Just a quick tip this week. I’ve had a weird problem with the last few releases of iTunes when downloading app updates. I’ll click on “check for updates” from the Apps screen and see two or more waiting for me…
and I click on the “Download All Free Updates” button. I put in my password (you don’t store yours so just anyone can buy stuff on your account, do you?) and the downloads start. But even after all the downloads complete, occasionally I’ll see one item left behind…
I know it downloaded – not only did I see it in the activity monitor at the top, but the old version is in the trash. If I hit “Download All Free Updates,” it downloads again – but sits in my iTunes store display as available.
This used to drive me nuts – because if it’s a big download (and I had this happen once with Navigon, befre they slimmed it down), then every time you click “Download Al,l” the dang thing downloads again, but won’t go away.
Sometimes I can cure this by sending iTunes away and then restarting it. But often that doesn’t work. The one way out of this that I have found works 99% of the time on the first try (and when it doesn’t, works on the second try) is to click on the “Get Update” button next to the item rather than “Download All.”
Yes, it means downloading one more time. But once is better than half a dozen times, right?
We all run into occasional problems, and most are easy to fix if you just follow a few basic steps.
Printer or mouse or ??? not responding? Check the cable connections. Plugs can work loose. Pets and people can accidentally snag a cable and dislodge it just enough that it’s not making proper contact. Oh, and that printer? Check both ends of the cable.
Cables a-ok? Quit and restart the program in use. If the program doesn’t respond, use the Option-Command-Escape key combination to bring up the Force Quit menu.
Still not working? Restart the computer. That cures a lot of problems. This also works for problems with iPads, iPhones, iPods and any other electronics you have. The act of shutting down and restarting gives the electronics in question a chance to dump cache files and clean up memory.
If you’ve done all that and you have a specific piece of software that is still causing problems, before going through the usual recommended reinstall, try switching to a clean identity to see if you still have the problem. Other software running in the background or that has installed extra components, can cause a conflict. If you can run the software in a clean identity, then there’s a good chance that you either have a conflict or a corrupt preference file, and a reinstall probably won’t fix it.
If the problem is with a cordless mouse or keyboard, double check the batteries. And on the subject of cordless keyboards, I’m still very happy with the Logitech solar powered K750 I wrote about a few weeks ago. Now all I need is a solar powered trackpad! Are you listening Logitech?
If you’re having a problem with something just updated, sometimes just rolling back to the prior version is the easiest thing to do. You do have a backup, don’t you? This is where Time Machines come in very handy. If you have a Time Machine backup, just open the folder that contains the program, highlight it, enter Time Machine from the menu bar, and go back to just before you installed the update. Hit the Restore button, and you should be okay. As standard procedure, you should be sure to do a full backup before installing any major updates or upgrades. Over the years, I’ve seen many updates released, only to be taken down within a few hours because of a problem not detected soon enough.
That’s it for this week. I’ll leave you with the latest music video from the MacGroup 5:
Another week goes by. Another week brings a
F R I D A Y!
Well, this is another week of introspect on a number of things dealing with backup. The week prior to Thanksgiving gave birth to an incident that was going sour but came back to sweetness because when I asked the individual if they had done a backup, the answer was “YES”. With that in mind, the process proceeded and all parties walked away happy. I have to tell you that sometimes when you have to tell someone that all of their data is lost, you might as well tell them that a loved one has died. Sometimes the lost data can mean that much and it’s a message I never like to deliver.
I also got an opportunity to get back to my roots as a “SuperHero” thanks to the nudging of my daughter. Now when I say superhero, I don’t mean like Superman or The Fantastic Four, they all had some sort of super power. No, I mean more like
“Kick Ass”
if you seen that movie. He did not have any super powers but he was still a super hero.
So my choice of a super hero came down to being …… are you ready ……..wait for it…….here it comes ……….
C A P T U N D E R P A N T S!
Oh yeah …. That’s the choice for me. Glad it’s based on a kid’s story. Else I would have to reign from my fortress at Hanes. I’d rather be headquartered at Victoria’s Secret but I couldn’t find any thing that fit right. _— Did I say that out loud —- scratch that Vicky’s sentence.
BTW – That’s me. Just to the right of the guy in the black coat. My daughter is to his left just t the side of the portly superhero.
Also I had a chance to go back to my family roots in the Virginia /DC area. I got a chance to see a few things I had not seen for quite a while and some new things. The Martin Luther King Memorial was impressive, even after dark.
So as I am shooting a bunch of pictures with my cousin’s digital camera that they just bought, was really nice, and they had no idea how to work at the time, I said to them, “Hey I want to get copies of all these pictures so when we get back, can I have you send them to me?” They said sure, and then I though, “Hmmm…. Maybe I should back these up so they don’t get erased by accident.” But how? They did not have their USB cable. Wow, I just thought, my Macbook Air has a built in SD slot. Popped the SD card out of the camera and into the side of the MacBook. Bingo, mounted on desktop like a hard drive and I copied what I needed and it was done.
My cousin then asked how do you backup you copy? Hmmmm…. Oh yes, connected my 3G modem and then connected to my DropBox account. 15 minutes later, pictures were securely copied. Some of the family wanted to see some of the pictures but I really did not want to use my MacBook in pass-around mode. Well meaning people but things can get dropped and I need the MacBook for work support. Ah Ha!, pulled out the iPhone and connected to my DropBox account and was able to share the pictures. However, the screen was small. Last trick out the magic bag Felix. I pulled the iPad out and connected to …..guess………come on…….I know you can do it ………yep DropBox account and I was showing pictures on a bigger screen.
So as you can see, not only was I able to securely backup my pictures for future use, I could also share those pictures as well. You could do the same with iCloud as well. In addition, remember that those SD cards you have around for photos can also be used for storage for small capacity backups as well.
Musical Selection
As the Holidays are approaching the gathering of families will become more frequent, please enjoy each others company.
The radio always sounds good to me.
Check out this weekend’s edition of the “Internet Advisor Show” on AM 760 WJR – http://www.internetadvisor.net. This Saturday’s show will be a live broadcast with Foster, Ed, and Gary. I however will not be in attendance. That doesn’t mean you can still tune in for talk and call in for questions that are internet and tech natured. I will be over at Royal Oak Ice arena for the New Edge Figure Skating Club’s annual “”SkateFest” competition. It’s great family fun to watch the skating and get this…. The price is very family friendly because you can bring as many as you like for one low price ……. FREE!
C Ya there!
It’s not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.
This week, I did a boatload of work on my computer. I imported video, I wrote articles, I created lesson plans, worked on pet projects, you name it. The morning of my experience, I ended up going to bed about 4am.
I have set SuperDuper to automatically backup at 11:30pm, daily. Hopefully, by then, I’ve started my procession to bed. But not this night. When the backup started, I turned it off to not interfere with the video project I was working on. So, by 4am, it had slipped my mind that the daily backup hadn’t occured.
Yes, I have a Time Machine backup too, but again, importing video, so I turned it off too…
Well, while I was back to working diligently the following day, the missed backup not on my mind, my computer starting running dog slow. The spinning beach ball appeared at every cursor move and selection. What gives?
So I decided to restart. Whoa. To my surprise, I was greeted with a white screen that lasted far too long. Knowing “this can’t be good” I was forced to do a hard reboot. Three times I was again greeted with this screen.
Finally, rebooting from my SuperDuper backup of 2-days ago, I copied over from my internal drive files that I knew the backup didn’t have. Some wouldn’t copy. I’d tried to do a normal backup, but kept getting a “Disk Full” error from SuperDuper. So, I was left wondering “What will I lose?” I know, not much, but that video project was halfway completed. I cringed at having to do it over. I decided to just be grateful that that was my only worry.
While working from the backup drive, I repaired permissions, and ran the repair drive function on the internal drive, and I think this helped with what happened next.
I’ve had drives die before. And times before, I kept throwing procedures at them to get something copied before they completely died. This was no different. It took five times of me asking (pleading) SuperDuper to do just one more Smart Backup. The 5th time was the charm. A Smart Backup takes a fraction of the time a full backup would have. In the meantime, I contacted Dave Nanian, of ShirtPocket, to find out why SuperDuper was returning a “Disk Full” error on a drive with plenty of space. Sending me some helpful information, he surmised that the problem is caused by Lion OS returning this error for a drive that could be failing. He was correct.
Feeling much better, that I was able to do those immediate backups, I unplugged the laptop, headed over to the Somerset Apple Store (great people work there), got the hard drive diagnosed and ordered a new one.
When the new drive arrives, the restore from my SuperDuper or Time Machine backup drive will be pretty easy. SuperDuper and Time Machine are worth their weight in gold.
In the meantime, I am working from this failing drive, but running Time Machine every 15 minutes to keep my data ready for a restore to the new drive.
While waiting for my drive, I made one more backup decision. I created a bootable flash drive from the Lion OS install download from a few months ago. While doing so, I received an email that my replacement drive was in. The drive came in about 36 hours after it was ordered. The Apple Store policy was to load my new drive with Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard! Really! My drive had Lion on it.
Had it not been for that last decision to make that bootable Lion OS on the flash drive, my restore experience would not have been smooth. After restarting from the flash drive, it gave me the options I expected to see at startup. I selected “Restore from Time Machine Backup” and left the computer to do its thing. Four hours later, upon returning home, my drive was restored and waiting for me to pick up where I left off earlier today, only with a new drive.
I’m always surprised that even at the MacGroup Genius Table, we have to advise folks time and time again to backup their computers. If you care about your data and your time lost, it can’t be expressed enough. And, even if you miss a day, Backup!
Right Cal? :-)
:::
I’m about halfway through a relatively recent book, Mastering Xcode 4, that you might be interested in if you want to learn to program for the Mac or any of the iOS devices. Xcode is the development environment provided by Apple for writing, compiling, and testing your code. The latest version, Xcode 4, has quite a few changes over the previous version (which I never really mastered, but I knew enough to get by). In the past, I mainly used Xcode for school projects, writing C and Java programs with it (and it worked out quite well). I always wanted to learn more about it in depth to use it for Mac programming, but there’s too much there to just go poking around.
With the previous version of Xcode, I bought a book titled Xcode 3 Unleashed. Personally, I just couldn’t follow it. The book used very complex code examples to show off the many Xcode features – but if you didn’t understand the program, then in some cases it was hard to understand what you were supposed to be learning about Xcode. I never did finish that book.
Mastering Xcode 4 seems to me to be much better at teaching Xcode. You still will be typing in programs, but they’re very small, and so you’ll be able to understand what’s going on – and what part of Xcode you’re supposed to be learning. I also think this newer book is written in an easier to understand style (at least for me). I’m about halfway through it now, and it only took me a few days. It took me considerably longer to make considerably less progress with the other book.
Xcode isn’t the only environment for creating Mac or iOS programs, but it’s loaded with features to make it easier to submit your programs to the Mac or iOS App stores (if that’s what you’re aiming for). Some of the other tools from third parties still require you to do at least a few steps in Xcode in order to get your app into one of the stores, because they can’t/don’t replicate some of Apple’s tools (that talk directly to Apple servers).
Even though this book came out just a couple of months ago, some portions are slightly out of date – it’s based on Xcode 4.1, and 4.2 is out (with 4.3 in beta!). So a few of the screen shots don’t match up exactly (but they’re close enough). Also, I noticed in a couple of lessons, when’re the author was trying to show the steps required to do something, where Xcode now automatically did some of the steps for you. That’s a bit confusing when you go to add some code and it’s already there! But it’s nice to see that Apple’s making Xcode even easier to use by automating more repetitive tasks.
This book will not teach you anything about programming in Objective-C (the main language used for programming the Mac and iOS devices). But it will give you a good grounding in the tools. I myself have done very little with Objective-C (or “Obj-C” for short), programming mostly on the Mac in RealBasic, which is a great cross-platform language (you can write programs for OS X, Windows, and Linux with only minor changes for each). But I want to move up to native Mac programming and maybe start doing some iOS programs.
So if you want to get a grounding in Apple’s programming tools, you should consider getting Mastering Xcode 4, available in paper and on the Kindle.
Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are finally past and the countdown to Christmas and Hanukkah has started. I’ve started looking at iPad/iPhone holiday apps, and there are a few new ones available.
FIrst up is Appy Christmas. An animated Santa will give you an Advent countdown, with a new free app every day starting on December 1st. Try to open one of the doors early and Santa will tell you “no, no, no” or “please be patient” and refuse to open it. Talk to Santa and he’ll parrot back whatever is said in a chipmunk-like voice. He’ll also give a countdown in days, hours or minutes. It’s cute, and of course, the price is right. Free.
Continue reading »
Our good friend and world famous concert pianist David Syme is coming to our next meeting to put on a show. That’s right David has agreed to help us out with a year end fund raising concert for MacGroup-Detroit. David will perform on Sunday, December 18th at 2PM for an hour. David just doesn’t play the piano, he gets the crowd involved and it’s sure to be a treat. The cost/donation for this event is $10 for members and $15 for non-members with the proceeds going to MacGroup and a small portion to cover David’s expenses. This of course is optional and takes place before the main regular meeting. However, we would sure appreciate your support. Yes there will be some really cool door prizes for this event as well!
Learn more about David Syme here.
At our regular meeting (starting at 3PM) I’ll show the NEW Photoshop Elements 10 as well as some Photoshop Tips and Tricks. This is one that you don’t want to miss!
Photoshop Elements 10 is now available on the
Enjoy, but maybe not to this level.
Happy Thanksgiving to you all.
Enjoy your family, your day, your Goodwill Gesture I spoke of last week.
I’m off doing the same.
:::
Last week, Navigon unveiled it’s latest version of its iOS navigation app. Until recently, I had been using the TomTom app (for reasons documented here). But circumstances led me back to Navigon, at least for the moment.
What circumstances? Shortly after upgrading to iOS 5, my real-time traffic subscription ran out on the TomTom (unlike Navigon, TomTom requires you to pony up yearly – Navigon has a one-time charge). No problem, I’ll go into the app and re-up. Except – there was a bug in the app, and you couldn’t make any in-app purchases (TomTom came out with a fix a week or so later). I use the traffic very day on my way to work – the traffic is very unpredictable, and some days I need to take an alternate route to get to work on time. So I switched over to Navigon.
Around this time, Navigon released version 2 of the app. It has some great new features (and one annoying omission) that could have been implemented a bit better, but overall is an improvement on the previous version.
One of the touted new features is the ability to download just a portion of the map. For many people, this will be a great boon, as they are fighting for free space on their device. However, I have the space, and actually want the majority of the maps on my device. I do a lot of “what if” planning for drives, and do drive quite a bit across many states each year.
Since I don’t need it for directions, just traffic, I wasn’t worried about the glaring error it makes on my way to work that tries to send me off in thew wrong direction. It worked OK, but I felt the TomTom was better at routing me around heavy traffic.
So I downloaded the new version – which is only 45.2 MB instead of the 1.5+ GB of the monolithic version. Unfortunately, here’s where we run into a trouble spot. After loading the app for the first time, you’re created with a screen that asks you to download the maps you want. Here’s the first annoyance – if, like me, you want most of the maps, be prepared to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap,scroll, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, scroll, tap, tap…yeah, you have to tap on each and every map you want to download. Yes, you can download maps later (and even remove them). But I already know I need most of them, so I might as well download them so I don’t forget one I need. A “Select All” button would have been nice (I wouldn’t mind so much unselecting a few items rather than hitting most of them). But that’s only one time, right? (If only…)
So after 40 minutes or so I finally have all the maps.I then go into the “Extras” and re-download my 3D views and re-activate the radar trap warnings and the real-time traffic (thank you for one time charges, Navigon!). I also decided to pop for the quarterly map updates (although it’s unclear to me if that was a lifetime or yearly sub).
I check my favorites and, unlike many people who’ve complained on the ‘net, mine are all still there (many reports of them getting wiped). Yay! I use it into work, and the menus are much easier to see, and the traffic info is presented better, with a small box listing the delay time and a line on the road next to the slow area. Navigon has always had (at least in my opinion) better depictions of the exits and the signs than TomTom, and they are still great here.
After getting to work, I decide to let it plot my way hope to see if it has decided to take any odd routes (the TomTom app wants me to make some very strange turns near the end of my drive to work, and while they will get me there, they take me out of my way to do it). So I tap on the left menu button to show the menu overlay (which still leaves the map up in the background, which I like) and tap “Take Me Home.” It then asks me to enter the address. Hmm. Well, if all I lost was my home address as opposed to all my favorites, not so bad. I go to Contacts, pick my card, and tell Navigon it’s my home address. Then it’s back to the main screen, hit “Take Me Home,” and…it wants me to enter an address. Sigh. OK, so I go through the address route. Hit “Take Me Home” and…it asks me to enter the address. Great. So I try killing the program and re-entering the address, rebooting the phone and entering the address…and it still won’t stick. That only leaves the nuclear option – I delete the program from my phone and re-download.
OK, so that’s not so bad…oh yeah, I get to tap like a madman all over again to get my maps (and wait again for them to download). Of course, this time, a couple of the maps fail to download and have to be restarted. Yippie. At least this time it takes my address, but of course now all my favorites are gone.
So not a great opening experience. But traffic seems to be much quicker than I remember from the old version, and it’s routing me around trouble spots nicely. So for the most part, after the lousy install experience, I’m fairly happy with the new version.
Only “fairly happy?” Yeah. Because one of my favorite features is gone. There used to be a small iPod symbol in the lower part of the screen – touch it, and the map would peel away and reveal the album cover of the current sone, the title/artist/album name, and show you the play controls. Well, it’s gone. I made use of that feature quite often.
Also, it seems that even with the new maps, the glaring wrong turn on my way to work hasn’t been fixed (yes, I have reported it more than once). So that’s a bit disappointing, because you don’t know when it might send you astray when you don’t know where you’re going.
Another of my pet peeves is the graphics in the lower left. Usually, it’s fine – it shows you the distance to your next turn and which way you need to go. At the end, that turns into a checkered flag and an arrow that points to the side of the road that your destination is on. Well, it’s a good thing the program announces the side, too, because if the arrow was any smaller you’d need a microscope to see it. Really, Navigon? No one there as looked at that tiny arrow and noticed that there’s quite a bit of space there available for something readable?
Overall, this is a worthwhile upgrade – don’t let my complaining make you think otherwise. But a few of the design choices keep this from being even better.
UPDATE: on December 19, 2011, Navigon release version 2.01 that restores the iPod controls (yay!), adds a button to “select all maps” in the Map Manager (yay!) and makes map downloading more reliable. It also fixes the lost Favorites (if you haven’t updated yet or were on the fence). It’s also on sale right now, and live lifetime traffic is 25% off. So if you were on the fence, or were waiting to upgrade, go for it!
When I play with videos, I usually go for the funny and/or warped, and I’ll admit that I looked at a bunch of funny videos to share this week. In the end, I settled on one on the sentimental side. As you sit down to that big meal on Thursday, surrounded by family and friends, give some thought to our military personnel who can’t be with their loved ones this year.
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