07.19.10
Posted in technology at 9:38 pm by Steve
In a previous post I mentioned my disappointment with the workarounds needed to enable CalDAV and calendar sharing on my iPhone 3GS. It seemed intentionally obfuscated to get the general public to spring for other (redundant) services. But, even after the workarounds, I found CalDAV to be a 99 yard liner, so to speak. It worked most of the time, but sometimes you had to load & reload the calendar app to get new or updated appointment to show up if they were added/updated via the web or iCal. I couldn’t help but think that there was, again, some intention behind the flaky support for a protocol that worked 100% in their desktop counterpart (iCal).
I am happy to say that Apple has not only fixed this (at least where Google accounts are concerned), but also made life even easier for everyone with iOS 4. Now if you setup any Google account (like a Gmail account or a Google Apps email) via the account setup interface it automatically allows you to enable calendar and notes for that account. And the calendar syncs instantly to changes made via web or desktop. This is a huge boon for my mobile lifestyle. I can’t be worried about missing an appointment because I set it up on the desktop or via the web interface when the iPhone wasn’t in my hands (or convenient).
But here’s a tip: do not enable a CalDAV account for the same calendar. It will send you back to the flakey sync behavior. Delete your Google CalDAV accounts first and then add the Google accounts with the Account Setup > GMail selection.
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05.04.10
Posted in technology at 9:37 pm by Steve
I have to say that I am becoming a huge proponent of the Google Apps cloud. The power and interoperability Google has made available to every organization is incredible. What’s more, I have yet to run into a situation where Google Apps didn’t provide an organization with more features and a significantly lower yearly technology expense line than what they already had in place. And that’s hard costs, not even factoring in the soft costs of things like less employee downtime and streamlined workflows.
I do think it’s incredible to see how productive you can be with a computer, a web browser and internet access. All thanks to Google and their little pet projects mandate.
I’m pretty sure Google will take over the world. And the only hope any other company might have to catch up is to allow their employees to be free thinkers too.
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04.26.10
Posted in Music, technology at 9:17 am by Steve
I have long been a fan of Metric-Halo and their products. I was an early-ish adopter of their Mobile I/O device, which has been my go to interface for recording both in the studio and on location for the better part of 6 (maybe 7) years now. My MIO 2882 has been the most reliable piece of equipment I’ve ever purchased. Add to the the incredible sounding converters and analog front end and you can understand why I have nothing but praise for this company.
I recently setup a MIO 2882 2d Expanded for a local church, transitioning them from the Tascam digital board they had bee using, and I have to say that the results are stunning. It’s hard to believe that a 9 year old design can still be so incredibly current. A very refreshing paradigm shift from the “planned obsolescence” mentality most companies adhere to these days. Easy to use, small footprint, minimal power requirements and great sound.
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10.13.09
Posted in technology at 11:54 am by Steve
So…have you been blown away by the new media revolution?? Neither have I. In fact, there’s really not all that much ‘new’ about New Media. Delivering a commercial to me as a pre-roll to an online video stream is not ‘new’. Sorry. Banner ads are certainly not new either. Sorry. Rich media? Again, not new. Animation dates back to the early 1800s with ‘flip books’. Sorry.
There’s nothing new about online media. Oh, sure, the delivery is new, but the media itself hasn’t changed any. And the control hasn’t yet shifted from the few to the many. The internet has not been the liberator of media. In fact, the threat of what the internet & internet media could be has scared the you-know-what out of those in control of “old media” so much that the backlash of lawsuits (ahem..RIAA, are you listening) has just become a farce, a circus, a comedy of errors. The only problem is that no one is laughing.
The ‘old media moguls’ are akin to the blacksmith in the early 1900s, who upon seeing the automobile, decided to try to pass law saying the automobile should not be allowed on the road with horses & people and control it proliferation and how it could be used by the general populace. And they then hire a great law team who goes on to show how dangerous these new automobiles are and how the increase in pedestrian deaths is enough to pass these laws. For example, in England, it was once law that you had to have a pedestrian walk in front of your car waving a red flag and blowing a horn to warn everyone that a car was coming. It was a law that was repealed in short order. It impeded the progress of civilization by limiting the use of the technology at hand. A meme that seems to be cyclic in history.
The problem is lack of vision. Rather than seeing the advent of new technology as a boon to civilization and a chance to make money in an entirely new market, the blacksmith simply can’t get past the fear that his livelihood is in jeopardy. With people buying automobiles there will be fewer horses on the roads. Fewer horses on the roads means less need for new horseshoes. This is a rather short-sided view of life and is usually the direct result of a business model that has no extensibility or leadership that has no vision, even for those things right in front of their faces.
And what’s all this “research says x% of people under y watch online video”, or whatever the technology du jour is. Why do we rely on the general populace to ferret out where everything is going. Are they not just taking advantage of what’s here, now. If they were so good at defining the future of technology, wouldn’t they all be millionaires. It was Henry Ford who once said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’ “
My advice to the blacksmiths of today: learn to make tires.
So…have you been blown away by the new media revolution?? Neither have I. In fact, there’s really not all that much ‘new’ about New Media. Delivering a commercial to me as a pre-roll to an online video stream is not ‘new’. Sorry. Banner ads are certainly not new either. Sorry. Rich media? Again, not new. Animation dates back to the early 1800s with ‘flip books’. Sorry.
There’s nothing new about online media. Oh, sure, the delivery is new, but the media itself hasn’t changed any. And the control hasn’t yet shifted from the few to the many. The internet has not been the liberator of media. In fact, the threat of what the internet & internet media could be has scared the you-know-what out of those in control of “old media” so much that the backlash of lawsuits (ahem..RIAA, are you listening) has just become a farce, a circus, a comedy of errors. The only problem is that no one is laughing.
The ‘old media moguls’ are akin to the blacksmith in the early 1900s, who upon seeing the automobile, decided to try to pass law saying the automobile should not be allowed on the road with horses & people and control it proliferation and how it could be used by the general populace. And they then hire a great law team who goes on to show how dangerous these new automobiles are and how the increase in pedestrian deaths is enough to pass these laws. For example, in England, it was once law that you had to have a pedestrian walk in front of your car waving a red flag and blowing a horn to warn everyone that a car was coming. It was a law that was repealed in short order. It impeded the progress of civilization by limiting the use of the technology at hand. A meme that seems to be cyclic in history.
The problem is lack of vision. Rather than seeing the advent of new technology as a boon to civilization and a chance to make money in an entirely new market, the blacksmith simply can’t get past the fear that his livelihood is in jeopardy. With people buying automobiles there will be fewer horses on the roads. Fewer horses on the roads means less need for new horseshoes. This is a rather short-sided view of life and is usually the direct result of a business model that has no extensibility or leadership that has no vision, even for those things right in front of their faces.
And what’s all this “research says x% of people under y watch online video”, or whatever the technology du jour is. Why do we rely on the general populace to ferret out where everything is going. Are they not just taking advantage of what’s here, now. If they were so good at defining the future of technology, wouldn’t they all be millionaires. It was Henry Ford who once said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’ ”
My advice to the blacksmiths of today: learn to make tires.
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09.06.09
Posted in technology at 2:49 pm by Steve
Not happy with my new iPhone not auto-syncing my Google Calendar I did some investigation, and here’s what I discovered. If you let your iPhone sync calendars with your Mac, they are considered “desktop” accounts and not synced over wireless or 3g. And this is true even if the calendar account is a CalDAV calendar like Google calendar that should auto-sync over the network.
The fix, for those of us who want to sync a Google Calendar (or any CalDAV based calendar) on our iPhone and have it auto sync over the network regardless of how the calendar is edited, is this:
- Turn off calendar sync for any CalDAV calendars in iTunes
- Sync your iPhone
- Goto your iPhone preferences > accounts > add account
- Choose “Other” and then on the next screen choose “Add CalDAV Account”
- Enter the account info.
- Save the account and let it verify the credentials.
For those wanting to sync a Google Calendar the credentials are:
- server: www.google.com
- username: your Google username (e.g.
)
- password: your Google account password
- description: whatever you want to call your calendar
That’s it. You now have a fully functional 2-way syncing calendar. Note: this will only sync the master Google calendar. If you want to sync any sub-calendars you need to replace the URL in the ‘Advanced Settings’ screen with the specific URL of the Calendar ID for those calendars. You can get the Calendar ID in the Calendar settings section of your Google Calendar account. Simply follow the above steps and then once setup, edit the advanced options to add the sub-calendar URL.
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08.10.09
Posted in technology at 9:51 pm by Steve
As I’ve had more time with my iPhone and have delved much deeper into it’s settings I have noticed a few places where Apple certainly missed the ball. Now, I’m still very happy with my iPhone. It has enabled me to be a lot more mobile and still be responsive to clients and colleagues during my work hours. It has also become invaluable for my personal time, as I think I have shot more video of my son with the iPhone than I have with our Sony HandyCam. The iPhone is just there and I can be shooting video in a matter of seconds…so I do.
D’oh-mo arigato, Mr. Roboto
That’s right. This first shortcoming was easy to avoid. Apple does an exceptional job fretting over the little things. The small details that take a product from good to great. Their user interface details are so well thought out that I can’t believe they missed this one. I cannot play my WiFi networked iPhone’s music over my Airport Express ‘Air Tunes’. How did they miss this??
Every Mac in the house can send it’s iTunes output to my WiFi connected stereo in the living room. And since I see the iPhone more as a Mac than an iPod or even a phone, how do you explain the omission of this feature?
I don’t know, either. Let’s hope iPhone OS 3.1 addresses this.
Lo-Cal…DAV
Okay. I understand that AT&T is using the whole iPhone OS 3.0 thing to push their ‘enterprise data’ package, which is a load of crap, honestly…data is data, what constitutes one packet as being ‘enterprise’ while another is ‘consumer’. But, I get it. AT&T provides the network, so you play by there rules. But iCal on every desktop Mac can do 2-way sync with Google Calendar via CalDAV, why remove that feature from the iPhone version of iCal?
Like I said, I get the Enterprise Data thing. AT&T wants another way to tack on another few bucks per month to the bill. Fine. Google Calendar is not a default setup on the iPhone (or any Mac), and requires additional configuration (and a Google account). That alone should have been enough to say “let’s leave it alone, if they know how to setup Google Calendar let them have full 2-way sync”. The fact that they went out of their way to make it a single direction sync really annoys me.
Of course, a way around this is to setup your Google Calendar on your Mac and sync to the iPhone. Anytime you edit your calendar from iCal on your Mac it will sync. If you need to add an appointment on your iPhone, use the web interface and then open iCal on the iPhone to have it pick up the sync. Voila…a (kludgey) 2 way sync.
Oh, and if you couldn’t tell, I refuse to pay for MobileMe. It provides almost no functionality I really want, other than calendar syncing. I have servers I use for web deployment, ftp, document sharing, et al. I don’t need an overpriced Apple solution that also includes calendar sync. And…I certainly don’t need another email address (I have 10 of those already…at least 10 that I can remember).
i-yi-yi-Photo
So, every time I connect my iPhone to my Mac to sync iPhoto opens and asks to import the same photos it imported last time. What about “I already have those” does iPhoto not understand. Apple needs to set some sort of trigger within the iPhone itself that tells the Mac whether or not there are new photos on the iPhone that need to be synced up. I’m getting tired of iPhoto interrupting me every time I attach my iPhone to my Mac. I keep telling myself that I need to go turn off the ‘auto open iPhoto’ option, but I use that with my cameras all the time and would much rather have Apple step up to the plate and have the iPhone communicate to the Mac whether it needs to launch iPhoto or not.
So, there you have it. 3, admittedly nit-picky, iPhone shortcomings that have been bugging me. None of these are real deal breakers for me, and I know they are all easily addressable in software updates. Apple has made a killer product in the iPhone – I truly see the future of the Mac (and all computing) in this device. I tell everyone who asks about it “the phone part of the iPhone is just a small part of what this thing is all about”, and it’s true. You don’t fully get it (grok it) until you use one for a while.
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08.04.09
Posted in technology at 11:57 am by Steve
It has been a week since I finally gave into the allure of Apple’s latest update and went to the local Apple store to purchase an iPhone 3GS. After a week my gut reaction is: how did I ever get along without one of these!
What kept me from upgrading my aging Motorola Razr was the fear that a smart phone would make me too accessible. There would be nowhere to hide when I needed to get away. The reality of the situation is that I now feel a lot more comfortable getting away, knowing I can still be in touch. I also can leave the office when I am expecting an email, knowing that I can get my email on the road (sans laptop) and reply from just about anywhere.
I’m still getting into the whole ‘App’ thing. I installed Facebook and a couple Twitter apps. I even found a cool little metronome (something every musician should have on their iPhone).
So, any purchase that feels like a good idea and seems to be more useful a week after it was purchased is a winner in my book. No buyers regret here.
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