Tag Archive for 'Apple'

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Missing icon

Published on January 30, 2007 in Tech. Closed Tags: , , .

Hmm, I’m missing an icon here. The Sharing icon in my System Preferences has disappeared. Instead of the icon I see this half-switch-picture:
Preferences

So, first I thought some images were messed up and checked the Sharing-package. Strangely enough, everything looks fine there. The image file (SharingPref.tiff Sharing Preferences Icon) is where it should be and contains the right icon. Frankly, I have no idea why the application won’t show me the correct picture. Anyhow, it’s not a big problem since it didn’t affect any functionality yet (crossed fingers!!), but it’s annoying and I’d like to fix it. Any hints resolving this issue will be highly appreciated!

Btw, what would be the reason for placing QuickTime-preferences in between Network- and Sharing-preferences? Considering another than a random system preferences arrangement…

Shoe box pics

Published on January 28, 2007 in Tech. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

rewind holgaesqueHow does a photography aficiado and Mac developer distract himself from regular project work?

Right, he writes a nifty little program which adds Lomo effects to your perfect digital photos and makes them look like those you find in old shoe boxes somewhere hidden in your parents closets (read the thread here).

Nothing new and already seen in various Photoshop actions, but who needs Photoshop when Apple blessed us with Core Image.

Apple iPhone

Published on January 9, 2007 in Tech. Closed Tags: , .

Everybody talks about it, the much anticipated Apple iPhone!

I just had a quick look at the Quicktime movies on the website and this thing must be a true masterpiece of interaction design! Unfortunately it won’t hit European stores before Q4 2007. So enough time to safe up some gadget-budget for Christmas 2007…

Cool GPS

Published on January 7, 2007 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Like every year right before the infamous Macworld Expo in San Francisco, many rumors about what’s next coming out of Apple’s pipe are making the round. As Mac user it’s pretty hard to stay out of this circus.

Anyways, especially this rumor, about integrating GPS technology in Apple products and making their devices sort of location aware, has called my attention.

What could it mean?

GPS technology, besides its use in industry and in-car navigation systems, is currently an alpha geek gadget. There are a few early adopters, like the geocaching scene or OSM, who enjoy playing around with GPS. But it’s still a small user group and not ready for the mass market.

As seen many times before, Apple’s marketing department can easily stamp the word COOL on a product and turn an alpha geek gadget into a lifestyle product.

I think if Apple would suddenly start integrating GPS in Mac OS X or any other Apple product, it would

  1. bring considerable attention from the entertainment sector to that technology,
  2. probably trigger development of new (entertaining) GPS applications and
  3. GPS would definitely become a COOL thing.

So, this year again, I’m anxiously looking to San Francisco on Tuesday.

iPhone released

Published on December 18, 2006 in Other. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Ok, so rumors turned out to be true and magic iPhone was released today. Not as new fancy Apple gadget though, but as VOIP phone solution made by Linksys. (via heise online)

How great is that!

Still, I’m wondering if Apple doesn’t own any imaginable iYouNameIt patent…

Magic iPhone

Published on December 15, 2006 in Other and Tech. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Just impressing how a one-liner manages going up on digg. No need for reporting about uninteresting details like features or something. Magic iPhone markets itself.

Sure, there is a good chance that it’ll come nicely designed, probably having an interesting usability too. But still, it’ll be a phone.

What do people expect of wonderPhone?

What would I expect of a new phone?

Actually I would like to see more or less the same features my phone already has (how un-fancy and boring!), but easier accessible by an improved user interface and usability:

  • all my contacts and friends with every contact detail, quickly search able
  • calendar, with better editing features
  • messaging – email, sms, im, blog – with improved writing features, I don’t like writing messages on the phone at all
  • a good camera and display with easy upload – flickr, blogging, etc. – features
  • request: gps enabled with routing and other location based services
  • request: music, replacing my iPod nano by a phone would be great
  • request: wifi enabled, would like to use VOIP and faster web access
  • constraint: size and battery life must remain at least the same.

There is probably some room left for improvements in the mobile phone business. But I heavily doubt it’ll be a revolutionary new Apple gadget. Well, lets see what comes out of Apple’s pipe (if there is something in…).

Just my 2 cents on the iPhone hype.

Poor Rosetta

Published on December 5, 2006 in Tech. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Interesting: Sean Carruthers did some tests and found out that Adobe Creative Suite 2 running in Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop (aff link) partly performs better than running in Apple’s own PowerPC emulation environment named Rosetta.

Not surprising, since Boot Camp and Parallels can access more or less directly the Intel core while Rosetta must emulate a PowerPC before starting any other tasks. I’m no hardware engineer, but for me it sounds like Rosetta has some more work to do than Parallels or Boot Camp.

However, it leads another time to the question if, along with increasing popularity of emulation environments on the Mac, Mac OS X versions of applications are needed any more

Why not just get your copy of Parallels Desktop, Boot Camp, etc. and run Windows versions on your Mac? Why waiting years for applications to be ported to Mac OS X when you can simply run them in an emulation environment (e.g. OpenOffice)? Perhaps even without any major drawbacks.

Thanks to the latest Parallels update, a combined workflow (coherence mode, drag and drop items) between Windows and Mac OS X has improved significantly. Parallels has done an amazing job during the last months and I guess some major upgrades (e.g. hardware acceleration) can be expected for the near future.

Big brother is watching

Published on November 12, 2006 in Tech. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

When I got my new MacBook, one thing that took me quite some time to get used to, was the built-in iSight. It’s kind of strange knowing a camera is constantly directed towards yourself. You feel watched any time you sit in front of the computer. Even if it’s turned off, meaning the little green light is off, but who knows if the camera is off too. However, after some time I got used it and didn’t think about it anymore.

Until today.

This morning I came over this little Quicktime iSight hack.

If you own an iSight and it’s connected to your Mac, it’s being turned on and you can watch yourself in realtime by just entering the website.

Isn’t that scary?

Actually not. So far this hack only works local. The video feed goes from your iSight over the Quicktime plugin into your browser. Nobody else can watch, stream or record you.

Thank you iTunes Store!

Published on November 8, 2006 in Other. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , .

For the last few days I tried to buy an album at the iTunes Store. Usually before I purchase music I want to preview it. iTunes offers therefore 30 seconds song previews. The problem during the last days was, that the preview wasn’t working. It started playing, after 3 seconds the stream started rebuffering for about 15 seconds followed by another 3 seconds music and so on. Ok, so I thought I’ll preview it somewhere else, and recalled the online music shop Bleep. The last time I purchased something there, Bleep was a small business and had only a few indies listed.

Boy, has this shop grown! I found the album I was looking for immediatly at Bleep, and still better, yes, SO MUCH BETTER: for the same price I (legally) bought 320kbps clean mp3s WITHOUT that crappy FairPlay DRM!!!

So what do we learn: without the technical problems at iTunes I hardly would have found out that there is still music business online who trusts in their customers and sells music that plays everywhere, for sure.

Bleep is now my personal first choice for purchasing music online. I already saw some other albums there which I had an eye on at iTunes but waited with my purchase because the preview wasn’t working.

Update:
Seems that I’m not the only one having streaming problems in iTunes. According to this thread my ISP Chello is the one to blame, not the iTunes Store. If I were Apple I wouldn’t be happy about an ISP who is blocking a few hundred or maybe thousand potential customers…

Photos and usability

Published on November 5, 2006 in Other and Tech. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

remotesUsually, when it comes to usability and interface design, Apple enjoys a quite good reputation. Especially the smart and simple iPod design is just brilliant, close to the legendary one-button-system.

This week Apple updated Aperture, added, finally, support for my new camera and made a trial version available. So I got a copy and tried Aperture. Mainly because I wanted to compare it to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which is available as public beta.

First off, I’m no professional photographer, just an amateur who is looking for a tool to manage his RAW images in the way iPhoto handles snapshots. I’m not going with iPhoto because it doesn’t take advantage of the RAW format, it converts and copies every RAW picture to another compressed image format. What I’m looking for is probably somewhere in between iPhoto and Lightroom/Aperture.

However, I tried Aperture, imported most of my RAW images and began adjusting, ordering, etc. Without the intention to slug anyone here, but Aperture gave me one of the worst user experiences I’ve ever had. We just didn’t like each other. I wasn’t able to find the most simple things like editing metadata or copy color adjustments from one picture to another (can I?) and Aperture gave me no hint where to look for it either.

Maybe Aperture is just not built for me and my MacBook in matters of usability, screen size and speed.

On the other hand, I had no trouble understanding the interface and concept of Lightroom. In my opinion it’s very clear, more intuitive, a lot snappier and runs overall with a better performance on my MacBook than Aperture.

Both applications seem to do their job well, just in different ways. For amateur photographers like me both products probably mean a feature overkill. If iPhoto would’ve a better RAW handling and slightly better color adjustment features, I would just stick with it.