the phone for a few seconds to receive the power off slider) and then booting it back up fixes the issue. Just for the heck of it, why not wait a few seconds or even up to a minute? It couldn't hurt, and it might work some network voodoo to wake AT&T up and get your iPhone rollin'.
  
• I honestly don't know about this one as it is simply an idea I had, but: if you have a second Mac or PC lying around with the latest iTunes 7.3 installed, you could try plugging it in to see if the activation process begins again. However, remember: this is just an idea I had, and I have no idea whether that will illicit any results or get your activation process even more borked up on AT&T's books. I honestly don't believe it could do any damage, but I certainly am no AT&T activations engineer either.
  
• This is another theory that I haven't seen tested or mentioned anywhere, so take this one with a grain of salt as well: If you're an existing AT&T customer with a SIM card in your current (or - hopefully - soon to be replaced) phone, you could try swapping out the iPhone's SIM card as outlined in the iPhone User Guide (not included with the phone itself). Simply open that in Preview and search for SIM; your first result should be a guide for removing the SIM card and inserting a new one. Then plug your iPhone back into iTunes to see if a new activation process can begin. Again: this is just a theory; I haven't tested or heard anyone try this as a solution for activation problems.
• Update: More readers are reporting that turning off your old phone before activating the iPhone might help with activation issues. While this tip won't do you any good if you're already caught in the limbo of AT&T's activation system, it might help if my idea of re-trying activation with a different computer is worth anything.

EDGE

• It's surprisingly fast. The best speed test I've found so far for Safari on the iPhone is dslreports.com/mspeed, offering a really scaled down page with a few download size options and no-nonsense results. I'm getting, on average, about 150 kbit/sec downloads on my phone. In light of the drawbacks of EDGE's (traditional) speed, the only reason that makes sense as to why Apple and AT&T didn't make some massive announcement of a network upgrade is that they're getting hammered this weekend with iPhone activations and people tinkering around with surfing via EDGE. If they're going to announce this at all, waiting until maybe sometime next week makes sense as the iPhone storm might be dissipating to more manageable levels where most users will see this increased speed across the country. Of course, this is just speculation on my part, but the tests don't lie: users across the nation are reporting that EDGE has upgraded from its previous 20 kbits/sec speed to anywhere from 100k - 200 kbits/sec. This is great (unofficial) news.
• Call me crazy, but I think YouTube is serving up different movies based on whether you are viewing via Wi-Fi or EDGE. I've watched three separate videos via both wireless methods, one of them user generated with crummy equipment to start with, and I swear I see a higher quality version over Wi-Fi than when watching with EDGE. Whether this means there are literally two separate files encoded at different qualities or if YouTube is working some streaming + compression magic I have no idea, but I would love to hear other iPhone users chime in on this one.
• Google Maps usually impresses me with its speed when viewing satellite images over EDGE. Simply viewing the standard map and searching for a location is almost always snappy over EDGE (sometimes there seems to be a delay, but not often), and even downloading satellite imagery is usable.

Google Maps

• This was probably demoed and I just don't remember, but I'm talking to enough iPhone owners who didn't know this that I felt it warranted a mention: you can pinch to zoom in and out of either Google Maps views. This is fantastic.
• Traffic reports are usually pretty snappy, again even over EDGE.
• The Bookmarks feature of Google Maps (accessible by the blue book in the address bar) is a great way to save frequently used routes and quickly get at the addresses of contacts.
• At first I was slightly disappointed that I can't hook the iPhone's Google Maps up to my actual Google Account, but after exploring that Bookmarks feature, I deem it a non-issue, at least for me.

Mail, selecting and deleting items

• Some readers are asking about doing operations like deleting more than one Mail message at a time. While you can slide your finger across any single message to invoke that red delete button for just that message, hitting the Edit button at the top of any message list will invoke red buttons to the left of every message in the list. While this isn't exactly the same as holding the Command key on a Mac, selecting a bunch of messages and hitting the delete key once to trash them all, this is the quickest way I can find to perform large deleting operations.
• This seems to be the UI for any situation where you have a list of items that can be deleted; there's no way to select a few of them at random and hit one delete key - instead, you enable a 'delete mode' which makes it easier to delete more than one message, but still one at a time.
• I'm slightly disappointed at the lack of the 'One Inbox to Rule Them All' like Mail in Mac OS X has; if you have more than one account synched to the iPhone, you have to drill down into each account's inbox to view any new messages, drill back out to the accounts list and then drill back into a new account and inbox to view that account's new messages. It's clunky, but it's also becoming inspiration for me to consolidate email accounts.
  

That's about it for now. Like I said, stay tuned for those more in-depth posts on individual features, but in the meantime, I hope everyone's activation problems can get solved soon.

Have you been holding your breath, waiting for the latest iPhone commercial that debuted last night to appear on the Apple website? The new iPhone/YouTube ad, with all its doggy skate-boarding glory is now available for viewing on the Apple website. And as you might have guessed, it has no "2 year contract" wording on it.

Breathe.

Thanks Nick

While YouTube on the Apple TV stole the show of the device's most recent software update, Apple managed to sneak in a few other features and some intriguing hints at possible future features. As TUAW reader Brandon mentioned, there is a new iTunes Store section in the Settings menu, but all this does (for now) is allow you to select your country of residence. Could this be a precursor to shopping the iTunes Store from the comforts of your living room couch? Or is it simply a way to make the Apple TV access the streaming content (such as top songs, movies, etc.) from one's own country?

Also new is the ability to use iPhoto slideshows for the Apple TV's screensaver (and possibly Aperture slideshows as well; I'll have to check on that), and a new Parental Controls section in Settings that allows you to lock the Apple TV with a 4-digit numerical password. Brandon also says he now sees a 'no audio' feedback on the Apple TV when trying to use an Apple Remote to change volume, but I don't.

I'm also not sure about this one, but I believe a 'Shuffle' option is new above lists of items like playlists, artists, etc. Can anyone confirm that one? How about features we're missing? Let us know if anything else is new in the comments or via our tips form.