Posts Tagged ‘apple’

Facetime, grar

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

My boss at work is moving to another state, and will be working remotely from monday on. So, we are setting up facetime betwixt my ipad and her mac, in preparation for the big day. And ever since, my ipad is now making little notification sounds, even though it’s completely muted, and everything I can find about facetime in settings is set to off.

Most annoying is that I can’t see any reason for it to be making the sounds; I’m not getting call requests every five seconds, but it’s making the noise that often.

At least killing the app seems to have stopped them.

UPDATE: Killing the app didn’t make any difference. I finally tracked down that somehow, making a facetime call, turned on email notifications for gmail. WTF?

Free Yellow Submarine in iBook

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

There’s a multimedia remix of the Yellow Submarine movie, as an ebook, in the iTunes store currently, and it’s free even. Looks pretty cool so far, but I always loved that movie.

Best Bubble-Physics game for iOS on sale today

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

This mis-spelt but otherwise awesome Dubble Bubble Shooter HD is on sale for $0.99 finally. I have been wanting to buy the game every since I first discovered the lite version, but just wasn’t willing to pay them 4 times what everyone else asks, no matter how good the game. So I was very glad to see their price reduction this morning.

iOS4 and Safari annoying usage assumptions

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

I understand that there are legions of people who never type in web addresses, going to google first even for sites like espn.com, that they visit every day. It’s still annoying as frack that starting with iOS 4, on iDevices like the iPad, when you open a new browsing ‘tab’, it puts focus in the search box instead of the address bar, and requires *2* presses of the address bar before you can actually type in it. I think it’s that second press that really bugs me. You want to put the focus elsewhere, grumble but ok, but why suddenly the double click requirement? If only Steve Jobs believed in letting users adjust the experience, it could be a setting instead of an unchangeable default.

Samsung and the Galaxy Tab

Friday, November 12th, 2010

I’m a few more days of usage away from writing up my thoughts on using the Tab, but I can sure as heck share how annoyed Samsung has made me trying to get support for it so far. In fairness to Samsung, Apple does no better at updating their website in time with their product releases; with apple, there are several pages where the dropdowns don’t include the current release of the OS or iTunes, with samsung, galaxy tab support is iffy at best. Trying to register, you get stuck at a drop down that never fills in with any options, but is required. Trying to get support ends much the same way.

It seems like one of those things that I don’t understand how you could have someone tasked with product QA, who failed to notice the bugs.

pre iOS 4 ipad change

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

Somewhen since I last paid attention to it, they made a change to the iPad OS, so that I can have more apps installed than are visible on the ~9 pages they give you.  It is a little disconcerting during downloads/updates, since you can’t see any indication of progress, only the spinning network activity indicator lets you know things are happening, somewhere, deep where you can’t see.  But once the spinner stops, assuming you remember the name of the app, you can search your iPad for it, and launch it from the search results page.

Now I just need an app to remind me what the name of that app I just downloaded is.  I think I’ll call it “Dave’s not here, man!” =p

Steve Jobs hates you

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Doesn’t seem to be much other reason for him to deliberately remove the screen-orientation lock button’s functionality.      There’d better be a way to lock the screen orientation in software still, or I won’t be upgrading.

iTunes store search broken on iPad/iPhone/iTouch

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

There’s something seriously messed up with searching the iTunes app store from an iDevice.  I’ve found at least two consistent examples of applications that are searchable and downloadable via iTunes-on-a-desktop, but are not even visible in search results from an iDevice like the pad, touch, or phone.

Nike+ GPS

Brion Gysin: Dream Machine

It’s an odd error condition, my guess would be it’s caused by having a separate search index for the mobile devices.  What is particularly annoying about the error is that auto suggest will start to fill in the name of the apps correctly, but then gives you no results.  Following a direct link to the app from safari just gives you an error once the device switches from browser to store mode.    Another great job of QA there apple.

UPDATE:  Darshan the useless, why does Apple pay you?  Then again, at least you could get email, even if you couldn’t understand basic english enough to do your job (or maybe you understood just fine, and have taken an American attitude towards your job); nike’s app support page just sticks you in a never ending loop if you try to submit feedback to them.

UPDATE2:  If you want to send feedback to Nike, ignore the big orange button that says “feedback”.  Look for the smaller link that says “contact us”…that one isn’t broken.

UPDATE3:  “resolved”

It turns out the problem is the lack of synchronization on iOS 4.x availability.  In their infinite wisdom, apple decided to have search pretend an app doesn’t exist, if your device isn’t running the required OS version.  Seems like the smarter, more user friendly UI design would be to return the items marked unavailable with a reason why, but I guess someone wanted to make sure the call center in India had enough pointless work to do.

iTunes process xx exceeded 500 log message per second limit

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

Dealing with some driver errors on my iMac, I started looking at /var/log/system.log on my Snow Leopard machine, and noticed that when I start iTunes, it’s generating a boatload of log messages of questionable value.

It’s row after row of incrementing numbers

Sep 16 10:22:03 WideMac [0x0-0x1e01e].com.apple.iTunes[202]: 14212
Sep 16 10:22:03 WideMac [0x0-0x1e01e].com.apple.iTunes[202]: 1
Sep 16 10:22:03 WideMac [0x0-0x1e01e].com.apple.iTunes[202]: 2
Sep 16 10:22:03 WideMac [0x0-0x1e01e].com.apple.iTunes[202]: 3

Sep 16 10:22:03 WideMac [0x0-0x1e01e].com.apple.iTunes[202]: *** process 202 exceeded 500 log message per second limit  -  remaining messages this second discarded ***

Once the next second comes up, the messages start again.  It goes all the way up to about 10,000 before it hits another discard message and doesn’t start again when the next second comes up.  Odd.

LogMeInGuiAgent blocking Mac OS X login

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac LMIGUIAgent[111]: 3891612: (connectAndCheck) Untrusted apps are not allowed to connect to or launch Window Server before login.
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac LMIGUIAgent[111]: kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: Wed Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac.local LMIGUIAgent[111] <Warning>: 3891612: (connectAndCheck) Untrusted apps are not allowed to connect to or launch Window Server before login.
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: Wed Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac.local LMIGUIAgent[111] <Error>: kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac LMIGUIAgent[111]: HIToolbox: received notification of WindowServer event port death.
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac LMIGUIAgent[111]: port matched the WindowServer port created in BindCGSToRunLoop
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: Session – Error occured:read errno:Bad file descriptor
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: WINLOG – 7 SessionManager Connection closed
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: WINLOG – 7 SessionManager Closing DisplayServer
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: WINLOG – 7 SessionManager DisplayServer close
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: WINLOG – 7 SessionManager Exiting
Sep 15 07:30:49 WideMac com.apple.launchd[1] (com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]): Exited with exit code: 1

I was going to try and reboot in single-user mode to see what difference that might make, but because the bluetooth keyboard wasn’t recognized before the window for requesting single-user had passed, I ended up in a regular reboot, and the problem has disappeared.  Or at least I was able to login.

I’ve had a USB drive keep ejecting itself unsafely yesterday, we’ll see if the reboot fixed that too….