Category Archives: Apple

The unintentional iPhone 2.0 beta tester – part 1

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There is so much to catch up on since Apple released 2.0 for the iPhone and iPod Touch that it’s hard to figure out where to start.

On July 11, 2008, we were getting ready to leave for a vacation to Myrtle Beach when I noticed the 2.0 software release for the iPhone was out.  Since my wife has the original iPhone I decided to download 2.0 and apply it once we got to the beach.  2.0 downloaded so fast that I figured I might as well apply it before I got in the shower, so I did.  (By the way, this was less than 10 minutes after my wife begged me not to touch her phone before our trip as she likes to use it when we’re on the road.)  Hey, it’s Apple, and Apple has never let me down before.  What could happen?  Well, thousands of you probably know the rest – after the 2.0 update the phone reset itself and needed to communicate with Apple’s servers to activate.  Since those servers were totally overwhelmed, nothing was happening.  So I jumped in the shower and figured it would be done by the time we were ready to leave.  No such luck.  I checked the Apple forums and found I was definitely not alone, but we had to get on the road so I grabbed my wife’s iPhone, her laptop, my laptop, and my backpack and we headed out the door. 

She was not a happy camper.  No phone to play with on the road trip meant no Goggle Maps.  It doesn’t matter that the awesome Garmin Nuvi 350 was less than 5 feet from her head, it was not her phone and Google Maps.  So she asked to use my iPod Touch since it was jailbroken and had FiveDice on it.  Well, unfortunately I had restored it to factory default to get ready for the 2.0 software for the Touch, which didn’t come out for another 13 hours.  If the software had been available for the Touch I would have never touched her phone at all.  So, no FiveDice.  Strike 2.

Then it hit her that we packed the Nintendo DS and that would surely give her plenty to do for a while.  Except that it was packed in the trunk of the car, which was an amazing feat in itself as we were originally going to take the mini van but decided to take the car to get better gas mileage.  The DS was buried deep in the bottom of all the luggage, beach chairs, and body boards.  Strike 3.

I had no intention of taking her laptop to the beach that day, but I grabbed her PowerBook because I didn’t know if I would have to complete the activation process on the same computer that had started it on or if I could use my MacBook Pro.  Unfortunately I wasn’t smart enough to grab the power supply and the battery on her PowerBook has seen better days.  If we’re lucky we’ll get 30 minutes on a full charge.  So I turned on her PowerBook and killed every program that started up and launched iTunes.  I turned the screen down to 1 little bar and hoped I could find a wireless signal.  Thankfully the hotel we were in that night had wifi and the iPhone activated itself almost as quickly as I plugged it in to the PowerBook.  Success!  We can now use the iPhone as a phone.  ”Apple must have resolved their capacity issues.”  ”Hey, where’s all your data?”

Next came the fun of holding my breath through the longest initial restore of data to a device in my lifetime.  I would continually take the screen down to 0 bars, then back to 1 a little later to watch the restore progress.  The battery indicator was down to 14 minutes and had turned red.  Not good.  Turn the screen back off.  With just 7 minutes of reported battery life left the iPhone retuned to its glorious former self.  It was a phone with all the data she had on it previously.  Life was good.

“Hey Valerie, check out all these cool apps I loaded on here for you” I said with the joy of a child on Christmas morning.  ”Watch how…hey, why is it just a black screen with an Apple logo in the middle of it now?”  Uh oh.

That would not be the last time that I saw that black screen with the Apple logo.

To be continued…

Are you backing up all of your data?

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I just spent the better part of the night trying to get data back from a friend’s MacBook that had a failed hard drive. Those of you that have had this happen while running Apple’s OS X may know the sickening feeling you get when all you see when you start up is an icon of a folder with a flashing question mark. Sometimes you can get lucky by resetting PRAM and telling the system what disk to boot from, but this was not the case with this MacBook. It was painful and took forever to get any data back at all.

Fortunately I had my MacBook Pro with me to help get through this. I had DiskWarrior on my MBP and figured I would just start up the MacBook in firewire target mode and let DiskWarrior have a look. (You do vacation with a 6 pin to 6 pin firewire cable, don’t you? Yeah, me neither, but I was lucky enough to find one at a Best Buy in Myrtle Beach since everything else had just closed. Unfortunately I paid a premium for that cable from Best Buy, as you do with all cables you buy there, but I was in no position to complain and they were my last option for the night.)

Well, the MacBook had different ideas about how this was going to work and I could not see the hard drive regardless of what I did; hold down the Option key. Nothing. Hold down Shift. Nothing. Hold down Command-S. Nothing. Command-V. Nothing. Hold down C to boot from a Tiger install DVD I had in my bag. Nothing. Hold down T for firewire target mode. Nothing!

As a last ditch effort I decided to make sure I was doing things correctly and tried to put my MBP in target mode and bring up the MacBook using my MBP’s hard drive. It actually worked. I still could not see the local drive on the MacBook, but I was able to run DiskWarrior against the MacBook and it did find the hard drive and did it’s best to repair. But it couldn’t. It was pretty much beyond repair and DiskWarrior gave me one last chance to pull off all the data I could in preview mode, so I copied as much of her data as I could to my MBP hard drive and every USB key I could find. That got us most of the way there. Now she can deal with Apple since it is under Apple Care and they can replace the hard drive.  In the end I was able to salvage their pictures, documents, settings, and music.

So here is my simple recommendations for protecting your data relatively inexpensive while still getting backups done in a decent amount of time:

  • For email, either use a web browser to access your email at your ISP (or GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) or configure your mail client for IMAP so you always have a copy of your email at your mail provider. If you must do POP/POP3 configure the client to leave a copy of the messages on the server. This way you will not have to deal with email recovery in the event of a disaster.  If your ISP purges email from its servers every X amount of days – find another email provider.
  • Do yourself a favor so you never have to go through the recovery process I just went through – go buy an external USB drive and use it for backups. The performance will be fine and if you are running OS X Leopard it will immediately recognize the disk and ask you if you want to use it for Time Machine backups. Answer yes and move on with your life. I probably spent close to 12 hours trying to save the data because I knew very few others would even try to save her data at all. The drives work just as well with Windows. I probably wouldn’t waste my time with the backup software that comes with the drives, as the operating system will have something you can use that it probably better.

There are other backup utilities out there. Do some light reading on Google and see which one makes the most sense for you. It doesn’t matter to me if you are using 10,000 floppy disks, USB keys, USB hard drives, copying to other computers somewhere in your home, backing up to one of the hosted backup solutions, or using .Mac – just do something! As we put more and more data on our computers the problem just gets worse and worse.

Best Buy has the Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB External Hard Drive on sale for $99 right now. It has USB connectivity and should work very well for backups. I may buy 2. The price goes up if you need Firewire connectivity or more storage, but this looks like a decent size and fit for me. The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is to check our backups. It’s such an easy thing to do and none of of do it like we should. None of us. It is not a matter of if a drive is going to fail, it is a matter of when. Good backups will lessen the pain when you have to rebuild that computer, or reload the hard drive from scratch.

iPhone 3G not (yet) for me

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I haven’t updated in a while because there really hasn’t been much I felt like talking about, but with the iPhone 3G coming out in less than 2 days I figured I would give my unsolicited reasons why I’ll be sticking with my iPod Touch for now.

My issues aren’t so much with Apple as they are with AT&T, but in the end I guess they both get some of the credit equally.  For example, I like the following items:

  • 3G performance.  I live in the Pittsburgh area and the AT&T coverage maps show us just dripping in glorious high speed bandwidth.
  • GPS.  This is a pro and a con with me.  I like that the phone can figure out where I am, etc., but it is still lacking in what I really want when we say GPS.  I’ll get to that in the items I don’t like below.
  • Price.  Hey, I can live with the extra 10 bucks a month for higher Internet performance, but I have a couple huge issues with the pricing that I’ll discuss below, but the price to purchase an iPhone is very attractive at $199 and $299.
  • Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.  Huge pro in my opinion.  I have used cell phones based on Windows Mobile and I now have a BlackBerry Curve.  Overall I feel the BlackBerry kicks Windows Mobile’s ass, but you can’t deny that Exchange ActiveSync is a better, faster, more seamless solution for accessing Exchange.  Don’t get me wrong, you’d have a hard time getting the BlackBerry Curve away from me, but I like Exchange Active Sync better than the BES solution.
  • Apps!  OK, this one may be a wash as I have (well, had) a jailbroken iPod Touch and having access to all of those 3rd party applications made the Touch a lot more valuable to me than the factory default model.
  • Push email with MobileMe.

But along with the good comes the reasons that I don’t really see the new iPhone 3G in my near future.

  • Consumer vs Enterprise data plans?  Come on AT&T, I’ll take the extra $10 a month for unlimited access to your 3G network, but charging enterprises an extra $25 a month, or $15 a month more than the consumer plan is just lame.  It is purely greed and is inexcusable.  There is no reason for this enterprise penalty.  Carries need to stop using the tern “unlimited” unless they really mean unlimited.
  • No SMS messages included with the data plan?  None?  Come on.  Actually, all of you carriers out there need to listen up, the fact that you have the balls to charge us for SMS messages when we already have a data plan is ridiculous and is nothing more than another example of pure greed.  We have the data plan, there is no need to hit us for texting on top of it.
  • GPS.  So I am hearing that the GPS antenna is too weak to work as a true turn by turn GPS, and I’ve also heard that Apple have stated in the SDK that 3rd parties may not implement turn by turn navigation systems as well.  What gives?  How useful will the GPS be if I can’t get turn by turn directions out of it?  I was hoping to eliminate a device.  Actually, I’m still hoping that Apple will acquire either Garmin or license their technology as I like the Garmin much better than any of the other GPS’ I have used.
  • No improvements to the camera or software to control it.
  • No video.
  • Still no MMS!  Come on, what technical reason is there that the iPhone still does not handle MMS messages?

So the new iPhone 3G is not (yet) for me, but I will keep watching the technology to see if Apple makes improvements to the things that I think are weaknesses today.  I remember when the original iPhone came out last year everyone kept saying that the great thing was Apple could do anything they wanted with the iPhone just by making software changes.  That’s great for some things but that’s not going to fix an underpowered GPS antenna.  Will software magically improve the camera or enable video?  Maybe, we’ll see.

For now, as I write this, I am restoring my iPod Touch back to factory defaults to get ready for the 2.0 software release and the Apps store.  I think those 2 items are the bigger news to me.  I’ll get to play with most of the new applications from the comfort of my home wireless and the iPod Touch.  Maybe some day the timing will be right and the features will exist that put a new iPhone in my hand, but for now I’ll stick with my Touch and the mighty BlackBerry Curve.

iTunes, this should be easier

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There must be an easier way to do this or I am definitely missing something.  All I wanted to do was create a playlist that excluded all songs that were listed as explicit.  Sounds simple, right?  Well, I searched around for a bit and finally gave up and decided it would be easier to just scroll through 4000 songs, watch for the red explicit text, get info on the song, add the word Explicit to the Comment field, and then build a Smart Playlist rule that says “Comment” “does not contain” “Explicit.”

Am I missing something or should the Explicit/Clean tagging be made available as a field so we can use it for playlists, etc.?  My solution worked in the end, but it took a while to scroll through all of those songs and add to the comment field.  Thankfully I only had 4000 or so, but I don’t envy those of you that want to do this and have 10,000 songs or more.

Come on Apple, make this one easier.

iTunes, you have a problem

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As I wrote about a few months ago, I started checking the Amazon MP3 store along with the iTunes Store when shopping for music, and I was surprised that most of what I was looking for was not only available from Amazon, it was cheaper as well.  Well, I have been buying more and more music lately and I can’t remember the last time I ended up buying it from the iTunes Store.  This is a huge change for me, but money talks.  I am getting individual songs a little cheaper, but I am usually getting full albums $2 cheaper.  That’s significant.  I still check with iTunes and I make sure to compare the number of tracks on the full album because once in a while iTunes has more songs for the money than Amazon does, but that has been really rare.

Apple, I realize you have the majority of the market share right now, but as one of your loyal customers that has way too many of your products than most people should, I think you have a problem here.  Not only do I have more Apple computers and iPods than any household should, I’m a share holder!  If I’m comfortable using another service over the iTunes Store what does that say for the average customer?  It may not be today, it may not be this year, but I think you need to address the pricing issue before others see what is going on and Amazon starts eating away at your market share.

Cringely says Adobe, I’d rather see Garmin

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I love reading Robert X. Cringely’s articles.  Always have.  He’s definitely one of my favorite writers.  In his most recent posting he states that Apple appears to be looking to unload its Pro applications in preparation to clear the way to acquire Adobe.  Interesting idea, but I’m not sure I agree as Apple’s Pro apps are some of the tops in the industry and Apple has made acquisitions that sure up that side of the business.  It might be nice for Apple if they controlled Flash, but I’m not sure any of that affects me much as a consumer.  Plus, those Pro apps only run on OS X, not Windows.  That may come in to play with the company that would want to acquire such applications.

While listening to my weekly fix of MacBreak Weekly, the topic of GPS came up and I was happy to hear that some of the folks on the show feel the same way that I do about the Garmin Nuvi GPS – it’s an excellent product.  So that got me thinking.  I don’t care about an Adobe acquisition as much as I would like to see Apple acquire Garmin.  I have used Magellan, Tom Tom, and Garmin GPS systems in my car and I have always felt the Garmin was the best.  I have the Nuvi 350, which fits easily in a pocket and takes us through turn by turn directions.  I like the interface better and I definitely like the maps better.  I’ve always found the Garmin to be very accurate as well.

Whether or not the rumors are true about the 3G iPhone having built in GPS, I think it is a safe assumption to believe it will be in there some day.  It’s just the way most phones are headed.  Nothing revolutionary, just evolutionary.  Many already have GPS included.  So why not take the best GPS technology and marry it with one of the best phones out there?  If not an outright acquisition, at least license the Garmin technology for the GPS solution that Apple uses?

If I remember correctly, I believe that even Garmin is working on a phone.  That could be an interesting product depending on how well they implement it and its final size, weight, and especially battery life, but Apple has already set the bar pretty high with the iPhone, so Garmin will have its work cut out for it.

So Apple, you know what you have to do; acquire Garmin, kill the Garmin phone, integrate Garmin’s GPS technology in the iPhone, wrap your interface around all that tech, and price it aggressively.  Oh, and figure out how to achieve decent battery life.  Easy, right?  So go get started already – I’ll be over here waiting with my credit card.

Amazon MP3s – I feel a little dirty

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I was picking up some new music for an upcoming trip when I thought I’d look at the Amazon.com MP3 Download store.  I’ve done 100% of my music purchasing on iTunes for the last few years because it is just so easy the way things are integrated with my iPods.  I was surprised to see how easy Amazon has made it not only for those of us that use iPods, but OS X itself.

Amazon provides a decent downloader that brings down the music and adds it to your iTunes library automatically.  It’s completely browser based so it’s not as seamless as iTunes, but I think it’s about as good as we’re going to get with a vanilla web browser for a while.

But the fun didn’t stop there.  I picked up 3 “albums” (is that really still a valid term?) and not only were they $2(US) cheaper per album, but they even had one that iTunes did not carry – an old Radiohead album. $7.99 for the full album definitely has my attention.  The no DRM piece is a nice bonus as well, and I’m happy to take 256k MP3 files for less money.

I think iTunes finally has a little competition here and competition should be good for the consumer.  I felt a little like I was cheating on iTunes with the first purchase.  The second click was easier, and by the third click the guilt was gone and I was just begging to get caught.

Nice job Amazon, I’ll be sure to check your store as well as iTunes when i am looking for music in the future.

iPhone and Outlook Web Access

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There has been something that drives me crazy about using Safari to access Outlook Web Access for Exchange email on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Whenever I reply to a message it is always a surprise where the cursor will land and I found that if I just press in one location and move upwards the magnifying glass will popup and it will slowly scroll to the top of the message where I want to reply. The longer the email the more patience this move takes.

Then I ran across this post that discusses two-finger scrolling in Safari on the iPhone. Although it doesn’t specifically mention Outlook Web Access, it does work for what I needed.

When you reply to a message in OWA on the iPhone/iPod Touch just tap inside the message area and the keyboard will popup. Press Done and the keyboard will then go away. Now scroll in the message area using two fingers to the top of the message, tap, and the keyboard will now let you reply where you expected it to. I never knew you could scroll in a text box like that with two fingers. That should take care of Safari Mobile’s lack of scroll bars in certain text boxes.

So thank you to Brett Peters at http://nobodywantsastyl.us/ for teaching me something new, and valuable, today.

Safari and WordPress. What’s the deal?

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I forced myself to go back to Safari when the beta for version 3 came out.  I now run the nightly builds of Webkit as well.  Overall version 3 is much nicer than version 2, but there is still one thing about Safari that is just driving me crazy -  WordPress.  I host this blog on my own site using WordPress and the editor is terrible with Safari.  It’s basically unusable.

When you open any post in the editor it strips out all of the line feeds and html.  Just destroys the formatting of your post.  Uploading a picture seemed impossible as well.  Of cource Firefox and Camino work great, but I was trying to stick with the Safari engine for everything and it is just not working out.  I had to fire up FireFox just to create this post.

I’m not looking to use more than one browser, I just want one that works for everything and, unfortunately, that just may not be Safari.  Is this an Apple problem or a WordPress problem to fix?

Getting more power out of my iPod

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My car has an Aux port in the glove compartment that lets you plug an iPod in and listen to it through the stereo.  It’s easy to find a cable to go from the headphone jack of the iPod to the Aux port, but what has always driven me crazy about this solution is that the headphone jack only puts out so much power, and if you turn the iPod volume up too far the sound through the stereo gets distorted.  If you have ever listened to your iPod when connected through the Dock to a stereo you can really tell how much more power there is without distortion.

So I have been looking for a cable to go from the Aux port to the dock connector of the iPod.  You’d think this would be easy but I checked at Radio Shack, Best Buy, WalMart, etc. and I couldn’t even find anyone that had ever heard of a cable like this.  I found a couple cables online, but one was retractable and wouldn’t work for the routing I wanted to do between the glove compartment and my center console, and the other was 4ft long and white.  The second cable was inexpensive, but I really wanted a black cable to go with the interior of my car and I didn’t think 4ft would be long enough, so I kept on looking.

What I ended up with was a connector called the PocketDock Line Out USB from SendStation that plugs in to the iPod dock connector and has a line out port. I can then run from the line out port to the Aux port in the glove compartment and the power and fullness coming from the iPod now is amazing. I bet it is at least 4-5 times more powerful than the headphone connector.  I don’t know why this isn’t carried in stores, but I was only able to find it online and I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a way to get better sound, and more power, from their iPod to their car stereo.

My only complaint would be the cost, but if you shop around online you can take a few bucks off of list.