At home with EyeTV and Apple TV in the UK

I never should say this but my computer media setup feels like it is “complete”. For so long we are always looking for the “one more thing” to make our home computer/media life just right. I am glad to say that I think (and I could be wrong) I am there.

Let me describe the beauty of my setup.

We have two main rooms in the house with the following equipment:

1. The Main Lounge with a Samsung 40″ HD LCD Television and Apple TV with version 2 software installed

2. The Playroom with an iMac with 2GB Ram, 500GB Hard drive and EyeTV 400 plugged into aerial socket

Here’s how it works:

iPhone Review - Connection speeds on wifi, GPRS and EDGE

According to www.inetworktest.com the average speeds users of the site are getting are as follows:

Average WiFi 800 kbps
Average Edge 210 kbps
Average Speed 520 kbps

Bizarrely, in my own tests I’ve been getting average wifi of 450kbps and today average GPRS of 283kbps!! Something might be off there in the speed test methods but the square box (for GPRS) was showing on the iPhone, not the blocked E for Edge.

Read the rest of this review at www.dotphone.net

iPhone - the week after review

the iPhone in my daily “lifeflow”:

Saturday after the MAGNIFICENT LAUNCH PARTY - iCal

Chatting to some friends in Belfast’s wonderful, St. George’s Market, we discuss a possible lad’s night this coming week. I consult my iPhone and notice that the Thursday evening is free. I add it to my calendar there and then before it can be stolen from me by other members of my family. At home it syncs and by the magic of .mac my work computer has the same information the next morning in its calendar.

Thursday arrives

I’m at work and I want to check train times to Belfast for this evening. I check them on my office Mac, take a pic of the results (a simple CMD-SHIFT-4) and drop them into a Note in the new Leopard Mail. I know that i will have access to this note on my iPhone as it syncs everything - images, pdfs using my .mac account.

Leopard Mail integration

Sure enough I get home and begin negotiations with my legally and spiritually bound female, my wife. I secure a lift to the train station. En route I open up the iPhone to check the times again in case I could make the earlier train. Sure enough my notes are synced - train time image appears - and we have EDGE here and its not wifi but its fine. Even if they hadn’t synced I could open up the web browser and check them again live on the website. I’m the sort of person who forgets something the minute I see it that’s why I take pictures.

Music and Phone Calls

I get dropped off at the train station and try out the iPhones handsfree headphones for listening to music. As I enjoy the latest Sigur Ros live offering the music dips in volume and a ringing tone in my ear indicates a phone call. I push the sleek mini button on the headphones and I’m speaking to a friend who is trying to organise his own public transport to our combined destination. The sound quality is good and I don’t have to repeat myself. [NB As we chatted text messages were coming through by my other friend, these appeared with the full text on the iPhone screen - I like that - better than "you have 1 message"] The big plus about the headphones is that because it is, to all intents and purposes a set of iPod headphones, wearing it makes you look more like a cool muso and less like one of those Dads who have a mobile phone on their belt buckle and a permanent bluetooth headset attached to the ear whilst shopping with their wife in As Qmonkey has stated these people have such technology in place “just in case”. These people do NOT work for the CIA and have been watching too much Spooks. With the iPhone headphones / iPod combination you spare yourself some scorn.

Fumble-Less Technology

I’m standing by now in a drafty train station on a chilling November evening in Northern Ireland. Several phone calls and text messages take place but all seamlessly on the one unit whilst listening to music, my iPhone. I am the sort of person who tries to put a train ticket in the exact same place every time so that when asked I can find it without fumbling. Yet every time I need to get the train ticket I have to fumble around in every possible pocket (2 front and back on jeans, at least another 2 on jacket or coat) because I have forgotten again. With the iPhone I am decreasing that amount of fumbling. One device, one set of wires.

Train Home

After a great night of banter, steak and beer I get the train home; I ritually check facebook (which has its own iPhone friendly webpage). A friend wants to know what I think of the iPhone - I tap a response directly into facebook’s regular mail section “I’m writing this on a train from Carrick to Belfast, its easy”. The fact that I am doing that is testament to the ease of use of the iPhone. Somewhere along the train route the signal differed from GPRS to EDGE and back again. It didn’t matter, the software just handled that for me in the background.

The Morning after

Friday morning in work I check my emails on the the iPhone - several discussing the night before, the ones I have already read at home on my mac before leaving appear but without a blue “unread” dot. I am so used to SMTP emails in perfect sync across many computers I forget what it is like to go to POP accounts where you have to wade through already read mail! I can immediately see the new mail no matter whether it is on my home laptop, my work iMac or now my beautiful iPhone. Easy.

in short:

- effortless syncing of calendar, address book, web bookmarks, music, podcasts
- Leopard integration lovely
- iPod to iPhone seamless integration. Music dips, text message chimes, phone rings, single click of headphones and we are chatting clearly.
- its the REAL web, my emails using .mac are my real NEW emails, my calendar is my ACTUAL calendar synced across two home macs and a work mac.

iLove her

*Max O’Malley realises that to live the sort of experience he has had this past week one needs :

1. Mac(s)
2. Leopard (Max OS 10.5) installed
3. a babysitter and/or permission from his wife for the night out

The experience can be mimicked with lesser equipment but you are on your own there.

With thanks to Apple and Lilytodd for providing all of the above services.

More ichat effects - free for Leopard

Great news for people who want to play around even more with the wonderful new ichat effects. If like me you have kids, they’ll love the extra effects in this software from Macpopou. I particularly appreciate the ability to provide hologram advice to Jedi Knights and twittering robots…

[Max O'Malley giving business advice to Jedis and financially ignorant robots.]

Did I say if you have kids? Forget the kids… I love this stuff!

Highlights include:

Mona O’Malley
One2Many O’Malley

Phantom Zone O’Malley
Mercurial O’Malley

[These are images of the software author, not Max O'Malley]

Max O’Malley - not just a business guru

Free Ringtones - iPhone UK

So… here is what you do. Go in to Garageband and create a 30 second clip of whatever you like for a ringtone. Songs in your itunes library, effects, a voice going Awooga Awooga!. Whatever.

Then .. select Export Song to Disk from the Share menu.

Export it to the Desktop for convenience. You will see a file with your filename and the extension .m4a - Click once on the file and once again to change the filename. Change the .m4a extension to .m4r and hit enter. You will be asked if you meant to do this.

Read the rest of this how to tip at www.dotphone.net

iPhone Launch Party

It was the end of a long long week. The FSA (Financial Services Authority) had been in to regulate us, nothing to do with our bowels or the Food Standards Agency but it was gruelling. The only light at the end of the tunnel was the thought of a long communist era queue outside a shop at the freezing start of November. Worse still, the shop was in Larne. For those who have never heard of Larne, the place where I was married, in the eastern shores of Northern Ireland, it is said that there are only two good things in Larne:

1. The boat to Scotland.
2. The road out.

Well I just want to repudiate that statement right now, because there is a third item I?d like to add… another good thing in Larne:

3. The remaining 19 iPhones in the shop after I was there on launch night.

Nowhere else in the country at 5:30pm was the launch party looking like this:

The shutters were down, I waited for a while eager to have craic with my fellow enthusiasts. An elderly gentlemen approached, tried the door… I muscled in on his attempt to bunk the queue but he hadn?t even heard of the iPhone. I spat on him and threw him to the dogs.

5:45pm - My friend arrived for moral support, anticipation grew as the crowd of the 2 of us (only 1 buying) watched the shutters slowly lift:

It was a slow strip tease, we were shivering with … well, the cold. I phoned two friends also in queues around the country - Lisburn had 15 and promotional girls, Worthing had 40 and banter. Larne had nothing, nothing except the prize.

6:00pm - Two other guys arrived. Phew - I wasn?t the only idiot in the Eastern part of Antrim! (But they were in looking for a Sony Ericcson).

(Max O?Malley, visibly excited)

Sure enough at 6:02 they put us (I mean, me) out of our/my misery. The three retail assistants who had prepared all afternoon since 3pm for this monumental occasion had to open their shop until 10pm to serve, just me. I felt blessed. I tried to pretend I didn?t know very much about the iPhone and tried not to correct the manager. I didn?t want to come across like a geek. None of us that queued that night felt we deserved the mocking of the crowd, we hardly could believe ourselves that we were doing it.

After crossing the shop assistant?s palm with considerable money and various attempts to get the credit card system to work (Carphone Warehouse servers couldn?t cope with the UK?s iPhone loving crowd) I walked out of the shop into the cold Larne air with my precious.

I love her and I will tell more of her next time.

Great Mac app for Facebook Photos

This is one of those applications that is truly Mac. Photobook from www.caffeinatedcocoa.com. It is free. It is robust. It looks and moves gorgeously. Essentially it is a mini browser application for viewing you and your friends photos on Facebook. No more, no less, but it does it with such style. It is a great example of how separate software really can add value to web information (take iTunes for example).

It has the look and feel of iPhoto with the ability to view people’s albums, view people tagged across many different people’s albums and play a slideshow of your selection. If there are photos you like then just click the “Add to iPhoto” button to bring them home. Simple, fun, great.

Max O’Malley recommends.

Filemaker and Leopard - Bad News

Bad news for any current Filemaker users excited about the release of Leopard. Filemaker have announced on their website that they do “not recommend the use of Filemaker 9 products on computers running the Leopard OS”, I presume until they can test its running and issue any compatibility updates. In addition, earlier versions (I currently am a very happy business and personal user of version 8 ) are also not recommended until compatibility testing is complete.

This is not going to be a rant. On balance, any operating system needs to be tested and it is no mean feat to ensure that all previous code and functionality will swim easily in the new water. We decided to purchase new iMacs quite recently towards gradually moving all our machines to Macs (we are currently 2 out of 5 Macs to PCs). A hard drive failure and backup problem on one of the PCs prompted the earlier than Leopard release purchase. With this announcement I’m glad we did buy early. My surprise, with others in all this is that Filemaker isn’t ready. Filemaker as I understand it is an owned subsidiary of Apple! If others can have their software tested and ready for Leopard why not family members? I phoned customer services UK and they told me they were waiting to test Filemaker with the release of Leopard. Now, obviously Filemaker developers haven’t been waiting until now to get ready, they would have had the developer’s releases of Leopard all along and what they are waiting for is final confirmation of its compatibility. They will have known general problems up to now and hopefully talked to Apple engineers to begin resolving any problems and even getting excited about making Filemaker rock even more with new Leopard only features. So I find it very strange that they are not ready. Very strange.

I would expect that further announcements will be made as to which of the previous versions will be made compatible for Leopard. Anything less than a full preparation of versions 8, 8.5 and 9 would be damaging to customer relations. As a small financial sector business user of Filemaker v. 8 we store all our client personal and financial information on Filemaker, it has become our data hub, helps us see the entire business process and is invaluable to our business. We can’t follow the upgrade path to Leopard just yet because Filemaker have ran into some difficulties. Did somebody at Filemaker fall asleep? Maybe they are just being cautious but plenty of us just expect things to go smoothly and have been ordering Leopard updates and new computers with no thought of our main data hubs falling around our ears. An unfortunate lesson and I’m glad I got the news early.

We love Steve, no seriously, we do - iPhone Third party apps allowed!

Apple - Hot News - Steve didn’t let us down, we knew he’d do it. The pressure to have applications other than Apple one’s on the iPhone was an unstoppable tide and the constant policing to keep iPhones and Touches unhacked was bound to end.  Now we know that developers will be able to freely develop software for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  There will be no end to the cool software and applications this will mean for us all.  Personally I’d like to see a Filemaker database app that seamlessly integrates with my office Filemaker and is as easy to develop screens for as Filemaker normally is.  After that, just surprise me developers, just surprise me….
I would expect this to mean that the calendar app will allow edits and the mail client will be permitted. There’s no point in letting third parties try and do this for the Touch when Apple already have them. I’d like to see a “flick” game using the flicking feature of the touchscreen. Subbuteo?

Leopard available on already ordered Macs

I ordered two iMacs about a week ago (I had good reason to) and with today’s announcement about a confirmed release date for Leopard (26th October) I was wondering what my options would be to upgrade to Leopard.One option was just to order two copies (setting me back 170 UK Earth Pounds). I knew that in the transition to Tiger some allowances / rebates were allowed for those who had bought new Macs within x number of days prior to the release. I phoned the Apple online store and asked what my options were as I preferred not to spend the extra cash. The nice girl on the phone told me that since my order was still open (i.e. not dispatched) I would be emailed in the next 24 hours and asked if I wanted automagically upgraded to Leopard. This may affect my delivery date but I’m happier that I get my iMacs with Leopard preinstalled and save £170.I phoned about 8 hours ago so hopefully the email will be in my inbox by morning.