Tag Archives: apple

Oct 17 2011

When Apple goes bad

Most people know that I am a huge fan of Apple. I have the full range of kit, an iMac, Macbook Air, ipad2, iPod, apple TV, iphone4 etc. I like it because it works. And having had years of staring at Microsoft egg-timers it was a refreshing change to plug and play!

The new iCloud?

The new iOS launched last week was going to be really interesting as it shifts much of the connectivity up onto the Apple Cloud and thus allows you to share everything you have between devices. On the face of it this sounds great (although I have used idisk for a couple of years quite successfully – and that is to become defunct next year).

But the transition has not all been good. I can forgive the long download times, because what Apple do most of the time is not provide sticky plasters – but rather the whole programme refreshed.

But in my move to the iCloud (I have an Apple Mac account) I must have pressed the wrong button. I allowed ical (the electronic diary) to merge with my work (outlook) diary. This it turns out was a mistake. Over the next few hours my work diary was reduced to blank pages. My ical is now beautifully full – and looks ugh prettier than the Microsoft system.

This is great – except that my office uses Microsoft. My PA books my appointments on her PC.

This morning that has all changed. I spent a frustrating two hours yesterday trying to undo the damage, but alas, you can’t go backwards. My guess is that Apple are just trying to educe Microsoft’s hold…

The technical forums are full of questions, but have no answers!

Sometimes Apple can be just a little bit frustrating…

Oct 14 2011

Technology – in you we rely

This week Blackberry has hit the news, but not in a good way. They have been having major connection issues with users left without email or browsing. And this spread all over the world. Thankfully we are iPhone users, so we were / are feeling very pleased with ourselves.

I am a keen advocate of the use of technology in business. I know that sometimes this ‘always on’ stuff can be a bit of a distraction. But I hope it means that we can offer a better and faster service to clients. It seems incredible sometimes to step back and realise what we are capable of. From taking digital images, dictating digitally, producing professional looking documents – from home, the office or a train. In my case this blog is being written in a hotel room on the Isle of Wight!

In simple, we have become completely reliant on our tech-toys. Who could really live without a mobile telephone now? I can’t imagine life without Google. The information you can draw upon, in seconds, is mind blowing. In my professional life it is amazing how we have progressed in such a short space of time.

But all of this goodness comes with a downside. When the internet fails – or the Blackberry world falls apart – we are stumped. People flood twitter with their frustrations! They stop functioning…

It isn’t until things go wrong that we stop to think how reliant we have become. In my office if we lose our email for a few hours, people start swearing and asking (demanding?) to know when it is going to be fixed. Appendages feel like they have been removed!

In God we may have trusted before, but I think it is the technology is our new God? Let us pray.

Oct 8 2011

How quickly things change

It doesn’t seem five minutes ago since I was ‘collecting’ slides for presentations to clients. In those days, really good presentations would use two Kodak projectors , synchronised and ordered to fade in and out. That was really high tech! I even had some slides commissions with some text on.

Then came Powerpoint – and put a presentation at everyones disposal – the advent of the laptop call us all huddle around a screen to be amazed at this ‘tranny’ replacement. And digital photography (another Kodak ‘first’) let us show images.

Next Apple showed us how Powerpoint could be made twice as good – with Keynote. I have used Keynote for the last 4 years or so – it is (was?) brilliant. I learned a lot from Steve Jobs presentation style – very little content – one word or one picture. That makes people listen to you. 32 bullet points is not good! Especially with my eyes…

Then suddenly I have come full circle. I gave a presentation last week and decided to go retro. I started by saying that I wouldn’t do ‘death by Powerpoint’. There was a palpable sigh of relief. What we did was hand out some short, bound documents – with six pages. They were A3 sized and full of images and key messages.

It was, in my view much better than a darkened room. We were able to talk to the people on the other side – not shout into a black box.

I have a feeling that this week has been all a bit retro – what with my longing for my LPs…

What next I wonder?

Oct 7 2011

Steve Jobs RIP

I didn’t get a chance yesterday to blog about the very sad passing of Steve Jobs. I was a sad day.

I can’t add much new but there were three quotes I saw in the day – which I thought summed things up really well, so my contribution is to shamelessly steal these..

Firstly, President Obama, “Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.”

Secondly, the phrase he borrowed from Wayne Gretzky, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”

And finally, an unattributed comment, “There are three apples that changed the world. The one in the Adam & Eve story, the one that fell on Newtons head and the one that Steve Job invented.”

All so very true of the genius of this man.

I think the world has genuinely lost one of the most influential people of our time. RIP Steve Jobs.

Sep 28 2011

Mac OS Lion – one month on…

I am a mac fan as you probably know and I upgraded my various laptops / desktop machines to Mac OS (Operating system) Lion more or less as soon as it was released.

On the whole I like it. Mac does stuff that works – and this holds a big appeal for me. I like the lack of discs! The new App store is really good too. Apple have moved further away from CD’s to load your software. You buy programs in the App Store and they download. That’s it.

I love the finger gestures as well – you can switch between screens easily on the trackpads. And as I have a baby MacBook Air 11″ – the full screen Apps are great. Hopefully all programs will soon be full screen enabled (hint to Microsoft here).

The Launcher is a good place to find everything. Files are easily sorted by date or name.

I also love the autosave feature – where you can swipe between older versions if you have made a real mess of what you are working on.

As with most Apple products for their machines the best features are the ones you don’t notice. The start-up from cold on my Air machine is about 9 seconds. It’s only when I see other people with windows machines I realise the benefit of this. One of my friends has a machine which you need to go and make tea whilst it cranks up. Of course, I rarely turn the machines off – they sleep, to be awoken by opening the lid!

The only downside I have found it that at my office we have some significant Canon color printers – and the Mac won’t talk to it anymore. They have found a workaround, but it’s not great. I’m told that I have to wait for 4 months for an updated driver…

That sounds like a Windows expression?

Sep 6 2011

A very cool app

My youngest son showed me a brilliant App he had found a couple of weeks ago – and I have been playing with it ever since. It’s called Panarama 360 and it pretty much does what it says on the tin. However, you can also get it to put the panorama in ‘stereographic’ mode – which produces these startling ‘globe’ images. I took this picture earlier on today in Turkey – the blue sky makes the image? You need to double take to work out where everything is, but I love the almost cartoon like feel!

Aug 27 2011

The good news was short lived….

I blogged about the potential disaster I had with my trusted AppleMac Pro. It managed to get patched up two months ago. But in the last week it was clear that it was not a terribly happy patient.

It has had it’s motherboard and hard drive replaced, but it was becoming unstable and I decided that I couldn’t risk being without it. It has lasted me around 4 years so (in computer terms) it has done well.

So, on the day that Steve Jobs announced his retirement as CEO from Apple, I spent some more hard earned cash with the Company (it didn’t help their share price!) and bought a new iMac 27″ machine. The transfer of data took 11 hours and 3 minutes! This was perhaps mostly my ginormous iTunes library – all 300gb of it (51,000 songs).

It was pretty painless – except that at the moment I can’t print, as MacOS Lion doesn’t like our Canon machine. They don’t speak which is disappointing as they are both new and shiny?

The screen is astonishing – and makes my other 23″ monitor look positively ‘soft’….

I have also got more of my desk back as it is so slim.

My colleagues keep asking me if I fancy going back to the dark side of PC’s. No thanks.

My next resolution is to start listening to my whole iTunes library. I have worked out that if I start this morning and leave it running, we will have played everything by 12th January next year – assuming I leave it on for 24 hours each day…

Jul 24 2011

The Lion Roars?

It’s upgrade time; Apple have released the latest version of their operating software system – Mac OS Lion. It came out on Thursday morning and was fully installed on my MacBook Air by mid morning. A bargain at just over £20?

Actually my first impression is that it is pretty good. Like most things Apple it just works. Plug it in and away it goes.

But there are some features I really like – the full screen applications are really good. Especially on the relatively small 11″ screen of my notebook. But the ‘gestures’ you can use to navigate around are great too. You can now switch easily between open applications by swiping your fingers across the trackpad. It is very easy to use.

The brilliant Apple spreadsheet and word-processing software has also been updated too – allowing a constant ‘autosave’ as you go along. All too often I forget to save stuff and then am only able to recover the positions several paragraphs back. Not now as it has a timeline of changes.

As with most of these upgrades it takes time to work through the vast amount of updating that has gone on. Apple suggest there are 250 new features! Thats going to take a while.

My only other observation at this stage is that the gesture for scrolling up and down the screen has been reversed. There is probably an easy way of swapping this around, but it is, at the moment, counter-intuitive… Unless I work upside down. Now there’s a thought….

Jun 16 2011

Passwords – another warning

It was last November that I blogged about a Nottingham firm of agents who had their database hacked and the entire list of their visitors details dropped on the internet – you can read about it here.

A new app in the Apple store was pulled yesterday by Apple. It was Daniel Amitay, who created an app called Big Brother Camera Security, and added an iPhone-style four-digit passcode access to his program. He then got the program to report the passwords back to him! He was staggered to discover how many of them use codes that are easy to recall, but also very easy to guess. His program recorded the passwords anonymously! Apple took a dim view and stripped him of a place on the shelf in their shop.

You will see from the graph the most commonly used numbers Daniel found! The last one is interesting – it seems that many of the users perhaps use their birth years as a password?

The problem we all have is that we are all being asked for passwords for all manner of things; your phone, computer, credit card pin and the list goes on. And how do you remember them all? Some need to have numbers in and some are specific lengths. Writing them down isn’t particularly helpful. So we do all tend to use the same or a similar set of passwords. As has been demonstrated here – this could be dangerous since you have no idea who is collecting them or how secure the storage is..

We have all been warned again – if you use 1234 as your password please take your seat in the silly corner…

Jun 11 2011

Good news…

Following on from my bad news last week there was good news. My macbook has been brought back to life by those clever chaps at Jigsaw24 in Nottingham.

After nearly one week of being parted from the beast of a laptop I was beginning to worry. Although some of my work was backed up, it is a major task reinstating it. So, the fact that the logic board had fried was actually good news. Apart from the £388 to replace it…

The machine was delivered back last week and has been running happily since. It took another 4 hours to update my email and diary! But all is back to normal. And is now backed up on another disk too!

When you lose your computer you quickly realise how much you rely on it! On this occasion it was a temporary loss, but a permanent one could have been disastrous…