Category: Apple

MobileMe

I’ve updated my iPod Touch with the 2.0 software, and done the necessary updates on my Mac to support the new MobileMe syncing stuff. Apple is *almost* where they need to be to allow me to replace my old Palm with the iPod Touch. I now have my calendar and contacts synced automatically to the Touch, accessible on the web, and on my Mac. And I can update either the calendar or contacts on the Touch, Mac, or web, and it should all sync automatically. Pretty cool!

There are couple of little problems. First, while the birthdays from my contacts can show through to my calendar on the Mac and on the web, they don’t show on the iPod Touch. This problem is described here, and there’s a tech note about it here. That’s not a killer problem, but it’s definitely an annoyance.

The other problem is that there’s still no good way to sync text notes in the same way as the contacts and calendar. There are a couple of third-party solutions that may work out for this. Here’s an interesting one that should be available soon. Evernote is available now, and might be what I’m looking for. It would be nice if 37 Signals came up with something to allow you to sync BackPack to the iPhone/Touch for offline access, but I don’t see any indication that they’re working on that.

MacHeist and other Mac stuff

Well, after deciding not to buy this year’s MacHeist, I changed my mind and gave them my $49 today. They’ve added enough stuff to the bundle to make it worthwhile for me. Even if I don’t use anything else I’ll probably get my money’s worth out of the two games they added.

And I gave Apple $20 for the new iPod Touch apps. The Touch still isn’t where I think it should be, in terms of functionality, but I’m hoping third-party software will fill the remaining holes after the API comes out next month. If I could just get contact, calendar, and note-taking apps that all sync back to my computer, and can be updated on either the Touch or the MacBook, I’ll be happy. I’m basically just looking for the same stuff I’ve got on my Palm.

Mac software

MacHeist has another bundle of Mac software on sale right now. It’s a good deal, if you need more than one or two of the included applications. I bought the bundle that they were selling about a year ago. About the only app from that bundle that I’m using regularly is DevonThink, which is pretty useful. I’m not really seeing anything in the current bundle that I’d be likely to use, though, so I guess I’ll skip this one.

I have pretty much everything working the way I want it on my new MacBook now. I’ve got FolderShare working fine now. I’ve replaced MacStumbler, which doesn’t seem to work on Intel Macs, with iStumbler, which works fine. And I found out that my old version of the Transmission BitTorrent client didn’t work, so I upgraded to the newest version, which is working fine.

Office 2008 looks interesting, but I don’t think I’ll bother with it. I hardly ever do any word processing or spreadsheet work on the Mac. I do all of that stuff on the PC.

I also paid for VMWare Fusion a couple of weeks ago. (I’d been using the trial version.) I’ve got a Windows XP virtual machine set up, and it’s working reasonably well. I’m mostly just using it when I need remote access to some stuff at work. (I still use pcAnywhere for that, most of the time.)

random stuff

I haven’t gotten around to blogging in the last couple of weeks. Things have been pretty hectic. I’m trying to relax right now, so I thought I’d just write up a few random bits.

I picked up a TomTom One LE GPS unit at Best Buy last week. I don’t really need a GPS often. Most of my driving is just back and forth to work. But, it will definitely come in handy once in a while. I used it today to help me find my way to my friend Paul’s house in New York. I’ve been there before, but not recently. The GPS was definitely a help. In particular, there’s one point where I need to make a turn onto a side street that’s pretty well hidden, until you’re right on top of it. The GPS takes care of that nicely by announcing the turn in advance, then again when you’re right there. It really makes things easier.

I’ve been working my way through the Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde. I’m on the third book now, Well of Lost Plots. It’s starting out quite nicely. I’m really enjoying these books. Lots of fun, weird, stuff.

I installed the trial version of VMware Fusion on my MacBook yesterday, and installed Windows XP into a virtual machine. It works pretty well. It’s a little slow, but a lot better than previous virtual machine products that I’ve used on the Mac. (Of course, this is the first time I’ve used an Intel Mac, so right there you’ve got a major advantage.) Oh, and I’ve got to say, I think it’s time for Windows XP SP3. I installed XP with SP2, and had 90 patches to install from Windows Update. Hey Microsoft, isn’t that enough patches to warrant a service pack? That’s one of the nice things about Apple that we maybe take for granted. OS X 10.4 went from 10.4.0 to 10.4.10, and each of those point releases is cumulative, so you never have too many individual patches to install on a Mac.

AppleCare

I didn’t get the extended warranty from Best Buy when I bought my new MacBook. I generally don’t see much point in Best Buy warranties. I’m considering AppleCare though. I don’t think I’ve ever bothered with it before, and I’ve never really needed it on any of my previous Apple laptops. I might actually keep this laptop for three years, though, so that might make it worthwhile. I just figured out that you can get AppleCare at Amazon for $200 rather that the $250 that you’d have to pay if you bought it from Apple. That makes it a little more likely that I’ll get it.

new MacBook

I bought a new MacBook today. I got the white 2.2 GHz / 120 GB HD model. This is my first Intel mac, so that’s the major difference for me between the new machine and my old G4 iBook. I’m liking it so far. The keyboard is taking a while to get used to, but it’s working fine, and I don’t think I’ll have any long-term problems with it. The screen is smaller than the iBook, but it’s a little higher resolution (1280 x 800). That leaves me with slightly smaller type on screen for some things, but that hasn’t been a problem (yet) either.

I was going to buy a custom MacBook from the Apple web site, and go for 2 GB of RAM and a 250 GB drive, but then I saw that I could get 2GB of RAM for about $50 from Crucial, vs. paying Apple $150. And I can probably get a 250 GB drive for less than what Apple is charging, if I decide I really need it at some point.

I bought the machine from Best Buy, online, for store pickup. That worked out pretty well. I actually got $10 off, since they didn’t have the machine ready for me when I came to pick it up.

I have a few apps that haven’t been upgraded in a while; while they all work on the Intel Mac, they’re probably not working as well as they could. FolderShare was a little flaky even on the old iBook, and hasn’t been updated for Intel, but I think it’s working OK now, since I turned off encryption and compression, per some advice on the FolderShare message boards. I’ve been using Juice to download podcasts for a long time. It doesn’t seem like they’ve got a Universal Binary out either. The PowerPC version works fine, but it’s a bit slow. And I’ve switched over from an old organizer program called iOrganize to DevonThink, which is definitely up-to-date. I also had to apply a patch to KeePassX to get it to work on Leopard.

Overall, not that much grief, considering I’m switching to a new machine, a new processor, and a new OS version.

more fun with consumer electronics

I decided to update the firmware on my HD-DVD player tonight. I don’t have the thing anywhere near my home network, so I figured it would be easier to do the firmware update via CD-R rather than trying to do it over the Internet. Lesson one: the Toshiba HD-A3 doesn’t like CDs burned with Nero. It seems to like CDs burned with ISO Recorder, at 2x speed. I picked up that tidbit from AVS Forum, which is a great source of information on various audio/video stuff. So now I’ve got the HD-A3 at firmware version 1.1. I’m not sure that’ll make any difference for anything I’m doing, but I feel like I’ve accomplished something.

I also ran over to the local Apple Store and picked up a new battery for my iBook G4 today. I’m pretty sure I want to get rid of the iBook and get a new MacBook soon, but the old battery had almost completely died over the last few days, and I really didn’t want to pick up the new MacBook right away. So the new battery seems to be charging as it should right now. Hopefully, it’s a good battery and will get me through until whenever I get the MacBook.

iPod Touch

I picked up an iPod Touch at CostCo today. Primarily, I’m just looking at it as a replacement for my Nano, which I’ll probably be selling to a friend for a few bucks. I like it a lot, though there are a few little annoyances. Here’s a couple of bullet lists of good and bad stuff:

Good

  • The interface, in general, looks nice and works well. The multi-touch stuff works well.
  • Safari works well on most sites, and there are a lot of sites that are formatted either for the iPhone/iPod Touch specifically, or more generally for mobile devices, that work really well. The browser on the PSP, by comparison, doesn’t work nearly as well.
  • The screen looks pretty good. I synced a few episodes of Heroes down to the device, and they look nice.
  • QuickTime and PDF support in Safari. (I was actually pleasantly surprised about the PDF support. I wasn’t expecting it.)

Bad

  • Since there aren’t any physical controls, I’m not going to be able to use it without looking at it. That’s something that I take for granted on the Nano. I don’t think it’ll be too much of an annoyanyce, but we’ll see how that works out.
  • There’s one stuck pixel on the screen. It’s not really obvious, except on a solid black background, though.
  • The keyboard is a bit of a pain. It works, and I’ll probably get used to it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be using it to write blog posts or long e-mails. (It’s definitely better than typing on my Moto SLVR though.)
  • No Flash support. That kills some web sites that rely on it.
  • You can’t use a stylus on the screen, the way you would on a Palm. That kills some potential applications that won’t work with only finger controls, like maybe a drawing app or handwriting recognition.

We won’t see (approved) third-party apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch until next year. I’m hoping for a few key apps. First, a note-taking app. If I can get that, then I can probably (finally) dump my Palm i705. I use the Palm primarily for contacts, calendar, and notes. The Touch already has contacts & calendar; if they can just add notes, then they’ve got everything I need in a PDA. I’d like to see a good offline e-book reader, too. I don’t know if I’d use it a lot, but I’d like to have it. And maybe a couple of games that make innovative use of the multi-touch interface. Heck, even a simple solitaire game would be nice.

weekend weirdness

My iBook stopped working on Saturday. I brought it to the Genius Bar at the local Apple Store, and they managed to get it back up and running again. For a little while there, though, I thought I was going to have to trash it and buy a new MacBook. I’m planning on doing that at some point next year; I’m glad I didn’t wind up having to do it today. Right now, I’m doing a full backup with Retrospect, just in case.

I found out that Citibank canceled my credit card today and issued me a new one. I discovered this by trying to log on to my account on the web, and getting a big red error message about how my account was locked due to a security problem of some kind. I called them to ask what was going on, and they told me that they’d canceled the card due to the TJ Maxx security breach that happened a while back. Now, I can’t access my account online until I get a new card in the mail (hopefully, early next week). And I’m going to have to change my card number with every merchant that has it on file — Amazon, eBay, and so on. Fun.

iTunes Plus

Apple rolled out “iTunes Plus” today, their DRM-free, higher-quality audio format. Any songs you already own that are now available in the new format can be “upgraded” for 30 cents a pop. I think this varies if you’re upgrading an entire album — my collection came to $11.70 for 44 songs, including two full albums and a handful of miscellaneous tracks. I decided to give it a shot, but I couldn’t get the purchase to go through. I guess a lot of other people are trying, too. Maybe I’ll try again in a day or two. Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide if I want to preorder the new Paul McCartney and Ryan Adams albums.

There’s a good article on iTunes Plus over at Ars Technica.