Category Archives: iPad

The future of computing

Remote with an iTunes music server

iPad, Macintosh

A work in progress.

Download Apple’s free Remote app to your iDevice and you get a handy interface for managing your remote music server. I explained how I set up one of these in yesterday’s column.

Start the app on, say, the iPad and this is what you see:

The list of sources appears in the left hand column and the contents in the right. This is the ‘Artists’ view – chosen from the tabs at the base of the screen.

Switch to Albums and you get this – as you can see I still have some work to do to get cover art for all my albums:

And so on. Touching the four arrows at lower right switches you to a blank screen which acts as a touch pad, permitting remote control of menu selections for the AppleTV on the screen of your television. Nice, and a lot more reliable than using a mouse on the sofa cushion!

Touch the ‘AppleTV’ bar in the left hand column and you see your sources on one screen:

The ‘iMac music server’ is the old G4 iMac I set up yesterday to act as a source for all our recorded music.

What is missing, and why I captioned this piece ‘a work in progress’ is AirPlay functionality. You cannot select where to output sound, so when I want to do so, I have go to the iMac music server and do so in the iTunes application there, as I illustrated yesterday. Not a big deal and maybe a constraint placed on Apple by the modest processing power and RAM of the current iPad. Given that each of my three speaker options has its own volume control – TV, Office and Dining Room – I can change or mute any of these when needed. Still, it would be nice to be able to do this from the iPad whose control is limited to pause/fast forward/rewind and play.

The Remote app is nicely engineered, the price is right (as in ‘free’!) and you can download it from the AppStore.

TuneIn Radio

iPad

A superb app.

This piece has nothing to do with photography but when something as well engineered and executed as the TuneIn Radio app for iPad/iPod/iPhone comes along, it’s hard to resist writing about it.

To those despairing of the culturally arid desert that is American Radio, this app is a must. And it says something about globalization when I tell you that a British Americanophile photographer friend recommended it to this Francophile California UK expatriate!

TuneIn Radio allows you to dial in seemingly any Internet Radio station on the planet (I have yet to check for Pyongyang Hits, and don’t hold your breath on that one) using point and touch maps, and your choices are easily saved as bookmarks. If you get stuttering then it’s a second’s work to switch to a lower bit rate stream using the app’s controls. The app is iOS 4 capable, meaning you can continue to listen while doing other things on your iDevice.

Typical streaming options for a radio station.

I decided to go one step further in distributing the iPad’s (and TuneIn’s) sound output around the home. With yesterday being the annual orgy of shopping which kicks off America’s season of gluttony, I did my bit for the side, got on the old push bike (a British Raleigh, of course) and toddled off to the local Apple Store, sadly far too close for fiscal comfort. They had the Airport Express for sale for $88 and moments later I was home installing it, my second. The first acts as a wifi extender in my office, sourcing its signal from the Airport Extreme router in another room. It also allows me to connect my Brother 2170W printer as a Bonjour printer for use as a wireless printer for any number of computers and iDevices, the latter using FingerPrint which does for iDevices what iOS4 has yet to provide – printing. The 2170W does have built-in native wifi but it stoutly refuses to work with OS Snow Leopard, so the AEX does the trick.

The AEX. The teal light is not that easy to get to ….

For reasons probably only known to Steve Jobs, every Airport Express (AEX) I have owned has been an absolute pig to set up. It must be made by Microsoft. Whereas the Airport Extreme is pretty much plug and play, the AEX is a horror story. You fire up the Airport Utility and hope and pray the new device shows up. Then you hope its configuration will be recognized. Then you learn there are no fewer than three reset modes on the gadget (that should tell you something) and next thing you know you are unbending a paperclip to activate the recessed reset microswitch. After four or five goes the thing comes around and eventually changes its amber trouble light to a teal ‘all is good’ one. At that point I plugged the AEX into the dining room wall socket and using a short mini-coax cable, connected the AEX to my old Logitech MM50 iPod powered speakers. If you buy this cable from the Apple Store then you have more money than sense.

The Logitech MM50 powered iPod speakers.

While the MM50 is long discontinued, and the rechargeable battery in mine died years ago, there are dozens of choices on the market. Just make sure there’s a loudspeaker input socket on the one you buy. That accepts the other end of the cable from the AEX. The MM50 is well made with an Apple-like attention to aesthetics. Unlike most Apple products it actually lasts longer than the warranty period.

The rest is child’s play. Fire up your source app on the iPod/iPhone/iPad of your choice and touch the AirPlay symbol to see a list of output devices.

AirPlay output options in the TuneIn Radio app.

‘Tigger’s Logitech’ routes the sound to my MM50 and each output device remembers its volume setting, so you don’t blow the roof off owing to output level mismatching. I complained to TuneIn’s maker that I couldn’t see the other AEX in the home and they blamed Apple. Wrong. The fault was mine. The list of AirPlay devices scrolls with the swipe of a finger and the other AEX, hidden in the above screenshot, is there when needed. The absence of a scroll bar had me fooled!

Best as I can tell you can only route AirPlay output to one device at a time, but this remains a very cost effective way of outputting sound to any one of multiple locations in the home, controlled with a portable iDevice. Cost per location is as much as you want to spend on powered speakers, but $100 buys you a decent pair and another $100 or so gets you an AEX, so call it $200 per location. Expensive? Have you priced running wires through walls recently? And if you want really good sound with a dedicated DAC, the English gentlemen at Bowers and Wilkins will be glad to relieve you of $600 for their oddly named (if appropriately shaped) Zeppelin which is as good as it gets. You would think the English would be tired of reminders of German aerial bombardment after two wars. Anyway, I’m going to resurrect those old B&W DM5 bookshelf monitors from the basement and maybe spring for a nice tube amp for my next AEX installation …. the output level from the AEX is like that from a preamp, so all you need is a power amplifier and regular unpowered speakers with this approach.

State of the art – the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin.

State of stupidity – the $26,000 Challenger01 – you will need two.

When you ripped all those old DVDs to your iPod you did use lossless not MP3, right?

Christmas gifts

iPad

Well, duh!

If you are a parent with young children, do yourself a huge favor and read my earlier piece The Unfair Advantage.

Then look at this chart from America’s taste-takers:

Sure, those kids want bragging rights and video games, but, properly policed, technology confers an unfair advantage and you owe it to your kids.

Disclosure: I have significant AAPL exposure today (but maybe not tomorrow) but if each of the several thousand daily readers of this journal rushes out and buys 5 iPads, the impact on AAPL’s bottom line and stock price will be precisely zero. Further, if you are coming here for stock advice you need to get a life, and a brain. Long AAPL stock and call options.

The AppleTV with the iPad and iOS 4

iPad, Photography

A dream combination.

Having just installed iOS 4.2.1 on my iPad I can scarce contain my excitement as to how it collaborates with a big screen TV and an iPad for a photographer.

It’s still a work in progress but this combination begins to finally show a meaningful, realistic step in the direction of coordinating disparate devices and making them work together painlessly.

Let me jump to the bottom line. I’m reviewing a photo album in my iPad on the AppleTV to the accompaniment of classical music, relayed by Pandora Radio. The source pictures and music are coming from my iPad. I flick the pictures on the iPad and the 42″ TV faithfully reproduces them. The colors are true also as I have profiled the TV with my EyeOne colorimeter.

For the amateur this is magic; for the pro, showing his pictures to the magazine editor, it’s essential. All that’s needed in addition to the iPad is a TV and the $99 AppleTV device, which I have reviewed at length here a few days ago.

So while much of what we are hearing about the latest iOS for the iPad is about multitasking, the real magic sauce for photographers is in AirPlay, the technology which makes what I describe above possible.

Setup is child’s play; after installing the new OS on the iPad, all you do is go to the Photos app on the iPad, select an album, turn on the TV, touch the AirPlay button on the iPad and you are off. Music? Add it in background mode from your iPad and route it likewise to your TV. The TV, of course, has two things the iPad does not – a huge screen and decent speakers.

Snags?

The iPad still needs a decent touchscreen photo processing app so that you can make changes and see them on the big screen, rather than round-tripping to your desktop. You still cannot turn pictures on the iPad through ninety or one hundred and eighty degrees.

And, worst fo all, you cannot print from the iPad. Mr. Jobs, please. All that hype about the new iOS 4 and we learn that the only way the iPad can print natively is through one of the latest AirPrint-enabled printers? What a crock! You expect me to buy a new printer? Well, BS says I.

Click the picture below and you can download an $8 app to your desktop Mac, check off your Bonjour enabled printer, and the iPad will print to it (or to DropBox, etc.) just fine. It works fine with my Brother 2170W monochrome laser, and I have yet to try it with the HP DJ90 wide carriage color printer. What have you got to lose? The app comes with a 7 day free trial period.

Click to see more.

Here’s FingerPrint being installed on my HackPro – note that I have checked off my Brother printer:

That’s a screen shot of the HackPro taken remotely using LogMeIn on the iPad to remotely access the HackPro – another piece of magic which I wrote about here. Note the FingerPrint icon in the menu bar (circled), and be sure to add FingerPrint to the login items on your desktop to make sure it’s automatically loaded after a reboot.

So now you can display your pictures on the big screen from a 24 oz portable device and print them to your device of choice. I’ll let your imagination do the rest.

Installing iOS 4 on the iPad:

If you have tons of data on your iPad the process of upgrading from iOS 3 to iOS4 could scarcely be worse. Mine took 9 hours. There’s a fault in the code and iOS4 will not load until the 9 hour backup (a mere 40gB of data in my case) is done through iTunes. Ridiculous. And please don’t tell me Apple is ignorant of this error. Look at the hits regarding this issue on their discussion board:

Only after I did the long backup to allow the installation of iOS4 did I learn of a free utility named BackOff which aborts the backing up of data and permits the iOS upgrade to proceed apace. Guess what I’ll be doing next time ….

BackOff comes in first world (Mac) and third world (PC) versions

We are at the cusp of a revolution in the ease with which devices can be connected in the home or business.

You need and AppleTV to go with your iPad.

Disclosure: I own tons of AAPL stock and call options. Your buying an AppleTV is hardly going to make me rich.

The end of IT hegemony

iPad, Photography

No more Mr. Bearded Guy.

For much of my life in business you got what the Information Technology department (rarely was there a greater misnomer) dictated, meaning a PC with Windows, Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Likely as not the guy in the corner office was computer blind and had (as did many of my bosses) his secretary print out his emails so he could read them and she would type replies. I am not making this up. That generation regarded using a keyboard not only as demeaning, it was a servile function reserved for low paid ‘girls’.

This was great for IT as they got the ultimate in job protection – they chose the hardware and software, got the vendor kickbacks, and there were no decision makers to argue. Their ‘client’ was a secretary ….

But that is all quickly coming to a close. The moment I exited the corporate system, because I hated being told what to do by someone I mostly had little regard for, and started working for myself, I dumped the PC and anything to do with it, and moved to the Mac. I still needed Excel, true, because I crunch a lot of numbers in my day job of managing money, but what drove me to the Mac was my love of photography and a desire to have as little technology intrude between my snaps and the finished print. Plus, I hated having to reboot all the time.

However, Apple has done a lousy job of selling to big enterprises and that only started changing with the iPhone, the most disruptive technology of the past five years. The CEO got one because his existing cell phone was garbage, and told IT to make it work with the company’s systems, over all their self-serving protestations about security. He then went home, buying an iMac on the way, because he was tired of having the smelly, bearded guy from IT come around, pick his nose and reboot his PC. Plus the iMac looked cool in his mansion.

That same CEO just got an iPad because it didn’t cost much and he knew it would work. The most disruptive technology of the next five years. And his kids loved it. And, yes, it too looked cool. Now he has his salesforce using the iPad and IT has reverted to being servant and is no longer master. They have to support what revenue generators demand, not what they think gives them job security. Hurrah for that. And the back end has migrated to Unix servers leaving no room for MSFT’s substandard server software.

That’s why the potential for corporate sales of AAPL’s mobile products is where the greatest revenue growth lies for AAPL, because Apple is just waking up to the demand. Tablet devices will front as the smart client for all those Unix servers and corporate users will increasingly write tailored apps (which do not have to go through the awful App Store and the related approval process staffed by that same bearded guy who lost his job in IT) for in-house use.

The primary users of full blown desktop computers will be the accountants, marketers and engineers. Few others need one. And once we get voice-to-screen perfected, the keyboard will die and a new generation of users will have to learn dictation skills. As for the laptop, it’s already rapidly becoming an anachronism.

Yesterday’s IT. Leica M2, 50mm Summicron.

Disclosure: Long AAPL and AAPL call options.