Tag: apple

Categories
Uncategorized

iPod Review – Five Years Later

iPod

I got an iPod for Christmas in 2005. I’m going to review it now. Wait, 2005… Is that a typo!? No…

I’m still using the first iPod I ever got. My wife gave me the 5th generation 30GB iPod with video. And yes, I did review this iPod back in 2007. So what? I’m reviewing it again.

I love this iPod. I have not felt the urge to upgrade or replace it. It works as well as it did 5 years ago when I got it. The interface is simple and easy to use. It does one thing, and it does it well.

I use this iPod almost every day. At least, every day I drive. I’d guess that 98% of its usage is in my car as an audio player connected to my car stereo. I have no desire to get an iPod touch, as I actually think the interface would be much more difficult to use while driving. In my previous review I did mention something about this:

The iPod interface also requires you to look, or at least be able to feel around and guess where to push. Other players (with actual buttons) allow you to memorize where the buttons are and what they do. I could operate my Rio while driving and never take my eyes off the road. This seems to be a big concern with the iPhone as well, it will require visual attention to be able to use it.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been using the old iPod interface for so long, but I feel much more at ease using it to navigate for music playing than I do for my iPhone. It’s all spin and click, no typing or swiping.

I still on occasion have an issue with the iPod not turning off, but it happens seldom enough that it’s not really a bother. Battery life also seems a bit shorter than it used to be, but hey, it is 5 years old and has been used a lot. The battery does hold a charge, so that’s good. The only really bothersome thing is that at some point it got confused and started showing the wrong artwork for some of the files on it. So I’ll be listening to Sleep and it shows album cover art for Cat Power. I’ve gotten used to it. A restore might fix that, but I’ve never had the energy to do one.

I don’t need apps, or wifi, or a camera, or anything except a music player, so as long as it holds out, I’ll keep using the 5th generation 30GB iPod for my automotive audio needs.

(And yes, I do realize that by posting the sentence above, it will somehow cease to function within a matter of weeks. I’ll let you know when that happens.)

Categories
Uncategorized

Logic Express Migration

Logic Express

Over the years I’ve become a fan of Apple’s Logic Studio (which I use at work) and Logic Express (which I use for personal projects.) They’re both pretty powerful applications for audio engineering. We’ve done a lot of good stuff with these apps.

About a year ago I tried using Apple’s Migration Assistant to move a user to a new Mac. There was some failure, mainly involving Final Cut Studio. I ended up having to call Apple and finally talked to a guy who straightened it out (it was serial number issues) and pretty told me to AVOID using Migration Assistant for Apple’s Pro Apps (Final Cut Studio, Logic Studio, Aperture.) He told me it doesn’t work… usually due to how the installs bind to the hardware of the machine, or something like that.

I’ll ignore the fact that Apple’s Migration Assistant can’t deal with it’s own applications properly for now… I’ve got Logic Express to deal with…

I finally got Migration Assistant to work really well on my last Mac move. Everything seemed fine. All of my applications, settings, etc. appeared to be in working order. All except for Logic Express 9.

No matter what I did, I could not launch it under my normal user account. I tried reboots, a reinstall, and nothing, It just hung there. I tried another reboot and reinstall. Nothing. I created a new user account, and it launched fine. Tried the install under the new user account, and it seemed fine. Went back to my user account… no good. I tried trashing it and another install, and this time it didn’t even show up in the Applications folder! I found this Apple Support Article: Pro Applications: Entering serial number after migrating causes the application to stop responding and tried to trash /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.aelwriter.plist this didn’t work either. I was getting a little bit annoyed by now. I’ve been taking care of Macs professionally for 15 years, and this one had me a bit stumped. (And I wasn’t about to do a system reinstall!)

But finally… I fixed it! I ended up watching Console.app for a while when trying to launch Logic, and saw that it was trying to launch /usr/sbin/AELWriter which didn’t exist. I copied /usr/sbin/AELWriter to my new Mac from the original Mac I migrated from, and also copied /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.aelwriter.plist as well, and we were back in business. Logic Express launched, asked for a serial number, I provided it, and it’s running right now.

I don’t give up easily.

Categories
Uncategorized

Microsoft Humor

Ken Segall let us know about a “funny” (?) video in his post The Microsoft festival of comedy.

Now, while you might think I’d join in with the laughter, I also think that in some ways, it’s not funny. I mean, I know that Steve Jobs thinks Blu-ray is a dud, and isn’t going anywhere, especially not into his Macs, but for those of us who work in the media creation industry, we’ve got to deal with it.

Ken has the following to say:

The big advantage of Windows laptops? They can play Blu-ray discs. Like (a) you’ll really appreciate Blu-ray on 15-inch screen, and (b) you’d rather carry discs around than just download high-def movies onto your Mac.

But this to me, is one more example of Apple products seen as consuming devices, not creating devices. If you want to just watch a high-definition video, it makes sense to download it to your Mac, but if you want to make a high-definition disc to give to a client, you’ll be making a Blue-ray disc, and you’ll need to buy an external drive (Other World Computing sells them) and you’ll need extra software (Toast will work) and while it’s all possible, it’s like this thing that Apple is just convinced you won’t want to, or need to do.

I pity the Mac user who is handed a Blu-ray disc and asked to play it, only to have some Microsoft weenie stick it in their laptop to play…

And you know, I actually found the video well done, and kind of funny…

Don’t get me wrong… I still don’t like Microsoft, and I still don’t like Windows, but I also get fed up with the control and decisions Apple sometimes makes about their products.

Also, I’m pretty sure Avatar sucks.

Categories
Uncategorized

The Obsession with Easy

Cat

Being involved with technology may have tainted my opinions for the past 30+ years, but it seems like now more than ever, there’s this push to make thing easier to use… maybe it’s always been this way, but the last few years (perhaps fueled by the iPhone/iPod) it’s been all about making things easier, and I find it slightly annoying.

Matt recently talked about ease of installation explaining that there may be (gasp!) 4 steps involved in installing an application. How does anyone even succeed at such a Herculean task? 4 steps! It’s a wonder we all don’t just stick our heads in the oven and turn on the gas. (There’s probably too many steps involved.)

For people that just want to “use” software, I suppose they do want it easier, I mean, who wants to spend the time to learn something when there’s cat pictures to look at.

My point is, while it’s good to simplify things, and make things easier, you may still need to do some work… and that’s OK. In fact, it’s a good thing, and should be encouraged. I wonder if brain surgeons bitch about “how hard” brain surgery is, and wish that it were easier, and someone would come up with a better way to do it that just required pushing one button or performing less than 5 steps.

I had to learn to use a lawnmower, and a screen press, and how to drive a car, and gift wrap a box (I’m still learning that one) but the point is, you still have to learn things, and if you have to learn how to use an iPhone, or an iPad, or a computer, or any piece of technology, I think that’s fine. Things will advance, but we still have to learn. Compare programming a VCR to programming a DVR. We are making progress, but yes, you still need to learn.

By the way, do schools teach kids how to learn yet?

(See Also: The Dumbing Down)

Categories
Uncategorized

Welcome to 1984, Apple

I think I first heard the phrase “The network is the computer” in the late 1990s. It was Sun Microsystems who wanted to convince us of this. I worked at a creative agency at the time, where we had pretty powerful Macs on every desk. We thought, sure, a dumb terminal or “network computer” was fine for office drones doing their menial tasks, but creatives needed more power than that… we needed to connect scanners, and color calibration devices, and weird disk drives, and work on ginormous Photoshop files, and things that required more than the VAX terminals we also used at the time.

Fast forward 15 years and what Apple has effectively given us is… a computer that looks like it’s nearly useless without a network. Hello MacBook Air. Don’t get me wrong… it’s a well designed piece of computer. The fact that it weight almost the same as an Eee PC I bought 3 years ago is not lost on me… nor is the fact that the user experience is probably 10 times better. But I still worry about where we are headed…

The MacBook Air has it’s place. But I just can’t help but feel like while hacker/maker culture is moving in one direction, Apple sometimes seems to be moving in the other… creating these sealed boxes that are definitely easy to use, but harder to open. Steve Wozniak must be turning in his grave. The Apple ][ was like the ultimate hacking machine when it came out… and now you can’t even connect a FireWire video camera to the MacBook Air.

In all this I hope Apple doesn’t forget it’s core creative audience. The ones who need Mac Pros, and need to install dedicated cards, and more drives, and tons of memory… The content creators. While the iLife suite gets these great improvements, many of us worry that the Pro Apps are being neglected. Does Apple take us for granted? Knowing that we’ll upgrade Final Cut Studio no matter what?

In the old days you could actually upgrade your computer instead of just getting rid of it and getting a new one. (You could even upgrade the processor!) I’ve been a fan/customer of Other World Computing for many years, and upon reading their write-up of Apple’s “Back to the Mac” event, it saddened me a bit:

Apple seems to be making things easier and more intuitive as well, but seems to be more enabling rather than empowering lately. We want to email our photos, Apple makes it drag and drop easy to put together one of four pre-made collages from our photos and pick an address to send them to. We ask for better tools to make videos, they hand us pre-built effects rather than tools to adjust them ourselves. We want to share our photos with our friends on Facebook, Apple automates and organizes it all for us. Are we as consumers going to gradually lose our ability to do traditional computing (using and upgrading) for ourselves as we conform our computing lifestyles to Apple’s one size fits all templates … and, as a result, is 1984 coming full circle?