Posts

Showing posts with the label Apple

Photos workflow on Android

Image
I recently switched from iPhone to a Xiaomi that runs Android. Taking photos is one of those things one uses the phone for and that too had to change. This was my iPhone workflow Take photos in Camera+ .  Review, delete or edit photos in Camera+. Save to camera roll (long process that may required manually preventing iPhone from sleeping). Dropbox then pushed the photos to the cloud (again, quite a pain, because iPhone may decide to go to sleep while doing it). Pick up Photos on a laptop, move them to a non-Dropbox folder. After all I do not have an unlimited Dropbox space. Use Total Commander to rename them and assign the time and date of when the photo was taken as the file name. Reason: one never knows when a photo editing software would change the times embedded in the jpeg. Camera+, for example, changes the file modification date but not, luckily the EXIF dates.  Use Picassa for final editing and organizing photos into native Windows folders. Photos are too ...

iTunes saga 5.0.1

Image
I went through a painful iTunes experience. Had to. I try to avoid iTunes as much as possible, but since I wanted to update iOS version on my iPad, it was not possible to avoid it. The bottom line is that it sucks as a device management tool. Here's why: iTunes is not a device management tool It is a media management tool. It was made to put music and videos to iPod which started as an MP3 player. Some say it sucks there as well. I don't care. I copy photos as files, I transfer music with MediaMonkey and use mail and Dropbox to manage documents. iTunes is patched to be a device management tool with key functions obscured by the media-optimized interface. Sync doesn't One of the most scary checkboxes in the Apple universe is the " Sync Apps ". User is warned that if selected, all apps installed by the user on device will be removed. And they are. The trick is that before one does that, it makes sense to " transfer purchases ". So that after ...

Wishlist for iPAD II

Image
Now that I got everything I wanted from Santa, let me write down what I want in iPad II. Software Shared file system for (some) apps. This has in fact nothing to do with iPAD. It is an iOS thing. As it stands, iOS is lobotomized . Each app only has access to its own files. I want for example Dropbox app and Pages app to have access to the same files. I will use one to read and write documents and the other to sync them with the could. Is this really too much to ask? I mean, really! Decent Safari. I want Safari to work with "destkop" versions of Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar etc. This has nothing to do with new hardware either. It is just a wish to make iPad a better client for the cloud services. More iPAD specific features in the iOS . iPad has a larger screen. It could be managed differently then the iPhone. Like switching among apps Expose style, for example. Keyboards with smaller keys, but more of them. It is really a pain to type anything that is not...

Two for the price of one

Image
This post is about two issues that are troubling me on the iPad. None would be worth the trouble writing about in the first place, but together ... First, this is a test if one can blog using Blogpres . Obviously it is not impossible, but this is no major achievement. In fact it is another reminder of how brain damaged the Safari for iPad is. Blogger has a very good browser editing interface which includes spell checking, insertion of images, links etc. Blogpress is little more than a text editor. Lucky that I remember how to code HTML directly. But I am not going to. Blogpress is not worth to be a commercial app. Period. Secondly, I am really unhappy with the Twitter clients on iPad. Twitterrific would be my favorite. It treats lists quite similarly as any other feed. But has a poor update algorithm and does not report what feed has new items to read. Also, at $5 for the multiaccount version, it is quite expensive. Osfoora has perhaps the most powerfull management opt...

Eckhart Tolle on iPad

What is your relationship with the world of objects, the countless things that surround you and that you handle ever day? The chair you sit on, the pen, the car, the cup? Are they to you merely a means to an end, or do you occasionally acknowledge their existence, their being, no matter how briefly, by noticing them and giving them your attention? When you get attached to objects, when you are using them to enhance your worth in your own eyes and in the eyes of others, concern about things can easily take over your whole life. Not really. Tolle wrote this before iPad was invented. But I guess iPad, for some, is the extreme case of what he writes about. Agree?

Apple solves the magnetic MacBook lid problem

Image
One simply has to love some features of the aluminum unibody MacBooks. Like the magnetic lid "lock". Not only it keeps the lid closed, the magnet has no moving parts, so there is nothing that could break. The design is clean. The magnet is also radiating magnetic energy, bending properly the cosmic waves and preventing the carpal tunnel syndrome. And if you keep the MacBook on your lap, as a laptop, the magnet is well positioned to heel your body. But many users are reporting problems with the magnetic lid lock. Mac simply would not stay shut. If I put it vertically in my trusty Tumi bag, for example, it springs opens for about 5 millimeters. Like on the picture below: This is quite annoying, because you don't know what will happen in the bag. If it opens some more it would wake Mac up from sleep mode. It happened to me a few times, even if it was bumped closed again it stayed on, drained the battery, got hot, very hot ... Not very pleasant at all, because in the bag the ...