Penguin Books posted a demo of their upcoming iPad offerings:
Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category
Loving Aperture 3’s new Places feature
February 25th, 2010
I upgraded to Aperture 3 recently, it seems a lot of people have been having trouble with the new version. Luckily I got through the upgrade with only some minor issues that were quickly solved. Having had a chance to play with the app I have to say that I’m loving the new Places feature.
At first I noticed that Aperture had automatically put all my iPhone pictures on the map and was content to leave it at that and not go through the hassle of trying to add GPS coordinates to the rest of my pictures. But once I started looking around in Places I found out you can search for places and Aperture automatically searches Google right from within the app. This allowed me to quickly put a couple of thousand pictures on the map by searching for monuments, city names, restaurants, and so on. It’s a really cool feature that worked perfectly for me, and I love being able to look at a map of the world and zoom into all the places I’ve visited and photographed.
The non-destructive brushes are also bad ass, but I’ll leave that for another post.
Square Up
February 14th, 2010
Check out this demo of Square Up, a new service for small business owners to take credit and debit payments with. They don’t call them smartphones for nothing.
I’m now using Time Machine
January 31st, 2010
I cleared out some space on an external hard disk this past week and decided to finally start using Time Machine. I don’t know why I never bothered to turn on Time Machine before. I did some manual backups from time to time, but nowhere near enough to really be safe. Luckily it never came back and bit me in the ass.
Time Machine really works great, I’m using an external FireWire drive for it. The initial backup process took some time, but after that all consecutive backups have gone by so quickly that you don’t even notice them. I have to say it’s a real elegant solution Apple came up with when they added Time Machine to OS-X. One of the many features that make OS-X such an elegant and polished operating system.
In closing every Mac user should go out and buy a cheap FireWire drive to run as a Time Machine disk, the small price is worth the security.
More iPad tidbits
January 29th, 2010
I was checking out Daring Fireball yesterday and John Gruber shared some of his thoughts and opinions after having had a chance to play with and test Apple’s iPad.
His article has some very interesting points in it and is worth reading in it’s entirety. One thing he mentions that is worth bringing up here is comparing the iPad with an automatic transmission in a car. He points out that an automatic car still cycles through gears but this process is hidden from the driver. He equates how the iPhone and iPad OS is removing certain elements from the user, like file system and where you install applications, but that these things are still present underneath the surface.
It’s pretty interesting when you think about it, the iPhone/iPad OS is in that sense really creating something more simplistic and elegant. On these devices you don’t have to worry about where you will save a document or project, it’s saved automatically within the application. Looking at a normal computer and I have to say that this is going to make computing appeal to a lot of people that can’t stand computers. I can’t begin to think of how many times I’ve been asked by people to help them sort out their computer. Back in December I took a look at a friends MacBook, a recent Windows convert, and it was a mess. He hadn’t installed a lot of applications properly, so that when you launched them the disk images he originally downloaded would all start to mount. These type of errors and confusing can all abstracted away if the iPad/iPhone OS starts to be used by real day to day applications.
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