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Enjoying Apple TV in the UK

January 12, 2012 Apple Mac OS X / News
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It January 2012 and Apple TV (second generation, also know as iTV) has taken three major leaps forward I the UK and really has become the heart of the AV setup in my sitting room.

First came iCloud support in the UK. I’d always been. Put off downloading films and TV shows in iTunes because I knew I’d soon run out of disk space. Now with iCloud you can delete the content when you’ve finished with it and download again from Apple if you ever want to watch it again. The Apple TV is actually even better than that. Instead of streaming the content from you Mac or PC it now streams the content from iCloud so you no longer need you Mac switched on. Indeed the average consumer no longer needs a Mac or PC in their home. It’s still annoying that photos can’t be stored in iCloud forever, as this is as far as I can see the only reason an average consumer still needs a PC or Mac. So for me the ability to buy content, not have to worry about storing it and backing it up whilst still having access on demand is really amazing.

The next great improvement came when the BBC updated their iPlayer App to support AirPlay. To watch BBC programmes I used to connect up my MacBook Air to the HDMI port on the TV which works but is a bit of an annoyance. Now I can just sit down with my iPad or iPhone, find the programme I want to watch on iPlayer and the press the AirPlay button to transfer it to the big screen and audio in the sitting room. This works really well and is amazing. I just hope that ITV and Channel 4 now catch up and allow this in their player apps.

Finally this week NetFlix have arrived in the UK. Netflix has been integrated into the Apple TV in the US since it launched. I immediately signed up for Netflix and enjoyed cancelling by LoveFilm subscription. Films and TV program’s stream smoothly from Netflix and are integrated really well into the Apple TV. I was really impressed that they have fully embraced the Apple TV menu system and maintained the whole Apple look and feel. Netflix isn’t perfect at the moment. They have a lot of content but equally lots of notable TV shows and films are missing. That said I’m sure that now they have launched in the UK they will quickly start putting the deals in place to make more content available in the UK. Either way it’s great for consumers that LoveFilm finally have a serious competitor in the UK. I’ll also happily live with Netflix because it’s integrated into the Apple TV so neatly.

For me, it’s as if very little changed during 2011 and then in the first few weeks of 2012 everything I’ve been waiting for arrived at once.

CMD Tab and CMD Space stopped working on Mac OSX

January 9, 2012 Apple Mac OS X
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I find that I mostly use CMD Tab to switch between apps on my Mac and frequently use CMD Space to bring up Spotlight so I can launch apps.  Anyway these both suddenly stopped working.  I Googled this and the common advice is to go into the Activity monitor and do a forced close on the Dock.  This didn’t work for me.  I was just about to do a reboot when I noticed that I still had a VNC session running in the Dock.  As soon as I quit the VNC session CMD Tab started to work normally again.

Looking forwards to Apples WWDC 2011

June 5, 2011 Apple Mac OS X / iPad
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On June 6th we’ll finally get to hear Apple’s next batch of announcements.  This time it has been a little different.  Normally Apple are very secretive and there is no official word in advance about what is going to be announced but this time we’ve seen several press releases about iCloud and other product updates ahead of WWDC.  But even at this stage we know little more than the product name and several of the new features that we’ll see is Lion.  This is an important event for the whole IT, technology and Electronic industry these days as Apple set the standard and in many cases make the market for so many innovations these days.   In the time honoured tradition I thought I’d better go on record and say what I would like to see Apple announce at WWDC:

  1. iCloud for streaming and storing any content you have in iTunes.  I worry that my iTunes isn’t backed up properly because its so large and I don’t currently buy a lot of video based content that I would like because it will consume too much disk space on my Mac.  If you add to this the problem that the content you want tends not to be on the Apple device you have with you when you are traveling unless you are very organised and sync what you want in advance then iCloud can’t come soon enough.
  2. iCloud for backup and storage of iPhoto and other content.
  3. MobileMe either replaced or upgraded so that I can access all of my iCloud content on the go.
  4. The Post PC Era.  When Steve Jobs said we’re now in the Post PC Era I couldn’t help feeling he was slightly ahead of the technology.  As of iOS4 you still need to plug your Apple device into a Mac or PC to register it, upgrade it and sync content onto it.  For many people with old printers you still need a PC to print!  iOS5 needs to truly remove the need for a PC or Mac base station.
  5. Facetime, I would like to see an upgrade so that you can conference in two or more people on the same video call.  Now that Microsoft own Skype I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Apple counter this by brining out a Facetime client for Windows.
  6. iBooks, we need a reader application on the Mac.
  7. Time Capsule.  There have been a lot of rumours that Apple will be upgrading their router / Time Capsule and this makes a lot of sense.  A device which can sit in the home and cache or backup your content from your Apple devices acting as a buffer between your home and the iCloud would be a great solution.  I would not put it past Apple to take this one stage further.  They could allow these devices to talk to each other across the Internet to form a grid, where all the communication are coordinated via their new data centre.
  8. Lion – Security.  I’ve always recommended Mac’s over PC’s to non-technical friends and family because of their ease of use and better security.  I would like to see this taken a stage further in Lion so that by default Applications can only be installed from the Mac App Store.  Of course there would need to be a way to switch this off for more advanced users but for most of my non-technical friends this would be a welcome security improvement.  As we have seen with the recent Mac Defender Malware it’s currently too easy to trick non-technical users into install software.
  9. Voice Recognition.  I want to see this done really well on every Apple platform.  I want to be able to be able to select tracks, listen to e-mails etc while driving or laying in the bath.  I don’t want to have to press a button to initial the voice command, it needs to be triggered by a phrase.  I want this to work like the LCARS Computer on the Enterprise, “Computer: Lights Off.”

Anyway not long to wait now, I’ll be back later in the week to review my wish list and review by 2011 Wish list from back on New Years Day.

The essential iPad

January 5, 2011 Apple Mac OS X
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Over the last few days I’ve realised that I’m using my iPad more each day to the extent that it’s now an essential tool. I thought it might be useful to share with you how I’m using it and
the key Apps I’ve installed.

  1. OmniFocus. This is a great tool for managing your to do lists. I have quite a large team and I use OmniFocus to record the tasks I allocate to people, target completion dates etc. You can include notes and email the task details directly to people from the application.
  2. The built in Mail and Calendar Apps are fine and work with legacy Exchange servers. To be honest unless you’ve got a really up to date Exchange server not all the functions work quite as well as they should but when used with modern mail servers such as Googles it’s excellent.
  3. Dropbox. I run this on my Mac, iPad and an old Microsoft Windows PC in the office and it’s a great way to store files in the cloud and sync them onto each machine.
  4. Kindle ebook reader. This is my preferred ebook reader at the moment for one main reason… You can buy books from Amazon and then read them using the Kindle reader on iPad, Mac and PC. I like the way that they sync the page you are on and book marks across all the readers. If Apple ever do an iBooks reader on the Mac I might start to use that instead.
  5. EverNote. I now scan all important documents into Ever Note which provides OCR and searching over the scanned documents. Great for getting access to you documents on the go.
  6. IA Writer. This is a nice simple little text editor. I use it for quickly and simply taking minutes in meetings. It also integrates with Dropbox so that notes you type can be stored in your Dropbox account automatically.
  7. Twitter. I use the official Twitter App which was previously known as Tweetie. I wish this iPad version was available on the Mac. It’s a shame that they don’t sync where you have read up to between the desktop app and the iPad app but I live in hope.
  8. Pages. This is the Apple Word Processor. I’ve only been using this for a few days and in many ways it’s quite refreshing. The main problem is that it’s not MS Word and that’s what we’ve all been forced to use since Word Perfect failed to get a foothold on Windows. I would say that for 99% of people Pages is probably a better choice than Word for producing short, simple documents. I look forward to getting used to this over the coming weeks. I’m planning to buy it for the Mac when the new Mac App store opens.
  9. WordPress. Yes I’m writing this blog post on using the WordPress app. It’s got room for improvement but isn’t bad. I love typing on the iPads virtual keyboard. I tend to find that as iPad apps run as full Screen applications rather than in windows there is less distraction and I focus on my writing and get more done.
  10. TuneIn Radio. My iPad is now my main radio. It’s great when travelling. I often used to find myself in a hotel room with a poor choice of radio stations or stuck waiting for a train and unable to hear programmes I’d planned to listen to. I’m really pleased with this application.

When the iPad was launched some people called it just a big iPhone. I think it’s a whole new class of device. For many people who used to have a laptop, the iPad would be a great upgrade. For others a laptop may still be essential, for example photographers using light room will still want a Mac but they’ll also want an iPad to carry their work on to show clients.

Upgrading to Mac OS X Snow Leopard

September 5, 2009 Apple Mac OS X
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On Friday the Apple OS X Snow Leopard DVD turned up and I didn’t waste anytime installing the upgrade.  This was the first OS X upgrade I’ve done since switching to a Mac from Windows and I was pleased with how quick and simple the process was.  In total the process took less than 45 minutes.  The end result is a faster system and as a bonus the upgrade returns disk space.  There isn’t much to see in terms of a change to the GUI in this release with just one very big exception which I haven’t really seen discussed in detail elsewhere on the web.  I may be alone in thinking this but the new dock which now incorporates the Exposé function.

I always found that on Widnows I’d end up with a very cluttered taskbar as I opened lots of documents.  On Leopard it could be difficult to find the exact doument you were looking for when you’d opened several.  This all changes in Snow Leopard; now you just press and hold down the application icon in the dock and Exposé then shows all the open windows for the application.  This is fantastically easy to use and nothing short of brilliant.  I could imagine this working really well on a Mac Tablet (iPad) touch screen device!

The overall performance has improved in the applications I use most, those being Safari, Photoshop CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4.

For people using their Mac in compaines who use Microsoft Exchange the built in support in the new OSX for Exchange will be well received.  Personally this doesn’t affect me as we use Google to host our e-mail and we’ve always been very pleased with that.