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

Accessing hybrid/data CDs under Mac OS X

Clearing out some old magazines, I recently found a pile of cover CDs that I thought I would check out before discarding.

Despite knowing that each disc had a combination of music tracks and data files, I could not find a way to get the CDs to mount as anything other than an Audio CD.

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A great little primer for using Things, still my personal choice of to-do app.

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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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.