JohnBs personal blog

not long now and the Tiger will be changing into a Leopard.

A question for any other iPod Touch users, does your ‘25 Most Played’ playlist contain what you’d expect on your iPod Touch (1.1.1)? When i look at it in iTunes it’s correct, when i look on my Touch via iTunes devices it’s correct but on the iPod it’s completely different. I even tried deleting the smart playlist and creating it again using a different name but it doesn’t contain what i’d expect at all! Any one experiencing something similar?

Look what the post man just delivered

I heard about Pixelmator a few weeks back on the MacBreak weekly podcast but at that time it was a closed beta. But now they’ve launched (apparently) the first GPU powered image editor for the Mac - boy it looks nice and certainly for us none Photoshop powerusers more than capable - plus at a mere $59 definitely worth checking out!

As expected Steve Jobs just announced the iPhone landing in the UK, available from 9 November on the o2 network. Phone will start at £269 on 18 month contracts ranging from £35 to £55 with unlimited (subject to fair use) data. No changes on the spec of the phone, so no 3G. A wifi deal has been struck with ‘The Cloud’ providing 7000+ free wifi hot spots - nothing about Starbucks announced just yet.

I completely forgot to blog on Monday that i received my iMac - despite feverously watching the online tracking (which made no indication that it was due that day) and even a phone call to TNT to say that it was in the depot about 5 minutes from where i work and ask when could i expect it - only to be told that it had arrived early and that it wasn’t scheduled for delivery that day……ONLY THEN for me to get back to the office after lunch with an email from reception to say there was a box arrived for me!

Anyhow, it looks great - in the store they look good, on your own desk at home they look even better. It’s the 20″ model (no sign of a blackening screen as some reports are saying) - I bought it with 1gb of RAM and bought another 1gb seperately (Apple were charging £90 for 1gb whilst i bought it for &pound25!!). I have one of the old style keyboards on a Mac Mini at work but i much prefer the new one - i use a laptop keyboard all day so the new design keyboard is pretty similar to using that.

After a quick IM with Sean C I installed a raft of his suggested software. I’m now solely using Google Apps so i don’t need any word processor/spreadsheet stuff but i’ll keep the trial of iWork ‘08 for the time being if i need it but it will probably be uninstalled. I’m using Spanning Sync to synchronise my Google Calendar(s) with iCal which works great. VMware Fusion flys along but the one piece of Windows Software I need to run - an RC Helicopter Simulator doesn’t run under a VM so it was time to install Boot Camp and Vista. That’s a pretty polished install, make the driver disk, partition the existing volume and install Windows…I ended up doing it twice (reverting to a single partition) because I stupidly made it 15gb in size and only ended up with 4gb of space after installing Windows!!! Vista looks really great on it, once the drivers were installed and a new performance analysis run Aero was enabled….but i’m still looking forward to Leopard!

All in all it’s been great - i’ve moved my iTunes library over to it, I did have some initial frustrations - like the equivalent of the HOME/END keys but i’ve figured that out now using the COMMAND and left/right arrows. COMMAND+Q to close an application as the X in the top bar doesn’t do that???? So why when i click X does the icon in the dock still have an arrow underneath it??? The minus obviously minimises it as it goes to the right of the doc but what is the X doing as it starts a new session when you click on the icon again….? The only thing now i need to know is how to switch users fast? Am i stuck with logging out and letting my other half log in? Can we switch without having to shut down all our apps? Surely I’m missing something…

Yep, that’s right - it’s moving, in fact it left Shanghai yesterday by TNT International Express, yet it’s still scheduled for delivery on the 12th September - which ain’t ‘Express’ to me!!! Fortunately I’m not in any particular rush!!!

UPDATE (7 Sept): It’s in Europe!! Arnhem to be exact!

Website is showing as ‘prepared for shipment’ - it’s close!

I’ve been using a Mac mini at work for a few months now mainly for testing purposes and i’ve really been liking the simplicity of it all - plus Leopard looks great….so at the weekend I took the other half to the Apple store and showed her the new iMac and said it would look great on the desk in the office, she agreed - so one iMac 2.4ghz 20″ 2gb 320gb is currently on order. We have an aging laptop from my last place of work and what with getting married next year and who knows what after that it seemed sensible to sort ourselves out with a new bit of hardware.

Massive news, EMI is to remove DRM from content on iTunes and provide high quality (DRM’ed) tracks for 99c as opposed to 79c for DRM free tracks!!! THIS IS MASSIVE NEWS FOR THE MUSIC INDUSTRY!!!