“Hey I’ve got an idea, let’s release an amazing new music service, and completely shun our biggest user-base and our most popular product!” (not an actual quote, just a dramatization)
This is Microsoft’s idea of how to roll out a new music service – don’t offer it to the hundreds of millions of users of their current flagship consumer PC operating system, Windows (7).
Or here’s another great idea, make it first available on your game console (XBOX). Who listens to music while they are trying to play a game or watch TV (and I don’t mean watch TV through the XBOX)? Oh but there’s an additional $60 per year charge to listen to music on your game console versus other platforms.
How do they come up with this stuff? This is a clear case of management by committee. Straight stupid. When they force me off my Zune subscription with the 10 songs to keep per month, I’m going straight to Spotify with my money.
Longtime readers of this blog will know that I have a focus on, and a personal interest in, PIM (personal information management). And while I've made a lot of progress the last couple of years in getting my PIM solution defined, the one missing piece has always been that I was unable to create new calendar entries that had alerts (reminders), using my preferred alerting method (which is a series of emails from Google Calendar), except by using the "full" (desktop) version of the Google Calendar web page.
I couldn't (get entries with preferred reminders) in the iPhone calendar app. I couldn't in Microsoft Outlook on the Windows desktop. I couldn't in the mobile Google calendar page.
But let me summarize my PIM solution so that you have the context. It's a triangle with 3 corners.
First corner: Outlook runs on the desktop for calendar, contacts, and email when I am there. It also provides another key component - backup of the cloud. Many folks are learning the rashness of not keeping a local copy of what is in the cloud. The company goes under, or the servers go down, or your account is compromised or deleted or locked out, and you are done. But not if you have a local backup.
Second corner: Google is my current cloud PIM solution for calendar, contacts, and email. They have highly functional and efficient web-based clients to fill every gap. They have mature API's and robust standards support.
Third corner: iPhone/iPad is my mobile client of choice. Apple has a unique focus on the user. They understand the toaster paradigm (people don't want to configure drivers, manage updates, and reboot their toaster, they just want to push a button and make toast). Apple's products, for the most part, strive to get out of the way and let you do what you came to do.
I should note here that I do not try to add iCloud as another cloud provider. It might be possible, but it doesn't make sense to make things more complicated than necessary. I do think the interesting thing with iCloud is it is vertical integration (it's for Apple products) and thus will always tend to lead to insularity rather than homogeneity, which goes against the whole point of the cloud in my opinion. Very interesting to me.
The coolest part of the triangle is getting them all syncing back and forth. That means a change on any one is replicated on both the other corners. And this has to be "non-rickety" - adding a phone number to a contact on one platform can't cause the email address to go away on another.
I actually bought a product to take care of syncing Google to Outlook, after a long period of research and trial and error. I'd prefer something from Google or Microsoft, but alas. The product I bought is gSyncit (http://www.fieldstonsoftware.com/software/gsyncit3 ).
I use a host of connections on the iPhone to sync back and forth with Google. In fact I use a different one for each of mail, calendar, and contacts. I use "Exchange” account for contacts, “Other” (Pop/Smtp) for email, and the “Gmail” account for Calendars. Actually it was moving to that last one that is part of the final fix. More on that in a minute.
Note in my diagram that the last connecting line (between Outlook and the iPhone) is grayed out. I am not syncing these two because Google takes care of that. I could do a sync with either iTunes or with iCloud directly between them, but I don’t see the benefit at this point.
Some other miscellaneous parts of my PIM solution follow:
| TYPE | SOLUTION | COMMENTS |
| Notes | Evernote | The notes are in their cloud, and Evernote has desktop, iOS, and web clients which all sync with their cloud. |
| Notes | OneNote | Second choice, but I'm evaluating it because it is more accepted in business and now has an iOS client and can sync to the MS cloud Skydrive. |
| Tasks | Toodledo | Tasks on their website, and there is a web client and iOS clients. Prefer the organization over Remember The Milk. I'm not currently syncing tasks back to the desktop, but I just read that gSyncIt has expanded to Toodledo (and Evernote and a mess of others). |
| Passwords/Bookmarks | eWallet | No cloud yet, but they have wifi sync between the desktop and iOS clients, very secure, supports many types of information. |
| Passwords/Bookmarks | Lastpass/Xmarks | For bookmarks and passwords associated with websites, this can be more easy to use on the desktop, because they integrate with the desktop browser. Not as easy to use on iOS, but they do have apps. |
| Music | Zune | I have Zunes still and use Zune software and the subscription service. |
| Podcasts | Zune | |
| TV/Movies | misc | I use Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and iTunes for TV and Movies. There’s still a lot of innovation to come in this category. |
| Pictures/Videos | na | I keep all of these local, and back them up. I use explorer to get them off the iPhone. I don’t sync them around. |
| Backup | iDrive | offsite file backup |
Ok, finally on to the topic in the title. How did I finally discover a way to create calendar entries with my preferred email reminders on something other than the desktop version of Google calendar?
Like I said above, the first key is switch from whatever iPhone account you are using for Google calendars (probably Exchange) and use Google Sync (listed as “GMAIL!” in add accounts). Google Sync will use your default reminders set in Google calendar if you don’t add them in iPhone. This was a revelation. I found out about it here - http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/mobile/sxF0iQs7bR4 . As noted in that forum though, this breaks multiple calendars, which is a problem as that is how I follow the rest of the family. They point you to the following URL http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/ with some instructions - http://www.knowliz.com/2009/02/how-to-sync-multiple-calendars-with.html but that didn’t work for me, my other calendars never showed up. Then finally I found - http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151674&topic=13950&ctx=topic which lead me to https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect . I was able to successfully add my other calendars there, and have them show up on my iPhone.
So finally, after literally years, my PIM search is done. Only remaining question is, how long with this fragile peace last?
“Someone I know” recorded some video on the iPhone of a special family moment. They held the iPhone up and down as you would usually hold it (except when watching a movie or YouTube, etc.).
I moved the video off the phone, in order to share it with family and friends. I discovered not only was the aspect ratio of the video backwards, but the video played sideways (correcting the aspect issue) in most standard video-playing software (besides iTunes and Quicktime).
So I thought “Handbrake” of course, because I was planning to make the file size smaller for uploading anyhow. Long story short I was frustrated and denied that day. I ended up settling for WMVs from Windows Live Movie Maker, and they came out awful.
Fast forward a couple of months (sometimes it helps to let a problem stew for awhile). Some more Google searches, and I came across a free, open source tool called “avidemux” (http://avidemux.sourceforge.net). It flipped the video (back to being taller than wider) and then even allowed me to crop (the top and bottom of) the video so as to fix the aspect ratio. Genius!
So if you happened to take video with the iPhone up and down, and want to share it but either the non-standard aspect ratio is a problem, or the video appears flipped on it’s side, try avidemux.
Finally some official guidance from Apple (or perhaps this was out there and none of my searches turned it up?)
There’s a new feature in iTunes to go along with some of the cloud functionality now rolling out. One part of that is basically syncing all of the pcs and devices when you buy something new. Automatic Downloads is how that is handled in iTunes (the computer-side).
But a side-effect nobody has mentioned that I can find, is that to turn all that on, you basically are turning off the prompt to login with your Apple account when you update or buy new apps. This is important to me so my kids can’t do something bad to my credit card if I accidentally leave my PC logged in. Up to now it prompts for those credentials for everything. But once I enabled Automatic Downloads that went away, and nothing I could find would turn it back on again. Suffice it to say Automatic Downloads are now disabled. I just wish I had back the time it took me to figure this out!
This is in reference to updating the iOS apps in iTunes, irrespective of whether there is an iOS device attached at the time or not.
To update the apps go to the “Apps” item under the Library section on the left of iTunes in the navigation area. Then choose “Check for Updates” from the bottom area of iTunes. If there are updates available there will be a popup, which when clicked, results in iTunes main area showing a page from the iTunes store listing the apps that have updates. In the top right will be a button labeled, “Download all free updates”, which avoids the work of downloading each update individually.
For the last couple of days, roughly 3 or 4, when I click this button nothing happens. But I can still download the updates individually. The only information I’ve found is on an Apple forum, however there is no fix indicated yet. It does confirm that this is happening to other people.
Got the new version of iTunes, to go along with Lion et.al. I go to look at an app that I hear the price has gone down on, and the button with the price just says “Downloaded” now. Yes, I know I already own it. However there are a bunch of reasons why it would be nice to see the current price anyhow – perhaps to give it as a gift, or give advice to friends on whether to get it, etc. This is just plain annoying.
So I found it confusing to figure out what is and what isn’t available today. Here’s what I have been able to figure out:
1. On the iPhone/iPad/Touch – in the “App Store” app, there is a new “Purchased” tab (along the bottom) where you can get any of the apps you have purchased before with your iTunes account, onto your device without syncing with desktop iTunes.
2. On the iPhone/iPad/Touch – in the “iTunes” app, there is a new “Purchased” tab (along the bottom) where you can get any of the music you have purchased before with your iTunes account, onto your device without syncing with desktop iTunes.
Now there is one additional item that was supposed to be available and is not yet, at least for me. That is iTunes 10.3, which will enable similar “Purchased” music (and some book management functionality?) for Macs and PCs.
Seems like today, for the first time, iTunes recognizes that I have multiple devices of the same type that would presumably take the same big honking OS update. I downloaded the most recent iOS update for one iPhone, and when went to update the second device (which is the same version of hardware) iTunes skipped the download and went right into extraction. Never happened before (and I’ve been watching for it). Way to conserve global bandwidth Apple, which must somehow save some oil and greenhouse gases somewhere, right?
Great article on the trend away from web sites to cloud applications and the business drivers thereof on Wired:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1
I had not considered this particular discussion (future of www) from this angle before, due to a lack of interest in advertising, which in light of the article appears to be akin to a lack of interest in money, and something of a blind spot. I have previously explored the idea of the internet and http being the new general purpose network, many times, but perhaps not on this blog.
The term cloud computing really begins to make sense here as well. I have been telling people to just substitute the word “internet” for cloud computing. But as this article makes clear (without actually saying it), is that cloud computing is the internet as a backend, without it’s default client, www. It’s a storage device, a computing platform, a delivery network. All these new custom apps are the front end client, or will be. Thus Google’s new Chrome Store, a place to now sell us, as apps, the very content and functionality we’ve been viewing for free as web pages for so long, begins to make perfect scary sense.
There’s a lot more to say about this topic. For instance it’s various back-stories of standard business cycles and even lifecycles. Birth, growth, learning, periods of discovery and wildness, time of work and contribution, injury, sickness, aging, death. But I don’t want to distract from the focus of Wired’s article. I was all for “apps” when they were just an alternate means to reach new audiences with our web content, but now that I can see this new angle of apps being yet another nefarious plot by brick and mortar big business to retain their stranglehold on my wallet and attention. Yikes!
Just prepend your searches with:
site:itunes.apple.com/us/
For example put the following in Google’s search bar:
site:itunes.apple.com/us/app guitar pedal
This will yield a search results URL similar to this:
I got the idea from a comment to Tim Bray’s blog post about the problems with finding good apps:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/07/18/How-to-run-an-App-store
Well I just typed my first significant document in Pages, the Apple word processor, on the iPad. It worked surprisingly well! The formatting options were intuitive. Once I turned the device to landscape, I found I could type at full speed as long as I looked at the keyboard. The excellent auto-correction made up for any inaccuracies resulting from the lack of actual keyboard buttons. Amazing! I wouldn't want to do any copying (where having to look at the original document would make it hard to watch the virtual keyboard). I imagine positioning the iPad is important to ergonomics. I am using a music stand, which provides a lot of support and flexibility.
Things got ugly when I went to transfer the device to my Windows laptop via iTunes however. I went ahead and performed a wired sync. I could not find the document. So I looked in iTunes, and saw that under the Apps tab there is a File Sharing section, with a list of Apps and Documents. Clicking on the Pages app did not bring up any related documents. I went back to the iPad, and found an Export option, and chose to export to PDF. Going back to iTunes, I then saw my document in the list. So I clicked the Save To button, and saved the PDF to the desktop. However when I went to view the document in Adobe Reader, I got a message that the embedded font could not be expanded, and the document looked very similar to Braille when viewed. A bunch of dots in a rows where the words should be. In short a lot of work with a poor result.
http://iponderus.com/2010/04/itunes-91-update-failed-on-windows-7.html
Today brings another iTunes update. Once again I tried to use the updater, downloaded the ~90mb of files, and had it fail close to the end.
At least I remembered what had worked last time, as it wasn’t so long ago. I went to Apple’s site and downloaded the full 64bit iTunes installer. I ran that. It did throw the error below 3 times, but I was able to get past it by clicking retry.
This makes the 3rd time the iTunes update has failed for me.
I just noticed I never wrote this up. The bummer is I have lost the information on the error and the fix. I’ll try to muddle through anyhow :).
This was the iTunes update for the iPad. Well no matter how I tried to install it, it kept failing.
I googled it a million different ways, and though there were a lot of hits on “iTunes update failed to install”, nothing really matched my syptoms, nor did any of the fixes people recommended fix my problem.
I think what I ended up doing was going to Apple’s main site and just downloading the regular download of iTunes/Quicktime, and running that.
I never did find out what the problem was, however I should note this is the second time I have had it. I don’t remember how I got out of it the first time either.
But I did want to post this anyhow, just to add it to the pile of hits to validate that yes, there’s something wrong here.
[Update] I did find the error description, “errors occurred while installing the updates. if the problem persists, choose Tools > download only and try installing manually”.
I have been annoyed for quite awhile that I could no longer find a link to Advanced Search in the iTunes store. There used to be one once I navigated to the Apps part. I could still get there, by doing a search, as your search results show up in Advanced Search, but that is not my idea of elegant, much less efficient, in fact I found it quite aggravating.
Today I discovered that there is a “Search” menu item in the “Store” menu. Not in the body of the iTunes store, but actually in the iTunes application menus. Takes me right to what I want.
I was wondering about snagging TV and Movie video from iTunes, and how it would look on my TV, especially if it went through my iPhone first..
Gizmodo, a year ago, spelled it out pretty clear:
As for iPhones/iPods – it looks like you get a standard def file with the higher def download, which goes to the iPhone.
