Tag: itunes

  • iPad, Nexus, Kindle Fire – which tablet should I buy?

    What a crazy time to be shopping for a tablet computer. There are so many, many choices. Which tablet should you buy? I have some advice — and please give me your intelligent feedback in the comments section below — on the biggest sellers, all of which I have personally used: Apple’s iPad line, Google’s…

  • Finally, serious Lightroom photo syncing on the iPad – no iPhoto required

    Old workflow for getting cool pictures I’ve taken from my camera to my iPad: Import photos into Adobe Lightroom. Throw out junk, make fixes, sort and rate. Choose photos I want on my iPad and export to a folder on my hard drive. Drag said folder into iPhoto. Make newly imported photos into a new…

  • Using iTunes Match to get rid of DRM-protected music

    Want to finally get rid of those low quality, DRM infested music tracks you bought from iTunes back before DRM free tracks arrived? Now you can. When the iTunes Store first opened for business back in 2003, all the music tracks were locked up with a digital rights management (or DRM) scheme called “Fairplay” to…

  • Using an iPhone 4S without iTunes – ever!

    For reasons that shall be dealt with later, I’m the owner of a new iPhone 4S. Having had more than my fill of iTunes annoyances, delays and freezes, I’m trying to go without ever syncing my new iPhone to my Mac. In the first few days, it’s mostly gone smoothly. Email/Contacts/Calendars I’m using both Apple’s…

  • The iPad as digital library and other lessons of the first year

    Well, we’ve been very satisfied iPad owners for just over a year now so it’s a good time to look back and review. My intention is to dig a lot deeper than the usual gadget reviews and give a sense of what it’s like to have an iPad day in and day out for a…

  • Review: BitBop offers dream of great video on Android someday

    Have I mentioned there are a dearth of options for watching TV shows and movies on Android devices? Yeah? Well, while we wait for the possible arrival of Netflix and Hulu Plus for Android, I’m just trying out a new offering called BitBop on my T-Mobile Nexus S. It’s very early days yet but it…

  • Getting iTunes to sync standard def videos to your iPad

    We’re big fans of the recent PBS Masterpiece series Downton Abbey and bought the high-definition version from iTunes to watch on the big TV that is connected to our Mac mini media server. But when my wife asked me to load the series onto her iPad recently, I ran into an annoying syncing problem based…

  • The future of Apple computing isn’t all led by Apple

    There’s a great video up on Macworld’s site of a conversation between four highly knowledgeable Mac pundits about the “future of the Mac.” The participants were Daringfireball’s John Gruber and Tidbits’ Adam Engst along with Jason Snell and Dan Moren from Macworld. The discussion was interesting and worth the 48 minutes or so of my…

  • How to get rid of iTunes ugly new blue icon

    The most recent versions of Apple’s overstuffed iTunes app made an almost universally hated change by switching to a boring, blue icon. I was among the masses who wanted to figure out a way to switch the iTunes icon to something better. It’s not as easy as it used to be to swap icons. There…

  • Why can’t anyone compare iTunes store video to Android’s offerings?

    The other day, Josh Topolsky at Engadget published a lengthy and detailed review of the new Samsung Nexus S smartphone which runs the very latest version of Google’s Android operating system. The 3,300 word review seemingly runs through every feature, includes a dozen or more pictures and generally appears to be the most thorough run…