Gregory Tarnoff Photography & Design
Madison | Milwaukee

Posts Tagged ‘Apple’

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Whhiiiiirrrrr, Click, Click, Whhiiiiirrrrr…Heartbreak

September 19th, 2008, posted in Computers, Prose

The Death of an iPod

Just over eighteen months ago I purchased my second iPod, this one with video. It was to replace my ailing iPod Mini that only held a 5 hour charge, had a faulty click wheel and had trouble syncing. The Mini lasted 30 months before reaching this state. Shortly after buying my iPod with video, I started noticing skipping in the middle of my songs. Sometimes it would skip places in the song, but more often it would jump to another song. The tracks played fine in iTunes so I returned to the Apple Store and the Geniuses there look at it. Apple promptly replaced it and claimed it was a hard drive about to fail that was causing the issues. I continued to have periodic issues with the new iPod but mostly on tracks that had skipped previous to the replacement.

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Me Time – My Experience So Far With MobileMe

July 30th, 2008, posted in Computers, Downloads, iPhone

Apple’s update of their .Mac online presence and syncing software has received numerous critiques since it’s launch earlier this month. People have struggled with the service being up and lost mail. I struggled with getting it to work for a few days until I stumbled across a solution in the forums that even the Apple techs didn’t have me try. Since then things have been pretty smooth with the exception of calendars.

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Has Apple Influenced AT&T's Customer Service?

July 29th, 2008, posted in Web Design, iPhone

I have been a fan of Apple for a while. I don’t consider myself a fan boy as while I do get wrapped up when Steve Jobs is pitching new wares, I easily see through the RDF after his presentations. But one of the reasons I like Apple so much is that when something goes wrong they are ready and willing to help fix it. I haven’t had any major calamities requiring losing a computer for weeks to a repair facility, but I have had a number of issues requiring Genius Bar attention and it has been easy to deal with.

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The iPhone's Achilles Heel

July 7th, 2008, posted in Computers

Many probably don’t consider this, but I had to this weekend. Over the holiday weekend, my phone performed as needed until Sunday when I went to call my tennis loving mother about the epic battle between Nadal and Federer at Wimbeldon. My call appeared to go through as I could see the little timer counting my time connected, but I couldn’t hear a damn thing. Upon further examination, I didn’t hear any of the little clicks either. It rang, but that was the only audio coming out. I thought for sure my phone was dying.

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Apple Underestimates iPhone SDK Demand

March 6th, 2008, posted in Computers, Project Management

Today Apple released the iPhone SDK in a beta format for developers. The official version and the ability for the average joe to use these to be developed applications will come out in July. However it appears that Apple greatly underestimated how many people want to produce applications for their now infamous device. The link to get the SDK and subsequent information is http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/, but unfortunately this site is suffering from a massive digg effect as it has not be available since the announcement was made almost 4 hours ago.

UPDATE:

It looks like Apple is struggling with keeping their servers up. I was able to get to the SDK page a little while ago, but a lot of the links were broken and I didn’t try downloading it (I am away from my Mac at the moment). Sporadic attempts to get through to the proper page may occur.

You also need to have an Intel Mac in order to proceed, so if you are like me and waiting to buy a new Mac, now is the time.

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Apple Updates iPhone and iPod Touch

February 5th, 2008, posted in Computers

iPhone 16GB

It looks like Apple took the store down this morning and when they brought it back up they increased the memory options on both the iPhone and iPod Touch. The iPhone is now available in a 16GB version for $499 and the Touch comes in a 32GB also for $499.

It doesn’t appear any other items were updated, so those waiting for a multi-touch MacBook Pro or even a speed bump will have to wait a little longer.

If you haven’t experienced either of these devices, I suggest you run out to your local Apple store and spend some time with them. I truly fell in love with my iPhone and wonder how I got by without it. Warning: if you happen to be a bit of an internet junkie and don’t already have a smartphone, these two devices are not conducive to your social interactions.

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Apple and Fox team up for iPod versions of movies on DVD

January 16th, 2008, posted in Computers

While everyone seems to be thinking that the new MacBookAir and iTunes Movie Rentals are the big deals introduced at MacWorld 2008, but I think it is that the studios are starting to cater to iPod owners. Fox’s DVD of Family Guy’s Blue Harvest will be the first DVD to include an iPod ready format on the disc that the user can automatically import into iTunes.

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Dr. Touchscreen, or How I learned to stop hating the iPhone

November 6th, 2007, posted in Computers, Standards, Web Design

I bit the bullet in late September. I had known that my needs changed from a regular phone to a smart phone back in April.  Between Late February and May I went through 4 improperly functioning phones. AT&T replaced each one of them, but that was hours out of my time I didn’t need. When the fourth phone started doing the exact same thing in july that the previous models had I decided I needed to just buy a new phone.

I started my investigation into the smartphone market. The big that I found is that I had to buy additional software to get one to work cleanly with my Mac, and even then there was much to be desired. I was convinced that maybe the Blackberry Pearl was for me. It was compact, the syncing was pretty decent to Macs and there were some really good deals going around.

I wasn’t ready to bite the bullet yet. In August my iPod started really acting up and skipping tracks when they were halfway through. I took it in to the local Apple store. I waited for my appointment for 20 minutes during which time I played with the iPhone more extensively than I previously had. I found overall the interface was very nice to work with, however the keyboard was a little funky. My feelings towards the device shifted from pure hatred to mere dislike.

So I stepped up to the Genius Bar when my turn came around and the techs there diagnosed a hard drive problem with my iPod and replaced it right on the spot. I was shocked. I thought for sure I would have to mail my iPod in (and would be lucky if they did it for me) and be without the thing for a week at least. Then the tech said something that made me go from disliking the iPhone to considering it.  he informed me that when the iPhones act up and need replacing they swap them out right on the spot just like they did with my iPod. I have been back a couple times since and have seen it with my very own eyes.

Well this is customer service! Realizing that if I bought an iPhone I would not be dealing with AT&T for tech support, but rather Apple, I reexamined the iPhone.  i started piecing together what I needed the phone to do, what I felt was a fair price for data access, and what the cost of the handset was going to be.

turns out I wasn’t going to be eligible for any handset discounts form AT&T. This moved the price of all smart phones to $300 minimum. The Blackberries started at $400.  The data plans for the Palm, RIM and Windows smartphones started at $40 and were not unlimited. Apple just knocked the price on the iPhone down. I could find the 4GB for $300 now. And the data package was just $20 more than what I was currently paying for voice.

My biggest problem is I wasn’t going to be able to sync my iPhone (without losing some data) with both my work PC and home Mac. However Google came to the rescue. I was able to export my calendar to Google on a daily basis and use Google’s subscription to iCal format to sync Google and my Mac, which of course allowed me to get my entire schedule on my iPhone.

With just about 6 weeks under my belt with the device, I wonder how I ever got along without it. I build all my to do lists, grocery lists, shopping list, weekly menus and other notes on it. I can find out movie listings in a couple clicks if on the road. I am constantly up on the news and mail. I have saved a few car rides that kids get bored on by playing a movie. In short, it is a huge benefit. My job as a User Interface Designer became more interesting when I realized how badly normal websites are on small screens.

The down side: I could really use the ability to extend it without hacking. I look forward to the SDK in February.  I should have gone for the 8GB as i quickly fill up the hard drive with just music. The camera could use a zoom. I am an internet junkie now that it is on my hip. It needs Flash.

Is it right for everyone? No. Am I happy with my choice? You bet. Like anthing out there, if you are considering it, make a list of pros and cons and see who wins.

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Safari on Windows

June 12th, 2007, posted in Computers, Flash, Standards, Web Design

There seems to be a question as to why Apple would introduce Safari for Windows and why anyone on Windows would run it. I think people are missing the point that Apple is trying to acheive and what this could mean for the small developer.

By introducing Safari on Windows Apple has introduced the SDK (as they call it) for the iPhone. Developers won’t be able to make their apps run directly on the phone and must use AJAX instead(Flash is reportedly not going to be supported). Having Safari on Windows will allow the vast majority of developers to make sure their application will run on Safari’s JavaScript. Now hopefully a developer will make sure it works in all versions of JavaScript on all major browsers, but Apple doesn’t care about that.

In addition to this, Apple is showing that it is doing something Microsoft has decided to undo. Apple is opening more than iTunes to the other OS. I expect by the time Leopard launches we will see Windows versions of iWork and iLife. I don’t expect major applications like Final Cut or Apeture to show up, but remember Apple dropped “computer” from its name. Microsoft has restricted its applications to VMware and Office, but the deal on Office is only for 4 more years. Watch that go away by then.

Last but not least, this is a great opportunity for the small web designer/developer to now test their application and site on all the major browsers without having to shell out for an additional computer. Not everyone can afford a Mac, nor do they want to use a Mac. Now they don’t have to. They can install Safari and use it for testing purposes.

Now is it the best browser? I don’t think so. It has usability issues (I found another issue today in that you can’t use backspace to go back in browsing history like ALL other browsers). I personally prefer Firefox with its extensions and themes. but I would pick Safari over IE because I know the CSS I write will work.

Update: Issue number 4 and a reason to have it on Windows. Wordpress’s WYSIWYG editor for writing posts doesn’t seem to work properly. I only have Code version available to me while writing this post from inside Safari. It looks like Wordpress is one of those small teams that need to test their JavaScript to see that it is compatible with Safari.

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Apple's Big News from WWDC '07

June 12th, 2007, posted in Computers, Standards, Web Design

So in case you missed it, Apple held their 2007 WWDC keynote this morning. The big news – no big news. Steve showed off 10 features of Leopard and talked a little about the iPhone. There are some features of Leopard that make me excited to get my hands on it. Of course I am not sure it will be worth it on my 12 inch Powerbook G4 (this looks to be a good time to start thinking about the 15.4 inch MacBook Pro). The iPhone turns out to be a big disappointment to most as they unveiled the way to do 3rd party applications on it. I think people aren’t realizing what the revolution Apple started was, but more on that in a minute.

OSX Leopard

Lifehacker has a really good write up on how most of the os features look like eye candy. As a designer, I like eye candy, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of using the product and doesn’t eat up too many resources.

Here is a quick rundown of the features revealed and my thoughts on them:

  1. Desktop: Lifehacker nails it here, most of it is useless, however Stacks will make my life easier. I tend to drop everything on my desktop and get frustrated at how messy it is. If I can drop them into a folder, smart folder or something similar and access them from the dock I will be much happier. Lifehacker does help the unorganized a little with this quick tip on how to mimic stacks in Tiger.
  2. Finder: Leopard will get a new Finder finally. This version will act more like iTunes in its search method. It even has Coverflow, the old iTunes plugin that lets you search albums by looking at cover art. This never really worked well for me in iTunes, but I think I will like it when going through design work. Now when viewing files, they will actually appear in the Coverflow. For spreadsheets, word docs and other office file, I don’t like this, but artwork, movies, and photos it will rock. Imagine you are looking for that one photo you have of your family for the holiday card, but you can’t remember which folder it is in or what you called it. Now with Coverflow you can open the folder and view the photos just like scrolling through your real world photo album. I am curious if it will render HTML pages with their related CSS if you look in your development folders or any folder you are using to design a site in.
  3. Quick Look: So you need to read that Word doc, but don’t want to open Word or OpenOffice.Org? Quick look will allow you “preview” the file without actually launching the application. This can be a time saver especially for artists and PSD files.
  4. Time Machine: Awesome idea, but nothing new.
  5. Spaces: I don’t really see the need for this, also shown last year.
  6. 64 Bit: this is good news for all of you running the Intel chips. Us PowerPC guys will have to upgrade to care.
  7. Core Animation: Same as last year, but looks pretty cool.
  8. Boot Camp: This is built in to Leopard now so that we can run Windows on our Macs. I am not really thrilled about this as it means having to reboot every time you want to switch OSes. I think Parallels handles this better.
  9. Dashboard: There is a handy new widget that looks up movie show times. Nice, but is it a new feature?
  10. iChat: now you will have fun laughing at your friends and colleagues with Photobooth like effects! Is that board meeting or video conference cal boring you? iChat will allow you to turn the other person upside down or into a Obi One Kenobi like hologram, just make sure you mute your microphone before you do it. actually the iChat theater concept of showing a movie or slide show in iChat while having a video conference is kinda cool, but they can drop the Photobooth effects.

Safari on Windows

I know I didn’t mention it above, but Steve announced this as well today. He is gunning for IE7 and Firefox and did so by making available the beta of Safari 3 for Windows. I played with it for a few hours today and here are my impressions.

  1. Something I never noticed in Safari on the Mac (I use mostly Firefox) is that it isn’t user friendly. It is missing the basic commands on the menu bar. I wanted to go to my homepage and there was no home button. In addition to that the text on the tabs was dark on a dark grey background. I had a hard time reading. For a company so focused on usability, they missed the boat on that one.
  2. Bookmarks leave me lacking. When I click to open up my bookmarks, I don’t necessarily want my current page hidden. I prefer a sidebar, not a whole page.
  3. Bugs. I know it is beta, but there are a couple of bugs I discovered within 5 minutes of launching the application that should have been caught. I run two monitors, one laptop and one external in my work setting. I put all my primary apps on my laptop and secondary (Outlook, Firefox, Excel) on my external. When I moved Safari over there and clicked to maximize the browser so I could view the Apple website, the window disappeared. Upon finding it in my taskbar and right clicking to restore, my only option was close. Maximize, minimize, and restore were greyed out. When I relaunched the application (since I had to close it), it popped up on my main monitor maximized. I use my windows machine with the taskbar on auto-hide. In the maximized role the browser now opened in, I couldn’t get to the taskbar. I had to use Alt+Tab to change apps and even then I couldn’t get the taskbar to show up until i reduced the size of Safari. to me these are two huge glaring errors that should have been caught before beta.

iPhone

There isn’t much to say here. Apple’s idea of a SDK for it is to build a Web 2.0 application and run it in Safari. this is lame. However, what most people don’t see is that this could be the push that makes the Web-Desktop finally explode. For years people have talked about a system that had no OS other than a web browser installed. Once launched you go to a website like Goowy . Now this really hasn’t taken off yet, but if you can image having one of these set up so you can access the needed files from your iPhone? all of a sudden that Safari browser will become really useful. Will it interact with the phone’s OS, probably not. This does limit it and mean that the iPhone is not as smart as the competition, but expect a boom in web based desktop solution.

One More Thing….

.Mac, oh how I have wondered why you still exist… Well now I know. The new finder will allow you to view all machines on your network and see all the shared files just like a mapped drive in Windows. They appear as if they are an external hard drive on your machine. this gets even cooler when you incorporate .Mac. You know that proposal you worked on all night, burned to a CD or threw on a thumb drive and took to the office? Well it turns out it was corrupted, or scratched or some other nightmarish situation. Well you have .Mac right? Log on to your work Mac open finder and see your home computer (which you left running). Search the files on that computer until you find the proposal and tada! you are ready to go. It looks like .Mac combined with the new finder is setting up SSH on your systems automatically.

I only see two catches here:

  1. How many people use Macs at work? Can this be made to work on Windows? If it can, sign me up.
  2. How often do you leave your computer on? Now that we are entering a time where energy is expensive and global warming is apparent, I shut my systems down whenever I can.
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