Category Archives: Apple Existence

My journey away from Windows, and into the light.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

iPhone Space, The “Other” Frontier

Last night, I dropped my iPhone and iPod Touch into their little cradles… and began my descent through various layers of USB-based hell. This morning, I sat at my little workstation, getting my news and feeds to start my day, and found error messages on my screen indicating that my iPhone couldn’t be found by iTunes, and that my Wacom tablet was not alive.

Best as I can figure, the USB hub dropped it’s communication, which confused my tablet, and may have interrupted the sync process to my iPhone. Apparently that had caused everything that was once called “music” ok the device to now be called “other”… making that space untouchable and unmanageable. From what I’ve been able to gather from Da Goog, it appears that a full restore is in my future tonight.

Blecch!

Apple Existence

What Was Missing

With all the dust having settled from yesterday’s Macworld keynote, folks are starting to look back, and see what was missing. Here’s my list.

  • New iMac — There were rumors all over the place about new iMacs, perhaps with screens as big as 28″.
  • New MacMini — This was the rumor that seemed to be a sure thing, but like the iMac, was a no-show.
  • Snow Leopard — This version of the OS has been rumored to be just over the next hill for months. I can’t believe that didn’t show up at Macworld. With the new bundle of iLife ’09, iWork ’09 and Leopard (10.5), I suspect Snow Leopard (10.6) is a ways off.
  • 32GB iPhone — This wasn’t a lock, but it sure had been rumored a lot.
  • iPhone Nano — This little device really seemed to be another sure thing for announcement, but also was a no show.
  • New MacPros — This was an outside shot, at best. I figured this might happen to placate folks (like me) that wanted a path to use the spiffy new 24″ LED monitor with the high end workstation hardware, with the hopes that some fallout would enable my not-so-old MacPro to run against the new screen.

I’m sure there were many other missing devices and code from Macworld’s announcements, but these were the ones that seemed glaring in their omission to me.

Apple Existence

Apple’s Last Hurrah

Apple gave its last keynote at Macworld today. There’s been a lot of buzz about the fact that Apple was going to pull out of Macworld, and even more buzz about the fact that Uncle Steve wasn’t going to deliver the swan song. However, at the end of the day, Apple went on stage today, and spilled the new goods. My opinion?

Meh.

Three big things were presented, plus “one more thing.” Updates to software were two of those — iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 — along with a new 17″ MacBook Pro and the announcement of the death of DRM in the iTunes Music Store.

The software updates to iWork didn’t grab me. However, the updates to iPhoto (part of iLife ’09) really impressed me. Apple has introduced face recognition in images — a kind of holy grail for archivists, I think — that will allow iPhoto to find all photos with a specific person’s face in them… within reason. If someone’s face is distorted — being kissed on both cheeks, for example — then it appears it may not work as well. But gosh, the number of images it will work on is going to be such a wonderful thing! There’s also support for geotagging, Google Maps, and all kinds of things that will make the iPhoto experience that much better.

For me, this brings a pretty good quandry to the surface. I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom as my DAM tool. However, it doesn’t have some of these nice bells and whistles promised in iPhoto. iPhoto couldn’t handle big image catalogs like mine, although I hear it manages large catalogs much better nowadays. LR also does a great job of non-destructive editing, and iPhoto seems to touch on that a bit, but I’m not clear on just how well that’s handled. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to playing with iPhoto later this month when it’s released.

On the hardware front, I fully expected to exhale a giant “D’oh” after the MacBook Pro announcements. However, the only thing announced was the obviously-needing-to-be-updated 17″ MBP, and frankly, for about $300 more than my 15″ MBP, you don’t really get that much. Bigger screen, sure, but the rest of the things that make the machine work bigger/better/faster/more just don’t seem to add up to the difference in price… and the extra pound of weight to carry around. So yeah, the new machine is an incremental improvement over my 15″ MBP, but it really does seem to be just a tiny evolutionary wiggle.

As for the DRM free iTMS… well, it’s about time. I hate that it’s 30¢ per track to “upgrade” existing purchases to DRM-free formats, but I think it’s gonna be well worth it. Higher sample rates and more freedom to use tunes I’ve purchased on gear I own will make this a worthwhile uptick. Frankly, I’ve got less than 200 tracks that I’ve purchased through iTMS — I’ve always just bought the CDs and pulled them into iTunes. With the new future of iTMS though, I may be a bit more inclined to purchase full albums digitally. It does seem as though the record companies have finally come to terms with electronic distribution, and I’m pleased that I’ll be able to take advantage of it with iTMS.

So, in general, meh. But there were some jewels today in iPhoto and iTunes that will bear some watching.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

And Then There Were Four

Last night, the AppleStork came, and dropped off the latest addition to the Deauxmayne… a new 8GB iPhone. As Becky has pointed out, I now have one of each current iPod model. That wasn’t a plan, but it is interesting that it has happened.

I like the device — of course, it’s not that far different than the iPod Touch. It’s a little narrower and thicker, and has a more substantial feel in your hand than does the Touch. One funny I noticed is that the touchscreen “feels” different. I would’ve assumed the same glass was on both, but somehow, the glass on the Touch feels slicker. When I first drug my finger across the iPhone screen, I thought it was “sticky” by comparison to the Touch’s screen. Weird, huh?

The phone seems to work pretty well as compared to my HTC Mogul. For me though, the impressive piece is the internet access. It is so much nicer than the experience on Windows Mobile 6 on the Mogul. That’s not HTC’s fault; that’s Microsoft’s. What an amazing difference working through Safari instead of IE! And since I’m all Apple at home, the integration with my Macs is sweet, and the interface concepts are familiar.

Phydeaux is a happy camper!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Touch-y Quirks

I’ve been fighting a weird little problem with my iPod Touch. I’ve noticed that some Genius-generated playlists have a quirk about them that prevented the correct artist and album cover to be displayed in coverflow for some tracks. Tip the thing over to the track view, and presto, chango, suddenly the art is right, as is the artist.

After doing a bunch of searching, I didn’t find anything that matched my symptoms. And then I noticed something… all the tracks involved in this had the same album title: Greatest Hits. Having all those tracks labelled like that created a giant album on the Touch that had myriad artist’s GH tracks all attached to the same album, and that seems to have been the root cause of the problem.

Now, I’ve added something to the album title for my GH discs so they will now be distinct from each other, and that appears to have solved the problem. Weird, weird, weird….

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

I’ve Got a Golden Ticket!

Back in September, I mentioned that I voted with my wallet, preferring an iPod Touch over an yellow iPod Nano. Well, the pressure of Black Friday sales weighed heavily on my shoulders, and come that fateful Friday, I ordered an 8GB yellow Nano.

And yes, I did get it engraved with the phrase from Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory. Check out the not-so-great photos below. 🙂

I’m very impressed with the little thing. It’s tiny. Despite that, it has a decent sized screen, although I don’t know if I’d wanna watch video on it (something I haven’t tried yet). And it weighs next-to-nothing, while sporting a glass screen and an aluminum body. It’s really a thing of beauty.

So why did I need a third iPod? Aside from being a sucker for the “on sale” high sign from Apple, I decided that having a device with some resilliancy would be good for yard work, hiking, etc. My Touch is a fine device, but it’s a bit bulky for some environments, and I’m a little concerned about breaking its screen in the great out of doors.

I guess we’ve answered the question, “How many iPod does it take to cover all my activities?” “One, a-two-who, three. Three.” (With apologies to the Tootsie Pop folks.)

Apple Existence

Guilty Pleasures

I’ve been a fan of music for as long as I can remember, and it seems like I’ve gone to proverbial ends of the earth to get the music I love. However, I’ve always insisted on having the original media — nowadays, that’s CDs. My figuring is that if I have the original media, I can convert the music into whatever format comes next. What I’m coming to find is that there’s a lot of the music I grew up with that just ain’t available on CD.

Enter the iTunes Music Store. I have been finding all kinds of old music — some I’d be kinda embarrassed to fess up to — on iTMS. And at 99 cents a pop, it’s pretty easy to take, and easy to grab the one-hit wonders I remember from days gone by.

However, there’s a fair amount of junk out there too. Many, many of the old tunes are actually re-recordings by the original artists. To me, that just doesn’t count. 🙂

So, if you see me bopping around with my Touch on, and it looks like the moves are old-school, just ignore me, and pass on by. It’s probably something you’d rather not listen to anyway!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

A Tale of Two Displays, Part Two: A Tale of Two Displays (really!)

Over the weekend, I decided it was time to stop waiting on Apple to pave the road that leads to my new screen real estate. I did a bunch of research — although not very well, as we’ll discover later in this tale of woe — and landed on a pair of Samsung T260 25.5″ widescreen monitors. Generally, they got good reviews, and looked as good as they could at BestBuy, given that every monitor in the store was being driven from a VGA signal with more splits than a high school cheerleading squad. I was planning on a single DVI source, so I knew it’d only get better from what I saw.

I unpacked the two beastly panels, and plopped ’em on my desk. My gosh, were they ever big! I felt like a kid in a candy store as I connected them to Doc Oc, and proceeded to bask in the electronic glory of the two brightly lit beacons on my desk.

My next step (as it should always be) was color calibration. I pulled out my trusty Gretag Eye-One, and calibrated both monitors. The colors looked great to my eyes, although the monitors were pretty bright, so I lowered the brightness a bit to keep the sunburn down. I brought up Lightroom, and began walking through some of my favorite images. The brighter the image, the better it looked on the new panels. And then I hit some low-light images…. and the house o’ monitors began to tumble down.

All my low-light images showed splotches and degradation in the shadowed areas — something I’d never seen on my 20″ Apple Cinema Display. The more I worked to eliminate the problem, the more I began to get concerned that I’d made a huge mistake.

It was back to research, and I learned that the T260’s used a TN LCD panel. Apparently, TN panels use 6-bit color (256k colors), and dither to get to the 16.7m colors that are advertised. And from what I could see, my photos didn’t like that kind of treatment. (For comparison, my Apple ACD uses an S-IPS panel — 8-bit color, and true 16.7m colors without dithering.)

Tail between my legs, battered and bruised, Beck and I took the two Samsungs back to BestBuy for return. Surprisingly, they gave us no guff about returning them, and I didn’t have to get into a philosophical discussion of the religion behind various LCD panels. And, no restocking fee, which I was fully expecting to be asked for.

However, that leaves me back at the smaller screen real estate, but I think that’s a problem I can schluff off until after the first of the year. No reason to rush, and it appears that I have a good deal more research to accomplish! 🙂

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

A Tale of Two Displays, Part One: What Are They Thinking?

This week, Apple has announced that the new delicious 24″ monitors are ready for ordering and shipping. These are the brilliant-looking monitors that will only attach to MiniDisplayPort enabled devices, which means you can only attach this new beastie to one of the new laptops from Apple. There’s no love for the MacMini or MacPro, both of which are DVI-based machines, nor for the older laptops out there.

On the heels of that announce, Apple also announced that they are discontinuing the 23″ Apple Cinema Display. While this isn’t a huge surprise, the things that are missing are.

What this seems to mean is that if you have a DVI-based Mac — essentially any recent Mac before the latest laptop announcements — the only two monitors available from Apple for you are the 20″ Apple Cinema Display ($599) and the 30″ Apple Cinema Display ($1799). The 23″ ACD came in around $899, and was a nice compromise for folks like me that wanted more real estate than the 20″, but didn’t want to spring almost two-kilobucks for the 30″. For some folks with twenty Benjy’s burning a hole in their pocket, it might’ve made sense for those in the MacPro crowd to put a pair of 23″ ACD screens on the desk for the same price as the 30″. That’s all personal choice however. 🙂

The key log to breaking this display logjam is a DVI to MiniDisplayPort adapter, something Apple hasn’t announced, and something that no one seems to have created (although it appears Amazon may have some third party dongles). From what I gather in reading other folks’ interpretation of the specs, this kind of dongle is possible, but was just never something anyone needed before. That’s the only way an Apple laptop older than a month will be able to connect to the new 24″ display.

For MacPro users, this would work, of course, but I suspect that the best path here would be a new video card. However, Apple has also not announced any DisplayPort-based cards, and even if they were available out there, I don’t know if they’d be compatible with the MacPro or OS X. And then there might still be the DisplayPort to MiniDisplayPort question — is there an adapter that will go between these two sizes of the same video standard?

If anyone from Apple is reading this — and I know Uncle Steve checks this blog daily — please, please, please get your collective product lines together so I can put the new panels on my MacPro!!!! Doc Oc needs new eyes…

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Laptop Bag Conundrum

When I put the Little-MacBook-That-Could in my stable a couple of years ago, I pawed through every laptop bag I could find until I finally ended up with a Brenthaven. This has been pert near the best laptop bag I’ve ever owned — loads of space to stow cables, adapters, power options and all kinds of other stuff.

Well, the new MacBook Pro won’t fit in my small Brenthaven, so I’m on the prowl again for a new bag. Now BH does make a bag that’ll fit my shiny new beauty, but for some reason, I’m inclined to do something different this time.

So who’s leading the pack right now? Timbuk2 and Booq. They both have gazillions of potential choices, and no one seems to carry them locally, so it’d have to be a purchase based off internet sales sites and opinion sites. Given my last bag purchase experience, I’m not real keen on that, but I don’t think I’ll have much of a choice in the matter.

Any suggestions out there?