Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category
That was a short honeymoon, Apple
If you recently purchased a new iPhone 3G or upgraded your iPhone 1.0 to the new 2.0 firmware, you’ve probably already put it through its paces. In fact, chances are good that you’re not only over the “honeymoon phase,” you’re considering divorce.
It would appear that the new firmware is suffering from some sort of bug (maybe a memory leak?) that’s bringing everyday utilities like text messaging and calling to a crawl. Frustrated users can be spotted at every turn on the web, including here, here, over here, and here.
I’ve been experiencing the same problem, though I’ve found some temporary relief by resetting the phone (hold down power and home buttons) when the lag gets really bad. When this situation shows up, you’ll know it almost immediately: opening SMS takes 5-6 seconds, text entry lag in SMS is unbearable (we’re talking 3-4 seconds between presses), scrolling through contacts takes 10 seconds or more, and selecting a contact to call can take at least as long.
This is undoubtedly one of those “early adopter” bugs that us geeks have grown so accustomed to, and one that I’d expect Apple to have ironed out through a firmware update in fairly short order.
Now, let’s just hope that the updated firmware doesn’t destroy our ability to unlock 2.0.
Tags: 2.0, Apple, contacts, iPhone, iphone 3g, lag, sms
Get EVDO, and stop being taken
I was having a fascinating chat with my traveling buddy, Walt, yesterday. We were sitting in the restaurant of the Hilton North Greenpoint in Houston, and he asked me how the internet access in the hotel was working out.
T (Me): Well, the speed’s fine.
W (Walt): Is the wireless pretty good?
T: I suppose. It transmits data, if that’s what you mean.
W: No, I’m just wondering if it’s any better than what I went through to use on of their desktops in the “business center.”
T: I’d guess that using my MacBook is better than using a PC in any room, on any internet connection. /me grins.
W: Yah, especially at $1.50/minute.
…and this is where the rant begins. $1.50/minute? I was already paying [correction: the company was paying] $10.77/day for a connection, wireless or wired, on each device that needed one. In my case, that was three - MacBook, Dell laptop for work, and the iPhone…which made for a grand total of $64.62 in internet charges for two days. [Note: this is about $5 more than what I pay for my Sprint EVDO card/month]
Must-Have iPhone App: Stanza
It’s awfully tough to avoid the hype surrounding the new iPhone release, but so far I’ve managed to completely ignore it on this site. You’re welcome.
The silence is over, though, because I’m just totally raving about Stanza - an eBook reader for the iPhone that’s now available in the App Store. This app is taking my life by storm, and it doesn’t even carry a blaster.
For those of us that had jailbroken iPhones (pre-2.0), there was one eBook reader available. It was acceptable, made decent use of the iPhone’s scrolling abilities, and was generally pleasant to use…that is, once you got books on it. Uploading books required that you access the phone via sFTP, upload the files to a specific directory, reload, and hope. Stanza makes the old reader run for the hills.
Number one best feature: it has a built-in book catalog! You’ve probably heard about Project Gutenberg - the place to get thousands and thousands of classic (read: out of copyright) books in digital format. Yep. That’s right. With just a few taps on the phone, you can access a decent selection of free books that will download to your phone for your reading pleasure. No syncing. No FTP’ing. Just reading.
The organization of the library is also excellent, allowing you to filter through books by author, title, recently read, etc.
The Stanza guys took an interesting turn on the page-flipping idea, choosing to go with the horizontal scroll rather than the vertical scroll. Personally, it doesn’t much matter to me…but I find it to be a little less “suave” than the vertical page jump that we saw in the original eBook app.
Overall, readability is top notch, the fonts are clear, and the application loads quickly. If I have a beef, it’s that the app doesn’t remember what book you were last reading; rather, you have to select the title, and the program picks up where you left off. Using the “recently read” sort gets you back to the same spot in two taps…not too, too bad.
In summary - if you’re an iPhone user, you need this app. Now.
Oh wait…did I mention that it’s free?
Neat Trick: Two Laptops, One Without Wi-Fi?
I was recently with a buddy whose corporate laptop doesn’t have wifi, and it occurred to me to see if I could share my EVDO connection with him. Guess what? The sharing preferences on your Mac make this task a two-click process.
Connect to the internet with your mac, and you can share that connection seamlessly over ethernet, firewire, or even wireless.
I guess I always knew this was possible, but I’d never realized how convenient it was. Give it a go.
Unlocked iPhone Upgrade: links to live by
I decided to get off my butt and upgrade my unlocked iPhone from 1.0.2 to 1.1.1 last week…and it was a complete disaster. Here are some of the mistakes I made, how to avoid them, and the links which will bail you out.
- Check your iTunes version, and make sure it’s supported by iNdependence before you start. I’d become somewhat relaxed with my iTunes upgrades, only to learn halfway through the upgrade that 7.5 is not supported by iNdependence. A quick download of AppZapper to completely remove iTunes, and a download of iTunes 7.4 (you’ll have to dig around to find the file) later, I was back with a useable version of iTunes.
- Always do option-clicks on the “restore” and “update” buttons in iTunes. I didn’t decide to upgrade to 1.1.1 until after 1.1.2 came out, and I didn’t realize that clicking “upgrade” (like all the walkthroughs will tell you to do) was going to put 1.1.2 on the phone. If you make this mistake, and have an iPhone that’s been upgraded from 1.0.2 to 1.1.2, follow these instructions to save your phone.
- Start here if you haven’t already screwed yourself up; the guys over at ModMyiFone.com will take you all the way through the downgrade/upgrade process.
- The jailbreakme.com trick didn’t work for me. The ModMyiFone guides will take you through a nifty little process that lets you visit a website from your iPhone, and jailbreak it automatically. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked for me (on two phones that I’ve now upgraded). Instead, unlock it with iNdependence, and install Installer.app manually through iNdependence.
Like I said, my phone was an absolute disaster…but I was able to upgrade my wife’s iPhone in about 15 minutes. Now, if only I could get her to consistently sync her phone…
Technorati Tags: apple, independence, iphone, unlocking
Quick Tip: Unplug that iPod during boot!
Here’s a quick hit for everyone. If you’re using a Mac (like my iMac), and you’ve got your iPod connected via USB - unplug it before rebooting.
I had a three or four minute extreme panic run when my Mac threw a couple of beeps out, and sat with a gray screen…three boots in a row. After some digging, it became clear that the beeps were flagging an unbootable disk; that disk was my 4G iPod, plugged in via USB.
technorati tags:ipod, boot, mac, apple, usb
The iPhone, and The Problem with Tech Guys
This blog is important for those of us who don’t do tech for a living. Trust me.
I spend a lot of time listening to tech podcasts and reading tech blogs…because they’re awesome. I can’t help but love tech stuff, and the guys who do shows like dl.tv and MacBreak Weekly are not only hilarious, but extremely “on top” of the latest tech goodies.
But when it comes to the practicality of something like the iPhone, they’re just missing the boat.
In a recent episode of MacBreak Weekly, Alex Lindsay talked about how he is dying to get his hands on an iPhone, but not because he cares about the phone functionality. His whole premise was that he loved the many functions of the iPhone, but that he would be using it almost exclusively through WiFi connections - either at his office, home, or Starbucks..and subsequently couldn’t care less about the Cingular loop.
Ya know, these guys need to get a grip here. Those of us who don’t spend all day in tech-friendly offices (or who actually get out on a regular basis) want a phone that works with all those features WHEREVER we are. We also need cell phones - because we’re not always within ten feet of our desk.
Don’t worry, friends. We’re here to stand up for us part-time geeks, and say “WE care about good phone functionality, and connectivity on the cellular network. WE want Cingular to provide excellent and affordable access plans for both phone and internet connections…because WE want to be able to rock the iPhone (and similar devices) when we’re walking through the park with our significant others.”
Hang in there, amigos. We’ve got your proverbial back.
technorati tags:macbreak, iphone, dl.tv
Apple Roundup
Today was a big day for Apple fans, with the MacWorld announcments of the iPhone and AppleTV. Here’s a roundup of those sites that are doing a far more thorough job of coverage than we are:
AppleInsider
MacRumors
Engadget
Apple.com
We are super pumped about the iPhone; and if you spend a few minutes to watch Steve Jobs’ intro for the iPhone, you’ll probably share our excitement. Cheers.
technorati tags:apple, iphone, ipod, appletv
OmniWeb: Ehh…Maybe
In our ever-continuing quest to find the perfect browser, we decided recently to give the new version of OmniWeb a spin. For those of you on Windows machines, you can skip most of this: the browser is for OS X only.
For those of you on OS X, using Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino, or some other alternative, you might find the following highlights useful:
- The Good
- Quick loading times: OmniWeb seems to load pages quite quickly. We’re not into the whole “sit in front of the machine with a stopwatch thing,” but we noticed that OmniWeb consistently loaded pages more quickly than both Safari and Camino, was a tad faster than Firefox, and was about the same as Opera.
- The tab layout scheme (with the thumbnails of the tabs on the left) is awesome. We considered this to be another overhyped feature…until we used it. Having a visual glance at your tab options is incredibly handy, and this feature alone might be reason enough to use OmniWeb.
- Bookmark layout: it’s on the same relative plane as Firefox and Safari, with a very intuitive page for editing and creating bookmarks. We found ourselves missing the integrated del.icio.us links available natively through Flock, and via extensions in Firefox, but satisfied with our local options. The ability to sync bookmarks across iSync (and .Mac) was also quite useful.
- Rendering: everything looked as it should on 95% of the pages we visited.
- The Bad
- The username/password management is absolutely terrible. Terrible. Some of the combinations that it came up with for logins was not only dead wrong, but quite creative. We saw the mixture of usernames and email addresses on several different pages - some of which wouldn’t correct themselves even after telling OmniWeb to accept the new values. Sadly, this issue is substantial enough to keep us from using OmniWeb as our main browser.
- The price: you’re going to have to break out the wallet if you want to use OmniWeb. It’s $29.95 for a single license, and $44.95 for a family license. While that price level isn’t particularly unreasonable, the free alternatives (every other browser we’ve talked about) make the price seem a little difficult to swallow.
- Display lag: we noticed that on slower machines (read: eMac G4/800 with 800MB RAM), form entry lagged several key strokes behind our typing. Yeah, we type fast…but that’s no excuse. Occasionally closing and re-opening OmniWeb helped a tad - which might suggest memory leakage - but who wants to do that? If you’re using Firefox, you’re probably already doing this…but you didn’t pay for Firefox, did you?
On the whole, OmniWeb is a solid browser. The username/password problem is a big one to get around in our book; but if you’re not big on saving that kind of info in your browser, you’ll probably find the graphical tabs to be worth the $30.
Technorati Tags: browser, omniweb
Samsung Camera Videos in OS X
My relatively new Samsung sports camcorder rocks the proverbial house. The thing is so small, solid and generally usable that I’m amazed it ever has time to charge.
That being said, we’ve had a hell of a time with converting its videos (which are .AVI DIVX files) into something usable on our Macs. Thus far, I’d been unable to convert the videos using any of the standard tools (DivX Toll, DivX Doctor II, etc.), and had been using iSquint - which works where Quicktime had not - to export the videos in .MOV.
I’ll still use iSquint, but it’s going to be for iPod conversions only…thanks to the solution below.
I took a few minutes and sent the following email to a lesser geek buddy of mine. You might find it helpful.
Yo -
I just discovered a much better way to convert the videos you shoot
with your Samsung video camera.iSquint works pretty well, but it’s really more intended for
converting videos to be iPod-friendly.This new method keeps the original file size, shape and resolution.
You can always export for iPod when you’ve done something in iMovie.First step: change the recording mode in the camera options of your
camera from TV to PC. Leave it there.Second step: download hexedit for OSX here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hexeditOnce you’ve copied your camera movies (*.AVI) over to your hard drive,
open one of them in HexEdit. Leave the settings as “auto”.It’ll open up a bunch of stuff that’ll look like garbage to you. Don’t
worry, this is hexadecimal representation of the file’s code. If you
look on the right side, you’ll see the letters “SEDG” twice: once on
row 70 (usually), and again on row B0. You want to replace each
instance (there are only two) of “SEDG” with the letters “DIVX”. Using
the Apple-F (Find) command has an option for Replace, so it simplifies
things a tad. Be aware that doing the “Replace All” command will take
a few seconds, as large video files have a ton of lines…I find it
quicker to “Find” then “Replace” twice for each file.Save the file, close it, and try to open it; it should open in QT by
default. If it plays, we’re golden.There may be some DIVX codecs that you don’t have installed….but
that’s super simple. Let me know if this doesn’t get your videos
playing.Once you’ve done that, you’ll probably notice that you’ve got a new
file called YOURFILE.AVI~, and the original called YOURFILE.AVI. This
is HexEdit automatically creating a backup of your file. Once you’ve
got things rolling smoothly here, you can turn off “Create Backups” in
the options menu of HexEdit, and it’ll no longer create those files
with the ~ at the end. You can also delete those files once your’e
satisfied. In the event that something goes terribly wrong, you can
restore the ~ files before deleting them.Essentially, Windows recognizes that SEDG nonsense…even though it’s
not standard. We know that the Samsung cameras are encoding in DIVX
format, so we’re just circumventing the weak attempt at further
Windows monopoly.
Tip: If you’ve got a bunch of files to modify, select them all in a
Finder window, and right click (ctrl-click), select Open With, choose
Other, and select HexEdit. It’ll open all of the files in stacked
windows.
Enjoy!