iPhone galore…

Well iPhone day has come and gone in the UK and Germany. Here it launched at 6:02 (why, oh why, did they make that joke?!) on Friday 9th, and seems to have been quite well accepted. I have had a fair bit of personal experience with the whole process thanks to both of my parents getting one this weekend. Activation is relatively painless, although having to wait a few hours for O2 to get their act together on this before you can really use the device and learn its intricacies was rather annoying.

As with most Apple products I have experienced, the experience as a user is lovely. The interface is revolutionary, and I don’t foresee a resurgence of buttons after this. Even the doubters are coming around to some extent once they use it. It is such a natural way to interface with your device, and comes into its own when something like a mouse or other cursor-based input device is not available. Of course this is not the first touch device on the market, and it won’t be the last, but combined with the hype that Apple products seem to generate purely by existing, and the fact that everyone who seems to use it can get to grips with it very quickly, means that I expect this will be one of the most famous, for a while at least. Indeed, my own mother, who by her own admission does not like technology, has come to, at the very least, not loathe this device. The big numbers of keypad dialling seem to be a big hit, and the simplicity of the SMS features have gone down well too. A QWERTY keyboard makes a world of difference it seems, as does auto-correcting typos.

Settings is relatively intuitive, although I am not sure why Bluetooth is in ‘General’. Took me a few minutes to find to pair the respective headsets to the devices. Speaking of which, I really like how the iPhone deals with headsets. When a call is made, it gives access to an ‘audio source’ list, from which the desired device can be chosen. This is especially useful when it is used to connect via bluetooth to a car hands-free, where some conversations need to become private quickly, and can be transferred seamlessly to the phones speaker and back again as need be. Again this is not a new feature, but like so many things, it is made easy to achieve, and so might as well be!

I am not going to do a feature by feature review, because these already exist all over the net in a much more polished form than I could accomplish. Suffice it to say that for most users this seems to be a very good choice of phone provided you don’t mind O2, and don’t mind being seen with this device. That said, for someone like myself, I still think my reasons for not wanting one are valid – 8GB is too little storage, and EDGE is old tech and is in fact a step backward for Europe. Like the loss of Concorde, and so the effective cessation of commercial supersonic flight, this kind of backtracking is pretty unacceptable. If and when there is a 3G/HSDPA iPhone with more storage, then I might consider getting one. Until then it is a toss-up between a Blackberry and a Nokia N-series. Suggestions?

Scrobble the iPod touch/iPhone

Over the past few months, I have gotten quite used to being able to scrobble the plays I record on my iPod. Being out and about quite a bit, I find myself listening to a fair chunk of my music on my iPod, and so not being able to record these to last.fm was very annoying. When I searched the forums at last.fm, all I could find were some quite convoluted ways of doing it, and nothing particularly simplistic. This is where Google comes in…

This morning, did a quick search, and found this. Perfect guide for a Mac user to get his/her iPod touch or iPhone scrobbling its plays when synced. This blog has since ceased to be, so I am reposting the info this article contained. Full credit to the original author though:

I found some very useful information last night on how to scrobble your tracks from your iPhone or iPod Touch. As you know I’m a big last.fm’er (?) and I’ve really been missing my iPod tracks on Last.fm. Here’s where I cobbled all this info from if you have any problems.

So here’s what you need to do:

• Don’t use the official Last.fm client and download iScrobbler currently at 1.5.1 here.

• Download this ‘Fake iPod’ .dmg file here.

• Make this AppleScript:

tell application “Finder”

open file (“/path/to/fake ipod.dmg” as POSIX path)

delay 15

eject disk “Fake Ipod”

end tell

• Put this script in your Library/iTunes/scripts folder (if it doesn’t exist just create the folder, it’ll work fine).

• Be sure to have iScrobbler setup to scrobble iPod tracks and set the playlist to ‘Recently Played’

• When you sync your iPod/Phone just click the script in the new ’scripts’ menu in iTunes and the .dmg will mount make iTunes think an iPod is attached and cause iScrobbler to scrobble your recent tracks from the iPod.

• The .dmg will then unmount. To be honest it probably doesn’t need to be 15 secs. Just 1 would probably do

The only thing I found didn’t work from that guide was the POSIX addressing of the Fake iPod.dmg. Whenever I ran the script, I got an error about not being able to find the file. To circumvent this I replaced the line:

open file (“/path/to/fake ipod.dmg” as POSIX path)

With:

open document file “Fake iPod.dmg” of folder “Scrobble” of folder “username” of folder “Users” of startup disk

To Windows users, I am sure this will be rectified eventually, either through the last.fm official application, or through a similar method to the above. To Mac users, good luck!

What a difference a week makes…

WOW. This week I was in Wales for a Field Trip for the first part, and then have been ‘blobbing’ since then – doing and achieving very little, but enjoying it. Just thought back on the events in Tech of the past week. We have seen TV Links being shut down, with the 26 year old owner arrested for the technological equivalent of ‘aiding and abetting’ piracy and copyright infringement. A sad day I think all will agree, and the implications of this decision may be more far reaching than we would like to think. It was said that would, for example, I also be guilty of this if I linked to TV Links, just as they linked to the sites which hosted the content? We will see but I hope this is overturned.

On a lighter note, we saw The Pirate Bay getting hold of IFPI.com, the domain similar to that of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI.org), and establishing the International Federation of Pirates Interests. According to El Reg, they claim that they were given the domain and so are using it as they see fit. Never ones to miss an opportunity to ’stick it’ to the lobbyists for the record industry et al. TPB are enjoying themselves.

We also saw Steve Jobs announce the SDK of iPhone and iPod touch (did somebody say U-turn?). Suddenly Apple realises that 3rd party apps won’t destabilise the platform after all, provided they sign off on every little bit of code that is (and take a cut from it?). Russell Beattie has put together a fantastic dissection of this official note from Steve on his blog, and it really cuts out the rubbish and spells out what we cynics see when we read the typical marketing bullshitese!

Ubuntu ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ 7.10 was released for download, and looks good. I am yet to download this release, but used Tribe 5 in VMWare Fusion on the MBP, and it seems good. I traditionally have used Ubuntu to breathe life into old hardware, such as my old Toshiba Satellite 2450-101 Laptop, which (provided you prop the screen open) works well enough. The Windows installer even seems to tax it now, but Ubuntu usually flies along. I look forward to playing with ‘Gutsy’, and eagerly await the name of the next Ubuntu incarnation (Crappy Cow?…)

iPod and iTunes fun…

Bit of a rant here (makes a change!). Just connected my iPod to the MBP, and iTunes seems to have forgotten who it is…

 

Bearing in mind that this is the same machine it synced to last night, and the same machine I ejected it from this morning, I wonder what could have happened in the intervening few hours to cause iTunes to forget all about this iPod, or for the iPod to forget that it was ever synced to this machine.

I don’t mind iTunes, but sometimes I wonder how there can be so many issues with what is effectively a closed system – Apple Software, running on an Apple laptop, syncing to an Apple iPod…

Thankfully the music etc is sync directly from this machine, so there isn’t a problem getting it back on there once I re-pair them and it syncs. This isn’t always the case though – see here for a perfect example.

LogMeIn Free

Just a quick software recommendation today. When away from home, even if I am able to take my laptop with me, there is always something that I want to do that can only be done while sat at my desk, in front of my Desktop machine. This is where LogMeIn Free comes in. This is some software which you install on your machines, and then sign into the website. There you see a list of all the machines associated with your account, and tells you which ones are connected to the internet and are accessible.

In the free version what you can do is limited, but I have found that it does all I need – offers Remote Control of my machine, and allows me some basic Admin control. I can take control of my screen from any web browser in the world (even I found, those in censored China!) and so from there can use something like GMail to send myself a file or print a document to the local printer at home. The Admin offers the basics, allowing control of Windows security, such as password changing etc, but also offers a very useful range of system restart options, ranging from Normal to ‘Hard Reset’.

At home I am the de facto IT Support, and considering I am the only one who knows the passwords to nearly everything, it is likely to stay this way. If I am away on a trip and something goes horribly wrong, this allows a quick check and hopefully fix, instead of trying to visualise the screens the user is seeing, and guide them through the troubleshooting and fix process.

Overall a really useful app which I think is irreplaceable! See more and get it here

T.T.F.N 4GB iPhone! We barely knew ye…

I thought I would jump on this bandwagon, if only to prove that I don’t approve of or agree with everything Apple does from on high at Cupertino. As you will know, Apple held their special event on 5th September at Moscone West. After the first few months of iPhone sales figures etc had come in, Apple knew what we all said from the beginning – a 4GB iPhone was simply too small and the demand clearly wouldn’t be there if there was a larger capacity version around. Indeed the only reason I believe anyone would even contemplate buying one of the smaller capacity phones would be the price.

Having said that, if I were an iPhone owner (and one of the only reasons I am not is that I am in the UK), I would not be best pleased with Apple at the moment. Of course technology moves on, and buying at the wrong time is always a risk – I waited 6 months to buy this laptop simply because I read the rumours of an update on the horizon. Equally I would say that buying on the day of a product’s launch can’t possibly be too early. The early adopters were screwed over by Apple. Of course this won’t stop them from buying another Apple product – and it wouldn’t stop me. We all know the risks. I do object to the half-hearted measures Apple and Steve have put out there to try to placate their customers.

If they are $200 out of pocket, then how is a $100 store credit going to go anywhere to solving that? I would say that it should be either just paid back into their accounts so that they can spend their money anywhere, or they should be getting more. Profit is profit, but sometimes I wonder how long Apple’s rock-solid fanbase will keep the shit from sticking to them… This is the summary of Apple’s whole ethos though. They know that regardless of what they do, their ‘fanboys’ will keep defending them better than any $5,000/hr lawyer could, and so they are willing to sit in their airtight campus, not informing anyone of their upcoming products, and doing whatever they want. Their products are revolutionary, but that can only keep them safe for so long.

In saying this I am being quite hypocritical. I am writing this on my 3 month old MacBook Pro, listening to music on my 3rd Gen. iPod, and eagerly awaiting the 29th September when I will travel for over an hour to go to the Regents Street Apple Store simply to play with the new iPod touchs and worship at the altar of Steve. That said if I had bought a 4GB iPhone a few months ago, to have it discontinued, or if I had bought an 8GB iPhone only to have it dropped in price a few months later I wouldn’t be happy. This is primarily because I have found that Apple does not rush any decisions. This is one of the reasons I believe they keep so quiet about new products – so that they can plan out in minute detail what they are going to do over the few months after launch etc. This means that they have intended for a long time, possibly even before the launch of the iPhone, to drop the price in September. This is no doubt why they have only released the iPod touch now – they can now use the consumers of those as Guinea Pigs, and see if the demand for it, and for a 16GB iPhone, which I expect is on the horizon, is there. As John C. Dvorak says, never buy the first gen. of an Apple product. For once I am thankful I live in the UK, because we will probably get the 2nd Gen. of iPhone.

I wonder why Apple ever launched the 4GB iPhone – the only reason I can think of is that they were desperate to prove from the word go that their phone would beat all the competition simply because they made it, and so introduced a cheaper option to maximise sales figures of the iPhone as a whole. Still, I look forward to the 16GB (or larger because although more acceptable, 16GB is still too small for a device where video playback is one of the key features) iPhone and iPod touch, and will be buying one. It just hope that Apple don’t ’suddenly’ figure out how to fit 32GB inside the 8mm thin case and revise the iPod touch up to Gen. 2….

New iPods Galore!

Well I, as any loyal fan should have done, sat watching the Engadget live blog (as well as using Scott Bourne’s Jaiku – he was getting stuff out faster than Ryan Block over at Engadget at times!) of Apple’s ‘The Beat Goes On’ special event this evening (6pm – 7pm BST). I must say overall I was astounded. Steve and Apple seem to have done it again, and credit to them because their total secrecy on product development always could end up coming back to bite them on the backside…

The iPod nano refresh was unexpectedly the rumoured, and leaked nano, which for the past few weeks has been called ugly and fatty, among other things! The traditional iPod became the iPod classic, and saw relatively minor updates apart from the increase in size options to 80GB & 160GB, along with the new interface which includes that old favourite – CoverFlow. The renaming also meant that for the first time Apple could release two types of full size iPod. This came in the form of the much rumoured, and desired, iPod touch – the iPhone without the phone. This comes in 8GB and 16GB varieties, and is available (in the US at least) for pre-order, to be dispatched before 28th September.

On an aside there is no notice of these new releases on the Apple UK site, or on the Apple UK Store. Hopefully these will materialise soon!

Update: The new iPods, including the iPod touch, have since materialised on the Apple UK sites

Printing Woes… – A follow-up

A few days ago I posted about the lack of printing compatibility as advertised by Apple between OS X & Windows. This has not changed. I have however gotten printing working now between the Mac and Windows. I did this in a rather convoluted way, but it works… The solution was to use LPD Unix Printing. This has to be installed as a Windows Component in Vista, and then manually configured in OS X. I found that OS X did not like the hostname of the Vista machine, and so I have now resorted to disabling DHCP and manually assigning IPs to the machines on the LAN here (about 6 machines) so that I can use the printer attached to Vista. Once it is set up in Vista, the computer’s IP entered in OS X as the lpd:// address, and the printers share name as the Queue name, it suddenly begins working.

While it is not as easy or fast as I would have liked, it is an acceptable compromise. That said I still feel Apple should update their website, or at least include something easy to find in the Support section of their website with detailed instructions on how to do this. I only figured it out having visited about ten 3rd party sites, and using some good old-fashioned trial and error…

Printing Woes…

Recently I bought a MacBook Pro. I decided that for long enough I had been very anti-Mac, and that it was time to get one of my own so that I could get used to it first hand etc. Admittedly I did only even consider this because the new Macs run on Intel architecture, and so I could install Windows XP or Vista onto it using Boot Camp (which I have since done, although OS X is definitely my main OS on here). I was looking forward to the challenge of learning a new OS, and figuring out all the little technical hitches along the way – and for the most part I succeeded. OS X was not as horribly alien or unusable as I had suspected.

However, around the same time I was getting my Mac, my Dad bought a new machine for his home office – a Compaq running Windows Vista. From this machine our only printer – an Epson AL-C1100 Colour Laser – is shared around the network using the standard Windows Printer Sharing. When I purchased my Mac, I did so with all the assurances I was given by the Apple website that OS X integrates flawlessly with Windows networks, and that I would be able to access all of the network resources as before. How wrong it was….

It appears that the compatibility with using the shared printers isn’t there between OS X & Vista, like it was with XP. Bear in mind that I bought this machine in June, and so Vista had been out long enough for Apple to update their software, or update their site to inform me that there would be problems. No matter what I try, including all the solutions online that claim to fix this I simply cannot get printing working from my MacBook Pro.

The two machines are on the same workgroup, and visible from one-another. I can share files between the two, and mount the Vista box’s Public folder through Samba. I therefore know that for this my user credentials are authenticating properly with Vista for File Sharing. However, when I try to access the printer through the Printer Setup Utility on the Mac, I get an authentication error ‘Unable to connect to server with the provided password and user name Error: 256′ The internet has yielded no results for this, and neither has the Apple Support site. When I get the time I will make use of my AppleCare and call a human being for assistance, although I expect I will be told it is a Windows error and they can’t help me…

Last.fm & iPods – a match made in hell… or is it? Part 2

The second option I tried, and the one which worked for me, was using the Last.fm client. Before I did this, I bought my latest shiny new toy – the 15.4″ Santa Rosa MacBook Pro – and so this section is using the Mac OS X version of the Last.fm client. Having installed the program I noticed that there was an iPod section in the Settings menu. Once I set up my (Dad’s) 5.5G 30GB iPod to sync with the MacBook Pro’s iTunes, to a playlist called ‘iPod Music’, I tried to get it to scrobble. According to the Last.fm website, the iPod must not be manually managed for this to work, and this was how I found it to be as well.

In my experience, iTunes on the Mac must be closed before the iPod is connected. Whenever I have had iTunes open the ’scrobble your iPod’ window hasn’t appeared. Remember that this is still an experimental feature at the time of writing, and so this may change in the future. If you do have iTunes closed when you connect the iPod, then it will automatically open when the iPod is connected, and the Last.fm window will also open (although sometimes it opens behind the iTunes window, so make sure to look for it). Also note that the scrobbling process is not totally automatic. The scrobble window presents you with a list of your plays, with checkboxes next to each so that you can choose to not scrobble some tracks, because for example, you have scrobbled another play later than that one, and so scrobbling it would trigger Last.fm’s spam protection. When you are happy, simply click ‘Scrobble Selected’, and these plays automagically appear on your Last.fm account. Simple as that.

I have not yet been able to try this with Windows, because the only Windows-managed iPod we now have here is my brother’s 2G Nano, and this is manually managed. I will at some point sync one of the iPods to Vista and see if those plays will scrobble too, although Adam Zethraeus has told me that he can’t get this working on Windows with his 5G.

Good Luck and Good Scrobbling…