Working for MartianCraft

In case you missed my tweets earlier this week, MartianCraft is looking to add a few developers. We're looking for a couple of experienced developers, and are also thinking about bringing in one or two entry-level devs without significant experience to be trained up.

Initially, the work would be project-based contracting and would start in late August. Conversion to full-time employment is a possibility, but not right away.

If you're interested in being considered, send an e-mail with relevant work experience and/or résumé/CV to work@martiancraft.com.

How to Care for Your iPhone

For most of us, our iPhone is a very essential part of our life. It keeps us linked to our business, our family and our friends. It isn’t just a phone. If something happens to our phone to render it unreachable, we go into panic mode. Here are ten ways to care for your iPhone to retain it safe and functioning properly.

1. Don’t leave it in your car. Cars are not a good place to leave your iPhone, even for short periods of time. Temperature limits of hot and cold can damage your device. Hot temperatures can particularly be magnified inside of a vehicle.

2. Avoid high moisture areas. Bathrooms, enclosed swimming pools and other high damp areas can cause water damage to cellphones much faster than you might recognize. Leave your cellphone behind when you enter these kinds of areas where the air is thick with moisture.

3. Drying it out. If your iPhone should get unprotected to moisture, take the back off and remove the battery as soon as possible. To captivate the moisture, place the phone in a container of uncooked rice. Immerse the phone totally in the rice and seal the container. If no rice is available, let the phone air dry for a day before trying to operate it again.

4. Use display protectors. The surface of your iPhone can easily become scratched and marred- you should already have learned it from one of our posts. Guard it with transparent film protection sheets. Change the sheet every few months. You can even bring your phone into your local cellphone carrier and have it renewed for you.

5. Keep it in a hard case. Purchasing a hard case to snap your iPhone into is a wise investment. The case will take the punishment of abuse instead of the phone itself.

6. Car chargers. Car chargers are a great convenience, but they shouldn’t be your primary charger. You should also disconnect your iPhone from the car charger when you are starting or shutting off the car to avoid injuring it with power surges.

7. Battery indicator. At times cellphones will appear to be losing their charge more rapidly than normal, when, in reality, it is the battery life pointer just giving a false alarm. To spot on this situation, let your phone battery to go thorough dead before recharging. After doing this a couple of times, the indicator should be reset and start action correctly again.

8. Don’t overload. Your iPhone is a mini-storage device and has a restricted amount of memory. If you find your browser or apps freezing, you may be reaching your memory limits. If there are apps that you don’t use, removing them from your iPhone on a regular basis can free up more memory.

9. Don’t overcharge. It is suggested that you remove your phone from the charger once it reaches a full charge, or else shut the phone down when charging the phone. Leaving a fully charged phone plugged into the charger and turned on can lead to overheating.

10. Be aware of placement. Many iPhones are injured because of being set down on a hood or roof of an automobile, and then forgetting it there when the owner drives away. An iPhone moving loosely in a handbag is also subject to ‘battering’ by other items in the bag. Keeping your device in a separate pocket of a handbag is much favored.

Maybe you’ve already experienced any of the situations listed above. We all agree that it is simply a common sense, but most of us find it hard to learn from others’ mistakes, unless they suffer all on their own...

via PhoneService

iPod nano – A Long Way Before It’s Here The Way It Is!

Apple products probably are the most rapidly developed devices in the world of technology. To measure the progress, let’s take one of Apples successful products – iPod nano. Below you can see the differences between the first and the 6th (the last so far) generations. You can compare the two and see how huge the progress has been in only 4 years!

1G Original Release Date - February 7, 2006 Capacity- 1GB, 2GB, 4GB Colors- Black, White Rated battery life (hours) - audio 14 hours, slideshow 4 hours Size- 89mm, 41 mm, 6.9 mm Weight- 42.5g (1.5 oz)

6G Original Release Date - September 1, 2010 Capacity- 8GB, 16GB Colors- silver, graphite, blue, green, orange, pink, red Special. Rated battery life (hours) - audio 24 hours Size- 37.5mm, 41 mm, 8.78 mm Weight- 21.1g (0.74 oz)

iPod nano actually is a global product, and its 29 UI languages prove this fact. The last version has a capacity of 240 to 1000 songs in 128-Kbps format – this is a whole library! Why do we love iPod’s so much, even now, when the world is so crowded by smartphones and numerous devices for music and video? Because: we can use iPod nano at the gym, while riding a bike, and with most leisurely outdoor activities. It’s so small and light that can clip on the collar or sleeve with an incredible ease, iPod nano has the “apple / line-out” connector, features pausable AM/FM radio, has a touch screen for stress-free navigation, and it turns on and off instead of just switching to a “sleep mode”!