The Mac Is Back

My MacBook Pro wouldn’t boot last Thursday morning. In a mild panic I made an appointment at the Genius Bar on Michigan Avenue. Everything was backed up — it was more a worry about productivity than losing data. We have a spare laptop at work but it’s a Windows machine — no biggie really.

The Genius reported that it was either the logic board, the graphics card or both. I asked how we could find out and he said something along the lines of “if you send it off for repair they’ll just replace whatever’s broken.” I asked whether it was common that these components failed — the MBP is just under two years old — and he replied that yes, sometimes they get a ‘little fried’.

So I rather begrudgingly agreed to have it shipped off for repair. $350 and a minimum wait of 5-7 days. This was Thursday. I then spent the rest of Thursday and all of Friday trying to work as best I could on a fairly slow and clunky Windows laptop. I missed all my shortcuts, apps and passwords. I felt naked and useless. Of course, this is all to do with the data & productivity that I’m used to, not the machine itself. But it was still a weird experience.

The weirdest and most annoying PC ‘quirk’ is that if you press ctrl-alt-down, it flips the entire screen upside down. This is a common shortcut I use frequently in Photoshop. Imagine my joy when each time I wanted to nudge an element down a couple of pixels, Windows thought it’d be helpful to flip my screen.

Seriously, who thought this would be a good user feature? Yes, I’m sure there’s a way of turning it off, but surely the better experience would be for users to turn something like that on — not have it on by default? Anyway, Friday was a strugglesome day.

I got a call on Saturday telling me it was repaired and back at the Apple Store in Chicago. A 2 day turnaround. Impressive. It booted up and everything seemed fine.

As of Monday morning, it’s all still fine. There are a few noises I’m not used to — deleting items in iTunes causes a weird ‘blip’ sound. I’ve not investigated this — it might be a new ‘feature’ of the logic board. At any rate, I’m just glad to be back in familiar surroundings. And I’m impressed with the service I received. Even if I am a little annoyed that I had to fork out $350 on a machine barely two years old.

Why I Won’t Be Getting an iPad…Yet

So Apple announced the iPad today. No great surprises — it’s been talked about relentlessly these past few weeks. And no great surprises with what it is or what it does. But, to me, it still doesn’t answer the question, posed by Steve himself:

“What are they good for besides surfing the web in the bathroom?”

I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the point. What is the point of the iPad? Is it the App Store? iBooks? iWork? Nothing I saw in today’s keynote made me think “ah, so that’s what a tablet should do”. I got that with the iPhone. Not so with iPad. Maybe I’m missing the bigger picture.

Here are some reasons I won’t be rushing out to get one:

• It’s pricey — $800+ is almost MacBook territory
• It doesn’t do much more than my iPhone does now — iWork and iBooks aside (but seriously, who wants to make spreadsheets on a tablet?)
• ‘Blown up’ iPhone apps just look weird — and regular size apps look lonely
• Scott Forstall had way too much Kool Aid before filming his bit in the promo video

I do get the impression, however, that this is just the beginning. Looking at the home screen, it struck me that it looks rather sparse — like an iPhone home screen with a lot more space. Plus the four icons in the ‘dock’ at the bottom looked strange. Maybe this is something you can tweak in the settings — much as you can tweak icon size & spacing on the Mac’s desktop — but maybe it’s an indication that Apple think this thing will just grow & grow.

How? More apps on the App Store specifically for iPad. More books in iBooks specifically for iPad. Magazines and other material coming through, specifically for the iPad.

Happy Tablet Day

Anxiously waiting for 12pm. Here’s what the world looks like today:

Snow Leopard: Installed

I installed Snow Leopard yesterday. Initial impressions:

• It’s definitely faster — pretty much everything feels snappier UPDATE: Although sleeping & waking aren’t noticeably faster, maybe I need to time it!
• The gamma now defaults to 2.2 which gives everything a bit more contrast
• The ‘traffic light’ close/minimise/maximise buttons seem brighter, almost ‘washed out’
• I love the new Dock menus — not sure why this design is restricted to the Dock though
• Dock Expose — I’ve not used this apart from my initial playing (although I could see it coming in very handy)
• 512 icons are great — especially pictures & videos

I’ve not come across any software that’s incompatible yet, although I’m still slowly reinstalling all the usual bits & pieces.

The Strange Case of iTunes Application Updates

iTunes has been behaving strangely lately. It consistently shows that there are 2 updates for my applications yet when I click ’show available updates’ I get the message that there are none. Something is clearly broken.

This is quite a common problem (a Google search will tell you that) and there are a variety of documented ‘fixes’, with some seeming to work for some yet not others. The issue seems to centre around some apps that think they have an update when they don’t (at least that’s my layman understanding — the problem may be with iTunes itself).

I decided to try and hunt out the problem myself. To alleviate this issue previously I would just trash the iTunes preferences which would solve the issue but would then require me to reset all my preferences in iTunes (obviously).

So yesterday I went through a more radical yet methodical approach. It seems a bit laborious but it did flush out those apps that were causing the issue.

1. Quit iTunes
2. Make a copy of the ‘Mobile Applications’ directory within your iTunes music library (backup, backup, backup!)
3. Launch iTunes
4. Delete all apps by selecting all and hitting Apple-delete
5. When asked select ‘Move to trash’ to move all the app files to the trash
6. Quit iTunes
7. Navigate to the apps directory within your music library folder (usually ~/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications)
8. Ensure that iTunes has indeed removed all the applications (I found that despite selecting ‘Move to trash’ there were still quite a few applications in there, some of them very old that I never used and thought I had deleted months ago)
9. If there are any remaining apps, move them to the trash
10. Breathe a sigh of relief that you followed step 2 and made a copy of your Mobile Applications folder. You did do this, didn’t you?
11. Double click an app in your backed up ‘Mobile Applications’ folder to add it to your iTunes library (this should make a copy in your music library folder)
12. iTunes should launch (if not running already) and the app should appear in the Applications pane
13. Click ‘Check for updates’ at the bottom of the Applications pane
14. If the app is up to date iTunes should tell you that there are no updates for any apps
15. Repeat steps 11-14 for all apps (told you it was laborious!)
16. You should find an app or two that, when you click ‘Check for updates’, tell you that there’s an update available. Remove this app from iTunes (you still have a copy of it on your desktop, right?)
17. Once you’ve gone through all your apps you should identified the wonky apps — they’re the ones that think they have an update
18. Download these apps again from the iTunes Store (if they’re paid apps you won’t get charged again)
19. All should be well within iTunes. You should now have all your applications back in iTunes and behaving properly. You can delete the copy of Mobile Applications you made in step 2. Backup your data.

I don’t know what the reason is but some of my apps thought they had an update when they didn’t and this is what was screwing things up. Going through the steps above identifies these apps and lets you download the most recent version.

(Disclaimer: perform these steps at your own risk. I take no responsibility whatsoever for any situation arising if you decide to follow these steps. Backing up your data regularly is always a good idea.)

How to Create a Ringtone Using iTunes

A very simple tutorial on how to create a ringtone from one of your existing iTunes music tracks. Just tried it and it works great.

Apple, the iPhone & Social Media Integration

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the recently-released iPhone 3GS is the ability to upload photos & video to MobileMe and YouTube.

(Of course, unless you’re a MobileMe subscriber — and I’m struggling to justify spending $99 per year on it, the excellent ‘Find My iPhone’ service notwithstanding — all you’ll be able to do is upload videos to your YouTube account.)

Apple have recently begun integrating social media into their desktop apps — iPhoto ‘09 lets you publish your photos to Flickr, Facebook and MobileMe. In my opinion this is great — Apple wants people to share and store their photos so integrating these popular image-sharing services right into iPhoto makes a lot of sense.

So why not offer the same functionality on the iPhone? Why only offer YouTube uploads?

Less than a week after the iPhone 3GS launched YouTube uploads increased by 400% per day. So it’s obviously something that people are using.

Right now the only way to ’share’ your photos is to either use a third party app (Facebook app, free, or Flickit, free) or email it to somebody using Mail on the iPhone.

Maybe it’s something Apple are working on. Maybe they don’t think people will use it. Maybe they just want more people to use their MobileMe service (perhaps one of the reasons push Gmail isn’t available on the iPhone?). Who knows.

iPhone 3G S Lust

So we finally got iPhones last Friday. We preordered them so muggins here only had to trek to the AT&T store on State at 6.45am on Friday to begin the wait.

There were only about 7 people in line ahead of me so the wait wasn’t a long one. Almost at the end of the wait, Chad (I kid you not) got our two iPhones from out back, did the number swap, activated them and we were good to go. Thanks Chad! I was in and out by about 7.20am.

Goodbye Nokia. You were the single most useless, frustrating and un-usable phone I’ve ever owned. If I could I’d close the street below and launch the damned thing off the balcony. Ugh.

But, oh my, iPhone — where have you been all my life?

Calaboration Sets Up Your Google Calendars in iCal for You

Google calendars now support the CalDAV protocol (which iCal also does) so you can now view & edit your Google calendars using iCal.

They’ve even created a nifty tool to make it simple called Calaboration.

And there was you thinking it was a typo in the title…

UPDATE: “Calaboration is no longer the recommended method of setting up Google Calendar calendar in iCal. Instead, use these instructions.”

Lovely Big OS X Icons

Lovely big OS X icons:

No more pleasure in small 128 x 128 pixels icons? Here’s the adults.  Lots of Mac OS X icons in much higher resolution.

(OK, that’s a Google translation of the page. My German isn’t that good!)