It’s easy to say this is un-necessary and over the top, but I think it’s great. In true Apple style of looking at the small things that matter, a service specific for its needs with no clutter has been created, perfection for those who need it.

But the reviews keep coming in, people can’t seem to get enough of it, and the more I look the more I consider it to be not that expensive anyway.

I think I have finally given in, after much looking around, review-reading, and “OMG it does this” moments I’ve decided that the 16 GB 3G model would be best for me, I’m not overly bothered about the storage as I don’t want to shove a whole ton of media on this thing, and would much rather have the flexibility of 3G mobile broadband and GPS built in.

Theres just one thing stopping me, well, 529 of them to be honest, but hey, hopefully I’ll be able to get rid of some unused stuff on eBay, and I henceforth declare the iPad fund: Open.

So, any readers of this purchased, considered purchasing, or had any experience of one of these “magical” devices?

I’m probably being picky here, but the fact that there are huge gaps between the icons seems like a waste of screen space to me, admittedly enlarging them would make it look childish, and putting more icons there would make it crowded, but this is Apple we’re talking about, surely they could come up with a better solution!?

Still, watching the demo videos, this thing looks amazing. Obviously these ideal scenarios have been picked to sell it, and to an extent I can see their use, but for me none stand out as a unique selling point. I have computer for web browsing, widescreen monitor for films. Yes these may be seperate devices, but devices which all do their job well, making it harder to justify a few hundred £’s on a device which can almost do them all.

But then you look further, the Calendar app for example looks perfectly suited to such a device, as does the Address book, at times when graphics try to emulate real life objects it can look very tacky, but they seem to have pulled it off here.

But then, everyone is saying you don’t see how good it is until you actually feel and use it. So, keep me away from the Apple Store!

So, I decided that charging my iPod via Laptop’s USB port was beginning to be a pain, and the firewire charger from my iPod mini just needed replacing. For a start it had the old “clips” on the dock connector to stop it from coming unplugged. The result of these “troubles” is quite simple really, a brand new replacement

Naturally, this came in a nice appley box. Admittedly £20 for a charger is a bit on the steep side, but I had an Argos voucher which needed using, bringing the price to around a tenner. Much more reasonable. To my surprise I found that it came with a brand new USB cable, a nice little bonus which will make a handy spare, but I suppose it is justified given the price.

One of the most amazing things about these chargers is the size, compared to my MacBook charger it’s tiny, compared to my old iPod charger it’s tiny, simply brilliant!

Pages work’s fine when saving a document in .doc format, but as soon as you try to save it again (e.g. a simple change to it) you get presented with the following window:

Which is a right pain when you’re trying to do virtually anything with a Word Document, so your options are don’t save until you’re finished and hope nothing goes wrong, keep going through the process above to save the document, or keep on reading to find a simple fix.

It’s all in the .plist

In common with Apple’s other recent “mishap”, there are just a couple of things you need to change in a .plist file. It’s nice & simple and only takes a couple of minutes, or if you’re lazy you can download the file which I’ve posted below.

For the technically minded

What you’ll need

For the sake of easiness I am be going to using Property List Editor, it comes included with Apple’s developer tools, if you haven’t got this installed it is still possible to do so, simply using TextEdit, although that is significantly more complicated, and I would reccomend that you download the .plist file at the end of this entry.

Update (11/8/09): As has been pointed out in the comments the actual plist entries which you are required to edit has changed with updated versions of iWork, please bear this in mind and look out for it when you follow this tutorial!

1. First off, you need to open the Pages.app package, to do this simply browse to it using finder, then right-click and click “Show Packages Contents”.
   
2. Now a new Finder window will appear, this allows you to browse around the … Package Contents, although for now we’re only interested in one file, “Info.plist” (in the Contents folder). This is what appears to be Pages’ main configuration file, so by editing it we can adjust the behaviour of it.
3. I would recommend that you make a backup of “Info.plist” before you do anything, just in case something bad happens, to do this simply copy it to somewhere you’ll remember (like the Desktop). Now double click on the original file (within Package Contents) to open it with Property List Editor.
4. Now we’re getting somewhere, you will see a view of the properties associated, you need to expand the “Root” by clicking the triangle/arrow to the right of it, and then expand the “CFBundleDocumentTypes” in the same way. This gives a list of numbers, and you then need to expand 8 and 9, which will let you view something similar to this:



5. The properties which you need to change are CFBundleTypeRole, for both instances (shown above) change them to “Editor” (without quotes), you can do this by double-clicking on where it says “Viewer”. Now you just need to save the file (File>Save), close Property List Editor, and you’re good to go.
6. Now when you open up a Word Document using Pages and try to save any pages it should all work seamlessly, although you may notice a small progress bar like this:
   
   Which is nothing to worry about, it just let’s you know that all is working well.

Hopefully that was easy enough to accomplish, if not here’s the easy version below:

For the not-so-technically minded

Here’s a version of the above tutorial which accomplishes the same output but with fewer steps, just to make life easier for you

1. Follow steps 1 and 2 above.
2. Download the updated Info.plist from here: Info.plist, you may need to tell your browser to download it (right-click, Save Link As).
3. Copy the new Info.plist into the Contents folder of the Package Contents window. Now just close this and re-open Pages to have the ability to save Word Documents.

Conclusion

I think that it is rather odd that this support isn’t enabled by default, after all when you open a document the last thing you’ll want to do is save it somewhere else, as that’s what “Save As” is for. To me it is a completely illogical step for a user to have to take, and I can imagine there being many “.pages” documents inadvertently being passed around by unsuspecting iWork users. Although maybe this is Apple’s way of promoting the software, with the hope that people who receive these “weird” files will end up paying for software that they don’t necessarily need?

I hope that this post has covered everything, and that it is easy enough to understand. If you have any questions please leave a comment and I’ll try my best to help you out.

Update (6/2/09): Inserted link to the pre-built Info.plist, which I forget to add. Oops.

One of the “exciting” new releases at MWSF this year, iWork (aptly named) ’09. Seemingly a bog standard progression of the standard iWork line. Since I’m relatively new to OS X I’ve never really had chance to use it before, so with a new release now seems the ideal time to give it a go.

Also, worth mentioning, is that it has had quite a lot of publicity recently regarding a certain iWork ’09 plist file. But that’s a story that Google will tell you, so no need for me to repeat what has already been said.

I’m currently playing around with them at the moment, having no past experience mean’s they take a bit of getting used to, but so far I’m liking Keynote & Numbers, but favour Microsoft Word over Pages – simply not a fan of the DTP aspects of Pages’ interface. Anyone else had chance to play around? What do you think, and how do you reckon they compare to past versions?

First Impressions

As I have said above, to begin with I had high hopes for this App, it seemed well polished like the usual WordPress admin panel. Adding my blog was easy; simply enter URL, username, and password. It is after this part when confusioon occurs.

Opening up the App you get a nice, simple interface with 2 options: “Set up your blog” and About, clicking on setup you enter blog details and how many recent posts you wish to display, if you’ve managed that part correctly it will be taken back to the main screen where your blog is now listed. So far so good.

Clicking on the blog brings up an interface similar to Mail.app, listing all of your previous post’s and a Local Drafts folder, which you can use for offline drafts. Clicking on a post let’s you edit it, upload Photo’s, Preview it and change Post Settings. Although for me the Preview page has often frozen, sometimes just quitting the app and returning back to the home screen, and other times showing the post under a default template as if it cannot connect to the internet.

Posting a new entry is pretty similar, press the “Write” button and enter all the text. Under one condition, it doesn’t crash and send you back to the home page. Once you get to the interface it is pretty much self-explanatory, letting you enter a Title, Tags, Categories, the entry itself and set it’s status. There are also the same additional tabs as the edit interface. Once you’ve done here click Save to then, well, save the post. Assuming this works and you aren’t thrown back into the Home Screen you’re all done.

Annoyances

Where do I start. Firstly I have found that the Categories are cached, sounds great, but I couldn’t get the cache to update. Since first setting up I had created lot’s of categories through the web panel, and no matter what I did I couldn’t get these to show up. Also there’s it’s love of the Home Screen, can’t go anywhere/do anything without it. And finally no way to edit settings once they have been entered (as far as I can tell). It seems like once a blog has been added, it can’t be deleted, and neither can any settings which go along with it.

So really I like the concept of it, although think it’s pretty badly implemented. For now it’s deleted from my iPod, and I’ll definately consider installing again in the future.

A logical choice for this to me seemed to be to go with what I was used to, Ubuntu box with all the additional software which I needed installed via apt-get, this is something which I’ve got experience in doing and I know it works effectively. But, since there are now Mac’s involved I also thought Time Machine integration would be a nice touch, after a bit of googling around I found this tutorial. It all seemed simple enough to understand so I decided to go for it and hope for the best.

A couple of hours later I’d got it all setup, along with a DHCP server running on the Ubuntu box which makes everything run just a tad more smoothly, so, time for the first backup. Initially I couldn’t get past the “Preparing Backup” stage, it seemed that I have got too much crap on my laptop, so I thought I’d kick-start the process by excluding the “Users” folder, bringing the backup size to a more manageable 27 GB. This all worked fine after a lot of fiddling, but basically the connection kept getting interrupted for some reason, and it took forever to do the initial backup, at this point I removed the exclusion folder for the Users fold and left Time Machine to do its stuff. Though not for long, I kept getting network problems, so came to the conclusion that this simply wasn’t working.

Time to rethink?

By then I was getting somewhat annoyed, what seemed like a simple process simply wasn’t working, and why could the backup’s simply be created on any file sharing protocol which OS X supports? After all the data is stored within a “.sparsebundle” file, therefore there won’t be loss of meta data regardless of these variables (I am pretty sure about this, not 100% though).

I came to the conclusion that the best solution would be to add something there which natively supported the AFP protocol, since a new Apple computer was out of the question it seemed the next best thing would be a logical choice, I knew that the machine I had to install “Leopard” on had driver support which left much to be desired, although my conclusion was that so long as I could get the ethernet port running I was good to go. Installed this without a glitch, ticked all the right boxes and within an hour a “brand new” mac. Setting up the Time Machine drive so that It was shared over AFP was no problem, and my MacBook picked it up straight away, then after selecting through Time Machine prefpane I set it going and got a backup done over a speedy gigabit connection, so far so good, but then I started getting the same problems – every so often the connection would appear to just cut off, not allowing me to login over AFP or, well, do anything really. Since this has happened twice on the same computer I am beginning to think that maybe the problem is related to the physical port, as otherwise I’m out of ideas.

And now …

That is where I’m stuck for options; I can either use Time Machine with a standard external drive, and simple connect it up to different computers, continue trying to get to the root cause of the problem with my Server, or spend money on new hardware (Time Capsule/Mac Mini).

First, the calendar issue, I’ve stopped using GCal, and started using outlook. Yes, it is great that it syncs, but, I want to be able to add/edit the calendar from within my iPod, which apparently is coming soon. Also I’d quite like an email client, maybe the iPhones one, as now I understand what IMAP is, it’s quite useful for getting everything working together. Another thing, a notes application, just for writing notes & stuff, as I am getting quite good at using the on-screen keyboard. No doubt all of these things will be fixed though, maybe sometime around February 2008?

Same problem with all the following: Argos, Comet and Currys.

So I’m out of ideas. Maybe I’ll just have to wait, and what annoys me is the ridiculous prices of accesories. £269 for iPod I think is reasonable, £19 for 6 socks, definately not, £35 for dock & remote. Not at all. But, people must be buying them, it seems an unnecessary premium for stuff that must cost nothing to make. Although controlling iPod by remote will be good

Also it seems like a Friday today for some reason, must be because I am attempting to do homework, but it has taken me (so far) a few hours to do just a relatively simple piece of physics. Must concentrate harder.