my2cents

After an upgrade to OS X 10.5 Leopard and iTunes 8 my iPod touch stopped showing in iTunes on my MacBook. I doubt, however, that the missing iPod has anything to do with Leopard or iTunes 8 because it worked flawlessly with Leopard/iTunes 8 on my Mac mini.

I went through a lot of steps trying to reset/restore the iPod, resetting the USB adapters and so on. Although recommended in some articles I didn’t dare to uninstall/install iTunes, tough. I saved this as my last resort, for I had no desire to loose all my settings and I figured that it’d be quite difficult to get rid of all the preferences files on my system that are associated with iTunes. Turns out there’s a great article entitled “Removing ITunes for Mac OS X” at Apples’s support center.

And indeed, reinstalling iTunes 8 solved my problem.

What to do when the following error pops up in Eclipse while saving a file:

Save could not be Completed
Reason:
Some characters cannot be mapped using “<your-encoding-here>” character encoding.
Either change the encoding or remove the characters which are not supported by the “<your-encoding-here>” character encoding.

If you’re certain that the encoding is correct an you didn’t enter any weired characters, you should copy/paste the content of the file to an external editor and see if it tells you where those hidden, special characters are.

On Linux and Mac you may as well abuse the terminal for that for certain character set. Just paste the code to the shell and see if you find anything unusual.

By coincident I discovered a cool feature on my iPod Touch. When you double tap the home button, the basic music controls (forward, backward, volume, etc.) are displayed regardless of which application you’re currently running. This works even if the iPod is locked. Very handy…

MacRumors has a whole list of iPod Touch tips and tricks.

Back in January 2008 Apple released a software upgrade for the iPod Touch and the iPhone. As a result, whenever you plugged your iPod into your computer and wanted to sync it, iTunes would first show a page with the option to download and install the new package. I would have done so right away if Apple gave it away for free – for the iPod Touch they charge you $20 while it’s free for the iPhone. Hence, I only installed the 1.1.4 firmware upgrade but without unlocking the new apps that come with it. The “commercial” page advertising to new apps, however, got on my nerves, so I clicked some “don’t bother me with that stuff anymore” button.

To get to the point, yesterday I changed my mind. I wanted that software upgrade. So, I went to apple.com and clicked on the “Have an iPod touch without the new software?” link in the iPod section. It took me to the above mentioned page in iTunes (the iTunes store to be precise). However, there was no “buy now” button anywhere to be found, only an “OK” button at the bottom of the screen that just took me back to the iTunes store home page when clicked on.

I tried resetting the iPod, searched the Internet long and hard for solutions to that problem, and – among lots of others – came along a thread at tuaw.com and softpedia.com that looked promising. However, nothing seemed to cure my problem until I stumbled upon a thread over at ilounge.com. A user posted the direct link to the desired page in the iTunes store: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=271872604&s=143441. I clicked the link, paid $20 in the iTunes store, and happily watched as the new apps got unlocked. Worked like a charm!

WARNING: just because this worked in my case doesn’t mean that it’ll work out for you! I’ve come along lots of threads where people complained that Apple double- and triple-charged them for the upgrade without installing the apps. Try at your own risk!

With the purchase of my MacBook I was converted to a Mac fan, not a die-hard fan, but still… A lot of Apple technologies behave just the way I expect things to work. I also noticed that for the first time I didn’t hesitate to purchase licenses for extra software. I seem to be getting my money’s worth. I have a feeling that the folks writing pieces of independent software (independent from Apple I mean) for the OS X platform  work to higher standards than those coding for the Windows platform. Of course, this is highly subjective and I haven’t thoroughly thought about the possible reasons behind this, but I’ve had this impression more than once.

Often I felt the same way about Apple’s own software and services, too. So I bought iLife ’08 and signed up for a .Mac account and was more or less happy to pay for it, too. It seemed worth it.

Now I consider upgrading from QuickTime to QuickTime Pro. Why? I need to cut pieces of a short movie (.avi) I recently shot with my FujiFilm FinePix F31fd, a great camera by the way. So, together with all the photos the movie was loaded into iPhoto and I started experimenting what I could do with it. Not much, it turned out. The movie can be loaded into QuickTime, this is the default behavior, but that’s about it. The editing features are greyed out in QuickTime’s standard edition.

Before throwing more money down Apple’s maw I started looking for alternatives.  Movie Cutter seems very promising but it keeps crashing due some trial-key related issues. Also, SimpleMovieX seems to do a fine job. However, it is unable to save the .avi file it manipulates as .avi again. Hence, a no-go.

Buying something usually involves an emotional component. You want something, you buy it, and you’re happy that you got it. The emotional component here is, that I’m angry at Apple that, starting with version 7.2, they dropped QuickTime’s Windows 2000 support; even before Windows 2000 reached end-of-life. As a matter of fact iTunes met the same fate.  So, will I unleash my standard QuickTime by shelling out another $30 to Apple? We’ll see…

I thought iPhoto was a pretty cool tool – even for presenting photos in a slide show. It’s limitations only became evident when I downloaded and installed PhotoPresenter. It’s a blast! I never got that much cool and flawless software for only $8. A good investment – check it out.

Somehow the trash folder for the IMAP account in my Apple mail application had disappeared. As always I suspected that I must have fiddled with the configuration not realizing what I was doing. And – as in most such cases – I was right.
Go to Preferences -> Accounts -> select the account in question -> Mailbox Behaviors. You’ll find the settings for your trash folder there.

This morning my iPod nano crashed when I selected ‘Shuffle songs’. Well, it didn’t crash as in “something collapses”, but it rather froze. None of the buttons were responsive and the display stayed fully lit. I read somewhere that this should help:

1. Check that the hold switch is in the off position
2. Hold down both the menu and then the middle button (in that order), for about 10 secs, this should reboot the iPod.

In my case, however, it didn’t take long until the battery was empty (display always on). Once I hooked it up again with my MacBook and the iPod finally had some power again it came back to life. Draining the battery completely does of course reset the device as well

You may or may not have followed the iPhone hype, but here’s a little story to indicate just how nuts and irrational the stock markets – or their players – act.

Introduction

When Apple launched the iPhone on Friday June 29th, 2007 their exclusive mobile network carrier AT&T was so overwhelmed with the number of registrations that a considerable number of customers suffered from long delays in the registration process of their mobile service contract. Meaning: by Monday night there were a lot of people who had bought the iPhone, but the mobile phone service was still not activated. Both AT&T and Apple refused to release any information as for how many units were sold during the first 2 days.

Showdown

This last Tuesday July 24th, 2007 AT&T announced their financial results for the last quarter. This time the whole world was watching as one expected them to announce how well the business with the iPhone had started. AT&T said they had activated 146’000 iPhone contracts during the first two days. So, they were talking about activated contracts while everybody was waiting for the number of units sold to be released.

Bummer! And the crowd goes: what, only 146’000 iPhones sold? But analysts expected between 400’000 and 700’000… What happens to AAPL (the Apple stock symbol)? It plunges over 6%! For no reason. The only interest one should have in the figure announced by AT&T is to find out how big the discrepancy between activated contracts and units sold really is, which would show how big the mess that AT&T created with their activation delays is.

So, ok AAPL plunged for no good reason, but only one day after AT&T’s report Apple itself was reporting their quarter figures. This was yesterday afternoon Wednesday July 25th, 2007. Steve Jobs reported that they had sold 270’000 iPhones within the first 30 hours. Considerably less than what the overly enthusiastic analysts had hoped for, but still a fair number! More than that, Apple reported record high earnings. Now that’s a reason for a soaring share prices. APPL compensated for the stupid 6% fall with a 9% plus. Is all well that ends well? No!

Conclusion

Never trust a company’s share price, because it is irrational. Of course, it’s the pure ‘supply and demand’ principle that I love so much but with a group of people on the demand side that is, what, out of their minds

Ohhh, and lesson learned for Apple? Why did they allow AT&T to report on the number of activated contracts? They’re out of their minds, too. Wasn’t it obvious that the public would somehow not be able to comprehend the true meaning of those numbers? Even a stock market novice like myself could predict what would happen after AT&T’s report. I’m still shaking my head over this.

From time to time opening FTP connections in Finder results in error messages that don’t reveil much about the cause of the error. What I see most often is “The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in (address) could not be read or written. (Error code -36).” What is Finder trying to tell me? I found a hint that including the user name in the FTP URL usually fixes this problem. So, instead of ftp://myurl.ch, you would connect to ftp://myuser@myurl.ch. It’s a valuable hint, indeed. It fixed all my connections problems at least.
Btw, don’t worry about including a “secret” user name in the URL. It’s not less (in)secure than without. Standard FTP sends user name and password in clear text across the wire anyway. If this bothers you, don’t use standard FTP.

By coincidence the very same URL that caused problems in Finder (see above) gave me a headache when I set it up in Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver. I can’t remember the exact error message, but whatever I tried the connection couldn’t be established. Dreamweaver only reported that I might try to switch on “passive FTP”. However, when I checked my System Preferences (Network -> choose your connection -> Proxies) I found that PASV was already activated. What the Dreamweaver team failed to mention in the error message is that the Dreamweaver specific “passive FTP” switch is only available in the advanced configuration dialog for your sites. At least in the OS X version of Dreamweaver that small Basic/Advanced button at the top of the dialog is so small that it can easily be missed.