Being the homepage of Matt Gibson, a random geek, writer and photographer from Bristol.
Marco Arment has a good response to Matt Alexander’s suggestion that the e-reader is already dead.
Most telling for me was what I thought Marco was going to say in his last paragraph. I think it could equally well read: ‘I don’t think the e-reader is “doomed” at all. It may just be relegated to a fringe device for reading nerds, but then so has the book.’
In my last post, I described the problems I was having syncing manual podcast playlists between iTunes and my iPhone after I upgraded to iTunes Match/iCloud. Well, it looks like I got an early Christmas present from YouOverRotated, who commented:
I was in the same exact situation, except mine’s a BMW, not a Mini =). I found that if you disable podcast syncing, do a sync, and then re-enable podcast syncing and sync again, your podcast playlists will come back. I hope that works for you too.
As soon as I got back to my iMac, I tried this workaround. Here’s what I did, exactly:
So, did it work? I fired up the Music app on my phone. Now, my MINIn_* playlists are all in a folder called “iPod Playlists”. Bizarrely, when I launched the “Music” app on my phone to have a look, I now had two identically-named “iPod Playlists” folders. The first was as it was before — it contained only the Smart playlists, “MINI1_RecentlyAdded”, “MINI2_Recent_Podcasts” and “MINI5_5Star”, with no sign of the manual podcast playlist, MINI4_Special.
However, the second copy of the “iPod Playlists” folder had “MINI1_RecentlyAdded”, “MINI2_Recent_Podcasts”, “MINI3_Audiobooks”, and “MINI4_Special”, the manual playlist that was missing. (Oddly, this “duplicate-but-not-quite” folder is missing “MINI5_5Star”. I’ve no idea why.)
So, though it looks a bit broken, at least the manual podcast playlist seemed to be back on my phone. I headed out to my car, and tried it, and my stereo found all the MINIn_whatever playlists just fine, regardless of which of the two odd duplicate playlists they were in.
W00t! So, thank you very much, YouOverRotated, looks like you’re quite right — turning off podcast syncing, and then turning it back on, seems to be a workaround to this odd problem. Yet another wacky workaround to make podcasts work properly in iTunes — but at least it’s working!
I hope this helps anyone else who’s been having trouble. Happy holidays!
EDIT: Whoop! Looks like YouOverRotated’s comment below was spot-on. Thanks! See my new post on how that suggestion got my playlist syncing working again.
Oh, iTunes. Does it have to be this way?
So, I now have iTunes Match, with all of its associated Cloudy goodness. But I also have a problem. Can anyone help me solve it?
Here’s the circumstances:
Up until iCloud started raining on my parade, this all worked fine. Before I drove anywhere, I’d fire up iTunes, fill up MINI4_Special with the podcasts I wanted in the order I wanted, sync my iPhone, and it would all be there and waiting for me when I plugged the phone into the car and pressed button 4. If I fancied listening to music for a while, I could press another button to listen to another playlist, then later hit “4” again and go back to the podcasts.
But now — disaster!
I paid my £21.99 for iTunes Match, and turned on the iCloud stuff on my Mac and my iPhone. And now I can’t sync my MINI4_Special podcast playlist with the iPhone any more. In iTunes, the playlist has a little sad picture of a cloud with a line through it. It tells me:
This playlist is not eligible for iCloud. iCloud playlists can only contain music. “MINI4_Special” contains other media types, and will not be uploaded.
And I can’t for the life of me find any way of getting the playlist back. No matter what I do, it won’t sync to the phone.
Did I just pay Apple £21.99 to shoot myself in the foot? Am I being dumb? Bueller? What am I missing? All help gratefully received.
Over the last few years, I’ve slowly been enjoying my day job less and less. It went in one direction as I went in another. Still, it was a decent source of monthly income, and while it was challenging work, on one level it was at least easy to keep on doing it, day after day.
But it’s difficult to ignore the issue when seven hours of every day is spent doing something you’re just not that fond of, even if the people are nice and you can get the boat to work.
So, a while back, I started digging around to find some more personally-interesting bits of the programming trade. First, I started learning about the web (although I was at university at just the right time to see the web kicking off, I went straight into the back offices of the finance industry when I graduated, and so haven’t touched it much.)
The web stuff led to a bit of work for my friend Benjohn, who makes Get Running (and also got me started jogging, but that’s another story.)
Long story short, I’ve spent a fair bit of my free time retraining myself, learning about HTML, PHP, CSS, XML, JSON and all the other acronyms and abbreviations with which the web likes to surround itself. On top of that, I’ve done odd jobs like designing icons for iPhone apps (I did the Sun Scout icon, and all its little suns, too. Not bad for a first attempt, I thought…) and familiarised myself with a whole bunch of different tools.
But doing all this stuff on top of a day job, as well as keeping up all the weird and wonderful spare-time things I like to do (from taking up photography to interviewing people for the BBC!) has left me pretty much exhausted and anxious and lacking in time to unwind.
So. Enough is enough, I thought. Part of my long-term strategy was to save up a chunk of rainy-day money, and I recently decided to declare now as my rainy day.
I have therefore quit my day job. This may seem a foolhardy move during a recession, but it was either that or lose my sanity, I think. As of a couple of weeks ago, the 21st September, I am no longer slaving away at a corporate desk writing complicated SQL queries and calculating loss ratios.
Where do I go from here? Well, first of all, more education. For the next few months, I plan to throw myself into a crash course on mobile app development. I’ve got lots of excellent resources lined up, from books like Tapworthy
Now, that’s not all I’ll be doing — I’d probably go stir-crazy learning on my own at home for too many days in a row — so I’m sure there will be more of my usual spare-time weirdness cropping up. Last week I took a couple of days to put together my first Arudino project, for example, and I’m sure other whims will arrive. And I will have to make some attempts to socialise; my longest conversation today was with the lovely Fran at Boston Tea Party, and I think we made it to five sentences.
But the good news is, for a while at least, I have seven extra hours in the day, and my weird spare-time projects should at last have some real spare time to be done in. And maybe I’ll have a bit more time to blog about them, too…
I’m sure the release of Lion will be accompanied by an entire pride of in-depth reviews. In fact, people have been doing warm-ups to get ready for John Siracusa’s mammoth review…
So, instead of digging too deep, or tackling any of the more controversial features — and it’ll be interesting to see which generates the most arguments out of Resume, Launchpad, iCal’s leather look, or just the new scrollbars — I’m going to touch on a few teensy, out-of-the-way Lion areas that I particularly like.
Photo Booth gets a refresh with Lion, most noticeably the Full Screen mode, with its wood panelling and curtains. But the feature I like most could easily pass you by. Photo Booth has always had a “take four snaps” photo mode, where you get the chance to take four poses. But it would only export the “four up” photo as a single photo, with all four snaps on it. Which is fine as a gimmicky shot, but not that useful per se.
With Lion, though, you get the choice. You can export the four-up ensemble as before, or click to zoom on any photo of the four and then export that photo individually — just drag and drop. Snap four sequential shots with a single click, and pick the one that works! As an avid DailyBoother, this is going to make my life easier.
As with Photo Booth, the “floating dictionary” window is not new in Lion. It’s been around for years, but is one of the lesser-known features of OS X. In Snow Leopard, hover your mouse over a word hit Ctrl-Cmd-D, and a little mini-dictionary pane floats up and defines the word for you, in Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Wikipedia.
In Lion, this dictionary has been given a makeover. The word you’re defining is highlighted in yellow, the pop-up is both snazzier and more informative, and, crucially, it’s easier to invoke.
Ctrl-Cmd-D is still the keyboard shortcut, but you don’t have to be floating exactly over the word. For example, if you’re typing a document, hit Ctrl-Cmd-D and you’ll define the last word you typed.
To go with all the other new touchpad gestures in Lion, there’s also a multi-touch shortcut for the floating dictionary — a double-tap with three fingers over a word will also bring up the dictionary. Quick, and, for me, easier to remember than Ctrl-Cmd-D.1
All these little improvements have made for a much more useful Dictionary, especially for us keyboard geeks who don’t like reaching all the way over to the mouse do do stuff.
I’m quite enjoying Lion’s Full Screen mode on my tiny 11” MacBook Air. It’s definitely designed for these smaller laptops. On the other hand, some web pages have text that flows across the full width of the page, which can make lines way too long to read.
Apple have put some thought into this one, though, with my next little luxury. Open up a web page in Safari’s full-screen mode, and then push your mouse to the extreme left or right of the screen. Your mouse pointer turns to a little “sliding division” cursor, and you can squeeze the screen in from both sides until it hits a good width.
Bonus tip: in the rest of Lion, you can now drag from any edge of an app window or dialog box — top, bottom, left or right — to start resizing it. Also — thanks for the tip, @mattgemmell — hold down Shift or Option to constrain the resize. For example, Option-drag in from the left-hand edge of a window and the right-hand size will simultaneously squeeze in to match.
I’m straying onto the beaten track a bit here, but I want to mention iCal’s natural language parsing, because it’s a good keyboard-user-friendly change.
If you can bear to look at the new leather iCal, click that “+” button at the top. Now type “Dinner with Jane, 7pm Friday.” Pop! And there’s your new event, with the description, time and date ready-populated in the appropriate fields.
This kind of natural event entry will be familiar to users of Google Calendar. If you want to see it done really well on the Mac, try Fantastical.
Cuteness
If you’ve used the new iTunes, you have a hint of what a lot of icons are like in Lion. Everything’s gone grey. Now, even if you miss the colour, I hope you’ll admit that someone’s clearly put a lot of time into these new greyscale icons, and I think they look pretty spiffy, especially the Finder and and Mail.app sidebar icons.2
But my favourite new icons have to be the big “something’s not quite right” icons. It’s just like Apple to pay attention to icons even in areas where they won’t be seen all the time. The big greyscale Safari icon that appears if you try to load a web page when you’re not connected to the internet is good, by my hands-down fave is the big cute parachute icon that appears if you try to use AirDrop without having Wi-Fi turned on: beautiful, friendly, and sitting inset in a subtle texture background.
Finally, “About This Mac” (Apple Menu → About This Mac → More Info) gets a makeover. The part I most like is the Storage section, where you get a coloured-bar overview of your disk usage split down by category, very similar to the view of your iPod storage in iTunes. It’s a very pretty overview, even if most of my space is currently taken up by “Other” — this may be more useful for the non-geeks, whose files are probably a bit easier to categorise…
(If you want to see a really pretty disk space usage app, though, ignore the built in free stuff and give £13 to the developers of DaisyDisk, which is a gorgeous alternative to traditional treemap-style disk usage viewers.)
Geeks will be happy to know that OS X’s detailed System Information app is still available from the “System Report” button.
And that wraps it up for my little Lion luxuries. As I said, I tried to keep off the beaten track with these — have you encountered any more hidden gems in Lion that others might have missed? If so, leave a comment…