TikiJon.com

If you live some place where it gets really cold in the winter — you might already be familiar with the advantages and convenience of a remote-start car system.

Rather than fumbling to open an icy door or waiting a few minutes for the car to start and the heat to come on, you can start the car using a keyremote and even turn the heat on, so that by the time you get to the car, it’s on and warm.

Today, Directed Electronics, who make the popular Viper remote start systems, are taking remote-start one-step further: start your car with your iPhone. The Viper SmartStart system combines the Viper system with an iPhone app that acts as a remote control for your car.

Here’s how the system works: if you have a compatible Viper remote system installed on your car, you can download a free iPhone app and configure your car to hook up to your phone. Then, you can start your car and turn on the heat before you head out to the driveway. The Viper iPhone app can also lock your car (or unlock it) remotely too.

The advantage of the iPhone app over the traditional key-remotes is that the range is much larger than what you get with IR. I’m assuming the system works via satellite, because Viper calls it “virtually unlimited.” This would definitely be convenient for anyone who has a relative or a spouse with a predilection for locking their keys in the car.

The Viper SmartStart iPhone app is available for either new SmartStart systems (retail price $499) or existing Viper users can get the SmartStart module (retail price $299) from Best Buy stores beginning today. If you like the idea of keyless entry and remote-start, bringing that sort of functionality to the iPhone makes perfect sense.

Do you have a remote-start system? What do you think of unlocking your car with your mobile phone? Let us know!

Tags: iphone, keyless entry, Remote, viper smartstart

We’ve been gushing for weeks now about the latest Chromium builds for Mac. Every day, they seem to get better. The problem is that every day, several updates are released and you have to manually go to the site and scroll down a long list to find the newest version to download. So we’ve made an application that allows you to easily ensure that you have the latest version at all times.

Our Mac Chromium Updater was built with the help of Greg Rosen, who created a script to check your version of Chromium versus the latest build. Then one of our developers, Hunter, created an Automator process so you don’t have to deal with installing something like Wget on your machine. The end result is a simple app that you run and let it update Chromium for you. You can find it here.

For those who aren’t aware, Chromium is the open source project behind Google’s web browser, Chrome. While there are pre-release versions of regular Chrome available for Mac as well, the Chromium builds get updated much more frequently, and as such, are the closest to a working version of Chrome on the Mac. For example, latest versions of Chromium include Flash support and bookmark support. Overall, the project is coming along very nicely.

A couple quick notes about our app: First, when you run the app, depending on the speed of your connection, it may take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to download the newest build of Chromium. So even if you don’t think the app is doing anything, let it run, and eventually you will see the latest build of Chromium open on your screen. Second, this has only been tested of OS X 10.5 Leopard, but Chromium will only run on Leopard, so there you go.

Enjoy. We’ve included a read me file in the zip with a few more obvious disclaimers and a note of who to email with problems.

Again, find it here. Bookmark this post, we’ll add a note here if we update the updater.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0