Results tagged “apple”

Today John Gruber wrote a small piece about Apple retiring the classic iPod next week.

Dan Frommer wonders whether Apple is set to eliminate the hard-drive based iPod Classic next week. I wouldn't be shocked if they did, but I bet they won't. The iPod Classic is like the Mac Pro -- not something that sells in huge numbers compared to Apple's mass market products, but it fills a lucrative and important niche. Some people really do want 160 GB of music in their pocket.

I count myself among those "some people" and I really hope they don't get rid of it. I love having my entire music collection with me at all times. I never know what I'll be in the mood for on any given day and being able to scroll through everything is so handy.

Now that I think about it, I probably couldn't go back to anything less. Well, I wouldn't want to go back to anything less anyway. Sure I hate having to carry around two gadgets but until Apple make a 160GB iPhone, that's what I'll do.

I install quite a lot of games on my iPhone. Some come, some go. After a little cleanup yesterday, here are the ones I decided to keep.

Of those, I'd say I've played Plants vs Zombies the most, closely followed by Doodle Jump, and Orbital. The two newest games are Leap Sheep - which is hellishly addictive and The Incident.

Do you game on your phone? Which are your current faves?

Well, sometimes all you need is one word.

• One word movie review - Shrek Forever After: good.

• One word weather forecast: hot. (110° yo)

• One word concert announcement: Pixies. (hell yeah I said Pixies - woohoo)

• One word iPhone 4 reaction: drool.

• One word music review - How To Destroy Angels EP: amazing.

• One word describing 12 year old staying with us for the weekend: tiring.

• One word reaction to oil covered wildlife: anger.

I take a lot of photos with my iPhone and of the many Flickr apps in the App Store, the one I love the most is Flickit Pro.

Among its many features, one of the things I love about it is the ability to select more than one photo at a time when creating your upload queue. Kinda like this, you keep selecting and then tap 'Done' when you're, er, done:

Nice, simple, and ever so handy. Well, at least it was.

Today I noticed that Flickit Pro had a new update and after reviewing what the changes were: "optimized for iPhone OS 3.2" and "new icon" I thought, sure why not.

And to my surprise, the multi image selector that I knew and loved had been removed. Not knowing if this was deliberate or a little oopsie, I sent an email to the developer, Michael Bernardo, to find out.

What he sent me in response is an interesting insight into the App review process by Apple.

Unfortunately I had to remove the multi-selection feature. It was rejected by Apple during my last update. You can read more about it at my blog.

And it made for an interesting read.

What makes this frustrating from a developer perspective is that Apple had already approved Flickit Pro many times over. What makes this frustrating from a user perspective is that it now appears to be a feature regression in an existing app. I know I'm not going to be the only user that wished they hadn't "upgraded".

I've read horror stories about seemingly arbitrary App store rejections but this is the first time I've been impacted by it. And more importantly, the first time that I wished I had a phone with an open marketplace for apps without the need for anyone's approval.

Siteadministrivia

If you're one of the few who actually visit this site instead of reading in a feed reader, you'll no doubt have seen a "Photos" link in the header bar above that for the longest time, just sent you to Flickr. I've always thought that was arsey and just didn't fit at all. So I've changed that.

Clicking Photos now takes you to a local page on this server instead. It's all auto generated using the Flickr API, phpFlickr, and some dodgy PHP code I wrote last night to glue it all together. I write Perl code for a living so hacking away at something different appealed to my inner geek.

Apps I Use The Most

My current iPhone home screen has the apps I find I use almost daily.

Around Me - finds things, er, around you. Most handy.
Todo - best "todo" list manager I've found. Bar none.
Tweetie - I've tried just about every Twitter client for the iPhone and this is the one that appeals to me the most.
Flickr - Nice "official" Flickr app, little crashy but still useful.
blog - web app, uses the iMT plugin to control Movable Type blogs from iPhones.
Reader - web app, mobile version of Google Reader. Solid, fast.
Flickit Pro - best iPhone Flickr app I've ever used. Love it.
SplashId - keeps all manner of information nicely locked up for you.
Simplenote - the official iPhone note app blows chunks. This one doesn't.
CameraBag - apply filters to your photos. Lovely Helga filter.
Nike + iPod - tracks running progress via chip in your shoe.

If you have a smartphone, what apps do you find you use the most and have you organized them onto your home screen? No? Just me then?

A Little Vacation

For the next 10 days I'll be thoroughly in vacation mode as my family are crossing the pond tomorrow. I've gotta say I don't envy them the flight. Still, these days you can catch a direct flight from London to Phoenix so it's not as long a trek as it used to be. Hope they have decent movies to watch and their iPods are fully charged.

Like most geeks, I read about today's iPad announcement with some interest. I mean I do like the odd Apple product after all.

My initial gut reaction: underwhelmed.

But then again, I think I'm probably not Apple's target market. Don't get me wrong, it looks lovely and if someone wanted to buy me one, I'd say thanks with a big grin on my face. It just doesn't do anything I can't already do with the devices I already have. And I think that's why I was left with a meh feeling.

I have an iPhone and I love it. It's become like a second computer to me. An ultra portable device with which I can make calls, surf the web, read email, tweet, watch video, read books, take photos, and play games. And it fits in my pocket. In short, it's convenient.

The iPad, to me, is basically just a much bigger version of that. Except it won't fit in my pocket. Which isn't all that convenient. I'd have to tote it around in a bag. And I already do that because I have a laptop. A portable device with a bigger screen, more horsepower, and more storage than an iPad.

Now, if I was in the market for a netbook, if I didn't have a laptop or a smartphone, I would probably be extremely excited by today's big announcement. But I'm not in that market at the moment.

However, ask me if I'm kicking myself for buying my girlfriend a netbook for Christmas. Go on ask me.

Watch

I think I was one of the few people left on the plant who hadn't seen District 9 yet. And if you're also one of those few, I heartily recommend that you watch it forthwith. One of the best films I've seen in a long time and so well done. Innovative and gripping. One thing is for sure, I'll be on the lookout for anything with Neil Bloomkamp's name on it after this impressive debut.

Listen

You remember the death of my favorite gadget back in September. Since then I've tried to live an iPod-less existence. Which actually meant lugging my laptop around just so I could listen to music. Including some rather dodgy set the laptop on the front seat of the car and connect it to the car stereo shenanigans. (shudder).

Rejoice, for the circle of gadgets is now complete. I have a new trusty iPod. And it goes with me everywhere.

Read

I'm currently juggling two books. You know, as you do.

First up, Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. Some people love to lambaste Brown's writing style. And sure, he's not going to win any awards, but his books keep me entertained. And that's why I read books in the first place.

I'm also laughing and edumacating myself on the finer points of beer by reading The Naked Pint. A thoroughly entertaining read.

Smile

I love getting blast from the past photos. This one is a rather younger me posing (top row, third from the left) for the Cambridgeshire county Rubgy team many many moons ago. Nice facial expression Spencer.

I've had my iPhone 3GS for about a week now and not surprisingly, I like it. I like it a lot. Then again, I am hopelessly late to the smartphone party and anything remotely better than my old Razr is going to feel like I swapped my Commodore 64 for a MacBook Pro. The 3GS is a great phone. It's fast and for the most part just bloody works.

My old phone contract expired a couple of months ago and since then I've been pondering which phone to get next. I spent some time playing with a Palm Pre, a Blackberry Storm, and a Motorola Droid. Of those, only the Droid seemed like it was almost good enough to own. Almost.

So, my one week in "far too soon to be giving this kind of writeup, but doing it anyway", er, writeup.

The Apps

One week in doesn't give anyone enough time to compile a decent app review so I won't even try. But what I have found that I like so far, and shown on my home screen are the following:

Google Earth
Evernote (iPhone port of my fave note taking, organizing desktop app)
AroundMe (finds businesses, er, around me)
TweetDeck (iPhone port of my fave desktop Twitter client)
Flixster (movie showtimes, information, and theater locator)
Shazam (music identifier)
Wikipanion (better than navigating Wikipedia in Safari)
Reader (mobile Google Reader)
Flickit (all round mobile Flickr gadget & uploader)
Last.fm (for listening to music streams)
IMDb (for movie junkies everywhere)

Most importantly, I replaced the Apple Mail client with the mobile version of Gmail. Which you must do immediately.

The Keyboard

The keyboard really isn't that bad. I thought that my big chubby digits would be a problem and to a certain degree they are, but the auto-correction is scarily accurate and I've found myself typing emails & texting at quite a good pace.

The Camera

The cameras in phones suck. All of them. The question then becomes, how much does it suck and can you live with it? Surprisingly, for a phone, the camera is not entirely made of fail.

Obviously it's no DSLR, but it's no slouch either. So that coupled with the rather spiffy Flickit app to upload directly to Flickr makes for a rather nice 'on the go' pic taking experience.

The Games

I haven't spent much time trying out various games because I really haven't gotten much further than Orbital. I'm hopelessly addicted and it might just be the finest $0.99 I ever spent.

Check me out with a high score of 40. Ahem. I didn't say I was any good at it.

Stop Waffling

Ok, it's fast, it works, I'm happy with it. Can't really say any more than that.

After owning iPods for years, and a MacBook Pro for just over 12 months, today I added one more to the Apple collection.

This replaces my old, beat up, downtrodden Motorola Razr that I've held onto for years. I'll be honest though, it was a bloody good phone that served its purpose well.

Now, off to the App Store I go and start downloading. What would you recommend? What are your must have apps?

[Moozik: Skinny Puppy - First Aid]

Well, it really hasn't been a good few days for me and Apple hardware. After the iPhone suckery from the weekend, I come home from work yesterday to find my iPod in the full throws of giving up the ghost.

It's stuck in perpetual boot-up hell. Seems to get no further than the Apple symbol, attempts to re-boot itself, and gets stuck again. Rinse, repeat. The hard disk is making an awful click of death sound. Mind you, it's had some serious use so I can't really complain. I think it's my third iPod and I've used it almost every day in the three years I've had it.

I didn't realize how much I've come to depend on it on my daily commute and felt lost without it. Good lord regular terrestrial radio sucks doesn't it? Even NPR was unappealing.

This is one gadget that I cannot be without for very long that's for sure.

[Moozik: Elefant - Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid]

On Saturday night, my better half accidentally dropped her iPhone into the toilet in Borders book store. You know, as you do. At first glance everything appeared to be ok. Phone dried off. Still worked. No harm no foul. Blimey those iPhones are cool, they're water proof and everything.

No they're not. For when we got home we realized the phone now would not charge. At all. Nothing. Bugger.

So armed with a grand plan of just saying "I dunno what happened, the phone just won't charge anymore" we go to the Apple store and speak to one of those nice genius bar people. After shining a light into the charging socket of the phone he tells me "sir, the phone has water damage". Damn those liquid sensors.

So we end up coughing up $199 because water damage is an out of warranty service item. Gulp. Oh well. At least we can restore the contacts, photos etc from a backup when we sync the phone in iTunes for the first time. Right?

Well, yeah, if that actually worked.

The phone was plugged in, iTunes recognized it, asked me if I want to create a new phone or restore from a backup. I select restore from backup.

"Cannot restore from backup because the iPhone software version is too old. Please select create new phone, update the iPhone software, and then restore from backup".

Now, in a moment of comedy gold, Apple decided that no one should ever need more than one backup. Your previous backup is clobbered by any new one you make. And who can guess what iTunes decides to do when you select create new phone?

That's right, it does a fucking backup. Lovely. So how am I supposed to restore from backup when you've just deleted the backup I was going to restore from? Thanks iTunes.

So, let this be a lesson to you kids. Don't drop your iPhone in the toilet.

[Moozik: Chris & Cosey - Walking Through Heaven]

At the weekend I performed my first OS upgrade since becoming assimilated by Apple last year. For $29 it seemed like a no-brainer even though there were no new features. It would make stuff faster we were told. I like faster, so I dove right in.

The upgrade itself was quick and absolutely painless. Like all good OS upgrades should be. Except for when they're not. And I'm looking at you Ubuntu. Still, it was that little suckfest that finally convinced me to become a Mac addict so that things just work going forward.

The verdict after using it for a few days?

The good? Well it definitely seems faster. The Finder is certainly a lot snappier - thumbnail generation is lightning fast now for example. I do like new dock menu colors and the scrolling stacks as well.

The meh? I haven't noticed any speedup on system wake up when opening the lid on my MacBook Pro though. I could have sworn that was one of the promised speed improvements.

The bad? iScrobbler broke which I didn't notice until this morning. Which is a shame because the official Mac last.fm client is a little temperamental when it comes to scrobbling songs from your iPod. Still, a downgrade to iScrobbler 1.5.2 seems to have done the trick.

So overall, I'm a happy Snow Leopard user and can count my first Mac OS X upgrade a success.

[Moozik: Jane's Addiction - Three Days]

From Bloomberg:

Apple's Fifth Avenue emporium probably has annual sales of more than $350 million, topping any of the chain's other outlets, said Jeffrey Roseman, executive vice president of real- estate broker Newmark Knight Frank Retail in New York. The location is 10,000 square feet, putting its sales per square foot at a minimum of $35,000, based on Roseman's estimate.

That's the equivalent of selling one Mercedes-Benz C300 sedan per square foot. Apple may be the highest grossing retailer ever on Fifth Avenue, said Faith Hope Consolo, chairman of the retail leasing and sales division at Manhattan-based Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

I visited it last year and loved it. The biggest, nicest Apple store I've been in. I don't find it hard to believe it's the highest grossing store on that street - It was simply jam packed full of people.

Mind you, it was absolutely pouring with rain so there might have been the odd one or two people in there sheltering and attempting to dry off.

I know I was one of them ;-)

[Moozik: Jesus Jones - Blissed]

I just had a mini cleanup of my iTunes library, got rid of some duplicates, songs I didn't even know I had, and albums I'll never listen to. Brought the song count down to 12,475 songs.

Now, some of those songs I've listened to a lot, and listen to all the time...

...and some songs I haven't even listened to once.

So I've decided that it's high time that I at least attempt to listen to those songs that I think I want to keep but for some reason haven't really gotten around to it. Enter iTunes Smart Playlists.

You can create some incredibly powerful playlists this way but sometimes the simplest are the best. Just give me the songs that have a playcount of less than ten.

So that's narrowed it down to 9142 songs. Which I suspect are going to be on heavy rotation for quite some time.

[Moozik: Thomas Dolby - Weightless]

A while ago we returned our cable DVR because we were recording so much TV we didn't have time to watch it all. Plus all the decent TV networks have their programmes online now so you can watch things "on demand" whenever you want to.

A friend asked why I'd want to "watch TV" on my laptop vs a big screen HDTV? The answer is I don't. I use the best of both worlds, I stream the TV over the internet to my HDTV. Using a Macbook Pro, it really couldn't be easier.

What You'll Need

• Apple MiniDisplayPort to DVI adaptor.
• DVI to HDMI adaptor.
• RCA stereo cables.

Connect As Follows

On the Macbook Pro, connect the Apple adaptor to the DVI/HDMI adaptor. Plug that into the MiniDisplayPort. Connect the RCA stereo cable to the audio out jack.

On the TV, connect the HDMI cable to the HDMI input jack, connect the RCA stereo cable.

Finishing Up

On your TV, select the appropriate HDMI input. Mac OSX then just "does the right thing" and you have a mirrored display & sound coming from your TV.

And before you know it, you'll be watching the HD stream of Lost on your TV.

I've also been playing with Boxee and Hulu and while it's all still a tiny bit rough around the edges, I could honestly see canceling our cable TV service completely at some point.

Very geeky and a tad exciting. Well, it's amused me while I've been at death's door this week anyway.

[Moozik: White Lies - Farewell To The Fairground]

Apple are using my favorite band in a little experiment. They just announced their pass feature and as far as I can tell, it's like DVR'ing an entire season of a TV programme, but for music instead. You pay up front and then you receive new songs, remixes and videos via iTunes on a regular basis as they become available.

I don't really think I'll find the new feature useful for other bands, but I'm totally stoked that they chose Depeche Mode as their Guinea Pig. Of course, I'm this close to handing over my $18.99 for my Depeche Mode Pass.

They're my favorite band after all. Have I mentioned that?

[Moozik: Killing Joke - The Feast Of Blaze]

Do you find that there are just some things that amused you growing up that still entertain you to this day? I know I do. One of which happens to be popping bubble wrap. I mean come on, how could you not be entertained doing that?

And thanks to the wonders of technology you don't even have to have bubble wrap these days. No, and let this be reason I need to get an iPhone #48877, the iPhone bubble wrap popping app.

Of course, part of the fun of bubble wrap popping is the tactile feedback you get when actually popping. So I'm not entirely convinced that this would be as entertaining. Still, I'd be willing to give it a try.

What things still entertain you now that you're all growed up?