Category: Apple

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The road to Leopard – Part 3

A weekend with the new cat

I spent the entire weekend working in Leopard and the good news is that I had very few issues. I could go on and on about the stuff that just worked (like my older copy of Quicken 2006, and QuickBooks 2006), however, I think you’re here to hear about the stuff that may be an issue and my overall likes and dislikes about Leopard. So here goes:

 

Let’s start with the stuff that doesn’t work:

As reported earlier my Dymo Label printer and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.2 aren’t fully compatible. The printer software will not even launch because it complains that the driver isn’t there (although it is and I reinstalled it). In Lightroom 1.2 I reported that I couldn’t switch the Print module. I still can’t, although one reader did report that he was able to. He did an Erase and Install of Leopard and installed Lightroom 1.0 and upgraded it to 1.2 and he can use the Print module. However, I have not been able to replicate this success on either Intel or PowerPC Macs. Also I use PhoneValet (a Mac based voicemail system) and although they claim Leopard compatibility my PhoneValet Anywhere Clients are no longer popping up visual caller ID alerts. I reinstalld the clients and made sure the Mac OS X Firewalls are off. They are checking into it for me. UPDATE I just got an email from Parlient to have me check the Bonjour names of my Leopard Macs which I do seem to remember getting conflict messages after each Leopard install stating that it was “changing the name”. That was the problem. Leopard for whatever reason resets the Bonjour network name of each Mac to “Macintosh” instead of whatever they used to me. Then when it sees another “Macintosh” name it just starts putting a number after each one. I went in and changed the names to reflect what they should be and added them back into PhoneValet and all is well!

My oldest Mac is an iMac G4 1.2GHz and I ended up doing an Archive and Install on that one after doing the first Leopard upgrade because it seemed to lock up either while attempting to sleep or when the screen would go black. I can’t tell which because the screen was black and wouldn’t come back on with the normal mouse movement/keyboard entry. So rather than continue to try to troubleshoot it, I just cut my loses and decided that it was probably over due for a fresh System. That brings me to a recommendation. If your Mac has been around for a while and you’ve constantly "Upgraded" from 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 and to 10.4, then you are running the risk of having more issues by doing an Upgrade to 10.5. You are better off doing an Archive and Install which produces a NEW System folder. Your settings will be copied over to the New System. Now of course this may mean that some of your apps may need to be reinstalled. However, it’s a lot cleaner to go this route and you’ll probably have less problems down the road.

That’s it! Everything else I’ve tried works. Even my Cisco VPN client works without the need for an upgrade which is VERY surprising.

 

There’s a lot to like about Leopard and some things are annoying as hell.

My Leopard Likes:

There’s a lot to like about Leopard and I’m sure I’ll discover more and tips along the way. Some of things that jumped out at me right away were:

The new DVD player ROCKS! Finally we have the ability to scrub a slider to get to any part of the movie without having to rely on chapters or fast forward/rewind.

Webclip is also pretty cool. This is the feature of Safari/Dashboard that allows you to select a portion of any web page and turn it into a Dashboard Widget. I’ve already set up a couple of these and they work great!

Mail’s data detectors are also pretty nice. For example, if someone emails you and they have their contact info at the bottom of the message you can add that contact info to Address Book without having to copy/paste line-by-line.

Sometimes it’s the little things. I used to keep the Activity window open in Mail to see what was going on. Now Mail has a little area in the lower left corner of the screen that shows your Mail activity such as messages being downloaded or sent.

Another biggy for me is the fact that Disk Utility now has the ability built in the change the size of Partitions/Disk Images non-destructively. For example, I have a encrypted disk image for private stuff on my drive and it was starting to get full. Rather than having to create a bigger one and then copy everything over, I was able to simply resize the existing one.

Lastly, I’m really liking the idea of Time Machine for doing network backups of my home Macs. See my notes below on some new discoveries.

 

My Leopard Dislikes:

I absolutely cannot stand the translucent menu bar. For those of you who have not gone to Leopard yet or seen it, now the menu bar is transparent which allows your desktop picture to show through. While it’s cute, it’s gets old after about 2 seconds.

It’s just simply harder to read and serves NO useful purpose. The drop down menus are semi-transparent as well, but those for some reason don’t bother me as much. I would very much appreciate an update or piece of shareware that lets me make the menu bar a SOLID color. Otherwise I may have to Photoshop all of my desktop pictures to have a solid bar across the top.

It seems that with this release Apple is trying to eliminate some of the redundancies in the OS. For example there were about 3 ways in Tiger to add a new printer. In Leopard the Printer Setup Utility is GONE. You now either add a printer from the Print dial box (which has also changed) or via the System Prefs. While I don’t add printers every day it seemed easier to just go to the Printer Setup Utility. Also the Internet Connect app is gone which makes it harder to do Certificate based network authentications. This one has thrown my company’s IT department for a loop.

Speaking of printing, now when you hit print you get a small print dialog box with very few options.

Now of course you can simply hit the down arrow to expose the rest of the options including a nice print preview, but this setting doesn’t seem to be sticky across applications. So I end up having to hit the down arrow in each app that I print from to get to the other options for my printer.

 

More on Time Machine and backing up over a network

Originally I setup a big external drive on my Power Mac G5 to serve as the Time Machine drive for the whole family. I figured that I "had to" partition it up for each user. After doing some research and watching the way Time Machine works, I found out that the partitioning is not necessary or practical. When you use Time Machine to back up to a shared disk (using File Sharing from another Leopard Mac), it backs up each Mac to it’s on Folder on the drive. So no need to make partitions. This way the space is used more effectively as subsequent incremental backups are done.

There seems to have been a lot of disappointment over the fact that Apple dropped using an AirDisk (hard drive connected to a New AirPort Extreme Base Station) for Time Machine as a feature from the release version of Leopard. After seeing Leopard backup over Wi-Fi, this is probably a smart move on Apple’s part. Two of my Macs are connected to the network wirelessly and backing up several gigs over Wi-Fi just brings the whole wireless network to it’s knees. Also since Time Machine backs up changes every hour this could cause a lot of network traffic jams. For example, I use MS Entourage for work email. It has one giant database for all of it’s mail. My database is anywhere from 3-5GB in size. So when I open Entourage it changes the database and therefore it would be backed up every hour throughout the day while I’m working. That would chew up a lot of bandwidth and storage quickly. Also it appears that while Time Machine is backing up wirelessly it really hogs most of the bandwidth for itself and makes it hard if not impossible to do much of anything in the way of surfing until the backup is done. Until there are more options for using Time Machine, backing up lots of data wirelessly will be painful.

 

The Bottom Line

There is nothing in Leopard that I absolutely could not live without. That doesn’t meant that it’s not a great upgrade with some really nice feature enhancements (which it is). I do like Leopard and I’m glad I’m an early adopter. So far it’s been the most compatible version of Mac OS X to date. One more thing I might add is that Leopard eliminates support for the Classic environment (Mac OS 9). While most of you probably haven’t touching Mac OS 9/Classic in years, there are a few people out there that still need it. I ran into a teacher today that has to run a Mac OS 9 app once a week that her school is still using. So if Classic is important to you, you better keep a bootable drive around with Tiger/Classic on it. If your workflow/livelihood is tied to certain apps or devices, then you definitely want to proceed with caution, backup and TEST before fully committing to Leopard! If you keep pretty current with your apps and like the new toys as fast as they come out as well as living on the bleeding edge, then jump right in the water is fine.

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The road to Leopard – Part 2

I’ve been installing and testing Leopard since about 10AM this morning and I’m happy to report that compatibility and stability seem to be very high. So far I’ve only run into one peripheral (driver) that simply will not work on Leopard and that is my Dymo Labelwriter 330. Now keep in mind that I haven’t tested every little thing, but what I have tested has worked surprisingly well. As a matter of fact I would say that this has been the smoothest Mac OS X upgrade since the original Mac OS X. I’m having far fewer initial issues than I did going from Panther to Tiger.

Now for the news that many of you have been waiting for: Adobe Creative Suite 3 compatibility is GREAT! A few of the apps (Acrobat 8 Professional, Premiere Pro CS3, After Effects CS3, Soundbooth CS3 and Encore CS3) will need dot releases and those dot releases are in the works. The dot releases are mostly to fix minor issues. For Adobe’s official Leopard statement complete with timelines for the updates click here. You’ll be happy to know that the rest of the CS3 products have no known Leopard issues.

Does Adobe recommend running Production Premium or Master Collection before its updates are available?

A. Yes, we are comfortable recommending this. Our testing revealed a few issues in specific workflows when running the video professional applications on Mac OS X Leopard. Many video professionals would not encounter these issues on a day-to-day basis, but we want to provide updates in December 2007 to address these issues and meet our standards of quality. You can evaluate the issues by visiting www.adobe.com/go/support and searching the online knowledgebase for more information.

So for right now I officially give Leopard a GREEN LIGHT! I still highly recommend that you follow my upgrade strategy from Part 1 earlier today (below). I can’t possibly know about all the apps, utilities and peripherals that you rely on every day, so you’ll need to test Leopard for yourself.

UPDATE: If printing from Lightroom is critical to your workflow, then you might want to hold off a bit until the Lightroom dot release is available. Currently under Leopard switching to the Print Module in LR 1.2 is not possible!

 

What’s improved so far

Like I said, it’s been a day of mostly watching progress bars. So I haven’t had a lot of time to explore the new features. I wanted to get in and test compatibility first. However, there are a few things that I couldn’t help but take notice of. The first one is how much easier it is to set up FileSharing between multiple Macs. Each of my family members has their own Mac here and I do have a Mac OS X Server running. However, I wanted to set up my older Power Mac G5 as a networked "Time Machine" backup server for the rest of the Macs (not the server, it already has its own nightly backup routine). So I took two 500GB drives that I had from a previous upgrade and put them in a dual bay enclosure. Then I partitioned them to match the drive sizes of each of the Macs that I wanted to backup. Next I shared each partition to its respective user and this was as easy as it can get. Then I simply went to each Mac and selected the networked partitions as the Time Machine drive for each user. Now each Mac is backing up REGULARLY and automatically behind the scenes. Before this I was using ChronoSync to just sync their Users folders to the server. Now I’m getting their whole drive with incremental changes every hour.
The next area of improvement seems to be around performance. Everything seems much snappier. I know that it’s usually perception, but I would swear that Leopard is faster than Tiger in most operations.

I’ll have more to report on Monday after I’ve actually had some time to do my day-to-day tasks, but Leopard is looking like a winner!

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The road to Leopard – Part 1

It’s Leopard Day (Mac OS X 10.5 officially available) and the big question on everyone’s mind is “should I upgrade?” or “is it safe to upgrade?” Apple posted a nice list of the 300 “New” features of Leopard as well as a Guided Tour Video. So if you look at these and say, “hey I want that!” then you will want to upgrade. However, let’s be smart about it. As you might expect from any major operating system update there WILL be bumps along the way. Even Apple’s on wholly owned subsidiary FileMaker, Inc. has announced that FileMaker Pro 9 (the latest version) is NOT compatible with Leopard. So needless to say there will most likely be other apps on your hard drive that have problems with Leopard too. The good news is that most apps will work just fine.

 

What about Adobe products?

The other big question on everyone’s mind is what about my Adobe CS3 products? I’ll have the official word for you later today. I know you want to know now, but I can’t say until I’m allowed to officially say what works and what doesn’t. So check back later today for Part 2 of this post.

 

My upgrade strategy

Sure we now know about FileMaker not being Leopard compatible, but what about the dozens or hundred of other apps you have there? Not every company is going to have a timely announcement and hey let’s face it, you’re ready to upgrade and play as soon as possible. So here’s what I recommend to cause you the least amount of pain AND to really know what works and what doesn’t:

  1. If you don’t already have an external drive that is capable of booting your Mac, go buy one today!
  2. Use a program like SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner or DataBackup to make a CLONE BACKUP of your hard drive. This should result in a bootable copy of your exact system on your external drive.
  3. Now let’s make sure it works, go ahead and boot from that backup drive! Restart and hold down the Option Key and choose your Backup Drive to start up from.
  4. Once your computer is up and running from the backup drive. Insert your Leopard DVD and install Leopard ON YOUR BACKUP DRIVE! Yes your Backup Drive, not your main internal drive.
  5. Once Leopard is finished installing on your backup drive, it should boot from it. Now YOU can test YOUR apps and utilities and see what works and what doesn’t. Don’t just launch your apps, go ahead and try creating some documents and editing. Do the same kind of work that you need to do daily. Test your printers, scanners, peripherals, etc. Make sure it all works!
  6. If you find something that doesn’t work, check to see if there is a Leopard compatible update for that app. If not, then YOU will have to decide if it’s something you can live without or not?
  7. Let’s say that you find something that you can’t live without that doesn’t work with Leopard and there is no update currently available. Guess what? All you have to do is boot from your internal drive and you’re right back where you were before you installed Leopard.
  8. Let’s say that everything works fine and you’ve tested it all and you’re sure that all of your apps and peripherals work. Then all you have to do is install Leopard on your internal drive and you ‘re good to go.

 

This is the approach that I plan to take and I’ll continue to post what works, what doesn’t and any workarounds that I find. MacFixIt also lists some good advice on what to do BEFORE installing Leopard. Check it out here.


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50 ways to make the iPhone better

While I still feel that the iPhone is absolutely the best phone/PDA I’ve ever seen or used, I’ve always said that there was room for improvement. So I started a list of things that I would like to see in future iPhone updates. Sure we’d all like to see a 16GB, 3g, GPS enabled, user removable battery, officially unlocked iPhone, but that would require new hardware. What I’m proposing are 50 things that would make the existing iPhone better and these things CAN be done via software/firmware updates.

 

Top 50 Wish List for Future iPhone Updates:

1 – Ability to use My OWN ringtones (sounds, music, etc.) The iTunes store will NEVER have some of the sounds I want to use.
2 – Sync Notes to the computer (probably coming in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard)
3 – Cut/Copy Paste system wide
4 – Email anything (besides notes, photos URLs) Contacts, maps, directions, voicemail messages as attachments, etc.
5 – MMS (Multimedia Messaging – send pictures/movies directly to another phone)
6 – Consolidated Mail inBox and an easier way to jump between accounts than going back, back, back
7 – Flash support in Safari
8 – Video and Voice (Memo) Recording
9 – Color coded or Separate Calendar views (just like iCal does today)
10 – Searchable Contacts
11 – To be able to assign ringtones to groups of Contacts
12 – Wireless Syncing iPhone to Computer over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi
13 – Voice dialing
14 – Dial-up Networking (use the iPhone as a modem)
15 – iPhones on AT&T corporate plans (discounts or not, I shouldn’t have to setup a personal account to use the iPhone on AT&T)
16 – Landscape Keyboard entry in all the apps
17 – Additional Audio email attachment support for files in Vonage (u-LAW encoded) WAV format
18 – Email to a group of Contacts
19 – iChat/AIM client built-in
20 – Calculator CE (clear entry) key
21 – Native Microsoft Exchange support (MS Direct Push or 3rd party support).
22 – Wireless stereo music playback over Bluetooth and AirTunes
23 – A one button Redial feature (example: triple tap the Home button)
24 – A "Dialed" list in addition to "Recent" and "Missed Calls"
25 – Ability to play music directly from the Slideshow feature
26 – Built in Unit Converter
27 – To Do’s, sync’d with iCal/Outlook
28 – Password/Pin protected Notes
29 – An option that lets me choose what screen I land on when I wake my iPhone; it can either be (a) whichever I screen I was at last, like it does now, or (b) I can choose to always start at another screen (like the phone favorites, or the Home, etc.).
30 – Being able to rotate Mail like Safari 90 degrees
31 – Keynote app (now with TV out, you could use your iPhone for slide presentations without needing your laptop)
32 – Pseudo GPS based on cell towers to tie in with Google Maps feature
33 – General file storage like a USB drive (Enable iPhone as a Hard Drive)
34 – Support for Stereo Audio over Bluetooth headphones
35 – Support for a Bluetooth Wireless Remote AND the ability to use the iPhone as a Remote
36 – Sound Profiles (example: I would create a profile that turns off all sounds except incoming calls for traveling)
37 – Auto dialing of a string of numbers/pauses (ie. you dial your company voicemail and tap a button to dial your ext. and pin)
38 – Built in "Movies" widget (show times, buy tickets, trailers) Yes I know there are good web based ones. Having one built-in would be faster to access and could remember your settings.
39 – Safari password remember/store feature (Keychain for the iPhone)
40 – Multiple email signatures (also the ability to assign default ones per account)
41 – Mail spam filtering
42 – Mail Rules
43 – Full Bluetooth support on the Mac (Browse the device, dial from Address Book, etc.)
44 – Delete multiple items at once such as emails
45 – iPod songs as Alarm sounds
46 – A true RSS reader (the one in Safari desktop would be a good start)
47 – Call duration display
48 – SMS to multiple Contacts
49 – .Mac Push Email
50 – The ability to direct ALL of the Audio sources over Bluetooth (such as email attachments, audio on web pages)
51 – Built in Dictionary/Thesaurus

 

OK I lied, I have 51 things that I would like to see. So here’s the thing. While it’s great that I’ve shared these ideas with you, we really need Apple to see these ideas. So if you read the list above and were thinking, "yeah, that would be cool", then head over to Apple’s iPhone Feedback Page and make your suggestions known. Knowing how software development works, project managers make a list of the top requested features and usually that becomes the basis of the next or future updates.

 

iToner is working again

The great folks over at Ambrosia Software have managed to update iToner to work with the latest iPhone 1.1.1 software and I’m VERY HAPPY to have my custom ringtones back. If Apple would leave these guys alone then that would be one thing that could come off my list above.

 

Native apps on the horizon

It’s great that Apple has announced an SDK is on the horizon and will allow 3rd party developers to create apps for the iPhone. In the meantime Apple has published a list of web based apps, many of which are quite good.

 

Competition is good

It appears that Amazon.com’s new DRM Free MP3 store has given Apple a wake up call and Apple recently announced a price drop of their DRM free (iTunes Plus) tracks which used to sell for $1.29 each and now are only 99¢ which is where many felt they should have been from the start.

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Tuesday afternoon news bytes

The folks in Cupertino have been a little busy today. Apple has announced that Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) will ship on the highly rumored date of Friday, October 26, 2007. They published a list of the 300 new features.

Also if you live in the Michigan area, Apple will be opening its 5th store in the state. The Apple Store, Partridge Creek, opens its doors at 10:00 a.m., October 18th. As usual you can expect lines and free t-shirts to the first 1,000 visitors. Apple stores are doing very well and the ones we already have here are constantly PACKED with people.

 

Aperture vs. Lightroom: What do Pros use?

I get the question a lot of "what’s the difference between Aperture and Lightroom?" and of course I respond "just buy Lightroom." Actually I’m kidding. I explain that while I can tell you about the features of Lightroom quite extensively, I’ve never really used Aperture, so I’m going to be a little (ok a lot) biased. However, our good friend John Nack at Adobe has some interesting stats on what the pros are using. Head over to his blog to check them out.

 

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5 Million Thank You’s

I have to take this opportunity to thank all of my listeners/watchers. My Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcast has reached over 5 Million Unique Downloads! I’m close to my 200th episode and the response has been phenomenal. Last year I made the iTunes Peoples Choice list and this year has been just fantastic.

So thanks for tuning in and taking to the time to watch my content and provide such great feedback!

If you haven’t checked it out, go do so now. It’s free and you can subscribe right in iTunes.

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A better iPhone headphone adapter

It’s a well published fact that the iPhone has a recessed headphone jack which means that most 3rd party headphones don’t go all the way down in the jack because they’re too fat. I expect that over time headphone manufactures will make the base of their plugs thinner. In the meantime, if you want to use your favorite headphones on the iPhone you’re going to need an adapter.

I knew that Griffin Technologies was working on their adapter, but it didn’t ship until recently. So like many of you I had no choice but to go with the incredibly long and awkward Belkin adapter. While I think Belkin does a pretty good job with accessories in general, I can’t believe how badly their adapter is designed.

Although it look ridged, it does actually bend in the middle, but not easily and I certainly wouldn’t call it flexible by any means. What’s worse is that it literally sticks out like a sore thumb of your beautifully crafted iPhone. So needless to say I placed my order for the Griffin adapter as soon as I could. I got my Griffin
Headphone Adapter for iPhone a few days ago and it looks and works much better.

Since both adapters are the same exact price, I can’t think of a single reason not to go with the Griffin adapter over the Belkin one.

If you have an iPhone, or plan to get one, order your adapter today. $9.99 at
Griffin’s site.

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Apple and iPhone ringtones, ARGGGH!

This is really getting old fast! As I wrote yesterday, I was happy with the latest iPhone 1.1.1 update. Since I don’t have a hacked iPhone I was free to put the update one without fear of losing the ability to use the phone. However, what I wasn’t expecting (I don’t know why) was that Apple would once again wipe out my custom ringtones! Yep, Apple clearly wants to OWN and CONTROL adding ringtones to the iPhone.

 

I get it, ringtones are big business

I know, I know, ringtones are a potentially huge source of revenue. There are issues with the record labels wanting ANOTHER cut of the song you already bought because they view ringtones as a different use. I’m not going to argue this no matter how ridiculous I think it is because I won’t win. It defy’s all logic in my mind that if I can put a song on my iPhone and play the whole song through the built-in speakers that I would have to pay the full price of the song AGAIN just to hear a small portion of it on the same iPhone when the phone rings!

Although I don’t want to continue this losing argument I will give you some more food for thought as to why Apple’s approach doesn’t make sense to me: Let’s take the iPod for example. It’s an MP3 player and Apple sells music, videos, TV shows and movies through the iTunes store. However, if you never bought a single thing from iTunes, you would still be able to rip your own CDs and convert your own videos to a compatible format and put them on the iPod. Heck, iTunes evens facilitates this FREE of charge. Let’s say you’re a musician and you record your own music. You can even do so with Apple’s own Garageband software that comes with all new Macs and put that music on your iPod too. Because the iPod is so free in this respect, Apple has sold millions of units. Now imagine if Apple started selling iPods that ONLY allowed content from the iTunes store. How many iPods would they sell then? So if I can put my own music and movies and sounds on the iPod or the iPhone and Apple doesn’t care, why would they care about where the sound comes from that I hear when the phone rings? If I record myself saying "ring ring" (which I didn’t, I’m just making a point), clearly I have ALL RIGHTS to that sound and there is nothing in the technology that should stop me from making that sound my ringtone. As a matter of fact, I could do this with my Treo and I could with my RAZR without too much effort. Before yesterday, I could even do this with my iPhone thanks to the help of iToner. Yet, Apple seems hell bent on taking away this basic ability away in favor of their own very limited (only a very small fraction of songs available from iTunes are ringtonable. Only 500,000+ songs out of the over 6 million songs available) paid ringtone service. Under the current model let’s say you bought an Earth, Wind and Fire CD years ago and you ripped it into iTunes. Let’s say you wanted to make a ringtone out of “In The Stone”. You’d have to go to the iTunes store and buy the “In The Stone” track AGAIN. Then you’d have to spend another 99¢ to convert part of it to a ringtone. So technically you would have bought the song 3 times.

 

I’m not cheap…

It’s not a matter of the cost of a ringtone. In fact as far as ringtone businesses go, Apple’s is actually cheaper than the other guys (Sprint, Verizon, etc.). They’re even fairer in their approach in that you get the whole song, you get to pick which portion of the song that you want to use as the ringtone and the ringtone doesn’t expire after so many weeks/months of use. The problem is not price, it’s selection! Even if I wanted to give up this "cat and mouse game" and just say "screw it" and buy the 3 or 4 ringtones I wanted to use, none of the ones I want are available as ringtones on iTunes. If Apple had the songs or sounds that I wanted to use, it would actually be CHEAPER for me to just buy them from iTunes than paying the $15 for iToner. So it’s not the money.

Let’s say I was a musician and wanted to use my own music as a ringtone. The way it works now, I would first have to cut a deal with Apple and HOPE that they approved my music for sale on the iTunes store as an independent label (wish me luck, espcially if you’ve heard me sing). Then I would have to buy MY OWN track from them for 99¢ or 1.29¢ and then buy the right to convert it to a ringtone for an additonal 99¢ and it’s my own song!

Apple needs to abandon this monopolistic approach on the iPhone if they want to continue to build good will and continue to have loyal customers. If you build the best iPhone ringtone service, you’ll get your fair share of the business from those out there who buy ringtones. You don’t have to block every attempt from your CUSTOMERS to spin their own.

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iPhone firmware 1.1.1 update released

As promised Apple released a new feature update for the iPhone. The new features include:

  • iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store
  • Louder Speaker Phone and Receiver Volume
  • Home Button double-click to phone favorites or music controls (hey, that’s a Terry White feature – see below)
  • Space bar double-tap shortcut to intelligently insert period and space
  • Mail attachments are viewable in portrait and landscape
  • Stocks and cities in Stocks and Weather can be reordered
  • Apple Bluetooth Headset battery status in the Status Bar
  • Support for TV Out
  • Preference to turn off EDGE/GPRS roaming internationally
  • New Passcode lock time intervals
  • Adjustable alert volume

These updates are very welcomed. I’m very happy that Apple implemented one of my suggestions! If you remember, I wrote an iPhone Review and has been very well received and ranks in the top five iPhone reviews on Google. In that review I said:

So I’m very happy to know that I helped the iPhone development in some small way 😉

I’m also happy that there is now a preference to turn OFF EDGE/GPRS roaming internationally. There are people who are traveling abroad and coming back home to monstrous roaming bills (some over $1,000) because their using their iPhone’s data capabilities internationally without realizing the outrageously high data roaming charges that some carriers charge. To simply check your email could cost you $5. Viewing a web page or two could cost you another $5-10 without knowing it. So this should help this situation quite a bit.

 

There is still room for more

I’m still very happy with my iPhone, but there is still lots of room for improvement. Most of the things I want should be relatively simple fixes that can be done via software – My Wish list:

1 – Sync Notes
2 – Cut/Copy Paste system wide
3 – Email anything (besides notes, photos URLs) Contacts, maps, directions, etc.
4 – MMS
5 – Consolidated Mail in Box and easier way to jump between accounts
6 – My OWN ringtones
7 – Flash support in Safari
8 – Video and Voice Recording
9 – Color coded or Separate Calendar view
10 – Searchable Contacts
11 – To be able to assign ringtones to groups
12 – Syncing iPhone to Computer over Bluetooth
13 – Voice dialing
14 – Dial-up Networking (use the iPhone as a modem)
15 – iPhones on AT&T corporate plans

Hopefully we’ll see more updates frequently to continue to add new features.

Hackers beware! It appears that the update restores the phone back to its original state from the stand point of needing to be "Activated" again (which it did automatically. No need to walk through the process manually). It doesn’t remove any data including my custom Non-iTunes ringtones, but if you’re not using an AT&T SIM card, you may be hosed!

Apple also posted this video on the new features…

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Amazon strikes back!

It’s no secret that Apple and Steve Jobs dominate the digital music player business and it’s also no secret that the iTunes store pretty much dominates the digital music business. One could even argue that Steve started the digital music revolution with near flawless execution and creating an almost impenetrable fortress with iTunes, the iPod and the iTunes music store. Everyone that tried to compete in this space has failed to make a serious dent in Apple’s armor. This due largely to the iPod being a closed system that only works with a few audio formats and and ONE music store. Most DRM (Digital Rights Managed) solutions from competitors not being compatible also makes them less attractive. However, at the heart of the iPod, it’s an MP3 player! So if you have an MP3 file you’re all set.

Steve even made a very compelling argument against DRM (if you buy an audio CD it doesn’t have DRM protection on it) and EMI blazed the trail by offering tracks that are DRM free on iTunes for $1.29. That’s right for 30¢ more than the standard 99¢/track you can purchase a song in AAC format that is free from DRM protection. This means this track will play on your iPod, your computer and any other device that can play AAC files including competing music players. You could even convert the track into other formats. This is great! However, if you want a song not in the EMI catalog, you’re pretty much out of luck or if you want to play that song on a player that doesn’t support AAC you’ll have to convert it to a different format first. So it would seem that Apple is unstoppable in the music business. Had you asked me this last week I would have said that "Apple is very hard to beat at this music thing. They get it!" That all changed for me yesterday!

I kept seeing the headlines that Amazon.com started selling DRM free tracks and I really didn’t pay much attention to this. After all we’ve seen online music stores come and go and so why would this be any different? Also in the past attempts to unseat Apple, the stores were either not compatible with the iPod or not compatible with the Mac which was a complete turn off for me. Then I saw one more headline about Amazon MP3 and happened to notice something I didn’t notice the first 100 times and that was "in MP3 format!" Woah! Wait a minute! This is game changing! MP3 is the most widely accepted digital music standard. So If I can buy a track that is DRM free in MP3 format then that means it will work on just about anything.

So I headed over to Amazon MP3 and decided to give this new music store a shot. I was floored not only by how easy it all worked, but also by the PRICE! Amazon’s DRM free MP3 tracks average between 89¢-99¢. I found a track that I wanted (it was 99¢) and I clicked the Buy button expecting the world to explode. I was prompted to download a "downloader" app and low and behold it was for the Mac (it detected my platform automatically). Once I downloaded the downloader, Safari (my browser) fired back up and took me right back to the song I was buying (Party Starter by Will Smith). I bought it and then something else pretty amazing happened. The song downloaded neatly to my Music folder in a newly created Amazon MP3 folder and like iTunes it organized the song by Artist, then Album then Track.

This was all going so well that I decided to go for broke. I opened iTunes and simply dragged the song over to my library and it imported it. Not only did it import it, but it automatically downloaded the Album Art for me. Thanks iTunes! (Note: The downloader is supposed to add the track to iTunes automatically by default. For some reason that didn’t happen for me on this first purchase. I’ll try it again later.)

Amazon only has 2 million tracks as opposed to iTunes’ 6 million tracks. However, the Amazon collection of DRM free tracks is MUCH larger than the EMI collection on iTunes.

Apple should be afraid, very afraid! This is the first SERIOUS competition that they’ve had. The service not only works with their iconic iPods/iPhones, but it’s also CHEAPER! The song I downloaded was in MP3 format which many would argue doesn’t sound as good as AACs from the iTunes store. However, it was sampled at 256kbps which should be very close if not on par to the DRM protected tracks you’d buy from iTunes which are at 128kbps at the same price. The iTunes DRM tracks cost more, but they are sampled at 256kbps in AAC format which probably sound better. So if you’re an audiophile, then the iTunes tracks are probably going to sound a bit better to you. For me, I’d have to weigh the cheaper price and more compatible format of Amazon’s MP3’s. That coupled with
Amazon Unbox service which allows me to rent movies and download them directly to my TiVo HD, iTunes is starting to slip a little (ok a lot) off that pedestal. Yes, there is a new contender Apple and they’re gunning for you! Apple, unless you match Amazon’s price, why would I buy any new music from you? Competition is good! This move by Amazon will benefit us (customers) the most.