Tag Archives: Mac

iTunes Bug – The information on this page is outdated.

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http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lfhtq0IWsF1qeh18e.jpg

Everytime I click ‘update all’ on the app updates page of iTunes I see this bug.
The bug has been around since early July 2010, that’s eight months and there’s still no fix from Apple.
It seems I’m not the only one suffering with this. There’s over 40 replies to my initial post on the Apple Discussion Forum
Come on Apple pull your finger out and let’s see if we can get this fixed sometime this year.

Charlie Brooker switches to a Mac…

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Members of the technology media try out Apple's

The iPad . . . ideal for keeping your lap warm. Photograph: Kimberly White/Reuters

A star appears over San Francisco and a new gizmo is born. The iPad! At first glance it resembles an iPhone in unhandy, non-pocket-sized form. But look a little longer, and . . Nope. You were right first time.

Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Apple excels at taking existing concepts – computers, MP3 players, conceit – and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration. It took the laptop and the coffee table book and created the MacBook. Now it’s taken the MacBook and the iPhone and distilled them into a single device that answers a rhetorical question you weren’t really asking.

It’s an iPhone for people who can’t be arsed holding an iPhone up to their face. A slightly-further-away iPhone that keeps your lap warm. A weird combination of portable and cumbersome: too small to replace your desktop, too big to fit in your pocket, unless you’re a clown. It can play video, but really – do you want to spend hours staring at a movie in your lap? Sit through Lord of the Rings and you’d need an osteopath to punch the crick out of your neck afterwards. It can also be used as an ebook, something newspapers are understandably keen to play up, but because it’s got an illuminated display rather than a fancy non-backlight “digital ink” ebook screen, it’ll probably leave your eyes feeling strained, as though your pupils are wearing tight shoes.

The iPad falls between two stools – not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it’s the spork of the electronic consumer goods world. Or rather it would be, were it not for one crucial factor: it looks ideal for idly browsing the web while watching telly. And I suspect that’s what it’ll largely be used for. Millions of people watch TV while checking their emails: it’s a perfect match for them.

Absurdly, Apple keeps trying to pretend it’ll make your life more efficient. Come off it. It’s an oblong that lights up. I’m sick of being pitched to like I’m a one-man corporation undertaking a personal productivity audit anyway. I don’t want to hear how the iPad is going to make my life simpler. I want to hear how it’ll amuse and distract me; how it plans to anaesthetise me into a numb, trancelike state. Call it the iDawdler and aggressively market it as the world’s first utterly dedicated timewasting device: an electronic sedative to rival diazepam, alcohol or television. If Apple can convince us of that, it’s got itself a hit.

Some people are complaining because it doesn’t have a camera in it. Spoiled techno-babies, all of them. Just because something is technically possible, it doesn’t mean it has to be done. It’s technically possible to build an egg whisk that makes phonecalls, an MP3 player that dispenses capers or a car with a bread windscreen. Humankind will continue to prosper in their absence. Not everything needs a 15-megapixel lens stuck on the back, like a little glass anus. Give these ingrates a camera and they’d whine that it didn’t have a second camera built into it. What are you taking photographs of anyway? Your camera collection?

And don’t bring up videocalls to defend yourself: it’d be creepy talking to a disembodied two-dimensional head being held at arm’s length, and besides, the iPad is too heavy to hold in front of your face for long, so you’d end up balancing it in your lap, which means both callers would find themselves staring up one another’s others nostrils, like a pair of curious dental patients. (Videocalls are overrated anyway. You just sit there staring at each other with nothing to say. It’s like a prison visit: eventually one of you has to start masturbating just to break the tension.)

Personally, I’m not sure whether I’ll buy an iPad, although I think – I think – I’m about to buy a MacBook. Yes, I was a dyed-in-the-wool Mac sceptic for years. Yes, I’ve written screeds bemoaning the infuriating breed of smug Apple monks who treat all PC owners with condescending pity. But being chained to a Sony Vaio for the last few weeks has convinced me that I’d rather use a laptop that just works, rather than one that’s so ponderous, stuttering and irritating I find myself perpetually on the verge of running outside and hurling it into traffic. (That’s a moan about Sony laptops, not PCs in general, by the way. I’m keeping my desktop PC, thanks: that’s lovely. Smooth as butter. Better than I deserve, in fact.)

I just hope buying a MacBook won’t turn me into an iPrick. I want a machine that essentially makes itself invisible, not a rectangular bragging stone. If, 10 minutes after buying it, I start burbling on about how it’s left me more fulfilled as a human being, or find myself perched at a tiny Starbucks table stroking its glowing Apple with one hand while demonstratively tapping away with the other in the hope that passersby will assume I’m working on a screenplay, it’s going straight in the bin.

The iBin. Complete with built-in camera. $599.99.

• This article was amended on 1 February 2010. The original said that Apple distilled the iBook and the iPhone into a single device. The iBook reference has been corrected.

via guardian.co.uk

Mac sceptic Charlie Brooker switches to a MacBook saying “being chained to a Sony Vaio for the last few weeks has convinced me that I’d rather use a laptop that just works”.

Hosting Your Own RSS Reader Using Fever

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Pile

Fever http://feedafever.com/ $30

So if your like me you probbably subscribe to far too many RSS feeds, don’t get me wrong I love RSS it’s the way I get most of my news. Recently I’ve reached my limit of what I can resonably get through in any one day. I’d ideally subscribe to more feeds but I really don’t have the time to read them all. I’d rather not suffer the ‘unread item guilt’ or ’second inbox syndrome’ that you can sometimes get with unread feeds. This is where the RSS aggregator Fever from Shaun Inman can help.

How is Fever different?

Fever is unique in a couple of ways, firstly (and most importantly) it’s a self hosted web app, meaning the Fever installation is stored on your web server so you will need hosting that’s running a recent version of PHP and MySQL. Fever is also different in the way it handles your feeds, this means you can subscribe to many more feeds without suffering the unread item guilt. This is achieved by organising your feeds into two categories, ‘must reads’ and ‘could be interesting’ I’ll explain more about this later.

Installation

Before you can purchase Fever you will need to download a small package which will detect if your hosting provider is up to the job. Once your server successfully passes the compatibility tests you will be given an activation key to purchase Fever. Installation is fairly straightforward and there is even a video on feedafever.com showing you the complete install process. You may need to change the permissions of the Fever folder, presumably to allow future updates to be pushed out. Fever refreshes itself automatically, however I did encounter a problem setting up a cron job to refresh my feeds every 15 minutes. The command provided over on feedafever.com didn’t seem to work with my provider (SiteGround) but after a quick email to SiteGround they soon managed to get it working for me.

Setup

Once Fever is installed you will need to bookmark it’s homepage, by default the installation is placed at www.yourwebsite.com/fever/ You can now start to feed Fever with your existing feeds, this is easily achieved by importing the OPML file from your previous reader. There are four sections to Fever, the main section is called ‘Kindling’ this is where you place your ‘must read’ feeds, you can create groups of feeds here and these are read in the traditional way (although by default Fever hides unread counts). Next up are ‘Sparks’, this is where you file all the feeds that can be interesting but are quite high in volume. Link posts and Twitter feeds are ideal candidates to be thrown into the Sparks section as you’ll never be hassled by unread counts. Just toss your feeds into Sparks and forget them. Now here’s where Fever hots up, Sparks and Kindling combine to create the next section called ‘Hot’. Think of Hot as your own personal Digg site.

Hot
What’s hot?

Fever will analyse all your feeds (Kindling and Sparks) looking for matching links and will pick out the most frequently talked about links. These posts are arranged in order of their ‘Hotness’, giving popular/interesting posts a higher temperature and will place them at the top of the Hot list. It’s all based on body temperature (hence the name Fever) the more popular the posts (based on similar links) the higher the temperature. There is also a ‘Saved’ section where (as you would expect) posts are stored for reading later. At the bottom of the main menu is a search bar for tracking down those lost posts.

Fevers design is simple, minimalistic and well laid out which works really well. Favicons are used to represent the feeds in both the desktop and iPhone versions. Keyboard junkies will love it’s easy to navigate user interface. The arrow keys are used to move from pane to pane and up and down the lists. ‘Space’ will move you to the next post, hitting ‘S’ saves the post for reading later and pressing ‘A’ will mark the selected section as read. To expand a story you hit ‘enter’ and to view the entire post just hit arrow right.

Fluid

Shaun suggests using the site specific browser Fluid.app with Fever and provides a link to a rather nice looking icon and screenshots on how to configure Fluid. Fluid turns Fever into a standalone application complete with an unread dock badge.

Dock
Fluid

iPhone

Fever also works well on the iPhone as a web app, sharing the simple, easy to navigate style of it’s desktop big brother.

Iphone-page
iPhone version

A link to the web app can be saved to your iPhone home screen giving the impression of a native app. However it can sometimes take a good ten seconds to open over 3G and when viewing an external site the screen orientation can get a little goofed up, a quick tilt to the left or right soon fixes this though.

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iPhone screen bug
Feed
A Post using Fluid.app
Img_0215
Same post on the iPhone

Conclusion

Used as just a standard RSS reader Fever works really well, I love the simple interface and easy to remember keyboard navigation shortcut keys. The ‘Hot’ section of Fever is a bonus, a place to find popular stories that you might otherwise have missed. The iPhone app also works really well and as it’s web based it stays perfectly in sync with the desktop.

For the last couple of years I’ve been using Google Reader on the desktop and more recently Byline on the iPhone and although I’d reached my limit of how many feeds I could reasonably get through in any one day I was happy with this setup. After using Fever for just over a week it has completely replaced my old configuration. I use Kindling in the same way I used Google Reader but every now and then I dip into Hot to… well.. see what’s hot!

Having said that the PHP MySQL app is obviously not as fast as a native OS X app such as NetNewsWire and this sometimes shows. Navigating through the pages can sometimes feel a little sluggish but you soon get used to it. It would have been nice to try an online demo installation of Fever before purchasing the app. The iPhone web app could do with a little polish, it sometimes feels a bit beta but I’m sure this will improve as the app matures. In the week that I’ve been using Fever there has been an update pushed which added some extra features and fixed a few bugs, I’m sure Shaun is committed to future updates.

A license for Fever costs $30 which is $30 more than most other readers such as Google Reader and NetNewsWire but I feel if you already have web hosting the great UI and the ‘Hot’ feature is well worth the money.

Dave Day 2009