Turns out manufacturing relatively a large phone chassis at scale would be far too intensive to make this a viable proposition for the foreseeable future.

Alchemist and metaphysician Brian Roemmele posts a detailed account of how and why Apple may be in the midst of a pivot from aluminium to zirconian ceramic for its hardware devices.

Really looking forward to iPhone 7, however these anecdotes about the fundamental design of iPhone 6 being compromised by a lack of sapphire screen and triggering a heightened focus on ceramics makes me genuinely excited to see what Apple has coming for iPhone 8.

American Express cardholders can now use Apple Pay wherever contactless payments are accepted. Still no movement from any of the big four though. Spoilsports.

One of the many err ‘things’ I am looking forward to with the Apple Watch.

Apple photo books

Ordered some photo books through Apple, very impressed with the quality.

Something a little more permanent than digital photos.

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Playmobil Apple Store

ThinkGeek’s April Fools prank for the year, a PLAYMOBIL Apple Store Playset.

Be sure to click over to the product page to view detail shots and the full description. Brilliant.

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AppleTV + WPA2 redux

A very late follow up to my earlier post about some issues I was having running WPA2 wifi security and streaming movies to my AppleTV.

Since updating to Apple Airport Utility 5.5.1 and changing my wireless settings to “802.11n only (5GHz) - 802.11b/g/n” I’m now able to run WPA2 Personal security with none of the buffering issues faced earlier.

The 802.11n only setting I’m using is not one of the default options, to access this mode you’ll need to press and hold the Option key as you click on the “Radio Mode” drop down as shown below.

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My things

One thing I particularly love at the moment about my iPhone 3G is nothing to do with the phone itself, rather an app that I have running most of the day.

It’s called Things and you could describe it in a nutshell as a to do list manager or task manager. But that would be selling it short.

I use Things as my personal oracle of – er – things. I check it when I get up, I plan my day on it whilst travelling into work, I get great pleasure from ticking things off and hate when something that I planned to get done, doesn’t.

Nothing is more satisfying that ticking that little checkbox against an item that’s been sitting in the Today list for more than it should or when completing anything in the Someday list.

The desktop version is great for keeping everything in sync (plus with the latest version you can add reoccurring items, something not yet available on the iPhone version), however the power of this great little app is being able to access it anywhere anytime to add that thing you know you should really get around to doing someday and to remember that other thing you got out of bed to do.

Not sure what I’d do without this little app. I’m really looking forward to giving it a spin on an iPad, their iPad version looks insane. And while I’m linking to videos, Apple also have a great one up profiling the developers behind Things.

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Will expire

Oh no!

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A very detailed review of Apple’s new “magical” creation.

Aperture Three-Oh

Apple this morning announced the next version of their pro-photo workflow app, Aperture 3.0.

Lots of new features, I particularly like that it now supports presets (preset adjustments) and the new brushes function looks pretty slick. This version also gets the iPhone ‘09 Faces and Places features added, Places gets some additional functionality to support importing GPS tracks and another function to use GPS data slurped from iPhone photos, without necessarily importing the iPhone photos themselves into your Aperture library. 3.0 also supports importing and storing video files (like iPhoto), it even has a nifty feature to easily extract a jpg screenshot from captured video and another to easily separate audio+video tracks.

Nothing seems to have been done about my big bugbear with Aperture: lack of native ability to backup to physical media (i.e. DVD) with any ease. There are a couple of plugins that do this, I just wish it was as simple as the way iPhoto does it.

That said, I’m really looking forward to installing this update.

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Apple event wishlist

As one typically does before a big event like the one going down tomorrow morning, it’s time to chime in with some predictions and hopes of ones own.

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John Siracusa’s thorough review of Snow Leopard. A must read for Apple nerds.

I don't think about that

“I don’t think about that, when I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford.

If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

Steve Jobs responds to a question about he intends celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh this year. (via)

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My AppleTV doesn't like WPA2

Update Oct 2010: Seems the latest Airport software resolves these issues, see related post - AppleTV + WPA2 redux

So I scored a 500GB Time Capsule for Christmas to replace the old 802.11b/g Airport Express we’ve been running for the past couple of years. Primary reason for upgrading was to remove the need to have a drive plugged into the MBP to run Time Machine with the added bonus of removing some cable clutter from the desk in the process. The changeover was not without issues, issues which took a fair bit of time & frustration to eventually resolve.

The trouble was that once installed and after upgrading the home WiFi network to use the faster 802.11n protocol, our AppleTV started playing up. iTunes on the MBP could see the AppleTV and was syncing to it without any problems (in fact sync speed was positively screaming compared to the previous “G” network), the issue was that when we tried to watch any video on the TV, the picture would stutter, perpetually attempt to buffer video and generally just sucked. Music worked fine, trailers worked fine, the problem seemingly only existed for movies streaming from iTunes.

So I did what any (in)sane person would do: changed the wireless channel; performed a factory reset on the AppleTV; unlinked and relinked it to iTunes; switched off Time Machine; changed back and forth between a 2.4Ghz 802.11a/b/g/n and 5Ghz 802.11n network; upgraded my router’s firmware; performed a factory reset on the router; switched off NAT and DHCP on the Time Capsule and made it into a bridge; all to no avail. It seemed like a WiFi bandwidth issue, I just couldn’t get the root cause.

After searching the outer limits of the Internets and beyond, then delving into some murky “support” forums and generally tearing my hair out, I ended up reading the ‘Troubleshooting’ section of the AppleTV user manual, like any good user should. There on Page 29 was the smallest ray of hope:

“If security is enabled on the network, temporarily disable it on the base station and try connecting again.”

As soon as I did this, streaming worked perfectly. I switched security back on and the streaming issues returned.

Now at this point I was running the full-hog 5Ghz 802.11n which on the Time Capsule happens to only support WPA2 security, albeit in a choice of either “WPA2 Personal” or “WPA2 Enterprise” flavours. Seeing as I’m not an “Enterprise”, Personal was the only way to go and unfortunately one that seemed to be interferring with streaming. So I downgraded to 2.4Ghz 802.11b/g/n mode, switched out to “WPA/WPA2 Personal” and bingo - everything just worked™.

Shame that I can’t take full advantage of 270Mb/s 802.11n WiFi, though 130Mb/s is still plenty fast enough whilst also still allowing my iPhone to access our home network.

Anyone else having these issues with WPA2 security & AppleTV streaming on their “N” Airport Extreme or Time Capsule?

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