Apple

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.

About two weeks ago I decided that I was just completely done with my Dell Latitude D630. I’ve had it for just under a year now and it had continued to disappoint me at every turn. I had had an Inspiron 8600 — which was a pretty darn good laptop — for about a year and then upgraded to a D610. I loved the D610. It was the best laptop I’d ever owned. Unfortunately my lovely wife was underwhelmed with the 8600. Plus, it was now over two years old, the battery was dead so she had to use the power cord all the time, and the processor was no longer cutting it for what she needed it to do. So we shelved the 8600, I gave her my wonderful D610, and I “upgraded” to the D630.

I hate the D630. It drives me crazy on a regular basis. Sure, a large chunk of the blame should be on Microsoft; I’ll admit that. When I went from the D610 to the D630 I also went from whatever version of Office was current three years ago to the “new” version of Office. (I have no idea what the versions in Office are these days. Microsoft, I think, intentionally uses a conflicting and confusing taxonomy to keep us all guessing. Let’s just say that I went from a version of Office that worked “pretty well” 80% of the time to the really slow and obnoxious version that uses all new, not-backwards-compatible file formats and hogs every drop of memory it can.) At the same time I also moved from a Blackberry to an iPhone.

Now, listen: I have been a Windows guy for almost 20 years now. I always looked down my nose at the silly artists and screenwriters eating granola bars, wearing Birkenstocks, driving eco-friendly cars, and using Macs. They had no idea how to use a real computer and certainly couldn’t program their way out of a paper bag. I’m a developer. I program computers. I needed to use a computer that let me build things. And, plus, I never met a Mac user that didn’t spend all day sending me files that would only work on a Mac.

But something funny happened when Y2K struck. I stopped writing computer programs. I am still a developer, but now everything I do is on the world wide information superhighway. It’s been almost a decade now since I needed to code a DLL or an actual client-side application. I still build fabulous and amazing applications, but they are all web-based. And that means that I have been working almost exclusively with plain old text files. And you don’t need Microsoft to work with text files. (Hell, you don’t even need a GUI to work with text files!) Combine that realization with the awe-inspiring, paradigm-shifting, mind-bending total f&$*@ing coolness of the iPhone (and the iPod!), and you can start to see why I finally decided to switch to a Mac.

So I did it. I made the switch. I bought a MacBook Pro. I’ll keep you posted.

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I have just about 9,000 songs (35GB) in my iTunes library, and I listen to music the entire time I’m in the office every day. I live and die by my smart playlists. I’ve seen more than a few tutorials lately about how to utilize this iTunes feature, so I thought I’d toss my hat in the ring with a few tips on how to make Apple’s killer app work better. Here are five tips to keeping your daily listening enjoyable.

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If you’re sitting there with a new computer and scratching your head trying to figure out how to get all your music from your iPod and iTunes library on your old computer, scratch no longer! This is how you do it.

Update: And if you want to get your playlists on your new computer, you have to do this.

And you should also read this tip on Keeping iTunes Organized!