An unexpected bonus of the recent trip back to the UK was my parents new Toyota Prius Hybrid. I had never really given the Prius, or any Hyrbid car, much thought to be honest, but have to say that I was really impressed in many ways.

The style of the car was very pleasant. Certainly it looked as attractive as any mid sized family type car. The inside was very plush with lots of thought expended on the layout and storage facilities. I particularly liked the gear stick mounted in the dashboard and the instrument panel set way back on the dash under the front window.

I mentioned before that I wanted to add the Garmin Zumo 550 to the Road King Classic. Well having installed it last Friday and ridden down from Stoke to Portsmouth and then Santander to Almerimar this week I must say that it is great. It is beyond great actually, it has overnight become one of my all time favourite ‘gadgets’!

I had decided on the Garmin Zum0 550 as it is designed with the motorbike in mind, specifically controls on the left hand side and large! Additionally the touch screen is easy to operate with gloves on it is waterproof, and the provided mount is both secure and shock resistant.

DEVONtechnologies, LLC today releases the fifth public beta of version 2.0 of all editions of its information manager DEVONthink as well as of the smart note-keeper DEVONnote. The version 2.0 upgrade addresses a large number of feature requests from the active user community and modernizes almost every aspect of the applications. The fifth public beta of DEVONthink 2.0 and DEVONnote 2.0, again, brings lots of new and promised features as well as many detail enhancements and bug fixes.

Heading off to the UK this morning, leaving behind a somewhat sick Mac mini!

It doesn’t want to start. For a while I was getting the ‘flashing folder’ when it powered up, but that has now been replaced with the grey screen, Apple logo and a spinning wheel …….. left it like that all night the other day just to make sure.

It has been all over the news today that Google have introduced ‘time based search options’, which is pretty cool, but the article that I liked the most was the one over on mashable.com which argued that the Google announcement is very much in response to the threat of Twitter and other real-time search offerings:

Using Balsamiq Mockups ($79) feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting.

I am in no way a Software Developer, Designer, Engineer or any other type of Software person at all. The closest I ever come is when I have an idea that I want someone to develop, or get involved in a projcet that includes the development of a new application.

Considering all the leaked evidence of video recording and editing in the iPhone 3.0 beta, it’s not really a stretch to predict that the next iPhone will offer long-requested video features. Still, Businessweek’s Peter Burrows confirms that to be the case based on a source familiar with Apple’s plans for the next iPhone.

In fact, Burrows suggests that video recording won’t simply be an afterthought but a major feature of the new iPhone.