How small is too small? March 17, 2009
Posted by David in Apple, Music.add a comment
That’s the question anyone purchasing Apple’s latest redesign of its iPod Shuffle should be asking themselves.
Quietly released last week, the new device removes all controls from the player itself, leaving it as a tiny stick, smaller and thinner than most of the USB flash drives many of us carry around.
On the back of the Shuffle is a clip for safely fastening it to your clothing – and presumably to help you to remember where it is.
The controls now form a little plastic nodule that is part of the headphone cable, meaning you will have to use Apple’s notoriously substandard earbuds in order to operate the iPod.
The final innovation, which will no doubt be introduced to other models very soon, is that your player now speaks the name of the song or playlist – quite an elaborate workaround for not having a screen to look at.
I think Apple has a problem here.
You can only go on tweaking and reinventing a product for so long before eventually reaching an optimum design. This is clearly starting to happen with not just the iPod Shuffle but with other devices that Apple puts out, too.
For a company whose selling point is often the aesthetics and elegance of its products, this is a marketing headache.
The truth is that the previous iPod Shuffle was pretty much perfect for a low capacity, screenless MP3 player. It was light and small but big enough to feature controls and clipped unnoticed to your clothing. It didn’t need to be made any smaller and take backward steps in usability just for the sake of it.
iMacs also appear to have reached their optimum design. I’m writing this on one now and it’s compact, has a small footprint on the desk but is nearly all screen and nothing else. Apple has released further updates to the model in the two years since I’ve had mine, but the actual look of the thing hasn’t changed at all – it really can’t.
Don’t get me wrong. Looks are certainly not everything and I love Macs more for their ease of use than anything else but we the fickle public are drawn more instantly to visual changes – particularly with Apple products.
Let’s hope the Shuffle’s needless redesign doesn’t become a trend.
iLife ’09 and why you want it February 6, 2009
Posted by David in Apple, Software.add a comment
Last week Mac owners were treated to updates of the two most essential software collections for their computers.
iWorks ‘09 gathers together the best office-type functional software (Pages, the word processor, is assisting me in the creation of this week’s column) but far more excitingly for the more creative type, iLife ’09 shows off some excellent applications that really should form the backbone of just about everybody’s Apple computer, including iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and the unrivaled fun and power of Garageband.
In its previous incarnations, iPhoto was already doing a sterling job of managing my ever-growing collection of digital photography but a couple of new features are little short of mind blowing.
First up is ‘Faces’ which attempts to sort your pictures by who is in them. By telling it the name of one or more people in a particular shot, it uses face recognition technology to find them in others. Initial results were usually accurate and sometimes way out (it suggested that my daughter might be her grandfather, for example!) but guesses become more reliable as errors are corrected.
The other new feature, called ‘Places’, had a friend and me literally gasping in amazement.
A Google map of the world featured a forest of red pushpin icons around central England. Zooming in increased the number of pins until they were dotted around the southern half of the country with particular emphasis on Oxfordshire. Certain modern cameras and the iPhone 3G plot your location coordinates when a picture is taken and embed the position within the photo’s data. ‘Places’ can then literally pinpoint where a photograph was taken anywhere in the world. Amazing.
I though I’d caught it out when a path of red pins traced a line right down the middle of the Thames until the pictures reminded me of a boat trip last summer.
iMovie makes editing your video footage an absolute breeze and my personal favourite, Garageband, combines a home recording studio and music teacher that is unrivaled by any other software out there.
No Mac should be without iLife. An excellent suite of software that’s just £69.
Finally… July 24, 2008
Posted by David in Apple, Gadgets.Tags: Apple, iphone
add a comment
This lunchtime I finally got my hands ok an upgrade to my iPhone and I’m now proudly rocking the iPhone 3G.
I’m out and about this afternoon so I’m making this post from the iPhone WordPress app again. So far I’m really impressed with it but I’ve run onto quite a major snag with the iPhone.
A few months ago I bought an Apple Bluetooth headset. Rather nicely it included a new iPhone ‘double’ dock that took both the phone and the headset and kept them both nicely charged. Great.
However, due to the shape of the iPhone 3G case being a little different to it’s first gem cousin, none of the old docking stations fit any more, so I’ve nowhere to charge up my headset.
Worse still, Apple mo longer provide a docking station of any kind with the iPhone 3G, so that when you’re charging or synching it at your desk it has to lie flat and you don’t see incoming calls of texts. Do Not Like.
In typical Apple fashion you can now BUY a docking station that will fit the 3G (but without the headset dock, of course) for 19. Thanks for that.
Apple, you try even my patience at times.
New iPhone tariff January 30, 2008
Posted by David in Apple.add a comment
Woot. I’ve just read on O2′s site that the iPhone tariff is being ‘tweaked’ next month.
I’m currently on the £45 a month service which gives me 600 minutes of talk time and more texts than I’m ever likely to send (I think it’s 500 or something – what am I, a teenager?).
The new £45 plan ramps up the talk minutes to 1200. For the mathematically challenged, that’s DOUBLE what it was or 20 hours each month.
This is good news for me as it puts me over the ‘am I spending too much time on my phone’ worry into the ‘I’m definitely OK to keep talking’ one. 20 hours a month is about 40 minutes a day which will suit little old me just fine. I did away with my landline almost a year ago and mobile prices are now becoming competitive enough for it to not have been a foolish decision.
40 minutes a day – at any time and to any number – for £45 a month is perfectly reasonable and, as an average, is well within what I’m ever likely to use.
Me = happy.
Tags: apple
In the spotlight this week… November 27, 2007
Posted by David in Apple.add a comment
One of the things I find most useful about Mac OS X is Spotlight, the built-in indexing engine that makes locating files and software on your computer an absolute snap.
Type a word – for example ‘skype’ into Spotlight and practically before you’ve finished typing, you’ll have a list of software and documents – including old emails – that contain the word.
The way the list is ordered is customisable in system preferences but by default, software comes top.
A tiny yet significant improvement in the recently released OS X Leopard picks the top hit from a Spotlight search by default (previously you needed to manually select a hit). What makes this really cool and useful is that if I want to start up some software that’s not in my dock, rather than go rooting through my Applications folder, all I need to do is hit the keyboard shortcut for Spotlight, Command-Space, start typing the name of the software and as soon as it pops up at the top of my list – usually within three or four keystrokes – hitß the return key to start the software.
The entire procedure takes less than two seconds.
Using Spotlight to find documents, music, movies and pictures is just as simple and intuitive. It’s quite difficult for users of Windows to appreciate just how useful Spotlight is but if you’ve ever used the search option in iTunes software, imagine that level of power running across everything on your computer. It almost makes it redundant to carefully save files to specific folders.
As I’m still forced to use Windows in my job, I’m constantly craving the functionality of Spotlight.
The default Windows XP search option which systematically rummages through your files each time you enter something to look for is utterly prehistoric, not to mention hopelessly inaccurate, when compared to a properly indexed search which knows all about your files and applications before you even enter your search term.
If you’re running Vista, apart from having my deepest sympathy, you also have an indexed search engine built in but my experience found it grinding and slow.
Fortunately there are a number of third party indexing applications for Windows. For once I’m happy not to recommend Google’s offering of Google Desktop. Instead you should definitely experience the power of Copernic Desktop Search which is free, unobtrusive and fast at finding your files.
Or you could just buy a Mac.
Running with Leopard (or not) October 30, 2007
Posted by David in Apple.add a comment
The following is taken directly from my newspaper column. As soon as I’ve had a couple of days with Leopard, I’ll be submitting my thoughts on it.
Last Friday saw the global roll out of the latest release of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system.
Version 10.5 – or Leopard – has been promised by Apple to contain over 300 new additions, tweaks, features and graphical improvements.
This week’s column, however, isn’t a review of Leopard. Unfortunately, I was somewhat remiss and rather than ordering online as I would normally do, I decided to pick it up from a bricks and mortar shop over the weekend.
I may as well have planned a day of chocolate fireguard manufacture, which I have a feeling would have proved slightly less futile.
I wasn’t exactly expecting Oxford city centre to have the bunting out for Leopard’s release but you would think in a fairly major town it shouldn’t prove that difficult to track it down.
Having long since vowed not to hand my hard-earned cash over to PC World (it’s a long story of incompetence and customer service that would cause Watchdog to spontaneously combust), I reluctantly found myself walking through its doors.
This was becoming tiresome. Surely they would have a copy.
“We had two copies in on Friday evening but they sold out quickly,” explained an assistant who seemed in no way surprised that a paltry couple of discs should be snapped up in no time.
“We should have some more in next week,” he added, helpfully.
So it was back home and to my trusty Amazon where I was able to buy a copy and even pay a little extra to guarantee speedy delivery
I’d love to hold back this week’s column as Leopard is due to arrive tomorrow but sadly I’m not in a position to treat deadlines in the same way as the late, great Douglas Adams (“I like deadlines. I love the sound they make as they go whooshing by”), so my considered impression will have to wait a week.
In the meantime, if you’re a Mac zealot you’ll either have your own copy (where did you get it?) or you’ll have read one of the other several million reviews already out there.
Let me know your impressions via my website.
As a recent convert – or ‘switcher’ to use Apple’s parlance – I’m really looking forward to taking Leopard for a run.
Hey, Apple. Watch your step October 1, 2007
Posted by David in Apple, Gadgets.add a comment
A few weeks ago I wrote how we Brits can feel cheated by having to wait for new gadgets that usually surface first in America.
A case in point was Apple’s iPhone which won’t see the light of day here until November, some five months after its American debut.
I must admit that the gadget and Apple fan within me was starting to get really tempted into shelling out for a UK iPhone but having seen what’s on offer, how much I’m going to have to pay for it and, crucially, how Apple is treating its American iPhone customer-base, I’ve decided to steer well clear.
The phone will cost a not inconsiderable £269 but more importantly you will be locked into an 18 month account with the O2 network at a minimum tariff of £35 per month. A quick bit of mental arithmetic calculates that at a total cost of ownership of at least £899 – and that’s for a service that offers no 3G coverage.
Perhaps more importantly, those owners in America who hacked their devices to use other networks or install third party applications saw those devices rendered unusable by a software update to the phone.
Such harsh treatment by Apple lowers their standing in the opinions of many.
It’s finally here (well, there) July 3, 2007
Posted by David in Apple, Gadgets.add a comment
Last week finally saw the release of what must surely be one of the most hyped and anticipated gadgets in history.
After being revealed six months ago, America was finally able to get its collective paws on an Apple iPhone.
As is the modern tradition, queues of people formed outside Apple shops for a day or two before the launch (despite the promise that there would be no shortage of stock) and the company managed to shift over half a million units in the first couple of days which, at $600 a pop, won’t do the coffers any harm.
So now that it’s officially out there, does the iPhone live up to its monumental hype? Sadly, we Europeans shall have to wait until late autumn before determining that for ourselves, but Stateside reviews have been almost unanimously positive.
As a pocket-sized internet device, the iPhone with its large, colourful screen is clearly without rival, featuring a version of Apple’s Safari web browser that shows full web pages. The email and Google Maps applications also look great as, of course, does music and movies.
Apparently it also works as a telephone. Madness!
Apple has been criticised for not making the phone available on a high speed 3G network in the US but with any luck that won’t be the case when it’s finally available here.
Why Apple Will Never Make A Game Console April 15, 2007
Posted by David in Apple.add a comment
The prospect of Apple making a game console has been discussed before, but if Apple were to do such a thing it would entirely kill what the company is aiming for and thus become a failure.
What a difference a week makes January 16, 2007
Posted by David in Apple, Gadgets.add a comment
Reaction to Apple’s iPhone has cooled considerably after the fevered initial wow factor died off.
The device, which merges a phone, music player and web browser in a sleek looking, button-less form factor, won’t be available in the UK until the end of 2007.
Tech analysts point to the fact that existing smartphones do everything the iPhone will do and more.
This may be true but Apple are clearly hoping to impress a share of the ‘Average Jo(e)’ market, despite the promised hefty price tag.
