Here’s the latest edition of ‘the Geek’ as Dave and I cover the release of the 3rd generation iPad and balance the show off with other tech news and some cool gear.
I’m way behind getting this posted. It’s the AGP #53 from way back in early March. Enjoy “A Touch of Culture.”
Right after I picked up my iPhone 4s late last year I found myself wondering if there was a list of valid “commands” for Siri. Since it’s supposed to provide “natural language” support, I was really looking for a comprehensive list of the things that Siri was supposed to be able to do for me.
I found a link to a blogger who has collected together a nice cheat-sheet of Siri commands. Available in both PDF and DOCX formats.
While I haven’t tried everything Siri can do (I live in Canada after all), I’ve tried a lot of them, and everything that “should” work, does work.
I was fortunate enough to come across the program that Apple had put together replacing some units of their 1st generation iPod nano because of a potentially explosive battery issue. Though the process has been lenghty (nearly 3 months), I have finally received my replacement unit: a shiny new 6th generation Nano.
It’s a pretty fantastic upgrade: 2GB – 8GB of storage, touch-screen controls and the ability to turn it into a funky wristwatch are all pretty cool.
Now I need to figure out just where the device fits in as far as my usage patterns. Most of what it does I already do on my iPhone on a daily basis, but I’m sure there’s a good use for a microscopic 8GB media player!
If you have a 1st generation iPod nano, it might be worth checking out the iPod nano replacement program website to see if you are eligible for an upgrade.
For whatever reason setting up your Google account with your iOS device doesn’t allow you to synchronize your contacts. I suspect it has something to do with the limitations of IMAP, but nonetheless it’s a tad annoying. You can, however get your contacts synced up by setting up your Google account a second time as an exchange server. Google has (mostly) implemented the necessary pieces to allow it to appear to clients as a Microsoft Exchange server.
The server connection details are as follows:
Make sure that you don’t double sync your mail or calendars if you’re already using the built-in Google account support in iOS. If you don’t need notes, you could consider using the exchange-mode only to reduce the number of accounts on your device.
Now that we’ve had a month to digest Apple’s 5th generation of the second-coming of mobile telephony: The iPhone 4S I thought it was fitting to take a look at what this product really means in terms of Apple’s product cycles.
As one might speculate based on the name alone this is a fairly minor revision of the current-generation iPhone 4. The new device carries only a few minor hardware adjustments, but some very significant changes for the software itself (most of which the iPhone 4 will receive as well).
The most significant hardware changes are the upgrade to a dual core ‘A5′ ARM CPU, a completely redesigned 8MP camera and the integration of the voice-interface called ‘Siri’.
The first two pieces of this puzzle are fairly easy to understand. The new A5 processor will give the handset much more power, particularly for gaming or video intensive applications. The second new piece of hardware, the redesigned camera has a higher resolution sensor, larger aperture and an additional lens element, all of which are said to contribute to brighter, crisper, “better” photos than any of the previous iPhones.
The odd-ball of the bunch is Siri. This is something which might be described as an assistive technology, something designed for users who would have trouble interacting with the phone in a traditional manner. But if science-fiction has taught us anything it’s that we’ll all be talking to our computers in the future and the keyboard and mouse will be “quaint” figures of our collective social memory.
Siri was rolled out in Beta to the iPhone 4S and is the only iOS 5 device receiving the enhanced voice interface despite similar processing power in this past year’s iPad 2. The “beta” monicker is something that Apple has used only sparingly in years gone by and it tends to be in a fairly traditional sense of the word, being applied to products which are truly unfinished when they are made available to the public. There has been a great deal of speculation as to what this means for the future of Siri. Many feel that the technology will eventually make its way on to every Apple product from voice-enabled phones, to computers through to the Apple TV. The digital living room device is, in my opinion, the killer target for the new technology as it would allow a remote-control free experience (assuming it knew when to listen to you and when to ignore the sound coming out of your TV).
But all that aside I really wanted to focus on this one point: the iPhone 4S is the next logical step for Apple. After the initial release of the iPhone in 2007 it was followed up with the iPhone 3G which was arguably the first “complete” version of the handset in 2008. June of 2009 saw the introduction of the iPhone 3GS which was for all intents and purposes a revised version of the previous year’s model. 2010 introduced the iPhone 4 with an all new design and the first instance of an Apple device with an Apple CPU (the A4). After such a major upgrade nobody knew what would happen next. Speculation early in 2011 led many to believe (correctly as it turns out) that Apple would abandon it’s traditional June timeslot for iPhone launches eventually delivering the new phone in October.
The delay also led to a great deal of speculation that Apple must be using all this extra time to produce an absolutely killer new iPhone 5 which would revolutionize the phone market as much as the iPhone 4 had the year previous. The iPhone 4 is still one of the best selling single handset models ever, particularly if you focus on smartphone sales. As time dragged on so did the predictors, pundits and pranksters. We saw mock ups of super-sized, super-small, super-thin, dual screened, cloud-based, fat, thin, black, white, pink, polka-dotted, tutu-wearing, pipe-smoking, tap-dancing iPhones (OK, I made some of those up, but you get my point). When the new handset finally arrived, it was not the much touted iPhone 5, but a revision to the iPhone 4 complete with evolutionary hardware upgrades and a new piece of software that may someday change the way you interact with most of your technology.
It makes sense. The next iPhone will (probably) have a more significant redesign. The next iPhone will (probably) not be called the iPhone 5. The next iPhone will have Siri. The next iPhone — well, we’ll see it when it gets here, won’t we (or when it inevitably gets left in a bar somewhere in San Francisco).
I was on the hunt for some new Mac and Apple podcasts after becoming frustrated with the amount of blatant fanboyism and un-necessary Microsoft and Windows bashing I was hearing on the shows I had subscribed to. I wanted more shows that take an even-handed approach like Mac OS Ken or a lighthearted approach like the Nosillacast. I put a call out on Twitter and Google plus for recommendations and was given a couple of great new (to me) shows to listen to.
This show is absolutely brilliant. I’ve only been subscribed for the past week or so, but I’ve gone back and reviewed the last 10 episodes.
Katie and David do a great job of covering topics in enough detail to provide a complete review without getting into too many inanities. There are typically two types of shows. The topic-shows provide a deep-dive on a specific topic filled with lots of tips, tricks and keyboard shortcuts. The other show type is a “workflow” show where they typically bring on a guest to talk about how they use Mac and iOS products to get their work done productively.
I listened to the Typical Mac User a number of years ago, shortly after
Victor started the podcast I suspect, and for whatever reason drifted away from it. When George Starcher suggested over G+ that I check it out again, I found that I really enjoyed it. I’ve listened to a few different episodes in the past week which ranged from uber-beginner intros to OS X Lion, through to highly-involved automator/applescript discussions The show provides a good balance of introductory, mid-range and technical discussion and offer a range of guests to get insights on different parts of the Mac community.
I recently had the honour of being asked to be a guest on Knightwise’s podcast during his KWTV Live event in September. He took the opportunity to interview three different people about the current state of the three major operating systems, Linux, OS X and Windows. The three guests for the evening were:
Larry spoke on the state of Linux and what drives Linux adoption; Bart covered the highlights and lowlights of OS X Lion in some detail; and I talked about the Windows 8 developer preview and the state of Windows tablet PCs.
Give it a listen!
This afternoon Apple released the sad news that co-founder and chairman Steve Jobs had finally succumbed to his fight with cancer. With that the world lost a man whose vision led Apple from the depths of irrelevancy to the forefront of day-to-day mind-share.
Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer in the late 1970′s. The company has had its ups and downs over the years and Jobs was ousted from his leadership position only to be hired back on in the 1990′s when Apple was bordering on irrelevancy. Starting with the iPod and iMac in the early 2000′s Jobs and his leadership team helped make Apple one of the most recognized and relevant brands in the world.
The early Apple II computers were some of the first to be placed in the home as the “family computer”. While they weren’t the only ones, they were certainly among the first and also among the most widely deployed. The number of people who can tell you today that their first computer was an Apple IIc, or Apple IIgs is lengthy; myself included.
While not the first company to produce MP3 players, or even hard-disk based MP3 players, Apple created a beautifully designed device in 2001 called iPod. Jobs took the position that existing media players were not particularly good, or usable. He assembled a team to create a new device as a part of Apple’s “digital hub” strategy. This was, at it’s core, a basic MP3 player with an internal hard disk which could store 5-10 GB of music, which at the time was all, or most, of most peoples’ digital music collections. iPod became the foundation of later forays into the personal electronics space which has become central to Apple’s position in the market.
It has been called “the second coming of mobile telephony”, it is Apple’s iPhone. Jobs and members of his leadership team like Jonathan Ive released it’s first iPhone in 2007 and has revised it every year selling millions upon millions of devices every year. Apple has become a (the?) leader in mobile phone sales and development worldwide leading a device category that they helped create less than 5 years ago.
With the launch of the iPad tablet in 2010 Apple helped to define a third product category which had, until then, been somewhat vaguely defined. Steve Jobs himself referred to the iPad and it’s successor the iPad 2 as devices that would usher in the “post-PC era”. While not everyone feels that iPads will replace their computers, they have certainly helped to define a product category where people will use devices to complement their “real lives” with their digital ones.
So there you go, a brief summary of the impact Steve Jobs has had on the worlds of computing and technology in the past 35 years. We can only hope that he’s inspired his teams at Apple so that the innovation of Apple, particularly over the past decade, will continue in years to come.
This past spring I made an attempt to move myself out of the shackles of the commercial software world and truly embrace open-source. I tried to move my primary machine off Windows 7, and onto Ubuntu Linux. I knew the transition wouldn’t be seamless but I’d heard so many good things about living in a Linux universe that I decided it was time.
The experiment did not go as well as I might have hoped, and despite my efforts to stick with it for some time, I eventually had to cut the experiment short. As I was preparing to re-image my system I started a blog post which I decided not to post at the time. I’ve included a short excerpt which shows my state of mind back in May, just after the experiment concluded.
I told myself I was going to stick it out for at least 3 months. But here I sit, not 3 weeks after making the decision to migrate my primary machine to Ubuntu, with the Windows 7 installation disk in hand. What could possibly have brought me to this point? Primarily, time. It’s going to take me about 8 hours of work to prep all the data on my system for the transition, wipe the linux partition, re-install windows, re-install the applications, re-install VMWare, re-install my Linux VMs (I do still have a use for them!). The problem is, things on linux generally have taken longer than they should. Some of this is due to the fact that I’m learning, and I’ve tried to ignore those. Others are generally due to the fit and finish of Ubuntu.
So what went wrong?
I generally resist the temptation to move to the latest OS release, but when I tried setting up a Windows VM under VirtualBox in Ubuntu 10.10 the audio was mucked up. It seemed a bit slow too, but that may have been my imagination. So I tried installing the newly minted 11.04. The VM now worked like a charm, but that was a long multi-step process.
Trying to set up a virtual machine that would start up at boot time (like a Windows service or any number of linux daemons) proved a nearly impossible task. After several hours of searching, tweaking, testing, and ultimately failing, I decided to abandon the effort and live with manually starting my VMs.
Setting up network shares was probably one of the better experiences I had. I was able to set up a “public” share on the linux machine and access it from anywhere on the network… as long as I didn’t want to protect it with a username and password. That was going to require more voodoo and black magic than I was prepared to endure for such a simple task. Overall, not a bad experience.
Like it or not Flash is still an integral part of the web, and Flash in the browser was just one of those things that never quite worked right. When I talk about fit and finish of a product, this is what I mean. Blocky artifacts showing up on video players was the most common issue, though there were other things like playback and audio problems as well.
The fact that I felt compelled to write a blog post calling attention to a tutorial for getting Adobe Air installed under Ubuntu 11.04 speaks to just how difficult this didn’t need to be. On any other major platform, you can go to a website and simply click the install button. The rest is automatic. Not here though.
I constantly had problems just clicking on buttons. Sometimes in an application (Chromium comes to mind) but sometimes just within the Ubuntu environment itself. This kind of thing makes you start to question the faith you have in your OS.
I suppose it’s a bit unfair to put this here as it’s undoubtedly the same issue that would come up moving between any two major operating systems. The bottom line is that I have a young family with whom I like to spend the majority of my day. That means that when I decide to sit down at the computer to do something, I don’t really have the time to spend learning how to do things all over again.
There were a few things that were also pleasant surprises during this whole thing. Mostly to do with 3rd party applications.
CrashPlan was able to seamlessly match up my Windows backup to the Linux file system. This made it very easy to move everything over. I just hope it works as well in reverse.
Digitizing DVDs has never been easier. It took a couple of tries to get the quality settings just where I wanted them, but the process worked out really well.
I love the *nix shell, Bash in particular. This is the one thing I will truly miss when I move back to Windows. Having commands like rsync at my disposal, and built in SSH support are also fantastic. While this is something that has to be hacked into a Windows installation, it is available by default on OS X.
The availability of good software to do most tasks is one of the key benefits of moving to an open source experience, but the truth is that the experience really didn’t live up to my hopes or my expectations. I’m getting to the point where I want my computing time to be spent creating, not just experimenting with different ways that I could set up my tool sets. And as time moves on, the number of free or open-source applications available on the major commercial platforms like Windows and OS X is growing. Once either of those operating systems is installed I can do everything I want to do without having to pay a license for another piece of software — and in many cases the applications are as good or better than the open-source tools available for the Linux platforms. Add to that the growing number of applications which reside in the cloud and are completely browser and platform agnostic and it starts to become a simple equation for me.
Is it worth the $150 or so that it costs to get my new computer preloaded with a commercial OS? Yes.
