Apple « Yet Another Fricking Blog

Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category

I want an iTunes Pro.

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

Apple makes a lot of good decisions. And for the most part, they’re made for normal users, not power users. If your mom can operate the computer and do what she needs to do without needing tech support, then Apple has succeeded.

However, for many apps, there is a counterpart ‘pro’ version of that app, which is intended for someone who has more specific expertise and wants more tools at their disposal. You might graduate up from iPhoto to Aperture, from iMovie to Final Cut Pro, and so forth.

Well, I would like a ‘Pro’ version of iTunes. Here’s my beef:
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Posted in Apple, Tech, iTunes | 1 Comment »

Pre-Tablet

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Tablet Fever

So everyone has been up in arms for the last month or three about what Apple will announce today (Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2010.) The big rumor is that it’s a tablet. At this point enough people are saying it that I feel reasonable about having hope that’s what it’ll be.

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Why Applecare is excellent.

Monday, January 25th, 2010

In a previous life, I thought I was lucky when I hadn’t bought AppleCare and the power supply in my iMac G5 1.8 Ghz died one day before the one-year hardware warranty expired. They sent me a new, self-service power supply and I installed it; I bought AppleCare that day even though I didn’t have to. They sold me with their excellent support and coverage.

Recently, I had an even more fortunate thing happen.
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iPhone 3.0 OS announced; thoughts and reactions

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Update: changed to reflect new iPhone 3G S.

In light of Apple’s recent announcement of what will be coming this summer in the iPhone 3.0 OS, I thought I’d revisit some of my wish lists / complaints from previous posts and recap what’s “solved”, what I’m hoping to see, and what still appears to be broken / missing.
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Posted in Apple, Programming, Tech, iPhone | No Comments »

iPhoto 09 (v8.0) – Face recognition and Locations

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

iPhoto ’09

iPhoto ’09 became available in stores today. I was excited about it because it has two new features that I think we can use at our camp, Places and Faces. It also makes it easy to publish photos to Facebook or Flickr. I tested out the new version by opening our Wedding iPhoto album… lots of people and a few locations to identify.

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Posted in Apple, Tech, iPhoto | 1 Comment »

The toy list, December 2008 edition

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

My typical issue with being asked what I’d like for a gift: I usually just get something, if I need it or really want it, or I’m saving up for it and it’s too pricey to be a gift.

So, this is more of a list for myself, to remind myself that there are things out there that I’m saving up for.

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Posted in Apple, Cycling, Sports, Tech | No Comments »

iPhone 2.1

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

It’s really v1.1 – It has been said that the 2.0 release of the iPhone OS was like a 1.0 release for third-party apps. Given that mentality, today’s 2.1 update was a welcome relief – it made all of my third-party apps start working again.

It also helped my phone realize that there was indeed 9 GB of media (rather than ‘none’), and the MUCH faster syncing and backing up also comes as a nice surprise. Other claims include better 3G service and less battery drain – we’ll see. I’m still tempted to pick up one of those offboard batteries, just in case.

I added Evernote as a substitute for the (yellow) ‘Notes’ app. It is a free service with a web interface and syncs with native clients for iPhone and Mac (and windows, etc.) Apparently it can OCR even handwriting inside of notes that you take photos of (eg on cocktail napkins, which are usually the only things around when the best ideas occur.)

Posted in Apple, Tech, iPhone | No Comments »

More iPhone Rants

Friday, September 5th, 2008

Update: iphone OS 3.0.

Things that AT&T and Apple should jointly make happen:

A brief list of features that I’d love to see implemented at a low level by Apple and/or AT&T.

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I want a Spam button on my iPhone – for Calls

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

While I wish I had a way to quickly mark an email ‘Spam’ on my iPhone’s Mail client, even more useful to me would be a button that would hang up on a telephone call AND mark the number as ‘Spam’. That would help everyone by minimizing the amount of solicitation they got.

My guess is that the Apple SDK does not provide any sort of API for plug-ins into the Phone application, for obvious reasons. Something like this would have to come from on high and be coordinated with the phone company.

In the meantime, I’m going to take some advice I saw online and create a ‘spam caller’ with a custom ringtone, and every time I get a spam call I’ll add that number to the same contact on the phone. But it’s more work for me.

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