Make Google Music Work (Sort-of) on iPhone, iPad (iOS)
No, I’m not back from my self-imposed leave of absence, but I do have a super quick post to help out people who’ve made it into the Google Music beta and are using an iPhone, iPad, iPod, or some such iOS device.
If you’ve been trying to use it and found it to be frustrating, you’re not alone. Here’s a couple quick tips on how to make Google Music remotely useful on your iPhone or iPad:
- To scroll your list of albums/artists/etc., use two finger scrolling. If you’re not familiar with two-finger scrolling, plop two fingers down on the device’s screen and then drag. You should see the page move to reveal more artists/albums/tracks/etc.
- To get the damn thing to play, open up an album and select a track. Touch the play button at the bottom and give it a few seconds. If you don’t hear music but see the EQ bouncing next to the track’s name, then hit the back arrow on your browser. You should see that you still have the music controls down in the bottom iFrame, so hit pause and then hit play again and, just like magic, it should play! (It does take a few seconds to load, even on wifi.)
That’s it. For those of you lucky enough to get in, this should make it moderately useful while we wait for Apple to offer a service that’s better integrated into the iPhone/iPad.
MacBook Air 11.6″ — A Steal At $999, But For Whom?
Much has already been written by now about the newest revision to the MacBook Air. Apple has seemingly once again done a number that has managed to get everyone talking about them and their crazy gadgets, and now that I’ve had the chance to play with one, I understand why. It’s no secret that Steve Jobs seems to have his finger on the pulse of what people want, but I wasn’t convinced that I’d want the new smaller, more diminutive, less powerful MacBook Air. But I do.
MacBook Air Late 2010 — the Good, the Bad and Why It Will Sell
So yesterday Apple had their event at the town hall on their campus, and among other things that they announced, the world seems to be focused on the new MacBook Air. Of course, in another few months that focus will change to the OS X App Store, and then a little further down the line it’ll change to OS X 10.7 Lion, and somewhere in between all of this will be Facetime for OS X. Whew, there were a lot of announcements! Oh, and let’s not forget iLife ’11, but then, I don’t really care about that one right now, so we’ll ignore it for the time being. What I really want to do is talk about the MacBook Air and why it’s the perfect computer for most, and that even though I love small form-factor systems, why it’s not right for me (and probably a few of you, too). (more…)
Hooray For Hiatus!
I’m going to be taking a hiatus from this site for a while. In all honesty, I’m not sure it matters much anyway because once I stopped hacking OS X onto netbooks, well, there’s quite simply not as much interest. I’m fine with that, too, because this is really just a hobby of mine, something I started to share a some thoughts and experiences on things.
I’m pretty sure along the way I, and especially you readers, have helped people to get OS X running on some machines it wasn’t meant for. I also like to think I provided a little discussion on some interesting products and stories along the way, but I don’t delude myself into thinking I did any real gut-busting reporting.
Regardless, I’ve clearly lost any and all interest I once had in netbooks, and seeing as SFF computing isn’t terribly exciting these days (sure there’s new CPUs from Intel and AMD, but really, they’re just updates to existing things, so how exciting can it be?) I just don’t see much need to keep posting for now. Besides, I really don’t want to turn this into a tablet site even though tablet computers are all the rage right now.
So, regardless, thanks for visiting, and I imagine I’ll be posting here and there as something catches my eye, but at least there’s a little warning that it’ll be sporadic. In the meantime, nothing will go anywhere, so for those who are still finding this site via google or other sites and are trying to install old versions of OS X on their machines, the info will still be there.
Cheers.
iPhone 4 For Me, Or, Goodbye Samsung Captivate
This is actually a little overdue. Okay, it’s a lot overdue. By a matter of weeks, even. But just the same, I couldn’t hang with the Samsung Captivate, better known the world wide as the Samsung Galaxy S. It’s not that it’s a bad phone, because it isn’t (though I did have reception issues), and it’s not that it’s not pretty enough (sure, it’s no work of art, but it’s nice enough), and it’s not that it’s made by Samsung because they make all sorts of quality products (including the Samsung N120 netbook I’ve spoken highly about (and I may have even pre-ordered — I don’t remember now)). No, it’s really no fault on Samsung’s part, in so much as we’re discussing hardware. The fault belongs to Google. Yeah, Android is the problem.
Samsung Captivate Android Smartphone Impressions
I just posted the beginnings of my Android Survival Guide for iPhone Users and figured I should go ahead and take a moment to give some impressions about the Samsung Captivate I just picked up. If there’s anything true about small form factor computing these days, it’s that smartphones are all the rage, and this US version of the Samsung Galaxy S is certainly getting a lot of press right now. But is it really as awesome as everyone would have you believe?
Android Survival Guide for iPhone Users
So I recently purchased an Android phone, the Samsung Captivate, which is the US AT&T version of the Samsung Galaxy S, and I’ve discovered that switching has been difficult. Aside from the obvious learning curve of going from one system to another, there’s been quite a few issues that have been incredibly aggravating and have left me wondering if I can make it to 30 days, let alone past 30 days, without getting a refund and getting an iPhone 4 instead. However, I’m still persisting for the time being, and while I’m suffering, I figured I’d address what issues I’ve been able to solve, but to also air some others and see if you folks have any ideas. Who knows, maybe there’ll be a good idea in this somewhere.