No one knows how hard it is to always make it to the MacGroup meetings more than me. I’ve been doing it for over 25 years and there have been times where I wished that there wasn’t a meeting today! However, life goes on and I do my best to make every meeting. However, if you can’t make it to the meetings there’s a cool way to watch the meeting replay on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch via the MacGroup TV App. We’ve been podcasting our meetings for years now and they are available in iTunes. However, our dedicated App offers one stop shopping with a great interface. You can stream the meetings right to your device or mark them as favorites so that they are downloaded to watch offline. There’s also a social media tie end to share the content and follow us online.
Check out the MacGroup TV here on the
A Better Typing Experience on the iPad?
I am aware that the intent of the iPad is that it be a self-contained device. And more times than not, I use it that way. No stylus, your finger is supposed to do. No external keyboard, the one that pops up at the bottom of the screen should suffice. But, at times, those devices are needed.
So, I have the Apple wireless keyboard and a Dagi stylus that travel around with me along with my iPad. Before I got this external wireless keyboard, I looked at lots of keyboards. Some were mounted into leather cases. Aside from adding extra bulk and weight to the iPad, the keyboards seemed to make you hold your hands in awkwardly-tight positions. They were noticeably smaller.
I like my Apple wireless keyboard, but sometimes, I wish it could fold it into my iPad when I’m on the go with it, keeping everything compact and together. Seems like someone was listening to my thoughts.
One of my favorite sites to check out, Kickstarter, recently posted a new item that is trying to get funding.
The “Brydge.”
The Brydge is a full-sized bluetooth-enabled keyboard, with hotkeys for iPad functions, a speaker, with clamp/hinge to attach an iPad, allowing it to open, tilt and fold closed.
To see more about Brydge http://thebrydge.com and on http://Kickstarter.com
As long as I have to flexibility to detach the keyboard and still have it function in the same manner, I think my present keyboard might be replaced in the near future.
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I recently picked up “the new iPad,” and one of the main reasons was because of the ability to use it as a hotspot. Sure, I could have dropped my pseudo-unlimited data plan on my iPhone and used it for a hotspot (and I suppose I still can in a pinch), but I wanted the better battery life of the iPad – and the better speed of LTE. So I bought a Verizon LTE model rather than the AT&T version, for all the reasons Terry and others have discussed here.
One thing I wanted to bring to your attention, though, if you are like Terry and me – upgrading from an AT&T iPad with an unlimited data plan you want to keep (after all AT&T has claimed they aren’t throttling iPad unlimited plans). As Terry has related, all you need to do is pull out the Verizon SIM card and put in your AT&T card, and you will get your 3G plan. But if you are one of those folks who turn the plan off and on again at different times of the year, you better have access to an AT&T iPad. Because if you try and and access your account on your iPad to turn it on or off, you’ll be greeted by this:
Rethink Possible indeed.
I guess AT&T wouldn’t be keen to support a Verizon model – but why not? Isn’t it a chance for more revenue? Just like the fact that you can’t get tethering with AT&T, and their LTE coverage is pitiful compared to Verizon’s,they just couldn’t get it right.
If I want to turn this off (and I might at times) I will pop it back in my old iPad2 (that I have passed on to my wife). But what if I didn’t have that? I guess a call to AT&T is in order, as the iPad provisioning web page doesn’t seem to have a way to turn it off.
So why am I keeping it anyway? Sometimes I want to stream a lot of data, and 3G speed is good enough. Plus, it gives me options – if I am out of range of Verizon, I can always fall back to AT&T.
The MacGroup Detroit meeting on April 22nd covered the latest iPad and Apple TV. As usual, there wasn’t enough time to cover everything and the Genius Table was handed a question after the meeting ended. “Can you wirelessly stream photos from an iPad to an Apple TV without going through a computer.”
The simple answer was to forget wifi and just use a cable to connect the iPad to the TV, but our questioner didn’t want wired. He wanted to be able to sit across the room with his iPad to control what was shown. He was thinking in terms of showing off photos at family gatherings. Have Apple TV — Will Travel. Yep. Beats passing around that expensive iPad for fumble-fingered Cousin Louie to drop and break. I’ve never done it before but decided I could do a bit of homework on this one, and as it turns out, there are a couple of ways to do this.
The first is AirPlay. Now, AirPlay is easy with audio and video files. That lovely little AirPlay symbol shows up nicely when there is an Apple TV on your network. Can’t tell you how many times I accidentally turned on my daughter’s Apple TV using my iPod touch late at night. Trying to find it in the iPad Photos app is another story.
- Open Photos and select the album.
- Select Slideshow.
- Select Start Slideshow.
- Click on the AirPlay icon and select Apple TV.
Must be an easier way. Enter iCloud Photo Stream. Photo Stream was an all-or-nothing things when first introduced, but Apple has improved it tremendously. I have it set so that any photos I take with my iPod touch and any screen captures I grab on the touch or my iPad (1st gen, no camera) go automatically to Photo Stream. iPhoto on my iMac is set to automatically download anything added to Photo Stream, but not automatically upload new additions. I add a bunch of things to iPhoto that I don’t need anywhere else, but I need those screen captures to illustrate articles. If I do have photos that I’d like to add, I select the photo, go down to share, and then click on Photo Stream. Easy.
Once the photos you want to share are in Photo Stream, just go to the home page on Apple TV, scroll to the bottom of the screen and select Photo Stream. That’s it. Now, if you want to do this using someone else’s Apple TV, be aware that you will have to change the Apple ID & password. And when you are finished — remember to restore the original ID and password.
Just a quick update on a product I first mentioned a couple of years back called Crossover Mac. CodeWeavers has produced a new version, version XI, that does away with the dual versions they used to have. It used to be that there was Crossover and Crossover Games, a version optimized for, yes, games (hope that’s not a spoiler for anyone).
They’ve finally combined the two into one, so no more need for splitting your programs up. Also, there’s no “regular” or “Pro” versions. On first run, it also offers to upgrade your “bottles” (your pseudo-Windows machines) and trash Crossover Games if you have it (it upgrades those bottles too).
They’ve also changed the pricing around a bit. Crossover is now $59.95 with one year of free updates, email support, and one free phone support incident. If you don’t want to spend that much, you can go with 6 months of updates and no phone support for $49.95. Or you can go for 1 month of email support for $39.95. In all cases, the software is downloaded, not shipped.
I’m using it now to avoid firing up a whole Virtual Machine just to run a baseball program I picked up. This program was designed for Win 95/NT (and runs on XP, Vista and Win 7) and also runs great in Crossover. The startup time is a lot less than starting up a VM – and my nightly backup doesn’t see a large, 20 GB VM file changed, just any files having to do with the program.
Oddly enough, I didn’t think it would work at first. The install hung near the end, where it said it was cleaning up. But after killing it and restarting the bottle, I was surprised to find the program working just fine. I did have to manually add the program to Crossover’s program menu because the install choked, but that wasn’t too tough. Crossover lets you poke around and look for programs on your “c drive” – the directory where it sets up the drive, anyway – so I found them there and added them to menu.
If you are thinking about using it, you should download the free trial so you can see if it runs your program OK. It’s cheaper than buying a copy of Windows, and if it works, generally faster than running in a VM.
Have you checked out the Radio section of iTunes lately? I did last week, and wow, what a surprise. I was beginning to think that Apple was backing off on streaming radio. At the February MacGroup meeting, one of our members came to the Genius Table for help because of the error messages that she was getting with her favorite stations. We tried it with my MacBook, and were only able to access a very small percentage of those tried. Knowing it was a problem on Apple’s end of things we finally gave up.
Last week something made me look again, and what a surprise. Not only have they added several more genre divisions, but the number of streams has increased to over 2,000. I found some great comedy channels, a bunch of International channels originating from Italy (hey, I’ve listened to this stuff since I was a tiny kid.), sports channels (including some of our locals), and of course, in with the talk channels is WJR-AM where our own Friday Guy, Calvin Carson can be heard most Saturdays.
If it has been a while since you’ve looked at iTunes Radio section, check it out. You may be pleasantly surprised. Oh, and when you find stations that you’ll want to listen to again? Create a new playlist and drag those stations into the playlist. Saves wading through those 2000+ station listings.
Wirelessly Share Content—Securely
CloudFTP is a pocketsize device that, like your Apple computer with AirDrop, creates it’s own WiFi network. So you can take this device with you, anywhere.
Connect an external USB device to CloudFTP and your other WiFi enabled devices, such as your iPad, iPhone, computer, will be able to connect to that external device, wirelessly. Yet, another way to stream movies and photos to your iDevices without having to copy them over. If capable, on the WiFi devices, you may also be able to open and even manage files on that external device.
I’m not sure if the dedicated app for iOS and Android has been completed, but you presently access the features through a web browser.
CloudFTP is a great invention that was funded by Kickstarter. A wonderful micro-loan site, visit Kickstarter.com to see some great and wacky concepts that may or not have made it off the ground.
Learn more about CloudFTP here: Kickstarter—CloudFTP
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iOS devices would seem to be tailor-made for using with video conferencing equipment. But trying to find a solution that works well, without buying onto an entire ecosystem, has been difficult. But it’s a bit easier now if you have an iPad 2 or 3, or an iPhone 4S. Polycom has recently updated their iPhone and iPad RealPresence apps (free) in the iTunes app store.
The apps were initially designed to interface with Polycom’s “RealPresence” video conferencing infrastructure (which is a whole system for managing video conferencing). When it first came out, the iPad app let you just enter an IP address for either a SIP of H.323 video conferencing device – sort of like calling a phone – and have a video conference. I used mine this way at work with the Windows version of the Polycom software, which can also be used without the entire infrastructure portion.
The iPad app then, after one of the upgrades, started asking for a username/password combo for the infrastructure, and would not let you at the controls for making or answering a call. I assumed it would no longer connect and started looking for alternatives. Then for some reason one day I just put in a valid email address and a password – and the password portion of the screen disappeared, granting access to the controls. So it was still usable in non-infrastructure mode.
Also along the way, Polycom introduced the iPhone version of the app. The system requirements specify the iPhone 4S only. And when you brought it up, it asked for a username, password, and infrastructure server. Just entering values did not make that portion of the screen go away like on the iPad version. If you check out the comments, you may see the numerous anger comments about how the app is pretty useless.
That’s true if you haven’t bought into the (not inexpensive) infrastructure – or was until recently. Polycom has changed both apps to work alike – they start with a “Sign in” link and one to bypass the sign in. Bypassing gets you to the controls, where you can make a call. I am able to call the Polycom software on Windows and my iOS devices from each other. It didn’t work over 3G, but only because I got non-public 10-based addresses – so my devices couldn’t find each other.
These are the best SIP and H.323 video conferencing apps I’ve used – I’ve tried others, and they were slow and buggy. I would have paid a modest fee for these Polycom apps – they are very polished and work well.
Just a quicky post this week. As MobileMe is coming to an end on June 30, we should expect to see more phishing schemes hitting the email inbox. I’ve seen a few so far. The latest hit my inbox this morning. If you haven’t yet migrated from MobileMe to iCloud you will get legitimate reminders from Apple, but please be aware that you will probably get some of the illegitimate junk, too. When in doubt, go directly to the website and do not click on that email link. This is what the latest one looks like.
When the iTunes Store first opened it was pretty simple to understand the rules of “Authorization.” However, now with the App Store, Mac App Store, iTunes Match, Apple TV, etc. it can be really confusing. There are also different rules depending on the type of content in question. For example, if I bought a song back in the day when Apple used Digital Rights Management (DRM) aka “Protected”, then I was limited to only being able to play that song on up to 5 Authorized computers and an unlimited number of iPods. Luckily Apple no longer sells DRM’d tunes, so this problem/limit goes away for any new purchases of “music”. However, other content, such as movies is still DRM protected and therefore still has the same rules enforced.
Authorizing your Mac or PC to play your DRM protected iTunes content
You can have up to five authorized computers (Macintosh, Windows, or both) at a time. To play a purchased item on a sixth computer, you need to deauthorize another one (from that computer). An iPod, iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV doesn’t count as a computer. When you go to play this content on your computer you will be prompted to “Authorize” your computer to play the content. This basically means signing in with the SAME Apple ID that was used to buy the content. Let’s say one of your computer dies or you sold it and forgot to deauthorize it first. You have no way of selectively deauthorizing computers that you no longer have access to from iTunes. The only way to deauthorize those computers is to Deauthorize All of your computer from your iTunes account and then Authorize the ones you want Authorized again from each computer’s iTunes App.
Automatic Downloads and Re-downloading content
Apple now allows you to re-download more than just Apps. You can now re-download music, TV shows and some movies that you’ve purchased in the past. This is great because it means that you can download content directly to a device such as an iPad while you’re out and about without having to return to your computer. However, this comes at a price as you have a restriction on the number of devices that you can “Associate” with an Apple ID:
When you turn on Automatic Downloads or download past purchases on an iOS device or computer, your device or computer will be associated with your Apple ID. Your Apple ID can have up to 10 devices and computers (combined) associated with it. Each computer must also be authorized using the same Apple ID. Once a device or computer is associated with your Apple ID, you cannot associate that device or computer with another Apple ID for 90 days. You can view which devices or computers are currently associated, remove unused devices or computers, and see how long before they can be associated with a different Apple ID from the Account Information page in iTunes on your computer:
iTunes Match
I love iTunes match, but it also has limits:
When you add a computer or iOS device to iTunes Match, your computer or device will be associated to the Apple ID being used for iTunes Match. Your Apple ID can have up to 10 devices and computers (combined) associated with it. This means computers, iOS devices and Apple TVs. That means it will be a lot easier to hit this limit since it includes everything!
iTunes Match is limited to 25,000 songs.
iTunes Store purchases made with the same Apple ID being used for iTunes Match do not count towards the 25,000 song limit.
Unmatched content will be uploaded as is; upload time varies depending on the amounts uploaded and local network speeds.
Song files over 200 MB will not be uploaded to iCloud.
Songs containing DRM (Digital Rights Management) will not be matched or uploaded to iCloud unless your computer is authorized for playback of that content.
iOS Apps
Luckily the policy is a little more generous when it comes to Apps. There is no limit on the number of iOS devices that you can install the Apps you associated with your Apple ID. Also since the very beginning Apple allows you to delete and re-download iOS Apps. In other words once you own it, you own it for life. You can always re-download an App that you deleted or got wiped out due to a crash.
The Bottom Line
Luckily none of the above is a concern for your own content, content you ripped from CDs or movies from DVDs or iTunes Plus content. However, if you bought Protected content from the iTunes Store then you’ll have to play by the ever changing rules above. In Apple’s defense these rules were more than likely brought to us by the authors, labels, movie studios, etc. Heaven forbid that you have more than 5 computers or 10 devices! 
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