Tag: Apple

iPO’d

Within the last month or so, the battery life of my five-year-old, third-generation iPod dropped to almost nothing. It was too old to justify sending it back to Apple for one of its expensive battery-switch jobs, but too functional to toss out. So I sent away to a company that promised to sell me a battery and easy installation instructions for just $33, a price that included shipping. Sounded pretty good to me.

The battery showed up last night. According to the instructions, and to a really nifty online video, all I had to do was wave this blue plastic tool (included) in the general vicinity of my iPod, and the case would magically, and safely, come apart so that I could make the switch without causing any damage to the insides. (I exaggerate only slightly.)

Let me cut to the chase and tell you there was no way on earth that case was coming apart with the magic blue tool. I enlisted the help of Media Nation Jr., who opened it the only way I think it could have been done: with a utility knife and a screwdriver.

The sides ended up slightly worse for the wear, but he was able to make the switch without incident and put things back together the way they were before I had attempted my blue-tool magic. It was pretty easy — no forcing anything, no pushing anything around.

And yet. Now that it’s back together, the headphone jack doesn’t work. If you squish things around, you’ll get some momentary sound, but you can’t sit there and listen to the thing. The other end — the slot used to charge it, transfer music and play through my car stereo — works just fine, which makes me wonder whether there’s some sort of headphone adapter I could get. For now, though, it looks like I’ve got a car-only iPod, which takes care of maybe two-thirds of my needs.

I’m not singling out the battery company because the battery seems fine. I suppose it’s not the company’s fault that it felt it had to lie emphasize the positive about how easy it would be to crack open the iPod. But, as careful as MNJ was, the difficulty he had in opening it up is obviously why the headphone jack got damaged.

All of which means that I’m now iPod-less, more or less. And wondering why Apple had make the thing so difficult to pull apart.

Technology Tuesday

We are celebrating in Media Nation. The AirPort Express really did configure itself.

I called Apple customer service, and a terrific guy walked me through it. I think what happened yesterday was (a) I messed around and screwed up the AirPort’s internal settings; (b) incompetently performed a hard reset; (c) then did it properly, but couldn’t configure the AirPort because it needed to be reset.

Anyway, we are back in business. Now I need to catch up on some e-mail.

Technology Monday

Which is another way of saying all is not right in Media Nation.

Got the digital box from Comcast this morning. I only had to go back once before everything was working properly.

Now I am dealing with our wireless Internet problem. I picked up an AirPort Express at the Apple Store after talking with a guy at the Genius Bar who seemed pretty knowledgeable (if not quite a genius). Here’s what I’m trying to do:

  • Attach the cable coming in from outside the house to the back of the cable modem.
  • Run an Ethernet cable from the back of the cable modem to the AirPort Express.
  • Set up a wireless network using the AirPort Utility software.

I’ve come close a couple of times. I’ve had a strong signal coming from the AirPort. By all appearances, we should be good to go.

But none of our Macs will connect to the Internet. (For the moment, I’m running the EtherNet cable directly into the back of the family iMac. Very frustrating.) And then sometimes, when I try again, the AirPort doesn’t even show up in AirPort Utility.

I’ve got a 7:15 p.m. appointment at the Genius Bar, and I’m hoping someone will walk me through it step by step.

Tweaking Gmail with IMAP

It’s tech week at Media Nation. Fresh from foisting my video issues on you, I thought I’d give an update on my ongoing efforts to make Gmail dance to my tune.

Taking some excellent advice from a few astute readers, I set up Apple Mail to engage in two-way communication with Gmail via IMAP. As promised, this proved to be a far better set-up than accessing Gmail via POP. With IMAP, Apple Mail is more or less in constant contact with Gmail, syncing messages and folders so that what’s on my hard drive is exactly the same as what’s in my Gmail account.

One thing that surprised me after I first set up Apple Mail was that copies of all my Gmail messages (and I save pretty much everything except spam) were downloaded automatically to my hard drive. I suppose that’s the idea. But what about when an iPhone user sets up IMAP communications with Gmail? Do all those messages get downloaded to the iPhone, too? That doesn’t make much sense.

Now, here’s the best part. My biggest problem with Gmail is the way it interfaces with my Northeastern account. I had set up Gmail so that it would grab my NU mail. But occasionally there are delays of an hour or more — usually not a big deal, but sometimes critical. Also, although I haven’t found any specific examples for a while, I swear that there were occasions when important NU mail never made it to Gmail.

So, I reconfigured Gmail to stop receiving NU mail, and then set up a separate Northeastern account in Apple Mail using POP (no IMAP available). Now all my NU mail is downloaded directly to my hard drive, bypassing Gmail completely. And once I’ve got it, I can move it into Apple Mail folders that are then synced to Gmail and its labeling system. It gives me all the advantages of Gmail with none of the disadvantages.

I had hoped to be able to sync Gmail Contacts with my Apple Address Book. But to do that, you need an iPhone or an iPod Touch, or a willingness to hack your Mac. Fortunately, it was simple to export my Gmail Contacts as vCards and then import them into Address Book.

All of which means that I’ve attained e-mail nirvana, right? Well, not quite. Here are some issues that probably can’t be solved, and that I’m trying to decide whether I can live with or not:

  • Cloud computing is better than desktop computing. The single best thing about Gmail is that you’re doing everything on Google’s servers. You don’t have to worry about which computer you’re working on. And you don’t have to have a bunch of different programs open. I’ve now got Apple Mail and Address Book running pretty much all the time, and that’s on top of Firefox, NewsFire, Word and whatever else I’ve got running.
  • Gmail is more aesthetically pleasing than Apple Mail. And it’s not just aesthetics. Gmail lets you compose a perfectly formatted HTML message. Apple Mail is stuck in RTF, even though it seems perfectly capable of reading HTML. I often find myself switching to Gmail to compose, secure in the knowledge that IMAP will bring everything back together in the end.
  • Labels are better than folders. Apple Mail uses folders. Gmail uses labels. IMAP makes a seamless transition from folders to labels. But, in Gmail, you can assign more than one label to a message. You can’t do that with folders.
  • No more Gmail Chat. Not unless I fire up Gmail. I don’t use it that much anyway, but I like to know it’s there.

What’s my bottom line? I haven’t quite decided yet. In a perfect world, I would stick with Gmail on the Web, but my Northeastern account is enough of a complicating factor that a hybrid solution probably makes more sense.

One thing I have not yet done is take up another reader’s suggestion and take Mailplane for a test drive. I did poke around the site a little bit, and I’m not sure it would make my life any easier. If anyone has tried it, I’d be interested to know what you think.

For that clean, squeaky Gmail Soap feeling, click here.

Sometimes evil works

Leander Kahney offers an interesting case study in how one visionary has proved all the tech catch phrases about transparency and openness to be wrong.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Kahney writes in Wired, has transformed his company by designing closed systems, screaming at his employees, suing bloggers and even parking his Mercedes in a handicapped zone. The Macintosh, the iPod and the iPhone, Kahney notes, all live in entirely separate universes from the rest of technology. Yet people clamor for them because they’re willing to give up some interoperability for products that work better.

All of this, he observes, goes against the “don’t be evil” slogan coined by Google, which encapsulates the ethos of Silicon Valley. Evil combined with genius works, in other words.

That’s fine, but I’m still holding out for a Google phone.

YouTube and the iPhone

I thought Jesse Noyes might have fallen into Steve Jobs’ famed reality-distortion zone when he reported in today’s Herald that the Apple iPhone will be able to play YouTube videos. After all, the iPhone is already supposed to come equipped with a full-featured version of the Web browser Safari. How could this be news?

Turns out that Noyes is on to something. Here’s what Apple says:

iPhone has a special YouTube player that you can launch right from the home screen. So now you can access and browse YouTube videos wherever you go. And when you find a video you want to send your friends, iPhone can even create an email with the link in it for you.

But what does this mean? Is Apple saying that YouTube will work better with the “special YouTube player”? Or is it saying that YouTube won’t work at all without it? If the latter, how can Safari for the iPhone be billed as a fully functional browser? Again, here’s what Apple says:

With its advanced Safari browser, iPhone lets you see any web page the way it was designed to be seen, then easily zoom in by simply tapping on the multi-touch display with your finger.

I’m scratching my head.

Update: Geoff gets to the bottom of this. Safari for the iPhone won’t support Adobe Flash, at least not in its first incarnation. (So much for its being a full-featured Web browser.) YouTube and a slew of other sites — including NYTimes.com, featured in iPhone ads — use Flash video. So there you go.

Protection racket

Here’s something most of you already know, but which news reports like this one consistently miss: The digital-rights-management scheme on music sold by Apple’s iTunes Store is so weak that it’s scarcely worth mentioning.

It’s pretty simple: (1) Download a copy-protected song or an album from iTunes; (2) burn it onto a CD, which you are allowed to do. That’s it. The CD is as free of copy protection as one you would buy in a store. Thus you can re-rip it to any format you like.

Which means that I can’t see why people are so excited about the deal announced yesterday by Apple and EMI.