Apple Offers Re-Download Feature, But Only to Americans

08. June 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: "It's a Feature", Apple, Rants · Tags: , , , ,

Being a Canadian citizen, I’m used to getting the short end of the stick when it comes to companies holding give-aways and the like. Apple is, of course, no exception.

I was excited to hear that, starting with iTunes 10.3.1, Apple would be allowing customers to download music that they had perviously purchased (before, if you bought a track/album and lost it, you would have to buy it again). In case it changes, the feature is described as:

Now you can download music you’ve previously purchased to all your devices. When you buy music from iTunes, iCloud stores your purchase history. So you can see the music you’ve bought — no matter which device you bought it on. You can access your purchase history from the iTunes Store on your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. And since you already own that music, you can tap to download your songs or albums to any of your devices.1

Note the (1) footnote indicator. That footnote reads as follows:

Available in beta now in the U.S. only and requires iOS 4.3.3 on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 (GSM model), iPod touch (3rd and 4th generation), iPad, or iPad 2, or a Mac or PC with iTunes 10.3. Previous purchases may be unavailable if they are no longer in the iTunes Store.

Emphasis mine. With any luck, once “iCloud” leaves “beta” (why are you push Beta software through the official update channel, Apple? Google should sue.) the functionality will be expanded to beyond the U.S. and let the rest of us poor suckers get back our copies of ‘Plastic Beach – Deluxe Edition’.

Apple Needs to Attend (to) Bootcamp

15. September 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Apple, Hardware, Software, Windows · Tags: , ,

My primary workstation at work is an Apple iMac 9,1 (in Apple terms, an ‘early-2009′ model), and spends 99% of its uptime running Windows 7 x64 (which actually isn’t supported on this model – you need to manually run the x64 Bootcamp .msi on the disk to install, as the setup.exe reports that 64-bit Windows isn’t supported).

During the installation of Bootcamp, though I noticed something — Apple although Apple appears to check which model of computer you’re using for compatibility purposes, it doesn’t do the same when determining which drivers to install. As such, the installation take approximately eight-billion times longer to complete than it should (sorry, I’m no good with numbers), and leaves Programs and Features looking like this:

Apple's Leftovers

I mean, really Apple? Is it really that hard to add a simple WMI call (WMIC BIOS Get SMBIOSBIOSVersion, perhaps?) and compare it to a simple CSV-file and only install the drivers required for that system?

It’s a good thing they stopped making the I’m a Mac commercials, or Justin Long would need to put on fifty pounds to account for Apple’s bloat.

Non-Tech: Unintentional Humour from Valve

14. June 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: Apple, Gaming, Microsoft, Non-Tech, OS X, Windows · Tags: , , , , ,

When Valve was first leaking details about Steam for Mac, they released a series of images parodying ‘classic’ Apple ads. This was one:

Turrets

I get what they’re trying to say – the PC is boxy and old-fashioned while the Mac is shiny and new. The unintentional humour is that while the Portal turret does it’s job adequately in its game, it’s easily defeated. The PC (or Team Fortress 2 turret) on the other hand starts out small and meek, but can be easily upgraded in to a massive powerhouse. That said, which would you rather have? Effective but locked down, or less-than-pretty but easily customizable?

Of course, I could just be reading too much in to things again.

Weighing in on the iPad

27. January 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Apple · Tags: ,

This is a first here, really. I’m not really an Apple guy (I used to have an iPhone, and I use an iMac at work that runs Windows most of the time), and I rarely comment on products that I don’t own, but really, this is just dying for picking apart.

Steve Jobs has reportedly been quoted to say, “This [the iPad] will be the most important thing I’ve ever done” – I really hope that this is just a misquote, or wrongfully attributed. Why? Well, let’s start with what we now know.

–How it looks. If you haven’t seen it, it looks basically like a huge iPod Touch with a massive bezel.

–What it runs. Apparently Apple has licensed the rights to make another ARM processor, dubbing it the “Apple A4“. Do we really need another ARM processor varient? What’s wrong with the Snapdragon?

–What it doesn’t do. Flash. Yes, really. I don’t particularly like Flash, but if they’re touting it to be ‘better than a laptop’, why are they blocking access to a large chunk of the content that’s out there?

–What it doesn’t change. It apparently going to run the iPhone OS (speculated at version 4), so you’re still locked in to the App Store and Apple’s draconian approval process. I wonder how long it will take before it’s jailbroken?

–What it lacks. Supposedly, it won’t come with 3G. Reports say that you’ll be able to tether it with a mobile device (although I wouldn’t be surprised if they only let you tether it with an iPhone), but really, if they’re saying people should use this instead of an e-book reader, why leave that out? And on the subject of e-books, who really wants to ready a 1000+ page book on an LCD screen, when you can get a Kindle 2 with an easy-on-the-eyes e-ink screen instead?

–What they screwed up on. Really, why name it the iPad? I see where they might want to leverage the branding from the iPod, but all that makes me think of is another type of product.

All and all, I think that a lot of people who bought in to the hype of this are probably pretty disappointed. The iPad? What a joke.

Update: Unconfirmed tweets are saying that it will be priced at $499, or $629 with 3G.

Update #2: Apparently you’ll be able to use connect a standard keyboard to the iPad as well. So why bother making it a tablet at all? Why not just give it a slide-out keyboard and be done with it?

Sony and Apple Will Be the Death of Me

20. October 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Apple, howto, OS X, Rants, Troubleshooting · Tags: , , ,

Argh. One of my recent tasks at work has been taking video recorded on a Sony Handycam HDR-XR200V (and HD Digital Video camera) and making the footage web-ready. Normally, the camera is a joy to work with. It’s easy to get the recordings off of it, and the software provided with it converts it in to WMV and MPEG2 quite easily. In terms of web-readiness, though….

Normally we just convert everything to WMV format, as the video is only used in-house for a short period of time and then deleted. Files are stored on our local server, so size isn’t really an issue. In this case, though, I need to put the final versions up our website so a few external people can access and download the clips. That means that 2GB+ files are completely impractical.

Digging around, I found that we had a Quicktime 7 Pro license, so I thought my problems were solved. Take the raw .MTS files, convert them to MPEG format using Sony’s utility, then use Quicktime to export them to smaller, more web-ready MP4 format. But do things ever really work out that easily?

The first problem is that although Quicktime will play .MPG files, it doesn’t have a built-in MPEG2 codec, which is the codec the Sony utility uses. Quicktime doesn’t support WMV at all. If you want support for MPEG2, you need to buy the codec from Apple. That wouldn’t be so bad (it’s less than $30 CAD), however it doesn’t recognize the audio track in the Sony-converted files. Crap.

After a few hours of near-hopeless searching through page after page of shareware and crap-ware, I finally found a solution. Take the Sony-converted MPEG2 files and convert them to .MOV format using MediaCoder, a truly free audio/video conversion suite (with a 64-bit Windows version). From there, I booted into OS X and fired them in to iMove to quickly splice a few segments together, and iMove spat out the .M4V files I needed. After that, it was a simple matter of using Quicktime Pro to make a few different versions of .MP4 files in varying levels of quality.

The system works, however it relies a lot on Apple products (not ideal if you don’t have a license, a Mac, or just hate Apple products), and takes a lot of time. The result is that my bacon has been saved, and I’ll be able to get the web-ready videos out to those who need them on time.

iPhone OS 3.1.2 and Blackra1n

13. October 2009 · 1 comment · Categories: Apple, howto, iPhone, Troubleshooting · Tags: , ,

So the other week, Apple released the latest version of the firmware for the iPhone, OS 3.1.2. Not really a lot in the way of fixes:

  • Resolves sporadic issue that may cause iPhone to not wake from sleep
  • Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart
  • Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming

However, always the optimist and hoping that maybe this update would fix the ever-present crashing Mobile Safari, and not needing to worry about needing to unlock (ever), I updated my 3G as soon as a jailbreak was available.

The update itself went smoothly, or rather, the restore did. Your best bet, with any new release of the iPhone, is to do a full Restore, and never an upgrade. This will help with performance and battery life, whereas you’re likely to have problems with an upgrade.

As soon as the Restore was finished, and after iTunes happily activated my phone, I downloaded Blackra1n, a jailbreak app by Geohot. The instructions are simple:

  1. Upgrade your phone to 3.1.2 – Note: THIS WILL UPGRADE YOUR BASEBAND! As such, you loose, possibly permanently, the ability to use Ultrasn0w, the Carrier Unlock.
  2. Run Blackra1n.
  3. Connect your iPhone
  4. Click “Make it ra1n”.

Simple, right? Well, sort of.

After you click “Make it ra1n”, your phone restarts in Recovery Mode (not DFU mode!) and you should see a picture of Geohot. However, if you have an iPhone 3G, that isn’t likely to happen. Instead, you’ll most likely see the iPhone Recovery Mode logo and Blackra1n stuck on the “Running” message. If you disconnect you’re iPhone Blackra1n will say it completed successfully, however the phone will remain in Recovery Mode. To exit, simply hold Power+Home until the screen goes black, then turn it back on.

If you check the log file Blackra1n creates in the same folder it’s run from, you’ll notice lines like:

ERROR: usb open failed while sending command

ERROR: usb open failed while sending payload

This means that no, you’re phone isn’t jailbroken. Fortunately, it’s not bricked – just reboot it and all will be well.

So, how do you fix this problem? Unfortunately you don’t. There are sites that tell you to put Blackra1n in the root of the C drive, and others that remind you to Run as Administrator, and some that say to use XP vs. Windows 7, or the other way around. The short of it is, though, it’s all crap.

I eventually got Blackra1n to work simply by running it over-and-over.

  1. Try it.
  2. It fails.
  3. Reboot phone in to normal mode (hold Power+Home until screen goes black, then turn back on normally)
  4. Repeat.

After around the 20th try, it finally completed and jailbroke the phone. Lesson learned? When all else fails, keep trying.

iPhone OS 3.1: What’s all the hubbub, bub?

22. September 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Apple, iPhone · Tags: ,

Last week I upgrade my iPhone to OS 3.1 using the iPhone Dev Team’s Pwnage Tool. As I don’t care about unlocking (Rogers is the only GSM/3G carrier in Canada, aside from Fido which is owned by Rogers), I was only interested in the jailbreak.

A few things to note: I initally made the mistake of trying to restore the custom .ipsw file in DFU mode, which gave me the dreaded 1600 and 1604 error codes. Easy enough to fix – just downgraded to the official 3.0 OS (ignoring error messages), jailbroke with Redsn0w, and then did a proper shift-restore with the pwned 3.1 .ipsw (yes, the pwnage tool only runs on OS X, but you can transfer the pwned .ipsw it creates to a PC and use the shift-restore method to jailbreak, instead of waiting for a new Redsn0w).

After the restore was done, I synced my contacts, favorites, music, etc… and reinstalled my favorite apps through Cydia without any issues. So far I’ve noticed that my battery life has improved (something rare, apparently – it probably helps that I never do a Restore From Backup), apps run and launch a lot faster, and best of all, Mobile Safari hasn’t crashed on me yet!

So far, 3.1 has been the best update yet from Apple for the iPhone – it’ll certainly be my fall-back-point if future updates aren’t as smooth.

iPhone OS 3.0 Update – First Impressions

23. June 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: iPhone, Software · Tags: ,

Sometimes there’s an advantage to only having one 3G carrier in Canada – when the OS 3.0 upgrade came out for the iPhone, I upgraded my 3G immediately without having to worry about waiting for the unlock to come out. Instead, I just waited for the Pwnage Tool (as I have access to a Mac at work, otherwise I would have had to wait slightly longer for RedSn0w) without my jail break for a few days.

So now that it’s been (nearly) a week, and I’ve had a chance to play around with the new OS with and without third-party mods, I’ve been able to come up with a few conclusions as to whether or not Apple is heading in the right direction. And, for your reading pleasure, I’ve put them in list form.

The OS 3.0 Features Themselves

  • Cut/Copy/Paste: Overall, it’s handy when you need it. I find that when I go to move the cursor around when I’m correcting a typo (of which I tend to make many), the little pop CCP pop-up often comes up right away, beckoning me to select something, as if it’s saying ‘You bitched about me not being here since you got the phone, now use me dammit!’. Unfortunately, I don’t find myself using it anywhere near as much as I thought I would. So far it’s been to dump things in to Tweets on Twitterrific, and that’s about it.
  • MMS: I rarely text anyone – my wife, occasionally, when we’re both out of the house and in different places, and maybe a friend here and there if I can’t reach them on Live Messenger/IRC/Twitter/Phone/etc…. In fact, Twitter has nearly completely replaced texting for me, and I really can’t ever see myself using MMS as most people I know don’t have phones that support it, so they just get a link from their carrier with a URL to go to find the picture. That said, I may as well just send then that anyways. Or Tweet it.
  • Tethering: Rogers, the iPhone carrier in Canada, decided that you can tether your iPhone at no extra cost if you’re paying for a data plan that’s 1GB/month or higher. I happen to be on the 1GB plan (although I rarely use even 500MB, my wireless router at home and work saving me from the rather slow 3G network), so I tried it out on my Acer Aspire One. The verdict? Well, it’s about as fast as you’d expect, which is to say, not very at all. However, if I manage to find myself in an area without free WiFi or at least free wired internet, and 3G service is available, it would be worth doing. For now, like MMS, it’s turned off.
  • Scrolling: I’m happy to report that scrolling is ever-so-slightly smoother in OS 3.0. Not much, and no where near as smooth as the 3G s apparently is, but it’s a noticeable difference.
  • Safari: The upgrade Safari received almost makes the 3.0 upgrade worth it just by itself. It opens and runs faster, and the best part of all, it hasn’t crashed on me at all since I upgraded. Not once! Of course, I tried to crash it – I opened Slashdot, Arstechnica, Digg, FMyLife, Twitter, the Dev-Team Blog, Wikipedia, and a page that I put up on the backend of this server specifically designed to put load on the browser. Safari handled it all with ease.
  • Flash: By far the best feature of the upgrade! I can actually get the full browsing experience most sites offer, and don’t have to look at that stupid questioning block anymore!…..is what I’d be saying, if Apple had actually pulled their heads out of their collective asses and actually included support for it. Then again, most all-flash sites are garbage anyways, so I’m actually not missing that much….
  • Spotlight Search: It’s last for a reason. I honestly don’t have enough stuff on my phone to warrant searching for anything. My contact list only has around fifty people on it, I use the Mail.app only while I’m away from work, and then I clean it out after I’ve read each message, and the notes that I take are one-off’s 99% of the time. In fact, the only time I generally use it is when I’m trying to scroll to the first page of the Springboard and accidentally go a page too far to the left. Whoops.

Jail Breaking

  • Cydia: Oh my. For the first few days after jail breaking, Cydia was hell. I actually re-installed Icy because it was just that bad. The constant crashing nearly drove me insane, but the worst part was how slow it was. The main page would take minutes to load, and then when I’d try to navigate through categories, it would take upwards of 10 seconds for it to acknowledge that I’d clicked anything. Then saurik (the app’s author) discovered that Javascript debugging had be left on and released a update to turn it off. After that, everything was right-as-rain.
  • Icy: Still sucks. Badly. Although it launches faster than Cydia, it takes forever to refresh the sources list, and (now that the Javascript-debugging thing has been sorted) responds slower than Cydia while browsing categories. And maybe I’m just too used to Cydia, but I can’t stand the package layout of Icy (little differences, like how it shows already installed packages in the Categories view when Cydia doesn’t). In my option, skip Icy – there’s a reason why the Dev-Team includes Cydia by default in the Pwnage Tool and RedSn0w.
  • BossPrefs: I installed it, tried to tweak a few settings, then removed it. The problem? I tried to disable the numeric battery. That worked. Then I tried to enable it again. That didn’t. Then I rebooted – very bad idea. Normal Pwnapple loading screen, then to my surprise, the Apple loading screen with a progress bar. Shit. Get to the Springboard and find a hint about arranging icons, and everything back to defaults. Apparently it fucked up the Springboard settings (probably changed a Plist in a way that 3.0 didn’t like) and reset everything.
  • SBSettings: Pre-3.0, I’d always used BossPrefs because SBSettings seemed to constantly crash other apps (whether because of a bug in the release version I was using or due to the increased memory usage, I don’t know). However, the SBSettings released for OS 3.0 works beautifully, and there’s even a skin for it to match the Winterboard theme I use.
  • Mobile Terminal: Still really handy when I need a command prompt to nmap something or ping something else, however it’s got an odd bug right now that causes it to flip upside down on launch, so you have to turn the phone upside down to match. Very, very strange.

In summary, the OS 3.0 update is definitely worthwhile, however be aware that until app authors start pumping out compatibility updates, especially in regard to apps that require the jail break, you’re likely to run in to a few issues along the way.