theseissl.com

Found
this ad today at REWE’s homepage – wondering if Apple is aware
about… Looks like REWE sponsored all the downloads,
or?

Steve Job’s response to a user about the higher iPad prices in germany:

Blame your government. Germany just added a new copyright levy for computers.

If this response is really from Steve – it’s more than other got over the last weeks / months 😉

Update:

Prices reduced on the same day – now it’s 499 € for the smallest one. Only the 64GB version has now that fee included – but I think this is still a fault because the fee shouldn’t be applying to such a device…

Update 2:

Apple now reduced the price for the 64GB too…

Zuerst mal: Frohe Ostern!

Tja – und da dachte ich mir heute morgen doch gleich ich gönn’ mir was vom iTunes Shop. Eigentlich nicht mir – sondern es sollte ein Geschenk werden.

Recht einfach dachte ich mir  – iTunes bietet da ja eine tolle Möglichkeit per Email Geschenke zu verteilen… aber die Rechnung hab’ ich heute offenbar ohne iTunes gemacht. Meine MasterCard war letztes Monat abgelaufen – und so musste ich heute meine neue bei Apple aktivieren. Doch iTunes weigerte sich beharrlich auch nur irgendeine meiner Kreditkarten anzunehmen.

Also raffte ich mich dazu auf den Support von Apple per Mail zu kontaktieren – garantierte Rückantwort innerhalb von 24h. Zuerst erhielt ich die übliche Mail mit der Bestätigung dass sie ein Mail von mir erhalten hätten – wunderbar, dachte ich mir –> damit hätten sie jetzt wohl mehr als 24h Zeit.

Aber falsch gedacht – kurz darauf erhielt ich doch gleich eine persönliche Mail; recht freundlich gehalten mit der Bitte doch ein paar Screenshots mit Erklärung der getätigten Schritte zu übersenden. Das hab’ ich dann natürlich auch gleich erledigt.

Gleich nach Zusendung der Screenshots erhielt ich ein weiteres Mail – und dieses spricht für sich:

Manche sind Ihrer Zeit voraus...

Also dann: Frohe Weihnachten und einen guten Rutsch!

🙂

Update:
Das Problem wurde inzwischen schnell und kompetent behoben!

The new Apple iPad.

The eagle has landed – and is not called iSlate. I always did not like the rumored name for the new apple device and I was happy to see that it is now called ‘iPad’.

It’s – as already blogged by many others – something between the iPhone and the MacBook(s) (Pro). It’s nice, it’s shiny and of course it’s NOT new.

Many competitors already tried to give an tablet a chance – but they wasn’t very successful up to now. What they made wrong? Well – as always during the last years Apple made it (or will make it) by a perfect setup of two things: design & usability.

Usability within this content means for me not only the haptic of the device and / or the OS which is driving it. It’s more the content which makes it some kind of usable.

This device seems to be a ‘Super-Kindle’ – it’s not monochrome, it’s not only showing up with eBooks: Apps (the iPhone / iPod Touch ones AND a new cat. of Apps just for the iPad), Business-Framework (iWorks), Fun (Movies, Photos, Games…) and a intelligent setup of accessories (Cover, Doc, Keyboard, Camera Connector…) right from the beginning AND a pricing where it’s worth to think about buying one 🙂 – amazing, again.

The Kindle is a great device – yes. But it’s usage is restricted to ‘reading’… this won’t be enough I think.

So what about? Simple: I WANT ONE – NOW! And I’m happy with the Wifi only only one… don’t need 3G!
update: did I mention that it’s shiny? Well this is one really big advantage of the amazon Kindle – it’s not shiny… and therefor you can read your ebooks at the beach for example – would be hard with the glossy iPad I think…

On Jan. 1st my TimeMachine Sparsebundle which is hosted on my DROBO 2TB via a Apple Airport Extreme AirDisk crashed. The directory of the SB showed several issues when I checked it with ‘Disk Utility’. I then tried to repair the image several times – under different conditions. So I tried it connected via AirDisk, accessed locally via FireWire connected DROBO, via USB connection… I also copied the image to an additional USB drive other than the DROBO… but it didn’t work.

I googled a little bit and found that ‘Disk Utility’ is not the right choice to repair images which are showing such issues. Mostly users refer then to ‘DiskWarrior’ – this piece of SW should be able to correct the errors. But is it really worth $ 99.95? There’s no trial version so I couldn’t test it – and by the way: the things stored on the TM-image are only things I’ve already wiped out of my MBP. And the other things are perfectly stored securely on my DROBO. So I just loose some convenience on deleting the corrupt image if I’m not able to repair it – but nothing which is worth $99.95 to spend 😉

So it was clear for me what to do: delete the sparsebundle TM-image and check what I can to to prevent further issues.

I checked the DROBO-Support pages – and hoped that since my last visit there they realized that there is a problem by using the DROBO in such a constellation like I do.

And yes – they have checked their user-discussion-board and come up with solutions now:

1. There is now a document showing how to setup the DROBO correctly
   (yes, I know – there was one in the past too… but this one now is different)
2. Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is now supported
3. a new DROBO Dashboard version 1.6.6 (release notes) is available (firmware is uptodate:  1.3.5)

The new point is that you have to partition the DROBO into two segments. One – the FIRST one – for TimeMachine use, the second for all your other data. In the past this was not supported and recommended.

How to proceed here is really simple – just follow the documentation. What’s not really clear on this document: keep in mind that the FIRST partition is the one you will use for TimeMachine and it’s new Sparsebundle image. This partition will keep it’s fixed size (e.g. 200GB out of 930 GB with a 2TB setup of DROBO).

So – if you expand your DROBO (e. g. with one additional disk, cap. 1TB) later on with new drives the FIRST partition will not change – only the SECOND partition is expanding then:

Partition A (for TM use): 200GB
Partition B (for data): 1.6TB

Following this guide I realized one thing: DROBO Dashboard again is only recognizing ONE single partition. But that’s not the problem at all 🙂

I also found now several documents at their knowledge base showing how to handle the DROBO in case of disk-problems… and – yes, you can believe it – now you are not only allowed to maintain you DROBO with third party tools (DiskWarrior, Disk Utility, TechTool Deluxe / Pro) – it’s now recommended!

Cool add-on for your MacBook Pro…

And they have much more stuff like this in their online shop – take a look!

My iPhone 3G bothered me over the last weeks. Why?

Well – my job brings a lot of travelling to me – almost every day I have to drive by car from Austria to Germany. So every day I’m leaving Austria the iPhone has to connect to a german partner provider (T-Mobile A –> T-Mobile D). Every phone I owned previously was doing this by itself – but not the iPhone. It just lost the connection and did nothing to connect to the partner provider.

Yes – I know… there is a preference I have to set to automatically switch. And guess what? Yeah – the preference was set to ‘automatic’… but it simply didn’t connect.

I always had to do this switch manually by opening the preferences menu and selecting the partner provider after the iPhone was showing up the list of providers it found.

That procedure took me sometimes up to 2 or 3 minutes… unacceptable.

Yesterday i missed several calls due to the fact that I simply forgot to switch to the german provider – bad luck, yeah. Really bad luck. But – this was the initial kick for me to get this ‘bug’ fixed.

But what should I do? I resetted the phone several times before without any change… So this was not the point. Soft-Resetting is just one way to reset your iPhone. You also have the possiblility to completely reset the phone to it’s basics by using the reset-option in the preferences menu (preferences/general/reset); therefor I yesterday used the option ‘Erase All Content and Settings’…

After resetting the iPhone the phone was setup as it was when I got it out of the box. Switching on showed me to connect the phone via USB cable to the computer / iTunes.

As soon as iTunes started up the phone was recognized and I was asked to reinstall the last backup – or to tread the phone as a completely new one. So I wanted to start over from the beginning and selected therefor the option to treat the phone as a new one.

Seconds later the phone was re-activated (yes it was deactived by erasing all the content) – and then a first synchronization was performed. I had to re-organize all the apps – and yes, for sure – all the infos stored on the phone have really been deleted (including all the login infos – e.g. Skype, Nimbuzz, 1Password…) – be aware if you do it the same way: you don’t get these kind of data back synched; you have to take care about this data by yourself BEFORE you start over resetting the phone. Finally Contacts & mail accounts where transferred so that the phone was perfectly setup.

The question was – would it work? Would the provider switch be done automatically? I was really looking forward to the next day 🙂

And yeah – it really worked like a charm! The provider switched within seconds now.

Sideeffects? Some…

• The phone generally got faster. This was specially recognized at the iPod features like ‘Genius Mixes’.
• Battery indicator wasn’t showing the ‘%’ version any more; that’s a 3GS feature – but was showing on the 3G because I JB’ed it in the past (before updating to iPhone OS 3.x)
• Battery capacity – the phone now is’nt that much battery hungry it was before

So for now – I’m happy again with my iPhone  🙂

Mobile Air Mouse

Do you have the same problems using your iPhone / MBP:

• using Apples ‘Remote’ App does’nt allow you to start your iTunes visualizer…
• using ‘Rowmote’ allows you to use different Apps, but you can’t control Applications not in the Rowmote-List…

So – what I was missing is a app which controls the mouse (or is an replacement for the multitouch pad of the MBP) and all the other stuff.

In the app store I found an application called ‘AIR MOUSE’ – and the description sounded really interesting.

To use ‘Mobile Air Mouse’ on your iPhone / iPod Touch you need to be aware about some points:

• Air Mouse is working within you local WLAN topology
• on the target computer has to be installed a little server app which can be downloaded here
• the ‘AIR MOUSE’ app itself has to be installed on your mobile device

The application itself works like an additional multitouch trackpad (note: not all the gestures of your MBP are recognized) which is connected remotely to your computer.

I’m using it to control my MBP when it’s connected to my 42″ LCD TV or to a beamer.

Two main setups are available: portrait & landscape

Portrait mode:
While using the portrait mode you can use the display as a ‘normal’ trackpad – an area on the bottom of the trackpad with two yellow triangles indicates the scroll-control of the touchpad. So moving your finger in the scroll area scrolls the display on the remote computer. Tapping the touchpad is related to a single or double click (one tap –> single click, two taps –> double click). Tapping the touchpad once with two fingers end up in showing of the context menu (right-click).

But you are also able to use the accelerators of your mobile device to move the cursor on the remote screen – click on the ‘swap-view’ icon in the right hand top corner of your device: your device now shows up an additional yellow ‘line-area’ in the top middle position of the device-display.

Click on this area with one finger and hold it – moving now the device over it’s axis will result in movements of the cursor on the remote screen. Clicking with a second finger on the left side of the area does a left-button click, clicking on the right hand side beside the area does a ‘right-button click’ and shows the context-menu.

Landscape mode:
The landscape mode does not provide the accelerators – so you only can use the normal remote trackpad feature here. The scroll-buttons are on the right-hand side now.

This mode can be switched-off by deselecting the ‘Force Vertical’ button at the settings menu.

‘AIR MOUSE’ also accepts shaking moves to show up (or hide) the keyboard on the device’ display.

The keyboard area (if displayed – don’t forget to shake ;-)) is full of additional features:

• controlling your iTunes library (previous song, next song, play / pause, volume +/-, mute, AppStore)
• your browser (previous page, next page, search, home, refresh, stop, favourites, zoom in/out)
• Function keys (including custom setups, page down/up, cursor movements, ESC, DEL, ENTER, HOME)

So – for now it seems to be the perfect application controlling my MBP while it is connected to my external display devices.