Category Archives: Apple Existence

My journey away from Windows, and into the light.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

Big Upgrade Day

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve already heard that iPhone 4 has been announced today. And I want one. Period. AT&T was “nice” enough to move up my upgrade date, so I’m eligible for an upgrade immediately.

So what do I like about the new iPhone? Well, the design is really industrial, a look I really love. Video calling — “FaceTime” — looks quite cool, although the reliance on wi-fi for that seems like a bad thing. I suspect that it is bandwidth intensive, and that’s keeping the 3G use of it at bay. At least until Apple thwoks AT&T about the head and shoulders. 🙂

I like the new camera, along with the capability to record 720p HD video and edit the video right on the phone. That’s way cool. And then there’s the big ol’ display. Well, it’s not actually bigger, but it’s got well over twice the pixel density of the old phone. Shweet. I’ve gotta think that come June 15th, I’ll be pre-ordering.

Now if I can just find someone who wants my iPhone 3G….

The other upgrade just released tonight is Lightroom 3. This has been in beta for quite a while, and it looks like it’s finally ready for primetime. I’m thrilled, and need to look into that upgrade, too. More on that later.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Rants

AT&T Gives Apple Customers the Raspberry

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So I go to Colorado for a week, and AT&T seems to have lost their mind.

OK, so those two events aren’t actually connected, but… I stand by my conclusion.

When the iPad was announced, Steve Jobs proclaimed, to the jaw-dropping gasp of everyone in the room, that the iPad would have a month-to-month all-you-can-eat plan for $30. And the throngs rejoiced.

Scarcely a month into the availability of the iPad 3G, AT&T has now pulled a Darth Vader, and changed the terms of the deal with Apple’s customers. Ya see, after promising the availability of the world for $30/mo atop a bandwidth hungry platform, AT&T now cried “uncle” and soured the deal to 2GB of bandwidth monthly for $25. For a device that folks were praising as the second coming of computing, AT&T has now clipped its wings, and made it harder for the iPad to live up to its hype.

The good news is that I bought my iPad 3G when I did, and will be grandfathered in with my all-you-can-eat plan… supposedly.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

An iPad Enters the Fold

I’ve been thinking about the iPad of late. It’s been a real quandary for me. While, I’ve loved what I’ve read about the thing, and seen some really great ponderances about how it could be used as a photography tool, I just hadn’t quite found the killer use for the thing.

I still may not have.

However, yesterday, I found that one of our local Best Buy’s had the 64GB iPad 3G in stock. This, after the same store told me a week ago that they had no idea if they were ever gonna get any, and that when they did, they were always gone before they landed. I left in a bit of a huff, feeling like they were calling me a fool for having asked after one. Well, yesterday, the moons aligned, and one landed in my lap.

I’ve gotta tell ya, I really like the thing. It’s convenient, fun to use, and really beautiful when displaying photos. It does video well, and both the 3G and WiFi (802.11n) seem to work quite well. For me, though, the biggest part I enjoy is the physical size of the screen. It’s ginormous, at 1024×768, and full o’ color.

It’ll be a while for me to figure out how I’ll best use it, but I’ve been putting loads of apps on it, and intend to find its niche in my life!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Landlocked and Near Calamity

So, things have been pretty quiet from the Deauxmayne of late. Why? Read on…

Since December, I’ve been doing all my work on a “late 2008” vintage MacBook Pro. Nice machine, and while I knew it wasn’t gonna be the same kind of horsepower I was used to on my eight-core MacPro, but I figured I could make it work. And I did, for a while. However, with bigger images out of the 7D, and bigger memory footprints needed for bigger Lightroom catalogs, I found myself landlocked. It was obvious that I needed more memory to crank everything through, but my sad little MBP was maxed out at 4GB. (Yeah, yeah, I know. Some folks have had success putting 6GB in ’em, but it’s an unsupported configuration, and as hard as I was stressing the little machine, I figured I’d probably run into trouble.)

How bad was it? Well, for some images, I would try to do an edit in Lightroom or Photoshop, and have to wait minutes between edits. It was bad, bad, bad. And for Lightroom, I couldn’t run with everything in the same catalog, which was hampering my ability to find my images easily.

I’d been looking at the new quad i7-based iMacs, and figured I’d start saving my pennies to get one later this year. However, my laptop was really struggling, and it was taking the joy (and practicality) out of working with images from my camera. It was bad, bad, bad.

Darla came to my rescue on Wednesday, taking me to the Apple Store at West County Mall, and putting a new iMac i7 in my hands! Absolutely wonderful! Now, the default memory complement of the iMac is only 4GB — which is the same as the laptop — so I knew I needed to enhance that almost out of the box.

I spent a lot of Wednesday and Thursday getting the iMac up, and beginning to migrate applications and data from the laptop. I’d decided to install everything fresh, rather than migrating apps from the laptop. This would be the first clean install I’d had in years. Yeah, that’s one big task, but it was mostly done by Friday.

On Friday, OWC graced me with another 8GB of memory, taking me to 12GB overall. I could not believe how well Lightroom and Photoshop CS5 ran under those conditions. I was even able to re-combine my Lightroom annual catalogs together again, making searches across my whole catalog once again possible.

Woo-hoo!

That brings us to the near calamity part of this story. Saturday, my external FW800 drive started failing. I tried different cables, and different power supplies, and nothing seemed to help. I extracted the drive from the enclosure, and dropped it in my Thermatake BlacX. And the drive just churned. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I do have a backup strategy, but because of the fiasco with the performance of my laptop, I hadn’t been keeping it up to date over the last few weeks.

The drive eventually came to life, but of course, I didn’t trust it. Becky suggested that we go out this morning, and figure out a replacement strategy. Overnight, I researched the Drobo, thinking that’d be where I’d land. However, I saw some info that implied that there were some folks having problems with them staying mounted on iMacs, and that the performance might not be quite what I was hoping for.

I landed on a pair of 2TB My Book Studio FW800 enclosures, one as a work drive, and a second as a Chronosync’d clone. So today has been spent copying data from my original 2TB drive to the first of the new twins. In retrospect, I’m not as convinced that the old drive was in as much danger as I thought, but getting away from a cobbled-together solution will help me peace of mind.

So… New iMac, and new storage. It’s been a big week at the Deauxmayne!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

Canon 7D and Software Updates

Having had my Canon 7D for a few weeks, I can safely say that I really like it. Not yet love it, but I like. Why not love? Well, I just haven’t had enough time to exercise it enough to fall in love. I’m in love with its potential, but I haven’t realized that potential practically yet. Mine own dang fault… along with the fact that there’s only 24 hours in a day. Dumb ol’ plantary rotation.

One thing that frankly had kinda slowed me down from getting too far down the path for making gobs of shots was that Apple’s Snow Leopard and Adobe products weren’t quite there with support for the new RAW format from the 7D. There’s been a release candidate for Lightroom that supported it, but after reading some of the forum info about that RC, I was concerned that I might end up having to re-import my images or some such nonsense to get them correctly rendered in the future production version of LR when it was released.

Today, both issues are solved: Adobe has released LR 2.6 officially, and Apple has update Snow Leopard to handle the 7D’s RAW files. Both are great news for me, and just in the nick of time.

Tomorrow morning, a gaggle from work are getting together at Forest Park to photograph, and it’ll be the first real world test for me with the 7D. Now that my tools are up to snuff for reading the images I’ll create, that just makes the pot sweeter. Woo-hoo!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t put my Grandpa Simpson voice on and mention the speed of the upgrades. I was downloading the almost 100MB upgrade to Lightroom at just a tick over 1MB/sec. That would’ve been just about one 3.5″ floppy disk every second for just under two minutes. It’s crazy to think about moving that kind of data around that quickly. And man, am I loving it!

Now to go to the camera store and see if there’s any used lenses I need! 🙂

Apple Existence

Stupidest iPhone Trick Ever

OK, so I usually love my iPhone. It’s days like today, though, that make me wanna chuck it in a conveniently located river from a conveniently well placed bridge.

As part of a small event I run monthly, I got an e-mail from someone yesterday with some large attachments — ended up being about 24mb altogether. My mail server had no problem with it, and Apple’s Mail application had no problem with it. However, when the iPhone got ahold of it…. Well, frustrating doesn’t hardly put the appropriately contorted face on it. I’d try to delete the e-mail, and Mail app on the phone would choke and die, even to the point of affecting the read/unread status of e-mails in other accounts that feed through my iPhone.

I tried sooooo many solutions, but here’s the solution I ran across that seemed to solve my problem. First, change the iPhone Mail settings to only display the last 25 items. That’s probably a pretty good setting for me most of the time anyway. Second, make sure that the mail account on the mail server is devoid of any new e-mail. And lastly, send myself 25 (or more) e-mails so that the only thing displayed are the new e-mails. That seemed to “scroll” the mongo e-mail off the screen, never to return…. so far.

This is a horrible behavior by the iPhone. There should be no acceptable mail behavior (meaning that the e-mail lives within standards) that should cause the mail app to behave this way.

Apple — this one hurts!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

New Gear: Apple Magic Mouse

When Apple announced their newest mouse a couple of weeks ago, I thought it sounded intriguing. They’d developed a Bluetooth mouse with a clean design, matching nicely with the recent offerings from the Kids from Cupertino. Normally, a ho-hum thing. I mean, Apple’s had a Bluetooth mouse available for a while, and there are tons of other folks out there with them.

This one’s got one extra step of cool on them though.

First, there’s no real buttons. There’s a click when you press the surface, but there’s no delineation between a left-click and right-click. You just click on the appropriate side, and the right thing happens. Cool.

The bigger coolness though is also delivered by the top surface. The top surface is also a trackpad, and man is it cool. The slick surface just begs to have your finger (or fingers — yes, it supports gestures) sliding across it, making for a really neat augmentation for any Mac.

For me, I’m finding that it’s a great addition to my regular use of my MacBook Pro. I like the glass trackpad on the MBP, but there are times when I’ll set the unit on the coffee table next to the La-Z-Boy. Doing that and twisting around enough to use the trackpad was a bit of a pain. With the new Magic Mouse, I can slide my mouse anywhere, making casual surfing pretty dang easy from the comfort of my easy chair. It just doesn’t get better than that!