In a previous post I gave my initial reviews of the new Apple TV. I bought the new one because it was smaller, supported NetFlix and also had the promise of a new technology called AirPlay. Based on the increasing number of devices in this area it is clear the tv is the next battle ground and will end up being as intense as the current smartphone war. The Google TV in particular was announced at about the same time as I bought the Apple TV and actually gave me pause. The Apple TV seemed to have a much more limited feature set and only had apps for YouTube, Flickr, NetFlix and some internet radio streams. Google TV had many more apps like Hulu, Pandora, YouTube, Flickr and with promise of many more.
In the end the Apple TV fit best with my home's technology eco-system, and I also really loved the first generation. As you know I really enjoyed it and while it was annoying to open up the MacBook to play music, everything else worked like a charm. I was even pleasantly surprised to see that the source photos for the slideshow are actually cached on the device and don't require the MacBook to be open. We originally had done NetFlix streaming on the TiVo, but this was a bit of a pain since you can only access your Instant Queue, and have to add things to it via a computer or other device. Annoying!!! NetFlix on the AppleTV is infinitely better and lets you browse movies and watch them instantly completely bypassing the InstantQueue.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I got my hands on a beta of iOS 4.2 and started playing around with the audio only version of AirPlay. Basically AirPlay lets you output any audio/video from your mobile iOS device to an Apple TV connected television. The only disclaimer being that the app has to use the native iOS media player. When this was first announced it was only demonstrated using the iPod feature for both music and movies, it wasn't clear at the time that this would be included in ANY app using the media player. It is really easy to use AirPlay, basically the media player on the iOS device gets an additional button if it detects an Apple TV on the network. You just tap the AirPlay icon and choose the Apple TV to output to and within seconds the audio/video shows up on the television. You can then put your iOS device away OR using audio multi-tasking you can continue using other apps.
Why is this so important? Combined with an iPhone and AirPlay the Apple TV immediately gains thousands of apps. This means apps like Pandora, Sirius XM, Hulu Plus, and the MLB At Bat apps are all capable of streaming to a television. Of course this only scratches the surface, basically any app you use on your iOS device to listen to music or watch video can be output to an Apple TV with AirPlay. Of course given Apples standard operating procedure of incrementally adding features the possibilities seem endless. I am sure it won't be long before AirPlay lets developers output the display of a game to the AppleTV, while controlling the game from the iOS device. The possibilities are endless.
The other important right move made by Apple is to realize that people don't want/need a web browser, email client or Twitter feed on the television. These types of activities are personal/private and aren't meant to be shared with everybody in the living room. Keep it simple, people just want to be able to put audio or video content on a bigger speaker and screens.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Monday, November 8, 2010
Storage is Cheap
Way back in 2009 I was quickly running out of space on my 80Gb MacBook hard drive and investigated upgrading to something bigger. I ended up going with a 500Gb internal drive with a 1Tb external for back up using Time Machine. All was going well until this summer when a friend convinced me to start taking pictures in RAW format instead of JPEG. Once I made the switch the drive I thought would take years to fill had less than 50Gb of free space.
I went back to the drawing board to figure out my next steps. One important factor last time was being able to keep all my movies, photos and music on the MacBook so I wouldn't have to find an external drive and hook it up every time I wanted to make a new movie. I went to NewEgg.com, the same site I bought the 500Gb from and order a 1Tb internal drive. It arrived a few days later and I started the arduous task of backing it up so I could migrate to the new drive. I used a 20Gb bootable drive to clone the internal drive to an external 500Gb drive I had laying around and started to take the old drive out. Unfortunately I forgot to read the details on NewEgg.com and found the drive was to tall. So I sent the drive back and returned to the drawing board. After further review of the internal drives I found they all wouldn't fit in the MacBook and upgrading to 750Gb wouldn't tide me over for very long.
I decided my requirement for having everything on one drive was not as important now as it had been in the past (two kids don't really provide time for much beyond storing and rating photos). I figured I had enough drives on hand to give me some time to really think about it and also think long and hard about how a Mac Mini might fit into the picture. I did add one new piece of hardware to the picture though, the 20Gb drive I had been using as a bootable backup was really old and big, so I decided to drop $40 and replace it with a 16Gb USB flash drive. It takes up much less space and doesn't require a power cord or firewire cable. It took most of Sunday to get everything squared away, but in the end the plan came together.
Here is the setup:
Finally, I did have a problem with Time Machine and I wanted to document my fix here. I was playing around with attaching my Time Machine drive to the AirPort Extreme, but iMovie was recognizing the movies on the movie share when configured this way, so I had to switch back. While I was in the middle of testing iMovie I also attempted a Time Machine backup (big mistake). It didn't recognize all of the old backup files (I could see the backups in the backups directory of the Time Machine Volume) and wanted to do a clean backup. I cancelled the back up and switched the Time Machine drive back to directly connecting to the MacBook. I attempted to do a backup and again it wanted to do a full backup and didn't have enough space. After browsing the forums for an hour or so I finally found the fix. All I had to do was delete the "sparsebundle" file in the root of the Time Machine volume. Once this was deleted I tried another backup and it did an incremental backup. I even verified it by going "in" the Time Machine and looked at what some of the directories looked like a year ago.
I went back to the drawing board to figure out my next steps. One important factor last time was being able to keep all my movies, photos and music on the MacBook so I wouldn't have to find an external drive and hook it up every time I wanted to make a new movie. I went to NewEgg.com, the same site I bought the 500Gb from and order a 1Tb internal drive. It arrived a few days later and I started the arduous task of backing it up so I could migrate to the new drive. I used a 20Gb bootable drive to clone the internal drive to an external 500Gb drive I had laying around and started to take the old drive out. Unfortunately I forgot to read the details on NewEgg.com and found the drive was to tall. So I sent the drive back and returned to the drawing board. After further review of the internal drives I found they all wouldn't fit in the MacBook and upgrading to 750Gb wouldn't tide me over for very long.
I decided my requirement for having everything on one drive was not as important now as it had been in the past (two kids don't really provide time for much beyond storing and rating photos). I figured I had enough drives on hand to give me some time to really think about it and also think long and hard about how a Mac Mini might fit into the picture. I did add one new piece of hardware to the picture though, the 20Gb drive I had been using as a bootable backup was really old and big, so I decided to drop $40 and replace it with a 16Gb USB flash drive. It takes up much less space and doesn't require a power cord or firewire cable. It took most of Sunday to get everything squared away, but in the end the plan came together.
Here is the setup:
Finally, I did have a problem with Time Machine and I wanted to document my fix here. I was playing around with attaching my Time Machine drive to the AirPort Extreme, but iMovie was recognizing the movies on the movie share when configured this way, so I had to switch back. While I was in the middle of testing iMovie I also attempted a Time Machine backup (big mistake). It didn't recognize all of the old backup files (I could see the backups in the backups directory of the Time Machine Volume) and wanted to do a clean backup. I cancelled the back up and switched the Time Machine drive back to directly connecting to the MacBook. I attempted to do a backup and again it wanted to do a full backup and didn't have enough space. After browsing the forums for an hour or so I finally found the fix. All I had to do was delete the "sparsebundle" file in the root of the Time Machine volume. Once this was deleted I tried another backup and it did an incremental backup. I even verified it by going "in" the Time Machine and looked at what some of the directories looked like a year ago.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Whirlwind Tour of Vermont
Last weekend we made a quick overnight trip to Vermont to visit Jen's family's cabin. We stayed in a little hotel in Ludlow for the night, upon arriving we unpacked our stuff and then figured out the heat wasn't working. So we moved to a different room. In the middle of the night Kaleb woke up and had to throw up, so we were up for about an hour at 1:30AM and then again at 5:30 when he woke up with a fever and still feeling sick. Kaleb was well enough to point out the snow on the car, Jennifer and I thought he was only seeing frost, but it was indeed snow (just a dusting).
We packed up the crew and headed over to the cabin for an enjoyable and brisk day outside. We had a great walk down to the stream with lots of tree clean up. We made the trip home and it was eventful, Kaleb needed to stop to possibly throw up and Cam cried the last half hour.
Here are pictures
We packed up the crew and headed over to the cabin for an enjoyable and brisk day outside. We had a great walk down to the stream with lots of tree clean up. We made the trip home and it was eventful, Kaleb needed to stop to possibly throw up and Cam cried the last half hour.
Here are pictures
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| Vermont |
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Back to the Mac Media Event Follow-Up
Well I went scored 4 out of 4 on my predictions.
Mac OS X Lion - The new Lion version was announced and they are going to take things they learned from iOS and bring them "Back to the Mac". There will now be a Mac App Store for purchasing apps. A new launchpad aka home screen will be featured. A lot more support for multi-touch is going in Lion including a new Mission Control window for easy navigation between apps, think new and improved Expose'. Finally lots of apps are going to get Full Screen modes with easy switching between apps. It will be released next summer.
iLife '11 - As predicted this was announced with new versions of iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand.
iPhoto does NOT have improvements for Faces, but does now have a full screen mode and has a look and feel much like the iOS photos app. There is new support for books, letters and some more Facebook integration.
iMovie gets some cool upgrades including improved audio editing capabilities and some new audio and video effects. The other cool feature is the ability to create movie trailers which gives you a story board and you just drag and drop different clips onto it combined with some manually typed in things like people in the movie and activities from the movie. It creates really cool looking videos.
GarageBand had some changes, but I didn't really pay attention since recording new music is the third priority for when I use a computer for creative purposes and I rarely get to my second priority which is making movies.
FaceTime - Apple is going to release a new FaceTime app for the Mac that will allow iPhone4 and iPod Touch users to do FaceTime video chatting with a desktop computer. Very simple and basic app which integrates with the Address Book app.
MacBook Air - A new MacBook Air was announced that is lighter and smaller than the previous generation. It comes with a crazy battery life and a new multi-touch trackpad. There is also an 11" model to go with the 13" model. The craziest part is the starting price for the 11" with a 64GB SSD is $999, which is dramatically lower than the previous MacBook Air.
Overall there were some interesting things. I am most excited about FaceTime and might consider buying iPhoto if only for the full screen move and cleaner UI. Lion is a great first step towards merging the Mac OS X and iOS, but there is nothing completely revolutionary that I can't wait to use.
Mac OS X Lion - The new Lion version was announced and they are going to take things they learned from iOS and bring them "Back to the Mac". There will now be a Mac App Store for purchasing apps. A new launchpad aka home screen will be featured. A lot more support for multi-touch is going in Lion including a new Mission Control window for easy navigation between apps, think new and improved Expose'. Finally lots of apps are going to get Full Screen modes with easy switching between apps. It will be released next summer.
iLife '11 - As predicted this was announced with new versions of iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand.
iPhoto does NOT have improvements for Faces, but does now have a full screen mode and has a look and feel much like the iOS photos app. There is new support for books, letters and some more Facebook integration.
iMovie gets some cool upgrades including improved audio editing capabilities and some new audio and video effects. The other cool feature is the ability to create movie trailers which gives you a story board and you just drag and drop different clips onto it combined with some manually typed in things like people in the movie and activities from the movie. It creates really cool looking videos.
GarageBand had some changes, but I didn't really pay attention since recording new music is the third priority for when I use a computer for creative purposes and I rarely get to my second priority which is making movies.
FaceTime - Apple is going to release a new FaceTime app for the Mac that will allow iPhone4 and iPod Touch users to do FaceTime video chatting with a desktop computer. Very simple and basic app which integrates with the Address Book app.
MacBook Air - A new MacBook Air was announced that is lighter and smaller than the previous generation. It comes with a crazy battery life and a new multi-touch trackpad. There is also an 11" model to go with the 13" model. The craziest part is the starting price for the 11" with a 64GB SSD is $999, which is dramatically lower than the previous MacBook Air.
Overall there were some interesting things. I am most excited about FaceTime and might consider buying iPhoto if only for the full screen move and cleaner UI. Lion is a great first step towards merging the Mac OS X and iOS, but there is nothing completely revolutionary that I can't wait to use.
Back to Mac Media Event Predictions
Last week Apple announced their second media event of the fall season with the title of "Back to Mac", scheduled for October 20, 2010 at 1PM EDT. Of course being an Apple fan-boy I am very excited to see what is in store for the Mac, which has appeared like a red-headed step child since the iPhone was released.
Here is the image for the event.
Okay so here are the predictions:
Mac OS X Lion - It seems pretty clear from the image above that Apple will make some announcement around the next version of Mac OS X. I am predicting some listing of the features and also a couple demos of the new features, but it probably won't be available until the WWDC next summer. The convergence begins....I expect it to include some new UI features with a more iOS look and feel as Apple begins the process of moving towards a single OS for all their devices. Not exactly sure about any other changes besides some general UI stuff, but maybe some updates to the native Mail and Calendar apps.
MacBook Air Update - The MacBook Air was announced back in May of 2009 and hasn't been updated since, so I think a new version is a near certainty. The new MacBook Air will probably be thinner, lighter and have a longer battery life. I think they will probably add a new screen size and also add some more multi-touch support. The long shot would be an actual touch-screen and ability to switch from Mac OS X to iOS.
iLife '11 - Again it has been two years since the last iLife update and it is time for some updates to the suite. Not exactly sure what the changes will be, maybe bringing some more features to iMovie and hopefully some better Faces usability in iPhoto.
FaceTime - I have had an iPhone 4 now for four months and have only used the "killer" app FaceTime on it once. The big problem is I don't know many people with a device that actually supports FaceTime. I think iChat will finally get FaceTime support and Windows may also get iChat as well. Since Apple wants to get this out to as many people as possible I don't think they will include it in iLife and will hopefully push it out as a Mac OS X update.
Now I just have to wait five more hours and find out if my predictions are true.
Here is the image for the event.
Okay so here are the predictions:
Mac OS X Lion - It seems pretty clear from the image above that Apple will make some announcement around the next version of Mac OS X. I am predicting some listing of the features and also a couple demos of the new features, but it probably won't be available until the WWDC next summer. The convergence begins....I expect it to include some new UI features with a more iOS look and feel as Apple begins the process of moving towards a single OS for all their devices. Not exactly sure about any other changes besides some general UI stuff, but maybe some updates to the native Mail and Calendar apps.
MacBook Air Update - The MacBook Air was announced back in May of 2009 and hasn't been updated since, so I think a new version is a near certainty. The new MacBook Air will probably be thinner, lighter and have a longer battery life. I think they will probably add a new screen size and also add some more multi-touch support. The long shot would be an actual touch-screen and ability to switch from Mac OS X to iOS.
iLife '11 - Again it has been two years since the last iLife update and it is time for some updates to the suite. Not exactly sure what the changes will be, maybe bringing some more features to iMovie and hopefully some better Faces usability in iPhoto.
FaceTime - I have had an iPhone 4 now for four months and have only used the "killer" app FaceTime on it once. The big problem is I don't know many people with a device that actually supports FaceTime. I think iChat will finally get FaceTime support and Windows may also get iChat as well. Since Apple wants to get this out to as many people as possible I don't think they will include it in iLife and will hopefully push it out as a Mac OS X update.
Now I just have to wait five more hours and find out if my predictions are true.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
My New Apple TV
The new AppleTV was officially released at the end of September, but with most Apple devices I couldn't actually buy one in the Apple Store (so annoying). However, this time instead of getting on a waiting list or going to the Apple Store everyday for three weeks I decided to order it online. About a week after ordering it appeared on my doorstep while I was at work. Of course now being the parent of two children I couldn't just start hooking it up when I returned home and had to wait a few hours before I had some free time. Once I heard the "five minutes 'til dinner" call I figured I would get started and see how far I could get. It turns out that is all I needed to get it hooked up to the TV, integrated with the iPhone remote and playing music from the MacBook. Apple has done a great job of simplifying the AppleTV and no longer requires syncing media like an iPod, instead you just start Home Sharing (which only involves entering an Apple ID and password) on the AppleTV, iPhone and MacBook and you have access across the devices.
I was very curious about whether or not I could set up the screen saver to use my photos instead of the stock photos and was happy to see it was not only possible, but much easier than worrying about syncing and having enough free space for photos. Of course the MacBook does have to be awake with iTunes open, which will be a change for us since we usually close it after every time we use it. It certainly makes me want to get a Mac Mini so the media will always be available, but I need to think about how that setup will look a little more before diving in with another new plan.
Finally, I tested out the Netflix application and it was a dramatic improvement over the Tivo Netflix application. The Tivo requires you to adding things to your InstantQueue on another device before it is available. The AppleTV on the other hand lets you browse movies and watch them right away complete with descriptions and controls for modifying your InstantQueue.
So far I have only spent a little bit of time with the new AppleTV, but I am happy with my purchase. For $99 the improved speed, Netflix and small size is well worth the price, but the possibilities going forward with AirPlay and integration with other iOS devices makes this a no-brainer.
Oh yeah and having a new device also gave me a chance to move some electronic devices around and clean up my setup. I ended up removing our audio receiver since we never use it and in its spot in the entertainment center moved the cable modem, 3G MicroCell and AirPort Extreme. Ever since I added the 3G MicroCell to the picture the kitchen was beginning to get cluttered with wires and devices, but I couldn't find a good place to put everything. Now they nicely sit in the entertainment center and also allow me to have some hard-wired network connections between the Tivo, Wii and Apple TV.
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I was very curious about whether or not I could set up the screen saver to use my photos instead of the stock photos and was happy to see it was not only possible, but much easier than worrying about syncing and having enough free space for photos. Of course the MacBook does have to be awake with iTunes open, which will be a change for us since we usually close it after every time we use it. It certainly makes me want to get a Mac Mini so the media will always be available, but I need to think about how that setup will look a little more before diving in with another new plan.
Finally, I tested out the Netflix application and it was a dramatic improvement over the Tivo Netflix application. The Tivo requires you to adding things to your InstantQueue on another device before it is available. The AppleTV on the other hand lets you browse movies and watch them right away complete with descriptions and controls for modifying your InstantQueue.
So far I have only spent a little bit of time with the new AppleTV, but I am happy with my purchase. For $99 the improved speed, Netflix and small size is well worth the price, but the possibilities going forward with AirPlay and integration with other iOS devices makes this a no-brainer.
Oh yeah and having a new device also gave me a chance to move some electronic devices around and clean up my setup. I ended up removing our audio receiver since we never use it and in its spot in the entertainment center moved the cable modem, 3G MicroCell and AirPort Extreme. Ever since I added the 3G MicroCell to the picture the kitchen was beginning to get cluttered with wires and devices, but I couldn't find a good place to put everything. Now they nicely sit in the entertainment center and also allow me to have some hard-wired network connections between the Tivo, Wii and Apple TV.
.JPG)
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