Apple

So Apple released a new version of iTunes today. Version 8 includes a new feature called “Genius”.

Play a song, click the Genius button, and iTunes creates a playlist of other songs from your library that go great together.

This sounds like a cool idea, although I consider myself already pretty handy at creating smart playlists.
What really intrigued me was the new Genius Sidebar:

As you select songs in your library, the Genius sidebar displays songs from the iTunes Store that go great with it.

Lots of other people are, of course, getting paranoid about sharing their listening data with the Apple mothership, but I’m not. I’m thrilled if iTunes is going to start watching what I’m playing in order to recommend other stuff. Finding new music is one of my favorite things to do.

Unfortunately for me, it is a complete FAIL.

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Jim just showed me a bitchin’ cool Mac trick:

If you press Shift, the Apple (”command”) key, and the 4 key at the same time, it will change your mouse cursor into a targeting device. Then hit the space bar and your cursor will turn into a camera icon. Use the mouse to move the camera over any window and left-click. Bam! That will create a screen capture as a .png file on your desktop.

This morning I discovered what is possibly the world’s most annoying iPhone bug. For some time now I’ve been trying to determine why every now and then I seem to sleep right through my alarm. The iPhone alarm can be set to be tragically loud and uncomfortably annoying, so the fact that I have frequently not heard it at all was a mystery. Until now.
Here is the bug:

If you receive an SMS message and do not acknowledge it — because you’re fast asleep, for example — the iPhone alarm will not execute until you clear the SMS notification.

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Crap. There goes the rest of 2008. Take a look at Frenzic (iPhone version), “a fast-paced, addictive game that makes Tetris look like child’s play.”

I really can’t say enough good things about Adium. This awesome little Mac app lets you connect to ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, iChat, and GTalk instant messenger contacts all in one place. It is the holy grail of IM clients. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and am thoroughly pleased. (It’s also hosted by the rockin’ cool team at Network Redux.)

Mac users: You can use this link to subscribe to the Florida Gators 2008 Football iCal Schedule, published by Yahoo!.

Warning! Do not be fooled by what you might read anywhere on the Internet. If you have been using Microsoft Money and you switch to a Mac, you are screwed. There is nothing comparable for the Mac. No … Quicken is not an option. No, there is no version of Microsoft Money in development for the Mac. No, there are no other software programs available which are even remotely similar. No, none of the other potential financial software programs will allow you to successfully import your MSMoney data. No, you are not going to find another financial software application that is freeware or shareware or open source that comes close to Microsoft Money. No, you should not believe any website that attempts to explain how to convert your Microsoft Money file(s) for use in any Macintosh program.

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Recommended by a friend:

iToner: No hacks. No per-ringtone fees. Unlimited custom ringtones for your iPhone.

Update for Windows Users: Make Your Own Ringtone for Free with iTunes

One of the cool new features of the updated iPhone software is the ability to take a screen shot. If you hold the home button and then press the power button, the system will save a screen capture to your “camera roll” library. You can then email it or save it to your computer when you next synch, just as if it was a photo taken with the camera. I’m sure this will come in very handy for developers and debuggers.

And, of course, it gives us all a cool way to show everyone what we have on our iPhone home screens. Here’s mine. Nifty, eh?

Seventeen hours have passed since I upgraded to the new iPhone. Can it possibly be too early for me to make sweeping generalizations and pass judgment? No. I didn’t think so either. The folks at Apple sort of painted themselves into a corner on this one. The original iPhone was just so incredibly, amazingly, stupendously better than every other cell phone on the market. I am sure most users are going to be thrilled with the 3G, even ones who used the original. So far, though, I am not.

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I dragged myself out of bed at 5:00am today and played 18 with Andy at Hillcrest Country Club. I shot an embarrassing 63 on the front 9, but an at-least-average 55 on the back 9. (My father-in-law gave me a round of golf lessons with the club pro at Lakeside Country Club as a gift for my 35th birthday. The goal is to break 100 before Christmas.) We were done by 9:30, so I grabbed a copy of Wired and drove to the Apple store in the Westfield Century City Mall.

I got in line at 10:05am and was (surprisingly) the 18th person. The store website said that they would open at 11, and I figured if I read every single article and advertisement in the magazine, I’d only have about an hour to stare into the sun waiting. My plan did not work. By 10:25 I had finished reading. But that’s okay. That’s when the fun began.

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It’s been just over two weeks now that I’ve been using my new Apple MacBook Pro (running OS X 10.5.4), and I think I’m now ready to post a list of the ten things I like most about it.

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The restore I did yesterday on my iPhone failed to fix the problem I was having with the camera. Even after completely wiping the phone and resetting multiple times, the camera simply refused to save photos to its internal file system. I was ready to just complain at a Genius Bar in an Apple store this weekend (when I will no doubt be getting the new iPhone anyway), when I decided to do one last Google search for an answer. And, of course, Google provided. I followed the advice of olemono posted on April 22 and now the camera works again!

A few weeks ago my iPhone randomly decided to stop saving photos taken with its camera. It would act like it was taking a photo, but it wouldn’t actually save the photo to its internal photo file system. I didn’t realize this until I had taken a few dozen photos of my dad and me golfing in Connecticut, so I was pretty bummed. Since then I’ve been wanting to do a full restore to see if that would fix it, but I was afraid of doing that because I didn’t want to lose all my SMS conversations.

Enter Syphone. This little Mac utility will retrieve SMS threads from your iPhone and allow you to save them as PDF, txt, or XML files. It worked exactly as it claimed on the first try. (Reason #231297 why I am happy I switched from M$ to Mac.) I’m in the process of restoring my iPhone now.