Tag: mac

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Mobile

iTunes gives me the Blues

MUSIC ON THE IPHONE. I wanted to copy 4 albums on my Mac into my iPhone and iTunes insists on backing it up first, syncing things before sending the files. I went through the process for close to an hour to find, while I was already out on my run, that the files weren’t copied.

There is a special place in Inferno for iTunes.

A few minutes to my Saturday run this week, I decided on a change in music. I usually listen to NPR podcasts or Bob Dylan, Nina Simone and Amy Winehouse while running but yesterday I wanted to listen to The Lumineers and Madeleine Peyroux.

I listen to songs on the BlackBerry Z10 because its storage is expandable with a memory card (unlike that of the iPhone) and it’s easier to manage songs there — just a matter of mounting the phone’s memory card as a storage drive and adding or removing the songs.

MUSIC ON THE IPHONE. I wanted to copy 4 albums on my Mac into my iPhone and iTunes insists on backing it up first, syncing things before sending the files. I went through the process for close to an hour to find, while I was already out on my run, that the files weren’t copied.
MUSIC ON THE IPHONE. I wanted to copy 4 albums on my Mac into my iPhone and iTunes insists on backing it up first, syncing things before sending the files. I went through the process for close to an hour to find, while I was already out on my run, that the files weren’t copied.

But for running, I prefer using the iPhone because of RunKeeper. The BlackBerry Z10 has an equivalent app — Sports Tracker — but it often hangs and force closes in the middle of your run. Several times, it also stopped tracking the mileage.

I planned to start running at 5 p.m. and attached the iPhone to the MacBook Pro to sync the albums a few minutes before that time.

Manually managing songs on iTunes

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Android Apple Highlights Mobile

App-y New Year

EVERNOTE. The Evernote applications for iOS and Android allow you to manage your notes on the go.

Mobile exploded in 2012. US consumers now spend 1.8 more times in mobiles apps than on the Web, according to Flurry, a mobile analytics company. Flurry said that between December 2011 and December 2012, “the average time spent inside mobile apps by a US consumer grew 35 percent, from 94 minutes to 127 minutes.”

Closer to home, the Philippines recorded a 326 percent increase in smartphone sales, the fastest growth in the Southeast Asian region, according to research company GfK. The Philippines is also the country “with the highest jump in smartphone market share within a year, from 9 to 24 percent,” GfK said in a press statement last September.

To mark the end of this year of mobile, let me riff on a Pinoy New Year’s Eve tradition by offering you my favorite apps in 12 task categories, in no particular order:

News apps Zite, Prismatic and News.me
NEWS APPS. (From left) Zite, Prismatic and News.me harness social networking connections to match news stories to users’ interests.

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Apple Highlights

Is this the end of SMS?

Apple announced last week that the next version of its operating system (OS) will incorporate features first introduced in the iPhone and iPad “re-imagined for the Mac.”

OSX Mountain Lion, which is scheduled for release later this year, will have Notification Center, iCloud integration, Reminders, Notes, Game Center and Messages – features that are currently on its mobile phones and tablets.

“We see that people are in love with a lot of the apps and functionality here,” Apple chief executive Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal in an interview, pointing at his iPhone. “So, anywhere where it makes sense, we are going to move that over to Mac.”

One of the things to look forward to in the new OS is the integration of Reminders and its working with the cloud. Items you add in Reminders in OS X will be added to your Reminders in your iPhone or iPad. This would be a great way to centralize to-do lists.

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PC

Make your Windows PC look, act like OS X

Refresh your boring Windows desktop by transforming it to resemble the sleek Mac OS X with the FlyakiteOSX transformation pack. The free software package automates the installation of tweaks, third-party programs, desktop themes and menus to make your Windows PC look and act like OS X (see screenshots below).

I tried the software and found the installation easy. I did not encounter errors when I installed it into my Windows XP with Service Pack 2 office computer. You need to restart your computer after the installation.

I was concerned that the transformation would be such a resource hog and would slow my system to the point that it becomes unusable. It did not. I was surprised that I did not notice any noticeable speed difference after I installed FlyakiteOSX.

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Uncategorized

My other PC is a Mac, sort of

After reading the usual excellent piece by tech journalist Chin Wong “My other PC is a Mac,” I found this instruction on how to install Mac OS X natively on a PC. I showed the instructions to newsroom technical assistant Dongdong Ygay and a day or two later voila – he turned a Celeron 2.5 GHz on an Asus P4GE-MX motherboard with 256MB RAM into a Mac OS X machine:

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After start-up, the Mac PC was able to detect our office’s local area network. When Dongdong entered the web proxy settings, the Mac PC was able to connect to the Internet without any hitches. Check the menage-a-trois of operating systems: the Mac OS X image was downloaded using a Windows PC, transferred into a new hard disk using an Ubuntu live CD and then the PC started its new life as a Mac OS X unit.