#apple

Free Expo Hall Pass to Macworld Conference & Expo 2009

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The Moscone Cen­ter, San Fran­cisco, CA
Jan­u­ary 5–9, 2009 (Expo: Jan­u­ary 6–9, 2009)
macworldexpo.com

Whether it’s a pro­fes­sion or a hobby, Mac­world is the place to learn the lat­est edit­ing, print­ing and shar­ing tech­niques for dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy and shoot­ing video. Sev­eral ses­sions are spread through­out our con­fer­ence pro­grams, high­light­ing the lat­est edit­ing tech­niques. Whether you are a begin­ner or advanced, the Cre­ative Safari con­fer­ence pro­gram offers a hands-on approach to mas­ter­ing your pho­tog­ra­phy and video mak­ing skills. Vis­it­ing the expo floor you can even learn from sea­soned pho­tog­ra­phers in the Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Experience.

Spe­cial Offer
Reg­is­ter using pri­or­ity code MKA31884 before Sep­tem­ber 26, 2008 and receive a FREE Expo Hall Pass.

Apple Shines The New iPod Touch

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Not to be out­done by the new col­or­ful and sur­pris­ingly thin iPod Nanos, the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion iPod Touch made its debut as well in Apple’s Sep­tem­ber 2008 Spe­cial Event enti­tled “Let’s Rock”.


So what’s so dif­fer­ent, a new body. The new iPod Touch looks like it came from Quick­sil­ver’s board. It def­i­nitely got some ideas for the iPhone 3G’s con­tour, but its shiny and made from pol­ished stain­less steel. I won’t be sur­prised if we see Apple comes out with this cha­sis on the iPhone 3G in the Win­ter (pend­ing the sale of the new iPod Touch of course).

 

Other new fea­tures are:

Not­ing the built-in wire­less sup­port for Nike+, this sucks if Apple can’t just push a firmware update for iPhone 3G own­ers. I won’t nec­es­sar­ily be run­ning with an iPhone as its freak­ing just too much to worry about and a dis­trac­tion, but it just makes sense and a goodie for all Apple fans alike.

In terms of price-point, if com­par­ing with the pre­vi­ous one, the new iPod Touch starts at $229 (8GB model) and is def­i­nitely worth the upgrade if you are look­ing to have the feature-set of the iPhone 3G w/o the phone. Now, if being com­pared against the iPhone 3G and bas­ing on the fact that you are also look­ing for a phone, I don’t think its a good buy. Other than the sub­scrip­tion fee to a mobile car­rier, the only fea­ture that the new iPod Touch has over the iPhone 3G would prob­a­bly be its built-in wire­less inte­gra­tion with Nike+ (for now). With that said, if in the sit­u­a­tion I just stated, I would still get an 8GB iPhone 3G over this new iPod Touch.

Apple Introduces New iPod Nanos

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Apple Intro­duces New iPod Nanos, orig­i­nally uploaded by stechico.

Apple intro­duced its new fourth gen­er­a­tion of iPod Nanos today in 9 fla­vor­ful col­ors. Here are the fea­tures that set it apart vs. its pre­de­ces­sors1:

  • Col­ors of course! Sil­ver, pur­ple, blue, green, orange, yel­low, pink, (PRODUCT) RED and black.
  • Built-in audio record­ing features.
  • “Genius tech­nol­ogy” which auto­mat­i­cally cre­ates playlists from songs in your music library that go great together, with just one click.
  • UI/UX improve­ments with the help of the accelerom­e­ter. This allows it to behave like the iPhone/iPod Touch between switch­ing from Por­trait to Land­scape modes.
  • Improved 24 hours of music play­back or four hours of video playback.

I just won­der if its still nec­es­sary to buy the Nike+ piece since this new Nano now have an accelerom­e­ter built-in. If any, they should mod­ify the Nike+ piece to work with an iPod 1GB+ Shuf­fle; which will be tempt­ing for me to buy and use when run­ning. Bet­ter yet, just a stand­alone Nike+ piece that can sync on its own to the Nike+ site.

  1. Para­phrased from Apple Insider arti­cle. [↩]

Sync iPhone and Google Calendar via NuevaSync

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I have been tin­ker­ing around try­ing to get GCAL­Dae­mon work­ing again after the update to Leop­ard, but it just hasn’t been the same from its for­mer self of 1-to-1 sync. Thought you can find dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions that may allow you to do this, it’s one thing to get it for free and do through the power of the crowd. But things have been look­ing grim lately as get­ting GCAL­Dae­mon to work with Leop­ard is still up in the air. Enter NuevaSync.

Nueva­Sync allows direct, over-the-air, native syn­chro­niza­tion of cer­tain smart phones and PDA devices with pub­lic PIM, and cal­en­dar­ing ser­vices includ­ing Google Cal­en­dar. Nueva­Sync does not need any soft­ware installed on your device because it uses syn­chro­niza­tion pro­to­cols that are already built in.

I had given it a chance. It requires you signup w/ nuevasync.com. Yah, I know its another account to keep track of from the many ser­vices out there, but hey… if it works—it works. The setup is pretty sim­ple. You pretty much just have to fol­low the instruc­tions which were writ­ten in terms of a 7th-grader—easy enough.

A cou­ple of facts that I found out along with NuevaSync’s FAQ:

  • It cur­rently sup­ports the fol­low­ing mobile devices:
    • Apple iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2.0
    • Win­dows Mobile based PDAs and smartphones
  • You’ll be doing push/fetch to NuevaSync’s “Exchange Server”
  • Adding an alarm noti­fi­ca­tion on an event will default to a “Pop-up” reminder in the event’s Google Cal­en­dar (gCal) ver­sion. Vice-versa; you’ll need to select “Pop-up” as the type of remind when cre­at­ing the event in gCal in order to have it also avail­able in your iPhone.
  • Hav­ing your iPhone’s set­ting of “Push to OFF” and “Fetch to Man­u­ally” will still enable to Nueva­Sync to per­form its job while allow­ing you to save your iPhone’s mojo.
  • It can sync to mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars under your gCal account of those Cal­en­dars you have a per­mis­sion to write to. You may find out which ones via going to the Nueva­Sync sta­tus page.
  • Even though you can sync with mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars, cre­at­ing an event in your iPhone would default to your main cal­en­dar. This you can say would be a step back if your try­ing to keep things very orga­nized and cat­e­go­rize your events (i.e. Per­sonal, Work, Project A, Project B, etc.).

Sounds good right? So, if you aren’t really using more than one cal­en­dar or don’t care if the events from your write-permitted cal­en­dars are merged together into one in your iPhone, I’d def­i­nitely rec­om­mend you to give Nueva­Sync a try. But don’t worry, they have that item in their TODO:

So when will you sup­port mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars on the Apple devices?
Soon, it’s one of our top new fea­ture priorities.

Any­ways, I hope this helps. Please do let me know if you hap­pen to find new, inter­est­ing things about it. Have a good sync!

Find Duplicates in Address Book

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Ever had the sit­u­a­tion where you have synced your iPhone (to iTunes OS X) and hap­pen to sync both the con­tacts from your Address Book and Google Con­tacts? Or, just hap­pen to add someone’s new con­tact info as another contact-card? Well, here’s how I cleaned and merged dupli­cate con­tacts so that my Address Book per­forms like a champ.

  1. Launch Script Edi­tor (Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor)
  2. Paste the fol­low­ing code snippet 
    tell application "Address Book"
    set biglist to {}
    set theGroup to count every person
    if not (exists (group "Duplicate Entries")) then
        make new group with properties {name:"Duplicate Entries"}
    end if
    set the_names to the name of every person as list
    repeat with i from 1 to number of items in the_names
        set this_Name to item i of the_names
        set theName to name of person this_Name as string
        if this_Name is not in biglist then
            copy this_Name to end of biglist
        else
            add (people whose name is theName) to group "Duplicate Entries"
        end if
    end repeat
    save addressbook
end tell
  3. Save your newly cre­ated script (would usu­ally default to ~/Documents/AppleScripts/), and just open/run it

Now, the eas­i­est way to fig­ure out if its run­ning or not (at least for me) was to run the Activ­ity Mon­i­tor and sort by CPU. I sim­ply just waited to see if Address Book would climb to the top doing 90+, and back down to nil. When this is done, you should be able to see a group called “Dupli­cate Entries”. From there, you may now sort through the details and delete the ones that you don’t need.

Note: You can also do a quick merge via Address Book itself from dupli­cate con­tacts. How­ever, you won’t be able to see which con­tacts are being merged as its just a set-it-and-forget kind of deal. If you do not care and sim­ply just want to get rid of those dupes, you can do so by doing the following:

  1. Launch Address Book
  2. Select Card from its menu
  3. Then, select Look­ing for Dupli­cates… and just go through the fol­low­ing prompts after search results finishes
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