Entries Tagged 'Apple' ↓

I remember thinking 60GB was tons and tons of space. I still think it is… but it turns out I’m just wrong.

I’ve got 2 MacBooks, one at/for work and the other at home for my personal stuff… and they’re both running out of space. It’s pretty damn annoying. Where’d all this space go?

I keep all documents on an external HD. So big ass Photoshop files, all my MP3s etc are not on my machine. The only documents on my machine are about 4GB of photos and code for Fuzz and various other side projects I tinker with. Being way over-generous, lets say I have 1/2 GB of code/images (that’s a serious over-estimate). Then WTF happened to the other 55GB of space on these machines?

My Applications folder clocks in at 13.5GB. My Home directory something looks like this:

• Sites: 10MB
• Dev: 117MB - nowhere near the BS 1/2 GB number i pulled out of my ass earlier.
• Downloads: 7MB (a couple zip files and some PDFs)
• Movies: 16K
• Documents: 1.3GB (mostly local copies of tons of Photoshop docs)
• Public: 4K

That’s pretty much nothing. My MP3s are on an external… so my Music folder’s pretty much empty.

So where the hell’s my space? Turns out my ~/Library folder’s 1.3GB (not bad) but the /Library folder’s eating up a good 14GB. What the fuck is in there?

Anyways this isn’t an analysis or anything. I’m just frustrated. I’ve always thought that documents took up most of the space and using an external for that stuff would keep me pretty clear of nuisances like this…. but, ya, I was wrong.

Normally I’d use this as an excuse to go get a new MacBook Pro. Fuzz is a member is iTunes’ Label Connect program so we get a nice price cut. But, I’m trying to be good with the whole “unnecessary purchases” thing and am trying to hold out until it’s a 100% show-stopper. + it would suck ass if they introduced some new laptops in June. Everyone’s saying there’ll be new iPhone but you never know with Jobs n crew.

As soon as I found out the Apple TV update was live I decided that I was gonna have to stop by the Apple Store and pick one up. So I bought one, set it up and now that a couple weeks have gone by I thought I’d write a little review.

OK, why did I want one? Well, lemme tell ya…

1. Movie rentals: Its nice & convenient. I watch a ton of movies and being able to rent one on a whim, without leaving the house, sounds pretty sweet.
2. YouTube integration: I play guitar and watch a lot of how-to type videos. I figured watching these on my TV would be better than on my laptop. Plus the speakers on the laptop kinda suck…
3. Music streaming: My TV is connected to a little home theater thing. Its not the best but the sound is way better than any of my alternatives (computer speakers, TV speakers etc). I was stoked at the idea of having my iTunes library play through a decent system (ya i know about AirPort).

So how did the Apple TV fair in light of my goals & expectations? Pretty damn well! But, it’s not perfect.

First off lets talk about the movie rentals:

The rental flow is super easy. Having previews available for their entire inventory is great as well. I’ve rented 3 movies in about 2 weeks and the experience was pretty simple. Once you rent a video it starts downloading and the AppleTV lets you know when it’s ready to watch. The quality of the rentals is just fine. I haven’t rented anything in HD yet but the standard stuff I’ve rented looks just fine.

One thing that would be nice would be a “flag” function. I check a bunch of previews before I rent anything and a bunch of ‘em look good enough to watch. Flagging ‘em or adding ‘em to some sort of list (favorites, queue etc) would be nice. I also don’t see any way to rate how much I liked what I just watched. Some Netflix style rating would be cool to power their yet nonexistent recommendations.

The whole thing’s pretty new but at the same time you can’t help but notice the inventory isn’t too vast. The documentary section had only 3 films the last time I checked (2/23/08). I’m sure they’ll have a bunch more stuff soon. Even though you can’t choose from an endless supply movies they still have enough to make it worthwhile.

So, all in all, even though it’s not perfect, the rentals are a great feature and I’m a fan.

The Youtube integration is fun as well. The quality of some of the videos does suck… especially when they’re scaled to fit the TV. Essentially you should expect the quality to be the same as when you watch a video at fullscreen on youtube.com. The entertainment factor is totally there though. I’ve browsed for and watched a ton of music videos, live performances and random funny clips. It’s a good party trick. A few friends and I have hung out and killed a bunch of time watching BS Youtube clips.

The photo integration is pretty useless to me. The flickr integration is alright. I have more gripes for this feature than any other:

1. As far as I can tell the “next” button doesn’t flip to the next image.
2. The transitions are annoying. You can change them but hopping through the menus to get to those settings and back is annoying.
3. The Apple TV doesn’t seem to be able to pull photos from iPhoto’s Events. From the little bit of poking around I did it seemed to only pull from Albums.

OK. That’s all I remember with the photo stuff. I really don’t care about this feature.

The music streaming is just fine. You can sync songs from your iTunes library to the Apple TV or you can set it up so that it streams without having to sync. I haven’t messed with this feature too much but I’m wondering if it has playlist support and whether the shuffle function supports album, artist and song. I should have checked this out before writing this review but eh… my bad.

I’ve never been a podcast fan but now I’m kinda digging them. The audio podcasts don’t much hold my attention but I have checked out a handful of the video podcasts and they’ve been cool. I particularly dig the podcasts from TV stations (ESPN etc). The ESPN podcast had the winning runs from the Winter X Games which was pretty cool. Like I said; I’ve never cared much about podcasts but now they’ve become a decent way to kill time.

All in all I think the Apple TV is worth the $229 price tag. I’m getting enough value to justify the cost. Is it perfect? No. But it works and does what it says its gonna do. Currently I find the rentals to be the best part of the product. Once the inventory grows it will be that much better… hopefully they’ll tack on search (by actor/actress - maybe pivot search) and some recommendations soon to ground out the rough edges.

It’s a cool gizmo… I’ll give it a solid B for now and hopefully some updates will be on the way to drag that grade up a notch.

Woot!

I never actually wrote a followup on my entry about indented names on my iPhone. I got a couple comments about it so I figure its about time for an update…

As Justin mentioned in his comment on my previous post the problem was the “Title” field. To the naked eye that field looked blank on both the iPhone and Address Book - however there must have been some BS character in there. My guess is that Address Book somehow ignored the unrecognized character and the iPhone treated it as a space.

The solution that worked for me was both easy and tedious. I went through each “indented” contact on iPhone one at a time and performed these steps:

1. Go to edit the contact’s name
2. Enter something, anything as the contact’s title (ex: “mr”, “bla” etc… doesn’t matter)
3. Save the contact with this BS title
4. Now go and edit the contact’s name again
5. Delete the BS you entered in step 2
6. Save the contact again
7. Repeat for each contact with an indented name

This solution worked for me. I only had about 20 contacts with this issue so it wasn’t too annoying but I couldn’t see myself doing it for much longer before going crazy. I posted my workaround on the Apple Forums and it looks like someone there has found a different solution which sounds way quicker (essentially: export as vCards, delete contacts, import vCards).

Like Justin said in his comment I also believe this is a probably a result of sync’ing with Plaxo. Thats just my gut feeling and I really have no proof I really should have examined my Address Book data before sync’ing back to my Mac. At least that way I’d have a shot at seeing the bad data and possibly cooking up a script to fix it.

The problem’s never come back though - so I’m happy.

Just got an email from the iTunes Store and Mail.app marked it as “Junk”. WTF?

I have never marked any mail from the iTunes store as SPAM before so this isn’t something I “taught” the SPAM filter. Maybe I should file a bug .

I have my iPhone all setup etc (more on that some other time maybe) and just about everything is A-OK except one thing is fucking pissing me off. I’ve had this same issue with the Ipod/iTunes as well. This issue is string trimming…

Currently some contacts in my Contacts List on my iPhone are indented by 1 space. Now, i checked thru these entries on my Mac’s Address Book and none of these entries have a leading space character. None of them. But still, on the iPhone some contacts have this little indent going on. Kinda looks like this:

 Ryan Abcdefg
  Ryan Bcdefg
 Ryan Cdefg
  Sam Blabla

Why the fuck is this happening? I trolled around the web and found someone in the Apple Forums with the same problem. They insist that their Address Book doesn’t have any leading space characters for any of the offending entries. BTW, The forum thread has no proposed solutions.

Now, I stash my contacts in a few places and sync them all up to Plaxo. I’m using Address Book on both my work and home MacBooks, some contacts that are created on my phone and a bunch of others I sync to Plaxo from my Yahoo! account. And somehow, while setting up my iPhone, iTunes asked me if I’d like to import contacts from Yahoo! as well. So, that leaves a few points of fuck up failure here. I’m guessing one of these sync points left/inserted an “invisible” character in either the prefix, first name or last names fields that’s manifesting itself as an “indent”.

I’ve had a similar issue with iTunes and the iPod. I’ve seen multiple entries for the same artist… its always just been the same artist name with trailing whitespace. So “Bad Religion” vs. “Bad Religion ”. Here the solution is easy because your can edit the ID3 tags of multiple songs at once using iTunes. Now, this new iPhone issue of mine is not as easy to fix…

Last night I went thru almost all of my contacts and made sure that their first and last names did not have any leading spaces. After that i synced the iPhone to my machine and nada; the contacts on the iPhone still had the indenting BS going on. Funny enough, the list of contacts on the Mac itself did not have any of the whacky indenting going on - just on the phone.

This leaves me pretty confused. I’ve edited names on the iPhone itself to no avail. The edit screen for a contact shows no leading whitespace… regardless I cleared out a couple contacts’ names and reentered them and even this didn’t fix the issue.

I guess I’ll write a script to plow thru my Address Book database tonight and see if I can find any whacky data.

But, seriously… why doesn’t Apple just trim the fucking strings? Maybe the iPhone bullshit is a bit more complicated (assuming crazy characters are at fault) but the iTune thing is just lame; just trim the fucking string upon saving data.

Bleh, hopefully I’ll have this shit squared away tonight.

… well, technically I already have the iPhone. I got an iPod Touch for XMas, exchanged it, payed the balance and got an iPhone. The lil guy has been sitting in my desk drawer since 12/26. I’ve been patiently waiting for my Verizon account to expire… I only have 6 more days to wait .

I’ve been very concerned about switching to ATT from Verizon. As far as the service goes I have had zero issues with Verizon. I get great reception both at home, work and the few places I frequent. Can’t complain. But, I am pretty annoyed with Verizon’s phone selection as well as the fact that some of their cooler phones are crippled (no PC connection via Bluetooth on my current Blackberry etc). Also, I can’t deny that the sexiness of the iPhone is a huge factor. Being a Mac user I’m also stoked on the fact that I’ll be using a phone that doesn’t use hacky software to sync with my work & home machines.

Either way, I’m pretty stoked. The new software update that was shown at this week’s MacWorld is making me even more excited. There’s wasn’t anything too ridiculous but the additions are nice.

Some time next week I’ll outline (with screenshots) the switching/activation process as well as my pros ‘n cons/comparison/experience with going from a Blackberry to an iPhone.

You really gotta watch these back to back to get a good “HA HA, that’s fucking rad” sort of reaction…

I found this online and thought it was pretty rad. Go Microsoft go! =)