Commentary on MacWorld article: “For OS X Mavericks, the best is yet to come” -

Another case of commenting broken on an Apple News website, this time MacWorld with their “For OS X Mavericks, the best is yet to come”

This whole thing screams “Special Music Keynote” (or whatever they’re called) for Autumn. Why?

Because Mac Pro & Logic Pro X utilizing 2 GPU’s (FCP X with an audio slant?) is enormously interesting for composers and producers - they could also focus on how iTunes Radio / Match / the over-all iTunes ecosystem is doing. 

If it’s tiny enough as a keynote, they could easily ram in Mac Book Pro updates and obviously Mavericks would assist in making Logic Pro X even snappier on older machines. Overall I’m guessing the changes and additions to Logic Pro X which are fueled by the Redmatica-acquire will actually take some time to work in. 

Let’s not forget that iOS7 also unveiled Inter-App Audio - this is going to take some time to break down in a cohesive way during a keynote..

And since Redmatica is definitely related to automatic audio-chopping on iCloud -level, this would be a great way to inform us of Offline Siri-capabilities for both iOS and OS X Mavericks. 

I can’t wait! :)

5 days ago  /  1 note  / 

TUAW: Weekend Poll: What would you have asked Tim Cook at All Things Digital?

Interesting article on TUAW, “What would you have asked Tim Cook at All Things Digital?”.. TUAW have a buggy system so here are my questions..

1- What are your thoughts on BloomEnergy with their Bloom Box Fuel Cell product? Are you satisfied with the performance of these devices on your FuelCell Farms and will you be purchasing more of them in the future? Do the Bloombox Fuel Cells fit the Apple ideal as using the best methods for energy generation, or would you like to see them (or Apple) go further with this?

2- D’you think the world will eventually move away from Coal, Nuclear, Oil and Fracking and towards Fuel Cells, Solar, wind and vortex-based water power production?

3- Will Apple one day be able to produce a Terawatt of energy via your server farms worldwide?

4- I would like to never have to charge my MacBookPro or iPhone - I’m also not a big fan of iPhone cases with solar panels, or backpacks with a battery and a solar panel as added weight - and they aren’t aesthetically pleasing either. Should I give up and buy one of these clunky things, or can I remain hopeful that Apple could one day provide us with iDevices with solar-panel layered touch-screens, fuel cells and thus also a laptop that will never require charging?

5- You know one industry that is ripe for disruption? The Electrical Utility industry. Could you envision Apple as an electrical company?

6- If you were to re-think the original “Think Different” -campaign, which scientists, inventors, philosophers, educators  and artists etc would you add as the north stars of Apple for 2013 and beyond?

7- Who were your childhood heroes?

8- You’ve accomplished a great deal during your tenure at Apple - is there something more you would like to accomplish during your lifetime?

9- What steps have you taken to make sure that research engineers experimenting with inductive/wireless charging will no longer be dying of cancer at Apple? Is there a plan to advance internal knowledge at Apple re: cancer so that you no longer lose valuable employees?

10- Steve Jobs was quoted at AllThingsDigital as saying (of his passing) “Well, it won’t be a party” (for the rest of Apple), but can you imagine Apple bouncing back from this great loss? Will it take some more time, or can you already witness healing happening at the company?

11- Do you have a message to all the armchair critics who constantly analyse all of your hires and decisions in the most negative light possible? I’m guessing most of these types of people do not register on your radar at all?

2 weeks ago  /  0 notes  / 

VOB to M4V to iBooks Author

If you have a VOB you wish to add to an iBooks Author file, you can do so easily by using Compressor.

Compressor will convert the file to .M4V, after which you can add a Media-Widget inside iBooks Author and drag the file from Finder to it.

The Movie Optimization will start, and after that, well.. There it is! :)

1 month ago  /  0 notes  / 

AppleScript to check for App Updates in iTunes’11. (Updated)

Hi, this AppleScript will only work in iTunes’11. It’s fairly simple:

1- Launch iTunes

2- Activate iTunes

3- Press CMD-L (Go To Current Song - this exits the Search-bar :) )

4- Press CMD-7 (switch to Apps-view)

5- Press CMD-R (Check for App-updates)

6- Stop.

tell application “iTunes” to launch

delay 2

tell application “iTunes” to activate

tell application “iTunes” to activate

tell application “System Events”

tell process “iTunes” to keystroke “L” using command down

tell process “iTunes” to keystroke “7” using command down

tell process “iTunes” to keystroke “r” using command down

end tell

I’ve set this up to be run by iCal daily. Let’s see if it’ll actually work. Enjoy. (UPDATED: Well, it did not work, because the CMD-7 / CMD-R would be ignored if the keyboard cursor was on the Search-bar. Took a while to realize that CMD-L (Go To Current Song) would exit the Search-bar, so here we go again.

UPDATED#2: This will ONLY work if you are actually playing something on iTunes and have playback paused. I just cannot get this to work. Depressing.

5 months ago  /  0 notes  / 

My one issue with iOS6

Hi. 

I’ve been using iOS6 for a few days now. I have one issue to report. I know you’ll think it’s what everyone else is talking about, but it’s not.

So, here goes.

In iOS6, Apple changed  when the “email sent” sound is played. The sound is played when you click “Send”. No longer is the sound played when the e-mail has been sent to the server.

In fact, being an Edge-user on my iPhone 3GS, it is crucial for me to know when an email has been sent. I already know when I clicked “Send”, I don’t need a sound for that. I need a sound for when the email has been sent. I see no way to change this setting, and it is driving me crazy.

Now, I hear you ask, why would this matter at all? Simple. If an user sends an email out and gets the familiar swoosh sound of email sent/delivered, the user will not know if the email went out, or if it didn’t.

I have seen emails in the Outbox, left there when a connectivity error has occurred, and realised, that even though I heard the sound, the email was not sent to the server.

What I’m trying to say, is that the decision in iOS6 to make the sound play when the email has not already been delivered, is the wrong decision to make, and that there is no setting to alter when the sound is played. 

This should be changed as soon as possible. 

8 months ago  /  2 notes  / 

Critics, go sit in the corner (Apple Maps)

Why people who have no imagination and no purpose in life  should keep in the shadows instead of venturing out to criticize Apple, or, the dangers of pigeon-hole-based thinking.

Yesterday, rumours started trickling through of a forthcoming iOS update, iOS6. Those, who have paid attention from the start, have been waiting for months upon months for what the Apple Geo Team would come up with, and come up with something they have, the Maps application - completely replacing Google Maps on iOS devices. Cue a psychological knee-jerk reaction - easily summed up as “There is nothing of interest here”. This knee-jerkism is as uninformed as the reacters are shallow. 

When someone has an opinion on what a deeply integrated mapping system is about without the ability to venture out of one’s limited sandbox of thought, one is in deep trouble. One will have opinions, and will shout them from the rooftops, but ultimately, one cannot envision it. Why? Because the role one has adopted in life is to pick apart, denigrate and most crucially - to not see possibilities. It is much quicker, and much much easier, to simply say, “This is useless!”, without thinking of what the multitude of iOS developers will do with a mapping system like this.

So what, if we can have layers upon layers of information mapped directly on top of a regular 2D map (Placebase (USA))?  So what, if it is optimized for the browser and lightweight (Poly9 (Canada))? So what, if it has heretofore underutilized 3D possibilities based on some of the most advanced 3d-mapping technologies (C3 Technologies Inc. (Sweden))? “It’s still a map, and it’s just some of that “oooh shiny” stuff that Apple fanboys always get themselves so worked up about”. 

Armchair theorizing is only interesting and worthwhile if one has a fresh perspective, a willingness to think constructively and to see possibilities. Otherwise it is only more of the same-old, from the perspective of “This is what I think of a company, and nothing they do will ever change my fully formed (and ill-informed) opinion.”

If you cannot imagine the possibilities, don’t waste internet space thinking that something you’ve just heard about comes from a bunch of people who also cannot imagine possibilities.

Since we’ve pretty much established that there is no point in listening to those who are only interested in airing their stale opinions, let’s move them into the corner and re-focus on the actual subject matter. 

What does it mean to have a deeply integrated mapping system given to every single iOS developer out there? What will they do with it? 

When the blogger site Ars Technica posted an analysis on what the Placebase/Poly9/C3 Technologies Inc. acquisitions could mean for Apple and the Apple Geo Team - they took the time to provide us with a few simple images, such as one would expect of a “social” mapping service, i.e. Facebook statuses, Twitter posts and Foursquare check-ins being shown, in real-time on a map. This in itself would be “kind of neat”, you could see that four of your friends are a block away at a nearby café, and you could navigate to that place. 

Who would this help? Let’s say a foreign exchange student would deeply benefit from being able to find out which campus building has the next lecture, or find the agreed-upon place for some after-school cramming for an exam. If you have an established network of Twitter accounts you are following, and you enter a new city, you could immediately check if any of the people you picked have something to say about a certain location or of the area in itself. This would give the universities and colleges a way of providing information on “safe places” and “potentially less safe places” to move around, by foot, during the night (via Placebase layering). 

Students could provide eachother tips and information on the hot-spots of a city (be this free wi-fi hotspots, vegan/vegetarian restaurants, or places you can get down in - pretty much anything that someone might take the time to curate). This completely alters the, ahem, map of current things - one moves from static webpages listing restaurants from a more-or-less-functioning database, to a dynamic map with realtime updates. 

Restaurant owners will be able to look at their own restaurant and see the amount of Facebook / Twitter / Yelp posts and reviews and they will immediately know if something is going wrong with their business. Why would they care? Well, they already do, as witnessed by how hotel employees respond to tweets. Those who have put their heart and soul into starting a business, or who take pride in having things work smoothly are deeply interested in customer feedback and will react accordingly. 

Those who just work for a pay-check and have never really connected with the company they are working for, cannot understand the mental-emotional payback of keeping things running smoothly and providing customers with satisfactory service. So let’s put them in the corner too and move on.

Apple Maps makes it possible for connoisseurs of curated information to finally air them out, in a dynamic, open way, available on the web (Poly9) and on iDevices. No longer will you be stuck posting on your blog about a fancy restaurant with a couple of pictures, or leaving a short tweet about good service in a place, or liking a company’s Facebook page, instead you can give out a map of the city, according to you. Curated by you. Hand-picked by you. This is where the fresh produce is, this is where you go to get ingredients for this recipe (oh, and by the way, here’s the recipe). Those who like to work themselves up to a live gig, can create a map amongst themselves (Find My Friends equivalent -> Map For Friends) and prepare for the night. 

The map will be available via iCloud - obviously. It will function exactly like iCal - you can share it with your friends and they will get notifications if they have been invited to a certain happening in a certain place. This is going to be great for friends, foreign exchange students, companies looking for real-time feedback through a multitude of different platforms - it will streamline information, and only Apple can pull this off.

Now, let’s take my favorite user case, the musician. They have a U.S. tour planned. Suddenly an opportunity presents itself for a brief in-store performance. The musician is already traveling, not necessarily connected 24/7, and he’s supposed to update Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, his own blog, the artist webpage, a couple of forums and who knows how many mailinglists  about this in-store performance, and, to add insult to injury, the in-store performance starts in 2 hours, so he has to prepare for the performance.

What’s he to do? Internet around with dozens of tabs open? Seriously?

No. He logs onto iCloud with his AppleID, and simply adds another entry into the public U.S. tour map. The fans, some of who are already visiting a number of cities to see as many performances of his as in any way possible, get an update, and head onto the store. There’s even a possibility that he could open the map to suggestions from fans - let’s say he’s looking to buy arcane old synthesizers from fleamarkets, but doesn’t know anyone in Boston - the fans could curate him some places to visit. Why would they want to do that - for bragging rights. “You know that synth he plays on-stage? I helped him find it.” “Woah!” “Yeah.” 

If you love something that someone does so much that you wish to spread knowledge about it (a live performance, a good restaurant, an excellent park, maybe even something really rare like a beautiful tree somewhere, you could use the Maps service for this. Mix and match this with real-time Flickr image updates layered on the 3D view, and what you have starts to be more than what Microsoft Photosynth can ever hope to give us. 

However, these are only things that would be obvious based on current technology. Let’s zoom out. Let’s go back to the Apple “Think Different” commercial. I don’t know how many times people have seen it, but they seem to favor their heroes over people that they saw brief glimpses of and do not really know of. Who could I ever be talking about? R. Buckminster Fuller - the father of design science. 

I cannot even put to words how happy I am that whoever picked the heroes for Apple to aspire to, featured R. Buckminster Fuller, or, Bucky. “How would hero-worship matter when it comes to talking about Maps?”, is the obvious question, and shows quite a bit about the quizzer. If you do not know who Buckminster Fuller was, and how he thought about things, I would gladly suggest that you go out and educate yourself on his ideas and views on the world.

One concept stands out (and this is doing Bucky a real disfavor, but let’s stick to one for the sake of this post). The Dymaxion World Game. Bucky gave the first World Game Seminar in July 1969. He proposed the World Game concept in the 1960s. Before he decided on “World Game” as a name, it was sometimes referred to as “the great logistics game” or “world peace game”. Bucky envisioned that the lowly computer, could provide us with enough calculating power to be able to start fixing the world’s problems by viewing the world as one great island surrounded by a sea, instead of being separated into different countries with artificial borders. His idea was to start solving the world’s issues with energy, for instance, by figuring out the best way of producing and transferring energy. Placebase technologies allow us to see infrastructures, which could be taken to the logical conclusion: seeing the utility grids (electricity, internet, water and so forth) mapped onto a 3d view of a city in a dynamic way.

What kind of education will we be able to provide the young and inspired students in our schools, when they are given the tools to visualize whole cities and grid-systems, and then be able to play around with historical information and see what happens if you make a small change here and a small change there? 

There is so much promise, there are so many possibilities, that it deeply saddens me to see the small-mindedness of those who think their little sandbox will not be affended by a curated mapping service. Enjoy it while it lasts, but you too will be dragged, screaming and biting, right onto Spaceship Earth.

“Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” - R. Buckminster Fuller on the world game and on design science.

“The way that we’re gonna ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around to everybody so that everybody grows up with better things.” - Steve Jobs.

I rest my case. Those who have no idea what Apple are here to do, should just go sit in the corner - if you cannot envision a company being a force for change and growth of humanity, if you’re still fighting “current reality” instead of working to make it obsolete and replace it with a better, larger reality, then there is nothing that will ever change your way of thinking about the world. 

And you know what? It’s as it should be, and you’re still a valuable human being, because you provide the friction and resistance required for those trailblazers to storm through your resistance and really get in and pick the current reality apart and re-create it.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”  - R. Buckminster Fuller

“Perhaps it is better in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its adolescence — by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through bitter trials and tribulations, through the strife of commercial existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.” - Nikola Tesla

I cannot wait till June-July to start seeing what the iOS developer community comes up with. I hope this time we won’t see copy-cats and also-rans trying to create their own cloud services or mapping services without first having formed an idea.

One has to have a vision to create something worthwhile, otherwise one is just copying it with no sense of depth, no sense of soul.

1 year ago  /  0 notes  / 

Two workflow improvements for iBooks Author

I’m kind of amused at iBooks Author. It is most definitely the first iteration of the software, and that’s fine. Hopefully it will be more deeply integrated with future versions of iMovie and iPhoto, and soon. 

While there is nothing we as end-users can do (except Provide iBooks Author Feedback at http://www.apple.com/feedback/ibooks-author.html) to the code itself, there are some minor adjustments made possible by OS X. I’m guessing none of you would be surprised that they are simple workflow improvements based on re-configuring shortcuts.

1. Show Media Browser. Since nothing seems to be done with CMD-I, set it via System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Application Shortcuts. Click on the + and mimic: 
2. Create Glossary Term from Selection - set to CMD-G.

These have helped me at least a little bit.

I do wonder why there’s no reasonable shortcut for creating a Glossary Term out of a Selection.. 

Well, there’s one good thing about sending feedback - there’s a lot to send! :)

1 year ago  /  0 notes  / 

How to run iBooks Author on OS X 10.6.8 

iBooks Author is amazing. I’ve been waiting for something like this for eons. However, you can only purchase it from the Mac App Store if you are running OS X Lion 10.7.x. This is a real drag for me, especially right now (creditcard in lock-down mode). However, many have posted variations of these instructions. OS X Daily was the one I came across. The instructions worked, so…

Here’s how I’d describe the process, after having done it:

1) Go to Finder

2) Press CMD-Shift-G  (Go To Folder -dialog pops up)

3) Type in “/System/Library/CoreServices/”

4) Zoom around until you find “SystemVersion.plist”.

5) Edit it. Your editor will tell you that it is Read Only, but edit it anyway and save it. (I used Coda for all of this tomfoolery and it allowed me to save on top of a read-only file)

6) The two lines you want to change are: ProductUserVisibleVersion and ProductVersion.

7) Change both of them from 10.6.8 to 10.7.2. Save the file.

8) Start up Mac App Store, download iBooks Author.

9) Do NOT run iBooks Author now, instead go back to Finder and press CMD-Shift-A (takes you to /Applications/)

10) Rightclick on iBooks Author and select Show Package Contents.

11) Open Info.plist in your editor of choice.

12) Search for the string “LSMinimumSystemVersion”

13) Change the 10.7.* anything to “10.6.8”. Save.

14) Start iBooks Author.

15) Remember to go back to /System/Library/CoreServices/ and edit your SystemVersion.plist back to 10.6.8 for ProductUserVisibleVersion and ProductVersion.

16) Drag the iBooks Author off from your Dock so it goes ‘poof!’.

17) Open Finder, go to /Applications/ and drag the iBooks Author back to your dock. You now have the proper logo instead of the one with the strikethrough.

Enjoy using iBooks Author on OS X 10.6.8. Apple, can we have iBooks 2 for OS X?

1 year ago  /  19 notes  / 

Automatically Add to iPhoto: Automator Folder Action

iTunes has a nice folder by the name of Automatically Add to iTunes. It’s a very handy folder, I recommend looking into it. The presence of this folder, which was added back in 2009, begs the question: 

If an end-user was able to influence Apple by sending a feature-request for the creation of Automatically Add to iTunes, to make it simpler to add songs to iTunes whether iTunes is open or not, can a similar addition be made to iPhoto by Apple as a request from another end-user?

I decided to test this prospect out by sending a feature request to Apple a few days ago. We will see what happens to that.

Whether Apple will implement something like this or not, here is a way of using Automator to accomplish the same thing.

You will need to launch Automator.

1. When Automator opens, select Folder Action. 
2. Now, click on Choose folder and pick out the folder you will check to import to iPhoto.
3. Look to your left for Library. If you can’t see the Library, click on Show Library.
4. Type in import to the search bar.
5. Select Import Files into iPhoto. 
6. Configure as you would - my choices were Existing Album and Events.
7. Remember to tick Delete the Source Images after Importing Them, so that the files are deleted afterwards (this mimics the behaviour of Automatically Add to iTunes)
8. Save your Folder Action.

Now test what you have done. Mine worked nicely with iPhoto on, took a while and the Folder Action ran and imported and deleted the files. 

However, here come the differences.

Apple made the Automatically Add to iTunes folder function in such a way that you can add as many files and folders as you please, and they are imported when iTunes is opened. 

This folder action to do a similar thing for iPhoto, will actually start iPhoto every time you send a file to it, so this would be more useful to you if you keep iPhoto open during the import process. Also, there is no word as to what happens if you put a file onto the folder which cannot be imported. I hope a new version of iLife will bring us an updated version of iPhoto capable of having this Automatically Add to iPhoto -folder by default, with as clean behaviour as Automatically Add to iTunes already has.

NOTICE: If an image you import cannot be recognized by iPhoto, it will not be imported - iPhoto will tell you that something wasn’t imported - this is your cue to move the files away from the folder to safety. Once you click “OK” in iPhoto, the files will be deleted. If, however, you place a .MP4 or a .MOV into the folder, iPhoto will try to import it, and then fail, but not delete the file.

NOTICE 2: if you move any folders into this Folder Action-folder, they will not be imported.

P.S. Yep, you could probably do this on your own with AppleScript with clever detection methods of whether iPhoto is open, or not. I’m not saying I wouldn’t be up for the challenge, but this first iteration will do for today (13th January 2012).

P.P.S. There is no Import to iMovie in Automator, at least not on OS X 10.6.8. This is the reason why I’m importing my movies via iPhoto by using this Folder Action, and hoping for the best.

1 year ago  /  6 notes  /