Apple

So I should be the ground?

December 13, 2008

When we got home from the winter light show at the Idaho Botanical Gardens tonight the trackpad on the MacBook Air was unresponsive. I think it's happened before, though that may be a memory effect, my memory that is. At any rate I managed to use the keyboard to shut down and restart the laptop. Once I did I found out this symptom can indicate a bad ground. The Apple knowledge base article suggests if you can fix it otherwise you should wrest your palm on the wrist-rest. Um thanks but I'm not sure I really want to be the the ground.

iPhone software gets 2.2 update

November 21, 2008

Apple rolled out an upgrade to iPhone software today. Version 2.2 includes some great new features like the ability to access public transit maps on the phone.

The update brings a welcome change, the ability to download podcasts directly to the phone. Unfortunately while this functionality is welcome it is also incomplete. The downloaded episodes are added to the iPod but there is no way to subscribe to a podcast from the phone.

Apple has previously denied applications for podcatcher applications based on this now-released functionality being forthcoming. At the time speculation centered on the likely restriction of Apple's app to WiFi only and not the cellular network. That, however, proved to not be a limitation with today's release.

Black Friday shaping up to be a mixed bag

November 17, 2008

The Idaho Statesman reports today that Boise Town Square mall won't open at crazy hours on Black Friday. Last year the largest shopping center in Bosie was among several shopping centers nationally which opened near midnight for sales that were billed as extraordinary. While there were some problems with last year's 1 AM opening it would not take much to imagine that the austere consumer spending reports figure into the decision as well.

Boise needs an Apple store

July 31, 2008

An Apple store is so very desperately needed in Boise. Please Apple if you're listening don't leave us stuck between long drives and our unsatisfactory local choices. Sure we have Boise Mac Life which looks like a great store. When you look a little deeper, though, the advice has been suspect (should one really wait six months to start using Leopard?), the prices are inflated (the "cash discount" price is the list price and the list price shown is higher) and the service leaves us wanting.

Earlier this week we returned home and the MacBook hard drive promptly died. When it came back today it had the wrong OS on it -- a problem I've never encountered with Apple's service directly. Sure it had a nice embroidered Marware keyboard cover, but the time I'm left looking at that waiting to reinstall the operating system on a blank disk just so I can then do the file recovery is making me not like it so much. (Though I sense there are some Drupal keyboard covers in the offing).

Problems combining PDF's in Automator in 10.5

November 25, 2007

Recently getting into job looking mode has led me to brush off the Automator routines for combining PDF documents into one document. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working in OS X 10.5 (or 10.5.1). A Apple Discussion Forum post suggests I'm not the only one encountering the problem.

When you run the action in Automator it works like a charm. When running the action as a plug-in in the Finder the action swirls for a moment and then nothing happens. From my testing it does not seem to matter what is done with the output of "Combine PDF Pages" nothing happens from there on.

Apple to ship macs with Windows installed 'very soon'

November 8, 2007

It is a day early for Friday funnies but this email from Examsoft today was too good to pass up:

Dear Administrator,

SofTest was certified to run on Mac OS X running Windows XP with the beta version of Boot Camp in the spring of 2006. August 31, 2007 marked completion of our first complete academic year (9/1/06 - 8/31/07) supporting this platform. Over this past academic year no issues have been reported to us running SofTest on this platform with either XP or Vista. We purchased the new Leopard OS (with the now supported version of Boot Camp) and have tested SofTest running XP and Vista on this platform without incident. SofTest is now certified to run on Leopard through Boot Camp. We will continue to support SofTest's use on this platform moving forward.

iPhone, gPhone, Androids and the company you keep

November 7, 2007

So the much awaited gPhone, nee the Android OS for the open handset alliance, debuted this week. Yawn. So Google's going to hock an OS that while it has the trendy underpinnings of Linux and the Open Source code-word attached won't at the end of the day (or year rather) give us much more than we already have on our Blackberries, Treos and iPhones. (Not to even mention the plethora of Windows Mobile cell phones with these capabilities).

Subscribe to Apple