The most recent update to McTube removes the ability to cache videos.
Apple & YouTube executives/lawyers seem to forget that the blanket of wireless internet that covers Silicon Valley and mountain view doesn’t extend over the entire globe, and 4G data plans are capped and expensive.
This would be more general than just a syncing solution, but you could use it just for syncing. Or you could add more sophisticated backend services. (You could write an RSS reader with this or something social like Glassboard.)
This would be awesome, but I would argue its still putting a large onus on Apple that isn’t necessary. The only part that REALLY needs to be seamless is the authentication. Allowing and/or forcing developers to manage their own infrastructure, deal with the own outages, and control their own destinies is the one really scalable solution, unless Apple really wants to attempt to become as wily and capable at infrastructure as Google, Amazon, and to a somewhat lesser extent Microsoft (speaking strictly about Azure).o
Just replaced my iPad mini thanks to AC+. Flawless and easy process; to my surprise, they even had a 64GB black mini in stock and available. I was expecting to have to wait for one in the mail.
So within 18 hours of dropping it on a concrete garage floor, shattering the glass, making me sick to my stomach, and causing no less than an hour of greater-than-usual-self-loathing and a higher volume of cursing than normal for a Thursday night, I have a replacement.
I can’t say how incredibly justifiable the cost of AppleCare+ is.
I have declared my love of McTube before here, but it just won another big award. Before I took the mini in for exchange, I took screenshots of my cached videos screen(s) so that I could re-download the videos later. Apparently this was for naught; McTube remembered that those videos were to be cached (either via iCloud or via the offline backup I did of the entire iPad), and as soon as I launched the app for the first time after the restore, it immediately went to work re-caching 45 videos. Super. Awesome.
I have to agree; when I left WWDC06, it was probably the biggest Apple high I have ever been on, and the effect still resonates at times.
That said, this isn’t completely unique to Apple. When I left MMS (Microsofts Management Summit) in 2009 I felt similarly. For at least a month afterwords I was implementing solutions and fixes discovered while there. LabMan later that same year produced a solid two weeks of highly motivated changes and experimentation.
There is definitely something to be said for surrounding yourself with peers and experts and coming away with lots of information and motivation.
But WWDC isn’t the only source of that, even if it remains the most targeted Apple source.
Marco Arment, correctly calling out the current pessimism surrounding Apple in the press (and on Wall Street) while also arguing for an “iPhone 6” moniker for the next iPhone — or really anything but the “iPhone 5S”. (via parislemon)
My vote goes (again) to just “iPhone”. Drop the counter all together.
For the love of all that is holy…
Please Apple, stop making me abuse my camera roll for this.
Textastic is an innovative and more than capable of handling your coding needs. Some really innovative stuff going on here like that navigation doodad (not sure what to call it).
Though there are now iPhone and Mac versions, it was created for the iPad first.
I see shit like this and it really makes me yearn for similar keyboard and cursor/nav options from Apple.
Oh, and give me Diet Coda’s Super Loupe while you’re at it.
So barely a few days after I bragged about the longevity of my Mac Pro, I started having issues with the optical drive in it.
Being unable to find a digital copy of True Lies
The drive had been behaving strangely the past few times I remember using it, taking a long time to spin up a disk, making strange noises (even for a 5 year old DVD burner) and generally not performing very well even when it did work (it took over 15 minutes just to scan the titles of the True Lies DVD in Handbrake. Regardless, It finally read the disk, I was able to make my title selection, set my compression parameters, and start the process before I headed to bed for the night.
Checking on it the next morning, Handbrake reported the rip completed successfully but the file was only 900MB, much less than the anticipated 1.8GB. The other odd thing was the drive was gone. The DVD volume wasn’t showing on the Desktop, the disk no longer showed in Disk Utility, and checking System Profiler, the ATA bus was empty.
So I took it upon myself to order a BluRay drive (Why? Why not?) as a replacement.
Given that my Mac Pro is an Early-2008 model, it shipped with a PATA optical drive, rather than the newer SATA variety. But Apple was wise and awesome enough to future proof the thing by setting aside two SATA ports for optical drive use. They hide behind the front fan assembly, which has to be removed (two screws) and slid out of the machine in order to gain enough access. It helps to remove the first hard drive as well, which is a pretty obvious step when you see the tiny hole you need to squeeze the SATA cable through. Combined with a spare SATA cable and a Molex 4-Pin-To-SATA power adapter I had in my closet of tricks, I had everything I needed.
For anybody looking to do this, I make a solitary recommendation: buy a long SATA cable. 24” should suffice. All I had were 18” models that I ended up getting to work, but a 24” would have made the process much easier.
Once I had everything hooked up, the fan assembly replaced, and the hard drive reinstalled, the old girl booted without a hitch and the drive works great. I can now browse and read blu-rays, though movie playback remains a hitch. Using MakeMKV its possible to rip at least some disks to the drive to be re-encoded, but I haven’t played with the idea much yet. Most of my blu-rays I already have digital copies of because they came with them, so making MKVs or M4Vs is pretty redundant.
One advantage I am looking forward to is 25GB burnable disks. Here’s to archiving and off-site backup!
Looks like a cool update, and the start of a great new interface.
I can already tell they need a way to set ignored files for the recently changed list, as 1Password changes are going to dominate that list for me…
Stephen Hackett writes about the hypothetical successor the Mac Pro, something I’m very interested in.
My Mac Pro turned 5 in January. To date, even with its ridiculous up-front cost, it has been the best computer investment I’ve made. Ever. Ever. Instead of an almost yearly upgrade cycle with all the PCs before it, I’ve barely touched the internals save for the occasional hard drive bump or replacement. It carries its own 2TB Time Machine drive, is loaded with 12GB of RAM, and dual Radeon video cards driving three displays.
I’ve put off things like upgrading the primary drive (would be #3) and replacing the two 2600XT graphics cards with a single 5770 simply because I don’t want to invest money in a machine I’m so close to EOLing. But the ambiguity of the future of the Mac Pro makes me somewhat apprehensive.
At a brass tacks level, a high-end 27” iMac with a Thunderbolt or Cinema display could replace this machine right now, and probably whip the crap out of it in several benchmarks. And it would be a more compact, and visually appealing setup, not to mention affordable. And loaded down with 16 or 32GB of RAM, I’d rarely see the day where it couldn’t keep up with my daily chores. And with Thunderbolt, the chances of me needing an upgrade I can’t hang off of one of those ports is unlikely.
But I’m not doing anything until the next generation of the Pro machine is revealed, whatever it may be. A Mini-Tower machine with a single 6 or 12 core Xeon, room for 6 or 8 sticks of RAM would take care of the core processing. Killing the optical drive entirely wouldn’t break my heart. And one option I haven’t heard anybody speak of is the inclusion of 2.5” drive bays instead of or in addition to a single or pair of 3.5” bays. You can find all manner of enterprise drives in 2.5” form factors these days, not to mention the consumer SSD market is centered upon that as the formfactor. I could very much see Apple taking that approach to save space, cut power (and heat), while still providing room for a couple of TB of space and driving people towards the Promise TB RAID arrays for bigger storage needs.
That’s not to say I’ll buy it, but I want the option. So, not that Apple cares, but there is literally a sale pending on the day of whatever announcement we can hope to see (lets hope there is something at WWDC!), whether its this hypothetical new machine, or a fairly loaded iMac.
Systems Admin.
Network Nerd.
Mac Geek.
Developer.
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Star Trek is nearly 50 years old now and it’s been around for so long because I think it offers hope for us as a species. The thing people have...
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Tumblr: still shipping through the madness. Fuck yeah.
