Entries Tagged 'iLife' ↓

I love my new iPhone

This week I went to down to the Apple Store and purchased myself a new iPhone!iPhone I know everyone has been talking about how great the iPhone is but I really had no idea how good it was until I had it in my hands for a couple of days. The user interface is amazingly easy to use and beautiful. There is no way in hell I could use a Microsoft smart phone after having an iPhone in my possession.

If one thing that I wish it had was full integration with Exchange. However, I ‘m able to get my work emails via IMAP to our Exchange server. Sure, I don’t get calendar support but I’m not away from my computer that often during working hours. I keep all of my personal calendar information in iCal, which tends to be the events that I miss because its when I’m not working is when I’m notified.

The setup had to be the best and quickest experience I’ve ever had in activating phone service. I unpacked the phone and inserted the cradle’s USB cable into my Mac. iTunes then came up and I answered a couple of very simple questions. I had switched over to AT&T last month because I knew I wanted to have an iPhone. After I tell them some security questions with my phone number and then pick a data package my phone is literally activated in 5 minutes! I was now able to make and receive calls.

The integration with iLife is to me is the best feature. I picked my music,videos and photos I want to have on the iPhone. The software detected my email configurations on my mac and asked me if I want to use these accounts! Finally, my iCal and Address book were synced to the phone. The camera takes really good photos (not as good as my regular camera but these photos are good!) and to my surprise, when I docked the iPhone to charge it, the camera photos were automatically added to iPhoto! The hand gestures to use the iPhone are extremly simple and intitive! No complicated menus (God, I hated the interface on my Razor) and within minutes you know where everything is.

The iPhone will detect if there is a wireless connection available to use instead of the AT&T data network. So when I come home, the iPhone automatically uses the wi-fi connection!

Instead of sitting with my notebook on the couch when watching tv, I found my self the last couple days using my iPhone instead. This is the best browser for any mobile device. It’s a REAL browser and looks exactly like the web page that I see on my computer.� The hand gestures allows you to zoom in or zoom out by either moving your fingers out or in.

I know a person who complained that it did not support Flash and that is why he’s not getting one. Personally I don’t give a shit about Flash support and there is not that many sites I go to that use Flash. You know however Apple is working with ADOBE to have a Flash version . If this is the only reason he’s not getting it then I have a feeling its more that he does not want to spend the money! :)

Others in the blogosphere have complained that it does not have IM support (not an issue for me), a video camera (I have a Hi Def Video cam so why would I want to have it my phone?), you can’t add multiple people to same text message(this is a feature I want, but I can live without it), no active sync with Exchange (my biggest “Want/Wish”) and finally no flash support (which I could care less but I bet this is one of the new additions before the end of the year).

Overall the iPhone rocks and I can’t find any reason why I would ever want to go back to the using a “Cell” phone or even a smartphone!

Windows Vista Beta 2 crashes before I could give my presentation!

On Friday I had created a presentation for my kids school. I’ve done the 8th grade graduation presentation for the last couple of years. I get all the images and video from each student and use Keynote and iLife create it on my Mac. I can create a very professional presentation that can be watched from a DVD very quickly.

However, I don’t have a portable Mac so each year I’ve played the DVD on my Dell notebook. I’ve been running Windows XP and it’s been pretty reliable. However a couple of weeks ago, I installed Windows Vista Beta 2 on my notebook.

Today I went down to the school, did test run and it played great in Windows Media Center. When it came time to showing the presentation (about 1.5 hours after the test run), Windows Media center decides to die. I kid you not! The exact moment when I have over 300 people waiting to watch the presentation, Media center crashes. Then a few minutes later Windows Vista Crashes! I had to reboot the computer while the principal and my wife are worried that we may not be able to play the presentation.

After the presentation my wife starts laughing and says that does not say much for Microsoft’s new operating system! I know, it’s a Beta, but by the time you’re in Beta 2, the core OS should be stable enough that something this trivial should not happen.

I can guarantee you next year, I’ll be doing everything on that new Mac book pro I’ve been waiting to get!

Flip4Mac installed may crash iLife 06

I installed the latest version of iLife ‘06 on my G5 and was very excited to be able to try out some of the new features. One of them was the new iMovie HD 6. When I went to go add some media from iPhoto, the entire application crashed. Not good. I tried to import the .avi and .mov files directly instead. Nope! Same thing!

I could not believe that Apple would ship such a terrible product that it would crash when it tried to import movies from its own product. What good would iMovie be if I could not add my movie and photos from iPhoto?

I started to investigate and see if there could be anything that I installed that could screw up things. Two days before I had done an update for Quicktime 7. I did some research to find out that this was actually patched so that it would work with iLife ‘06. I could not find any other sites complaining about this update directly related to 7.04 update.

I had also installed Flip4Mac from the Microsoft site that would allow me to watch Microsoft standard files within Quicktime. Little did I know that Flip4Mac was the problem. I uninstalled Flip4Mac and guess what? My iLife was working again!!!

Again leave it up to Microsoft to screw up even my Mac!