Category: Apple

Who needs Apple TV?

Nullsoft have update Connect360 to play nicely with the 360’s spring dashboard update. While this is good news as after the update it was a bit buggy the best bit for me is that .mov files are now supported. Well, WMV+WMA, H.264 and MPEG4 are actually supported now which means the 360 alongside Connect360 can playback all my video podcasts plus movies stored on the Mac. Fantastico. I’m sure the Aple TV menu system is slicker and it’s obviously quieter but the 360 makes for a great free alternative which I already own.

Style

Bit of a lazy weekend has been had although there’s a few things worth noting. Firstly, Casino Royale on Blu-Ray looks fantastic. If you’ve got a PS3 or a Blu-Ray player (all 10 of you in the UK) then this is a must own title. I’m enjoying the PS3 for movie playback so I’ll be picking up the remote which will get a lor more use than the 360 equivalent. Only annoyance is the remote is Bluetooth rather than Infra-red so I can’t program it into the Pronto.

The new Bond has moved to the Bourne style of movies and low and behold if there isn’t a Bourne Ultimatum trailer available. Really looking forward to this and hope it meets the same high standard of the last two.

More style can be found in the new trailer for Forza 2 (cheers Graham). Around one month to go for this must have 360 title that can’t fail to be good – can it? There hasn’t been a decent racing game on the 360 since PGR3 (Test Drive unlimited is a sims game rather than proper racing – harsh but true) so i can’t wait!

I also decided that I would start hand crafting my own site style a good while ago but that stalled after a couple of days so I finally got round to putting some time into it this weekend. A new app from Panic may help (Coda) but it isn’t even revealed until tomorrow so that will have to wait. I’m finding it all a bit frustrating at the moment but I’m getting there…slowly. I’m guessing at my pace it will be a few weeks before I have something to show for my efforts. At the moment I’m aiming for white, minimal and little or no graphics or ajax. It’s time to get simple.

Trialling .Mac at the moment and it’s great for keeping the two Macs and their apps in sync (calendars, address book, iGTD, Transmit and Yojimbo). The trial lasts for another couple of months before I have to hand over any cash but it’s likely thats another £70 to the Apple temple which is a tad annoying as .Mac doesn’t offer much disk space – this is an area Apple could address for not much money. It would be great if the £70 bought 40Gb of disk space to back up to and share.

EMI and Apple…sitting in a tree

So, the big announcement today wasn’t Beatles on iTunes but something far bigger. Firstly all EMI music singles will be available DRM free for £0.99. Not only that it will be encoded at a higher bit rate of 256kbps. All EMI albums will be available DRM free and at the higher bit rate. £0.79 EMI singles at 128kbps will still be available too along with the DRM that is currently employed. You can upgrade any EMI DRM’d music that you’ve previously purchased on iTunes to the new format for £0.20. All this will be available in May.

About time!

I hate buying music from iTunes and not having it available on the 360 or other devices. The jump in quality is also a nice bonus. Well done to EMI for stepping forward and finally providing DRM free music. I don’t believe that 90% of consumers really said they wanted DRM free music at a better quality and higher price but it suits me. Hopefully some of the other music labels will follow in the coming year(s). So how many people thought it was all marketing when Jobs released his open letter regarding DRM in Feb this year? Ho ho.

k800 as Mac Bluetooth Modem

Finally got round to getting the k800 working as a bluetooth modem on the Mac. To get going visit Ross Barkmans site which has a massive list of mobile phone drivers and scripts for the Mac. Grab the 3G and GPRS Sony Ericsson scripts and then install following the included readme’s. If you don’t know your providers connections settings then they can be found here. Speed is OK – better than dial up, worse than broadband but considering this gives the Mac an internet connection anywhere I’m being picky.

Spanning Sync

The Spanning Sync public beta is now available again after the servers took a pasting midweek. First impressions are mixed. First sync took a few minutes but sync’s after that seem to be quite fast. However it seems to be one way at the moment. Syncs from iCal to Google are working but not from Google to iCal. Still, early days and teething troubles are expected.

I should probably have mentioned that this applies to Mac iCal users only and is an app for syncing Google to iCal calendars.

Macworld Thoughts

Despite all the rumours that an iPhone would be launched, despite knowing how good Apple industrial design is, despite loving how all my Apple products work…the iPhone launch tonight still surprised me. I expected a good looking device but not that good. I expected a small device but not that small. I didn’t expect so much in such a small device either.

Key factors are the screen resolution, the multi-touch interface, it runs OS X and it’s sync features. The rest (iPod, camera etc) are all just nice extra’s for me. I’m also pleased it won’t be here until the end of the year. Gives me time to save and also get my current mobile contract out the way. Should also get some firmware updates out of the way by the time I buy. Only snag – it will be covered in fingerprints within 5 minutes!

The other big announcement was Apple TV. Specs were as expected and included a 40 Gig hard disk. However it looks no more than an iTunes sharing device and I wanted a bit more. Also there are no video cables included and while an HDMI cable is only £17 it’s another little extra. I’ll be reserving judgement until it’s on the market and the first reviews come through. I’m really interested in how extendible, if at all, the Apple TV is.

Not announced at the keynote but of most immediate interest is the new Airport Extreme. Now supporting draft N standard it should give faster speeds over a wider range. It also allows a USB printer to be shared wirelessly or a USB drive to be plugged in and shared on your network. The site also states you can plug in a USB hub and share multiple drives or printers. Sounds a good buy for £119.

No leopard, no release dates, nothing else really but looking at the iPhone you be hard pushed to see a more exciting gadget from CES this year – it even made the top three stories on BBC news. Amazing.

Macworld Predictions

The first Macworld where I’m actually a Mac owner takes place on Tuesday. So like other geeks here are my predictions for the two hour keynote.

  • iPhone – maybe. But is it a phone with iPod type functionality or is the emphasis on the iPod which has additional phone capabilities.
  • iTV. With flash disk, support of external drives via USB2, HD playback, HD downloading from iTunes, playback of media from home pc’s Macs and NAS devices, a mini OSX – the community at large could then add so much functionality over time – some of the dashboard widgets would look great on the big screen, controlled from bluetooth keyboard or Macbook/Macbook pro. We’ll also get the proper name which if it has to include ‘Mac’ will make it the MacMedia or something corny like that.
  • Updated Airport to take advantage of the pre N hardware in Macbooks. Macbook Pro’s and iMacs. Maybe driver support won’t be available until leopard though.
  • Leopard – a new look. Maybe the reason why the Apple logo was black- a new dark look to Mac OSX? Will also get release date and some previews of new’ish functionality. Built in virtualisation or is Parallels to good to compete with?
  • iLife – updates but I don’t think there will be that much of a change
  • .Mac – never thought this was much value with so much web competition doing it better and for free. Maybe this is where some Google integration will come in.

A couple of days from now we’ll know how close the list is. if I was to pick one thing off the list it’s iTV – I really want something new that works with all my media to replace XBMC which is getting a bit long in the tooth.

Ruby Monday

The inner geek has been satisfied today. Since getting the Mac I’ve had an urge to do a bit of programming. Nothing fancy but I really wanted to play around with Ruby on Rails to see just ow easy it was to get a nice web app up and running. The only problem was getting a development environment. My web host offers Ruby skeleton and I couldn’t get command line access. No worries – install it all on the Mac. Todo that meant installing MySQL also. Firstly I followed the excellent post on Hivelogic, Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger. This takes you through everything you need to get Ruby up and running. This was also my first proper use of Mac terminal. I loved the following warning…

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Anyway, the install went well and I’m now at the point of starting to dabble but that will have to wait until later in the week. One final tip – there’s an excellent set of MySQL GUI tools available from the MySQL developers. Handy if your not familiar with command line MySQL.