Category: Apple

App-les and Oranges compared..

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 8, 2010

Having got a 64Gb iPod Touch as a forerunner to a fully fledged iPhone, I have to admit that the Apple Store is wonderful. But Apple have got a lot to learn from the Android Market. For example, if you purchase an App and you don’t like it, there is no automatic mechanism from within iTunes or the iPod/iPhone to uninstall and obtain a refund. With Android Market, you click Uninstall & Refund and it’s all done. For iTunes App Store, you’ll have to get in touch directly with Apple through a web form and request the refund from there. Messy.

I’m also at odds as to why if you download an App from the iTunes App Store via your iPod/iPhone that when you transfer it back to iTunes on your desktop computer, iTunes refers to it as a “purchased item” if the App you’ve downloaded is free. This has lead to me to accidentally nuking Spotify and other applications all the offline music at one point as I was attempting to sync with my MacBook at work. I’ve now disabled syncing with the MacBook and will just use the Mac as a charging point.

While I may have some reluctance with the Apple camp these days, there’ s no point denying their products are bloody good to look at and use (when they work). If the QA could improve slightly, I’d have no hesitation now to come back to the Mac side for good. Especially now that Portal 2 (and possibly Half-Life 2) are going Mac native (although it’d be nice to see a few Grand Theft Autos coming to the Mac as well – that said, there is Chinatown Wars for the iPod/iPhone so it’s a start)!

Film studios forming online distribution alliance?

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 5, 2010

I was intrigued by this article from Ars.Technica about Apple’s potential plans to introduce “cloud” storage to the iTunes ecosystem.

As the article suggests, Apple may either allow iTunes customers to store backups of their purchased music, movies and TV shows so that they can recover them should their computers and own backups fail (after all, while the cost of storage is coming down all the time, there are few households with decent fault tolerant SANs), or to stream the content direct to the desktop, iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. I’d go for the former – one can recover purchased Apps from the iTunes Store but not music, films or TV shows. This necessitates that one has a bloody good backup plan in case of failure. I myself backup to blank Blu-Ray media, external hard drives, and online backup services such as SquirrelSave (UK) and Backblaze (US).

However, the article suggests that as far back as 2008 (it may be nearly two years ago, but that’s an age in the digital era), the major film studios (NBC Universal, Warner Bros., Sony, Paramount and Fox) got together to flesh out something called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (or DECE for short). This is a system that intends to implement some form of universal DRM that would allow any device to play digital content such as video or audio. Thus iPhones, Android devices, Chrome OS netbooks, etc. could all play the same content across all these platforms, yet the content provider keep a tight leash over when the content is played – and by whom. The studios would be free to negotiate their own price points, terms of access, etc – something that they’re currently restricted by when using a third-party CDN such as iTunes.

I’m not certain DECE will be a success. It would require a complete industry acceptance of the system. Look what happened with HD DVD and Blu-Ray: studios such as Warner Bros., Paramount, and NBC Universal all initially supported and backed HD DVD over Blu-Ray. Fox was one of the few studios not to. Arguments over the technical details soon started to cause drifts and eventually the format lost out to Blu-Ray. The same could go the same way of DECE unless EVERYBODY agrees on how it is to work.

In short: Hollywood is unable to get together to agree on anything. It’s history of petty squabbles, fierce competition and greed has resulted in a horrible experiences for the consumer who ends up paying the price because nobody seems to be able to agree to anything. Will DECE produce something viable? Might do, but given the dominance of Apple and iTunes – it may be too little, too late.

The love affair is over: Nexus One a big pile of unfinished business

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 4, 2010

When I first got my Nexus One back in January, I was over the moon. Here was the very latest in HTC hardware and Google Android OS in one neat package. We had a wonderful honeymoon period in which everything seemed to work, despite all the naysayers on Google’s Nexus One forums.

Then the symptoms started creeping in. Losing the 3G signal in an area where 3G works well, Wi-Fi connections at home wouldn’t automatically connect and had to manually be connected through Settings, touchscreen would lose calibration, forcing me to twist the phone around like a baton until the bloody thing accepted the correct input. Google eventually rolled an update back in February which fixed the 3G part, but Wi-Fi was still giving problems and the touchscreen still is causing problems.

The last straw came when I went on-call for work. I found that I’ve missed out on emergency SMSes due to delayed sound alerts. Due to the speaker being positioned where it is, I also found that the alert sounds are quite muffled in comparison to our four year old Sony Ericsson non-smartphone. In short: I don’t trust the Nexus One in it’s current state. I was also hacked off that photos taken didn’t show up in the Gallery after the most recent OTA update. I could access them through USB and through the Camera application itself, but not through the Gallery. A reboot of the phone seemed to have fixed it and the photos then turned up in Gallery. I shouldn’t have to do that, though.

Thus I’ve stopped using it and gone back to the SE. The battery life lasts well over a week, I can hear all incoming SMSes just fine, and as a phone only, it does what it says on the tin. The Nexus One tries to be too clever and fails. The AMOLED is also a complete arse to work with in strong daylight. My wife has also been complaining about the quality of calls recently and has kept asking if I’m on hands-free when I’m not.

I’ve decided to go running back to Apple despite my earlier grumblings about them. Love them or hate them, they do make exceptionally fine products. Which work. I’m starting off with an iPod Touch 64Gb and assuming that I’m able to switch my contract to Memset late next year (or after the T-Mobile/Orange merger allows the legal purchase of an iPhone on my existing contract with T-Mobile), I’ll go iPhone. I’m finding it hard to go back to the Android platform right now – especially how well I’m finding the iPhone/iPod App store and how well multi-touch and Apple’s capacitive display just works. The quality of the applications seem a lot more professional too.

The irony is that I had no problems with the HTC Hero. It was a little slow, but it worked well. I hope the HTC Desire works better than the Nexus One – I’d so hate it to turn out like the Nexus after Sense UI has been applied.

I now split my smartphone use between the Sony Ericsson and my iPod Touch. Phone for the phone related stuff, iPod for the apps, calendar and everything else.

Today’s the day: Apple to reveal iPad/iTablet/iSlate*

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 27, 2010

(* delete as applicable)

I’ll be bitterly disappointed if Steve Jobs doesn’t walk on stage in a toga, wearing a false white beard, holding an iPad/iTablet/iSlate tablet device under his arm and shouting to the crowd, “Behold! The 10 Commandments of Apple!” and recites things like, “Thy Shall Not Covert They Neighbours Macbook Pro – buy your own you cheapskates!” and “Thy Shall Worship The One True Computer Company”. You get the idea.

The cult of Apple comes full circle today, I think.

Update: So it is going to be called the iPad. Looks good, I’ll admit, and I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on one for review, but Apple isn’t exactly in my good books at the moment and I’ll wait until the iPad 2 before even remotely thinking of asking for or buying one. Not until I see how the uptake of this device goes.

The Nexus One

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 18, 2010

I now have a Nexus One Android phone.  This runs the Android 2.1 operating system and comes with a massively impressive screen and a touchscreen that responds beautifully.  As all of my contacts are stored in my Google Apps account, as well as my email, transferring from my previous HTC Hero to the Nexus One took literally just minutes.

The touchscreen keyboard operates a lot smoother than the Hero, although the Nexus does not contain HTC’s Sense UI and consequently does not feature a few refinements that make typing numbers and punctuation which means that one has to press a few more buttons to get to them.  But this doesn’t particularly bother me, and I’ve been typing away like a madman.

I’ve yet to try the voice dictation system whereby input fields can utilise the phone’s microphone to allow you to dictate words and sentences rather than having to use the keyboard.  Apparently the hit rate is anywhere between 70-80%, but will hopefully improve as Google’s voice recognition technology improves.

From what little I’ve been playing with it, this is one very impressive phone.  Android is blossoming as a mobile phone operating system and it just keeps getting better and better.  Now the hardware is catching up, Apple have a serious contender on their hands.  I am very glad I’ve given the iPhone the elbow.

Update: The voice input is absolutely bloody marvellous – so far it’s had 100% success rate, but that’s with a very limited test (I’d like to see what it can do with a tongue twister!).  I shall continue to experiment and explore.

It’s a Chrome away from Chrome.. I’ve switched from Firefox on two platforms!

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 15, 2009

While I have given up Google Apps (no, it’s not because I fear the Google and it’s tight grip on my data – I’ll write a blog post about why I left Google Apps a bit later), Google still gets used an awful lot here at Drake Towers.  Google the Search Engine is the de facto here.  Then there’s Google Maps, Google Reader, Feedburner, Google Webmaster Tools,  Google Analytics, Google AdSense, YouTube, and so on.

I now use Google Public DNS on the Dell laptop at home and as a secondary DNS server for my MDaemon mail server.  And now I’ve converted to Google Chrome, Google’s efforts to produce a fast web browser designed for simplicity.  And it works exceptionally well on Windows.  And now OS X.  Despite Chrome being beta on my work Mac, I now use it as my primary browser despite a few kinks (the main one being the passwords are not saved if you’re browsing a site that uses an expired or self-signed certificate – I’ve filed the bug with the Chromium bug report system).

My dependence on Google will not end there either.  While I have no intention of running the Chrome OS on this PC (although if I had a netbook I would probably consider it), I am still very tempted by the T-Mobile G2 Touch which runs the Android 1.5 (at the time of writing) platform.  I’ll be carrying Google in my pocket too.

I’m a Mac AND a PC. Yet I’m not complacent.

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 2, 2009

Interesting article over at the Mail Online about the so-called Windows 7 “black screen of death”.  Even more interesting is the comments where the forever OS snobbery war continues.

People saying “Get a Mac”, or “My Mac has never seen a virus” are far too complacement for my liking.  In the six years of working in an industry where Macs are the dominant platform for creatives (followed behind by Linux – yaaboosucks to Microsoft!), I’ve seen Macs become infected by trojans – installed by users who have unwittingly given the trojan access to their system by giving it their admin user password (which is usually only required for major system operations, such as installing kernel extensions or amending system configs).  This has resulted in an compromised system – and this is because the users have usually downloaded something from a dodgy (warez, illegal torrent, etc.) web site and believed their Macs were invulnerable to viruses, etc.

The same can be said of some Windows users.  Despite the almost universal paranoia of Windows systems getting viruses, I’ve also seen some Windows think along the same lines of the smug Mac owners in that “I’m careful – I’ve never caught a virus before and therefore do not need anti-virus software”.  Subsequently their machines have been compromised and it’s re-install time.  NEVER think you will be affected because one day you’ll most likely be kicking yourself.

Regardless of whatever platform you use – it’s always worth having some form of anti-virus/anti-malware software installed (free or otherwise) to ensure that you’ve got some warning about the new application you’ve just aquired will do.  Never willingly grant strange applications access to your system and always verify their source first.

Mac users – I highly recommend Sophos Anti-Virus.  Despite a few wibbly moments which have since been ironed out, Sophos is one of the most trusted and respected security vendors for all the major OS platforms.  Certainly, I’ve been very impressed with their Windows products in the past when I’ve used them.  For Windows users, I do not hestiate to recommend ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus.

Another thing that bugs me are people who do not take care of their system backups.  It’s now so incredibly cheap to buy an external hard drive, CDs, DVDs or Blu-Ray rewritables to back up all of your sensitive data.  And add to this the numerous onlne backup services (my favourite being SquirrelSave – but then again I provide the majority of support for this as I work for Memset who own and run it!) and you’ve got no excuse for losing data.

Pride and Prejudice and Operating Systems

Posted by Martyn Drake – November 5, 2009

This will sound hypocritical of me, but I really dislike OS snobbery.  I've unsubscribed from the Greater London Linux Group (GLLUG)  a number of times due to the general bitchiness of some subscribers over their hatred for all things Microsoft, OS X, or any number of other operating systems that are not Linux.

I also hate to say this, but much of this snobbery seems to stem from Linux zealots.  I continually hear how crap Windows is and that Linux is so much better than every other operating system.  Similar things from the FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD camps too – although they tend to put their OSes above Linux.  As for the hard core Windows user, they bitch about Linux being unfriendly and complicated.  OS X users come into the fray and say their computers/OS is better than Windows, Linux and all other *ixes put together.

I have news for you.  No one operating system is any better than the other.  And it also all boils down to personal choice.  I've seen Windows, Linux and OS X systems compromised[*] (and I should note: none were any of mine!).  I've not been around FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD to say the same.  But certainly one cannot be smug about any operating system when it comes to security. 

In terms of usability, I've always found Linux desktops to be terribly inconsistent and fiddly – and not a little ugly.  But that's just my personal preference.  Windows has generally been a bit more consistent (although I am still getting used to some of the changes in Windows 7 where Microsoft have moved some regular options I used to the Control Panel), but it provides the biggest choice in terms of software and compatibility.  OS X has been the most consistent interface of all, and provides a very friendly and wonderful approach to user friendly computing.  But I'm not liking much the software availability and quality of some of the software that's available for the Mac.  Apple's own software products are, for the most part, wonderful, but there are still some issues that prevent me from loving Apple completely.

The reason I'm now rooting for the Windows/PC camp is that it suits my needs now.  I may well head back to Macs later down the road, but for now, the PC and Windows does what I want it to do.  I could even go to Linux as a desktop if the interface was right (Ubuntu comes very close to my ideal, but it still needs work).  In terms of hardware support, Linux has never had it so good.  And the same can be said about Windows.

I certainly grumble about OSes and hardware myself, but I *do* try to bear in mind about having an objective outlook on things rather than simply dismissing something simply because it comes from Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, or whoever.  Each and every operating system has advantages and disadvantages over each other and I believe it is quite wrong to start slanging matches for the sake of doing so. 

[*] I'm seeing more people running obsolete versions of Fedora Core and even Red Hat Linux operating systems.  A few years ago I noticed a film distribution company running Red Hat 9 with telnet (not SSH!) and all available default services running (and all versions of those services were available for all to see) – and this was a server running the web site for a Terry Gilliam film.  I had to write to the systems team and advise them that this was putting their site (and reputation) in jeopardy.  Thankfully they then firewalled off the machine and fixed the problems.  The stupid thing is, this is still a common problem!

iTunes 9 & iTunes Extras: Users short changed – Apple/film studios double dips

Posted by Martyn Drake – September 11, 2009

I'm sure my regular readers (all one of you – ha!) will know by now that I am very much an advocate for video on demand and content delivery systems.  I have been following (and using) iTunes for a good many years.  Similarly I have been using Apple products (iBooks, MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iMacs, Mac Minis, iPods, etc.) for equally as long.  I've come to see Apple as a company which tries very hard to provide the consumer with good value for money and fights to give consumers what they want.

With iTunes, we can rip our CD collections and organise our music.  We can now purchase DRM free music on demand (when iTunes started it was all DRMed to the hilt, but it brought convenience for the user of buying music on demand despite the inconvenience of locking everything down to a single portable platform and licensing system).  We can now rent and buy movies and TV shows.  We can even buy TV shows in HD (and I'm sure movies will soon follow).  iTunes is a media centre par excellence.

The downside to buying movies from an online store versus buying it on DVD or Blu-Ray is that you don't get the extras like audio commentaries, documentaries, etc. that come along with the physical disc purchase.  With the release of iTunes 9, this changes things – consumers can now buy movies such as Wall-E, Iron Man, Quantum of Solace to name a few, with extra features alongside the main film.

But what about consumers who have already bought these movies through iTunes?  Do they get to download these extras now that they've installed iTunes 9?  The answer is a big fat no. 

I've attempted to contact iTunes Store support to find out just what can be done about that, but so far I've had absolutely no straight answers from them.  All they've said is that they can't re-authorise the download of any films and that, when I got back to them to say that it doesn't answer my original question, they simply gave me 5 song credits to shut me up and once again avoided answering me directly.

I can only assume that if you have already purchased the movie via iTunes earlier than version 9 and want the extras, you're going to have to pay for the film again.  A neat way of making Apple (although to be fair, I doubt they see much of that cash you pay them – most of that goes to the studios) and their clients, the film studios, more money from the same content (you'll be paying for and downloading the film twice).

Given my previous post about how my boss, Kate Craig-Wood, has quantified the carbon emissions from producing CDs versus music downloads, I applaud Apple and the film studios for making video on demand more attractive.  But unless they either allow existing purchasers to buy the extras separately, or give them the ability to download them for free now, then I must question how well this system is going to work (one issue is that you can't resell these downloads unlike a physical CD or DVD).

Snow Leopard shows it’s spots..

Posted by Martyn Drake – September 3, 2009

On Tuesday I received my copy of Mac OS X Snow Leopard at the office and was itching to give it a whirl.

Having backed up all my valuable data to the external hard drive (still using the Iomega drive I bought with my Apple Store gift voucher given to me by MPC back in 2007 when I left), I did a complete clean install of Snow Leopard which took just over 42 minutes to install having opted to go for the default installation.  On reflection, if I had chosen not to install the additional languages and printer drivers, things would have gone much quicker.  As it is, the default install took up 11Gb of hard drive space.

Once install was complete, a reboot got me into the familiar Welcome animation, which is EXACTLY the same as with the original Leopard.  After going through the final bits of setting up, I then started copying back data from the hard drive.  I should mention that I would normally use Time Machine to restore my Mac data – but having recently moved over to using File Vault in order to comply with ISO security accreditation in the office, Time Machine's functionality is somewhat more restricted than for non-File Vault volumes.

Installed Office 2008 for Mac which initially failed to install properly and required a subsequent re-install.   Not quite sure why it failed the first time around, but given it's a Microsoft product, one can hardly be surprised at this sort of thing.  When Office was installed, ran the updater and all went well.

Installed Final Cut Express 4.0 which went without a hitch.

Everything else (Adium, CyberDuck beta, Firefox, Remote Desktop for PC, Parallels Desktop, VMWare Fusion, etc.) all installed and work just fine.

Snow Leopard is somewhat speedier in some operations.  Apple Mail, for example, is noticeably speedier when accessing large mail folders.  It opens much faster too.  Safari is a seriously nippy little bugger, but unfortunately I much prefer Firefox and therefore use that as my primary browser instead.

The downsides have been the inability to compile a few open source projects that worked just fine with Leopard, but I'm sure I can get around that with a bit of perseverance.  Likewise, I'm having to wait on a few developers to release Snow Leopard compatible binaries to ensure that any kinks don't crop up in day to day work (Growl is one such example).  Time Machine can still not backup File Vault volumes without having to log out first.  As such, I recommend an online backup service or third party backup software to perform as-you-go backups until Apple figure something out.  It's most annoying.

Oh, and OpenCL doesn't work on Intel GMAX3100 GPUs.  Grrr.

Snow Leopard won't set the world on fire, but it does what it says on the box and sets up the Mac nicely for a 64-bit filled, high performance future.

Why can’t Microsoft keep current pre-order Windows 7 pricing for the duration of the OS’s life?

Posted by Martyn Drake – July 17, 2009

As soon as Windows 7 came available for pre-order on the 15th July, Jennifer and I secured our copies.  We have now pre-ordered two FULL copies of Windows 7 Home Premium (E) for £65 through Amazon.co.uk – £32.50 per copy.  Okay, we used a free gift voucher from Be to claim more money off, but nonetheless it's still a bargain.

The demand for Windows 7 has been such that the pre-order price has now gone up to £80 for the Home Premium edition.  When Windows 7 is finally released, it'll go up again.  But why?  Why have Microsoft's operating systems always been so damn expensive (especially the Ultimate editions of Vista and 7)?  In comparison, Apple's OS X have been cheaper, have no activation restriction (with the one exception being OS X Server).  You're forking out a fortune even before you've added any useful applications other than the media players, gimmicky games, and web browser (and even then, Microsoft have taken that out of the European edition of Windows leaving the user to use another computer or magazine cover disc to install one – they didn't have to do this, but Microsoft seem to be sticking fingers up at the EC commission at the expense of their customers).

If I had my way, Windows 7 would be completely free for existing users of Vista who have had to endure a very long time for an operating system which now promises to live up to being a good one.