RHFtech™ Write on Tech » apple

Want to upgrade to an iPhone 4S?

Richard Frisch — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:07:12 +0000

Check your eligibility here

Apple’s Post PC Era explained (redux)

Richard Frisch — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:08:02 +0000

Are you interested in buying the new iPhone? The next generation iPhone will be shipping very soon and Apple will turn on free iCloud services simultaneously. Come to my presentation and learn what you this means for you.

Steve Jobs says, “We are living in the post PC era.”

What does that mean?
Is he correct? (Yes.)
Do you need to do anything?

I will present Apple’s Post PC Era (redux) for the Friends of the Weston Library Lunch and Learn Program .

The talk will be about:

Evolving cloud computing initiatives — Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
Lion – Mac OS X version 10.7
iOS 5 for the iPhone, iPad, iPad Touch and 2nd generation Apple TV
iCloud services, including Photo Stream, Documents in the Cloud and iTunes Match.
How do Apple’s new products and services work with Windows computers and Android devices?

The presentation is Wednesday, September 14, 2011, 12pm (noon) — 1:30pm.

It is at the Weston Public Library Meeting Room, 56 Norfield Road, Weston, CT. Google directions – http://g.co/maps/zjx5

The meeting begins at noon. Bring your lunch and a beverage.

I hope to see you there.

OS X Lion: Close application and turn off Resume

Richard Frisch — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 20:22:05 +0000

Apple added the Resume feature to Lion. Enabled applications save their window(s) when closing and open up to the same state when restarted.

What if you don’t want an application to reopen your last document(s)?

Hold down the option/alt key when clicking Quit and it will change to Quit and Discard Windows.

Quit menu

Quit and Discard Windows menu

Mac OS X Lion: It just works, sometimes.

Richard Frisch — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 15:33:10 +0000

This week I received a forwarded email complaining about a bad experience a user had when she rushed to upgrade her Mac from Snow Leopard to Lion. She wrote a lengthy note about her awful, frustrating encounter with the king of the beasts. After attempting to install Lion OS X 10.7 herself and then spending 7 hours with an Apple Genius, she reverted her computer back to Snow Leopard.

Her biggest issue was with the incompatibility of her version of Microsoft Office and Lion. She complains,

…Microsoft, the evil empire, has refused to make any changes that would allow Office:Mac 2008 to work with Lion!!!!! Now I expect that sort of sleazy behavior from Bill Gates BUT what is VERY disappointing is that Apple does NOT specify that Lion will not work with Office 2008, so that downloading the $30.00 Lion App will cost you an additional $175.00 (on sale at Staples) to buy Office Mac 2011!!!!! None of the programs that we use and count on the most will work with Lion–no Word, Excell [sic], Powerpoint [sic]. Apple’s answer to this problem: a) blame Microsoft b) buy our Pages, Numbers etc. Really? I think that if people are aware of this limitation and were given advanced notice very few people would download Lion which is why they don’t warn consumers. As I wrote before, A LOT of other specialty software won’t work with Lion so Buyers Beware.

I believe she is misinformed and is running Office 2004, not the 2008 version. This post was written in Microsoft Word 2008 on a 27″ iMac running Lion. Office 2008 works fine on this machine. Microsoft states that 2004 will not work with Lion,

Office for Mac 2004 will not run on Lion.
Note: Previous MacOS versions supported Rosetta, an Apple Mac OSX bridge technology that enabled applications such as Office for Mac 2004 to run on the latest chip architecture for Mac. Because Lion no longer supports Rosetta, applications that relied on it will no longer function under the new MacOS.

Apple abandoned Rosetta in Lion. I have previously warned users of Quicken 2007 (Mac version) not to upgrade for this very reason. This is not Microsoft’s doing. It is Apple’s. Apple is very quick to dump technology and let its users suffer. Microsoft supports legacy technology much longer.

As with “unlimited” cellular plans that are not unlimited, Apple’s motto, “It just works” means “sometimes”.

Mac OS X Lion, v10.7, to upgrade or not to upgrade

Richard Frisch — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:40:26 +0000

Simple answer is you can wait. It is possible that you may never need to upgrade.

Apple released Lion as a $29.99 Mac App Store update, earlier this week. The only other way to get it is to buy a new Mac.

My experience
I bought and downloaded the almost 4GB file on Wednesday, July 20, when it was first released. I have installed it three times so far. Two installs were upgrades from Snow Leopard. One was a new, clean install to an external hard drive. The installation, whether upgrade or clean install, is simple, straight-forward and relatively quick. It takes about 30 minutes.

I find many of the user interface (UI) enhancements, like Launchpad and multi-touch gestures of no value. Apple is trying to make the Mac UI more like the iOS UI for iPhone and iPad devices. However, iPhones and iPads are touch screen devices. Pretty much no one, myself included, has a touch screen Mac, so why bother?

I like the Resume feature, which is similar to Microsoft Windows Hibernate.

The integration of Dashboard, Exposé, and Spaces into Mission Control is a subtle but inspired change.

Auto Save and Versions are useful but Apple removed the Save as… feature from many applications. This will flummox many users.

A simple, if inelegant work-around is to find a file in Finder, duplicate it and then rename the duplicate.

Character Picker is a great feature. If you hold down key, you get accented characters.

Network/File Sharing issues
I ran into a troublesome filesharing/networking issue on the upgraded Snow Leopard Macs. These Macs used to share files with each other and with Windows machine on my LAN. Lion killed this. I am not alone in this issue – https://discussions.apple.com/message/15674006#15674006.

It took me several hours of screwing around with networking and file sharing settings to fix this: to get Windows to access the Macs, to get the Macs to access Windows, and to get the Macs to access each other.

Should you upgrade now?
I suggest wait a week or two at least or better yet wait until Apple releases iOS 5 and iCloud sometime later this year. When the complete Apple post PC strategy components are in place there may be good reason to have Lion on your Mac, until then…

Transfer photos to iPad from a Mac

Richard Frisch — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 18:03:27 +0000

Two methods:

A. iTunes

Sync photos or folders

Connect iPad to Mac.
Go to iTunes.
Select iPad in the devices list in left column.
Select Photos from menu running across top of window.
Select iPhoto, or Choose folder… to sync photos. (Don’t know if you have Aperture. I do and it appears in the list above from my Mac.)

B. Dropbox

Save individual photos to the camera roll

Open Dropbox on the iPad.
Browse to the picture(s) you want to save to the iPad.
Open the photo in Dropbox.
Select the rectangle icon w/ an arrow in the menu on the upper right and choose Save Photo.

My response to an Apple fan

Richard Frisch — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 14:00:41 +0000

My last post, Apple is the value leader in personal computing, elicited the following response:

“One point he doesn’t raise is that Apple products generally get zero viruses, require zero tech support, and have longer useful lives, which actually makes them arguably cheaper.”

I didn’t raise those points -

Zero viruses
Zero tech support
Longer useful lives

because they are incorrect.

Macs are vulnerable to malware and other hacks. Last month’s exploits (Mac Malware) show this. This morning, a new story, Apple device security flaws revealed by German government watchdog reinforces this. Up until recently, the marketshare for Macs was too small for the hackers to bother. Smug Mac owners will be in for a rude awakening when they are hacked. The Mac is always the first machine to fall victim at black hat conferences. Windows 7 is more hardened against attacks than OS X.

This person is lucky they never needed tech support but Macs are like any other computer. Software gets corrupted, computers or software freeze and crash, hardware fails. Yesterday I had to repair a Mac Snow Leopard operating system that had corrupted disk permissions and a broken Keychain. There is nothing special about Macs vis-à-vis a Windows 7 computer. I work on many versions of operating systems, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux. I am agnostic. They all have pros and cons. My experience is that Windows 7 is superior to Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I suspect my arguments will fall on deaf ears if a person is a Mac fan.

Apple obsoletes it hardware and software faster than Microsoft. Perhaps this person didn’t read about Final Cut Pro X, which Apple just released, which is incompatible with FCP 7. I and many other video editors are upset about this.

Apple tosses aside technology—floppies, PowerPC chips, FireWire, and soon optical discs—with abandon. All Mac programs that pre-date Apple’s move to Intel chips (mid-2006) will no longer work when a Mac is updated from Snow Leopard to Lion later this month. People using the Mac program Quicken 2007 will be quite upset when they discover this. Microsoft supports legacy hardware and software for much longer. Heck, it is still supporting Windows XP which shipped beginning in 2001. This adds to Windows complexity but it means that Microsoft’s customers are not left out in the cold every time something is updated.

Apple is the value leader in personal computing

Richard Frisch — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 21:29:49 +0000

Most people think of Apple as selling over-priced equipment. We think of it like Mercedes, BMW or Bose. These brands stand for high quality, but are commonly perceived as over-priced, which is part of their snob-appeal.

Look at me. I can afford to overpay!

I think that perception no longer jibes with reality for Apple. It is now the value leader in personal computing.

Apple changed their corporate name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in early 2007 when they announced the iPhone. This was an indication that the management (AKA Steve Jobs) saw the company as more than a high-priced computer company.

The original pricing of the iPhone used the traditional premium pricing model Apple had followed since its founding. Yet Apple quickly backed off and put the carrier-subsidized iPhone on the same price footing as comparable smartphones. That was the first game changer.

Today Apple sells hardware into five market segments:

Cell phones – iPhones
Small, portable media players – iPods
Tablets – iPads
Computers – Macs
Miscellaneous – Apple TV, AirPort devices, mice, trackpads, keyboards…

The first three categories are a combination of iOS devices—iPhones, iPod touches, iPads— and true iPods—iPod classic, nano and shuffle models—which run the iPod OS, not iOS.

The original iPad was priced much lower than it needed to be. There was no competition and Apple faithful would have bought it if it cost $100 or possibly $200 more. But Apple chose to keep the pricing constrained and below Mac price points.

iOS devices today are usually the same price or less expensive than the competition. Samsung, Motorola, RIM, and others price their tablets and smartphones on par with or higher than Apple. In the tablet category, only ASUS seems to understand that they have to offer a different feature set and better price-points than Apple in order to compete. (See this tablet comparison table for more information.)

iPods have no true competitors today so it is hard to compare them.

PCs sold through retail channels, used for non-organizational or non-business computation, i.e. individual or home use, are either Windows PCs or Apple Macs. Windows machines are initially lower-priced than comparable Macs. However, Macs do not command as much of a premium today as they once did. Furthermore, when I look at total cost of ownership for a household running multiple computers I see no real difference.

Since the introduction of the Mac App Store to Snow Leopard earlier this year, much of Mac software is licensed to an Apple ID and not by CPU, the Microsoft model. The cost of upgrading multiple Macs to Snow Leopard was a fraction of the cost of upgrading the same number of Windows computers to Windows 7.

The cost of upgrading a household full of Macs to Lion, due shortly in July 2011, is $29.99 for all your Macs. I expect Windows 8 upgrades, due in 2012, to follow the more expensive Windows 7 per CPU pricing. Today Amazon sells a single computer Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade for $110.

iWork competes with Microsoft Office. Although I prefer Office, iWork’s applications—Pages, Numbers and Keynote—are usable. If I buy iWork I can install it on all my Macs. I don’t have to have a separate 25 digit alphanumeric product key for each computer. Microsoft charges a license fee for each CPU. (Microsoft does offer a Home and Student edition which can be installed on up to 3 computers.)

So Apple has made the software side of owning a Mac much less expensive than Windows in a multiple PC house. The multi-year effect is to make the total cost of ownership for a Mac household comparable to a Windows household.

Apple uses this same app pricing model on iOS devices. You buy the software once and can install it all your iOS devices. You don’t have to buy a new license for each iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.

When I look at the miscellaneous hardware category I think AirPort network routing devices, mice, trackpads and keyboards are still premium-priced. Apple TV is not.

From my perspective, Apple is no longer the premium-priced brand. Today they are more like Honda or Toyota in their pricing than Mercedes or BMW.

I am as surprised as you.

Apple’s Post PC Era explained

Richard Frisch — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:44:04 +0000

Steve Jobs says, “We are living in the post PC era.”

What does that mean?
Is he correct? (Yes.)
Do you need to do anything?

I will present Apple’s Post PC Era at the next meeting of the Connecticut PC Users Group (CTPC).

My talk will be about:

Lion – Mac OS X version 10.7
iOS 5 for the iPhone, iPad, iPad Touch and 2nd generation Apple TV
iCloud services, including iTunes Match.
How do Apple’s new products and services work with Windows computers and Android devices?

The meeting is the evening of Tuesday, June 28, 2011.

It is at the Silver Star Diner, East Room, 210 Connecticut Avenue (Route 1 – Post Road), Norwalk, CT. Google directions – http://goo.gl/maps/7ft5

The meeting begins at 6:30pm. My presentation will begin about 7:30pm and end at 8:30pm. The meeting is open to the public and you are welcome to stay for salad, pizza, and beverages after the meeting.

Walt Graham, CTPC’s president will host the first part of the program, starting at 6:30pm. This consists of Random Access and then a look at tools for managing Windows files.

I hope to see you there.

Fix your Mac’s desktop with HazeOver

Richard Frisch — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:07:24 +0000

Microsoft Windows makes it quite simple to know which window has the focus. That Window’s title bar is brighter than all the others. The Mac OS X desktop doesn’t have this feature so it is easy to think you are working in one window when you are not.

HazeOver is a simple, inexpensive utility that fixes the Mac desktop by dimming all objects except for the one with the system’s focus. You will never mistake which window has the focus once you run HazeOver on your Mac.

Below are two screenshots of my Mac’s desktop, first in its normal state and the second with HazeOver running. It is much easier to identify the Finder window with the system focus in the second image, isn’t it?

HazeOver is available for Snow Leopard users in the Mac App Store. It currently costs $1.99. I think it is worth the price.