Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Apple news, tech tips, and more…

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  • Aging iOS Devices

    iOS 9 is on it’s way and I’m super excited! There are all sorts of really great things coming. Of all the features of this upcoming release, I’m most excited about “under the hood refinements”.

    I am still using an iPhone 4S and I get a lot of blowback on this from everyone that knows me and all the cutting edge gizmos I have. My iPhone is definitely my most significant and most used device and while I’ve thought a lot about going for a brand new iPhone 6 plus 64GB and adding AppleCare+ to the mix, the price tag has scared me away (I buy my phones outright leaving me free from 2 year contracts and early termination fees). It’s a beautiful device and the speed improvements would be something I feel many times throughout the day.

    My poor iPhone 4S 64GB is pushed much harder than most. I’ve got dozens of push notifications coming in every day, sometimes dozens in an hour, on top of that I have several really awesome notification center widgets. This old iPhone from 2011 is a technological marvel. I remember when it was being announced in October of 2011, Steve Jobs was on his deathbed. The iPhone 4S was and remains a truly beautiful device. It’s well built, but its dated hardware struggles (sometimes limping, flailing, or crawling) through every task that I throw at it. I also love the physical size.

    The 3.5 inch display was actually a very carefully thought out design decision because it would allow the average human thumb to reach every part of the screen without needing the grip to be repositioned. There’s a feature on the iPhone 6 that addresses that issue. A double tap on the home button (not actually mechanically pushing down on the home button causing it to click) will cause the display, or at least the image on it, to slide down a bit and make it much closer reach. While one handed operation has never been something I’ve needed on my iPad, it doesn’t make sense to me to have a phone that can’t always be used with just one hand.

    The small physical size of the iPhone 4S isn’t something that I want to give up, but the speed of the device is definitely making me long for a faster device. The device will routinely freeze up when I’m using an app and I’ll have to quit out of the app by pressing the home button, return to the home screen, quit the app and try again. Sometimes this will be so bad that I’ll have to force reboot the device by pressing the home button and the lock button at the same time until the Apple logo appears and let my poor old iPhone 4S reboot. Even rebooting has become a painful process; it takes over 2 minutes for the device to power back on. Generally this isn’t too bad, but if I’m in the middle of something (like taking a photo or video) it’s a real show stopper that’s sometimes the most frustrating part of my day.

    iOS 9 is supposedly going to address these issues with “under the hood refinements”. Copying the marketing directly from Apple’s iOS 9 preview website, these improvements will result in more responsive performance (hopefully this will be an even bigger deal on older devices), easier updates (optimized storage of only what you need for the specific device, rather than one universal app for all devices), and better battery life (more efficient programming means less work for the processor, this also ties back into the more responsive performance).

    The fact that iOS 9 is going to be compatible with older devices like the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2 means a lot to me. It makes me feel like my older devices are still current and relevant even though they’re missing a few features the newer devices get. Even with those missing features, it’s not like I bought my device with those features and they disappeared. My iPhone does more, works harder, and is more capable than it was when I bought it. Same goes for my iPad 2. I’m happy with my older iOS devices. They meet my needs and I am glad they are still able to roll with the punches.

  • Get More Out of Your Trackpad

    Click, point, drag, scroll. That’s about the extent of most trackpad users’ experience with their trackpad other than wiping it off when you touch it with sticky fingers. But the Apple Trackpad built-in to Apple laptops and available as an external device (which I use at the office) has much more to offer. And that’s not even talking about the new Force Touch trackpad on the MacBooks and MacBook Pro. I will go over those new features in a follow-up article but I do not have much 1st hand experience with that, yet.

    *Click*

    * *One*
    The one that we all know about is taking one finger and clicking on the trackpad surface. It is simple and is your primary tool for selecting content, etc. Click once to place your cursor, click twice to select and highlight a word or to launch an App, click three times to select the whole paragraph.

    * *Two*
    But there is more than one finger clicking. Two finger clicks act like the right-click of that other mouse. It brings up your contextual menu which allows you to cut, copy, paste, check your spelling, change fonts, share, etc. If you see this contextual menu popping up you are probably clicking with two fingers instead of one. Once you master the two finger click you might not only find this menu to be handy but you are ready for the more complex three-finger click.

    * *Three*
    Okay, now you can try clicking with three fingers and it activates Apple’s Look Up & Data Detectors. What are data detectors? Well, they are a little something extra that is in the Mac OS that you won’t find elsewhere. Mac programs like Mail can recognize commonly used bits of information that may appear in your text: a physical address, a phone number, a date and time, etc. You may have noticed “Look up” in the contextual menu, well, three fingers makes a shortcut to get there. A three finger click on a phone number will look it up in your contacts or allow you to make a new contact, and a three finger click on a word will open the dictionary and much more. Play around with three finger tapping!

    *Scroll*

    You use two fingers to scroll and your content follows your fingers. Swipe your two fingers to up and the content moves up, swipe left and it moves left. Flick your fingers at the end of your scroll and you will create some momentum with the scroll.

    *Zoom*

    Using two fingers you can “pinch” to zoom in and out. Or double tap with two fingers and you activate smart zoom.

    *Rotate*

    Use those same two fingers to rotate an image.

    *Swipe*

    If you swipe left or right with two fingers you can scroll between pages in Safari, for example. Or use four fingers and swipe between open full-screen Apps!

    Put those two fingers all the way right and swipe left to activate the Notification Center. Swipe up from the bottom with four fingers to activate Mission Control or swipe down with those four fingers and you activate Exposé.

    *Pinch*

    This one is a bit complex but very useful. Pinch with your thumb and three fingers and you activate Launchpad. Do you use Launchpad? This is the easy way to get there. Reverse that, i.e. spread instead of pinch, and you show the desktop, also a handy feature.

    In Safari, if you have multiple tabs open you can pinch with two fingers to show all open tabs with live content. Spread those two fingers and it is back to tabs.

  • Storage Space

    There’s a famous quote often incorrectly attributed to Bill Gates back in the early 1980s that “640KB of memory ought to be enough for anyone.” He didn’t actually say it, but the quote has been ubiquitous in computer articles and discussion. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after just over a decade of computing it’s that no amount of memory or storage space is ever enough.

    In 2006 I remember the big deal was new laptops were starting to ship with 1GB of RAM. This was a big deal! Almost a decade later there are few modern operating systems that will even run with 1GB of RAM.

    Around 2004 my parents got me a new computer that had a 120GB hard drive. This wasn’t giant for the time, but it did seem like it would be hard to fill it.

    In 2011 I built a new desktop at home and opted to shift money from a bigger hard drive to a better processor. Instead of springing for 1TB I went with 500GB. Today that machine suffers from lack of disk space.

    It really does seem like a universal law that if you have the space, you will fill it. I think when all is said and done my home disk storage space adds up as follows: 500GB disk in my desktop + 120GB disk in my 2007-08 Mac mini, 1TB Seagate mirrored RAID, and the 128GB SSD in my Macbook Air. The 1TB mirrored RAID has become the real workhorse for my home storage. I could’ve built it as RAID0 and had 2TB of storage space, but I wanted mirroring since I was also using this as a destination for several backups including my Macbook Air Time Machine backup.

    I’d never had 1TB of free space before, so at first it seemed like I’d never be able to fill it. The Time Machine backup didn’t end up being that big either and it’s grown rather slowly. However, I’ve been getting back into film and sound production and I’ve quickly amassed 10s of gigabytes worth of raw HD video footage. Last time I checked, my 1TB RAID had just under 200GB remaining.

    I decided it was time yet again to expand my storage capacity. Since I already had the stable RAID, I went looking for the biggest reliable storage I could find. I was also very interested in Thunderbolt. Now that I have my Macbook Air I can take advantage of Thunderbolt storage. It should be noted that single disk, spinning drives connected via Thunderbolt will ultimately be limited by the speed of the drive itself rather than the Thunderbolt bus. Therefore it’s hard to tell whether a Thunderbolt-connected drive will actually be faster to access than the same drive over USB 3.0. Thunderbolt drives are also more expensive because the controller chipset is still much more expensive than USB 3.0 chipsets.

    That being said, I was going to be transferring things to and from my Macbook Air which has the super snappy SSD. I ended up settling on a “LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 mobile 2TB”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/85864/lacie-rugged-thunderbolt-usb-3-0-mobile-2tb drive. I’ve only had it a few days, but I **love** this drive. First, the construction is excellent. The rubberized cover helps protect it against bumps and LaCie even claims it’s water resistant (I’m not going to test that claim though!). I don’t like portable hard drives with cheap-feeling construction. I like the solid feel in my hand. Second, I do think the Thunderbolt transfer speeds especially off the Macbook to the drive are very good. Since a lot of what I’m moving onto the drive is big HD video files, this is very helpful. I also love the fact that the Thunderbolt cable is integrated into the drive case and is also long enough to be useful. Many portable drives ship with comically short USB connection cables. The Thunderbolt cable on the LaCie is at about a foot long, and tucks away in a slot around the outside of the rubberized case for safe keeping. The drive also comes with a USB 3.0 cable/connection if you want to connect it to an older Mac or PC or anything else.

    I know it’s early, but I’ve yet to even make a dent in the space on the LaCie. 2TB should be enough to handle my storage needs for at least a little while.

  • _Dear Friends,_

    The rainiest June on record continued into July as summer is still MIA. But then again the forecast is looking good for the big Independence Day party on Saturday. I’ll be at the Warren, VT parade as usual and then hosting our annual strawberry daiquiri party up at my house. Hard to believe that half of the year is already in the books.  

    Apple Music launched with their free 90-day trial this week and Bronson is going to run that down for you. I’ve been listening to Beats 1 some and maybe I’m just too old but I don’t like all the talk and prefer just to listen to music. I grew up with DJs on WLS radio in Chicago and the format really hasn’t changed.  

    My latest verdict on the “killer app” for the Apple Watch is Apple Pay. I love going into the grocery store and just holding my watch up to the terminal to pay and the check-out clerks being awed. I have even gotten into the habit of not taking my wallet with me since I have my e-wallet with me all the time.  

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive features the Apple Certified Refurbished MacBook Air 13-inch. With 4GB ram, 256GB SSD drive and a 1-year Apple warranty, this is a great buy at our normal price of $889.99 but this week I am bundling it with AppleCare which extends that warranty from 1-year to 3-years and extends the normal 90-days of technical support also to 3-years. Better yet, we are including Safeware accidental damage coverage for that three years, too, so if you drop your MacBook Air or spill water on it you can get it repaired or replaced for only $250! So, this bundle includes the MacBook Air, AppleCare and Safeware and would normally cost you $1239 but for Kibbles & Bytes readers you can snag this bundle for only $1179! “*Click Here*”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001885/ to claim your bundle today!

  • I hope everyone had a great 4th of July weekend! I spent the long weekend camping with my family, complete with lots of great times with friends around the campfire and out on the water. As much as I love technology and make it a point to always have the newest products from Apple, it is nice to spend time away from it all. Most of the time where my family and I camp there is no internet, much less any cell phone reception. I admit that I get a bit of a thrill out of letting the battery drain on my phone and not bothering to even plug it in again until Sunday evenings when we return home. Technology is all around us, but it’s nice at times to forget about it all and spend a few days just taking in the world around us.

    Technology is a powerful tool and often times we forget about the power that it can have as we become so accustomed to just clicking and typing away at our machines. In our service department and retail store we continue to see a rise in customer machines with invasive programs such as MacKeeper installed on their machines without their realizing how this invasive program ended up on their machines. Over the years as avid Apple users we have had little to worry about when it comes to these kinds of problems, and for the most part there is still not a lot of worry. Simply double checking before you download a file is often all that you need to do!

    Thank you for reading!

    Emily
    “emily@smalldog.com”:mailto:emily@smalldog.com

  • Grace is heading out to Louisville to celebrate her mom’s 100th birthday so I’ll be hanging out with the dogs this weekend. It is hard to believe that the 4th of July is only a week or so away. As usual, exactly on the summer solstice, Artie changed his chat status to “the days are getting shorter and I hope it snows soon…” I started the chorus of blues from everyone except for the hardcore skiers on our team.

    Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Dean, Bronson, and Scott_

  • Gearing Up for Summer

    As the days get longer and the summer sun gets hotter, winter seems only to be a distant memory. Even as a passionate snowboarder and overall winter enthusiast, I am not counting down the days to its return like some of my co-workers are. The thing that I love most about the arrival of warmer weather is the amount of motivation it gives me to be active. As a long-distance runner trying to get back into the swing of things, I wanted to gear up quickly so that I could take advantage of the mild early-summer temps. With a few suggestions and tips from some of my outdoor-enthused co-workers, I was hitting the running trail in no time. 

    The first thing on my list was a good pair of running shoes. I will admit for as much as I loved running I haven’t really kept up with it since high school and certainly not enough to get a new pair of $80 shoes, which was why I was still rocking the shoes from ’09. I guess that’s it, right? You don’t need much to go run, just yourself and a good pair of running shoes. I quickly realized after my first run that something was missing. I needed something else to push me to get over that first hill. The answer was music, and this is where Small Dog came in. I never really ran with music because I never found a great way to carry my music with me. I tried numerous armbands and even tried to carry my music in my pocket with me. As phones have slimmed down so have the armbands and I was able to find the perfect one right here at Small Dog for my iPhone 5s. I went with the Belkin Sport-Fit Plus Armband and have been very happy with it so far. The thing that stands out for me is that the stretchy neoprene material it is made out of keeps it lightweight and the clear screen protector keeps my phone safe but also functional on my run. For my music I am using Spotify Premium. If you have read any of my Kibbles articles in the past you know that I am a big fan. With the new Tempo feature that matches your music with your running pace, Apple will have to try pretty hard to convert me to their newly-introduced streaming service, Apple Music.

    With the Belkin Armband on my arm and Spotify Premium pumping my beats, I was ready to go. More motivated than ever, I felt that I was running a farther distance in a shorter amount of time but I wasn’t exactly certain that this was true. In an effort to track my run, someone suggested I try the popular running/cycling app, Strava. Since downloading it, I have been able to track my distance traveled, calories burned, elevation gained and more. You can also go Premium to access more content but I find that the basic version has more than enough to suit my needs. Strava alone has helped me to stay motivated and has given me the reason to constantly push myself while on my runs. 

    Though I am not sure what other hobbies I may pick up along the way this summer, I am certain that there will always be awesome accessories and apps out there to maximize my fun.

    To help you stay active this summer we are including a great special in todays Kibbles. Buy Outdoor Tech Orcas and get a FREE armband for iPhone 5, 6 or 6 Plus!

  • Accessibility – Hearing

    Apple under Tim Cook’s leadership has taken a keen interest in accessibility and health. One of Apple’s initiatives that often goes unnoticed is in hearing. I guess years of loud rock & roll, motorcycling and as Hapy said this morning, my lumberjack times running a chainsaw without hearing protection, has taken its toll and I have found that I have some moderate to severe hearing loss. I found myself saying “what” a lot and had myself checked out and will be getting hearing aids next week. Hearing is really how your brain interprets the sounds that come into your ears and when you are missing some of those sounds your brain struggles to make that conversion. Hearing devices help to reconnect those sounds to your brain. When you get to be my age there is always some hearing loss but today’s technology and Apple can help mitigate that inconvenience.

    Based upon a Bluetooth technology designed by Apple, some advanced hearing aids provide great sound quality, offer new features and are easy to set up and use. There are many hearing aids on the market that use Bluetooth but most of them require a separate device to interface between the hearing aid and Bluetooth, so you end up with a device hanging from your neck. With advanced products from primarily two companies, ReSound and Starkey, that middle device is eliminated and there is a direct connection from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or even the Apple Watch to your hearing aids.

    Garage Sale

    In the accessibility section of your iOS device is the hearing aid section (Settings–>General–>Accessibility–>Hearing). Here, in addition to being able to pair your hearing aids easily you can adjust volume to those and activate the special Hearing Aid Mode that improves sound with some hearing aids. The hearing aid companies go even further with apps that let you control bass and treble, monitor battery life and provide setups for particular environments such as restaurants, outdoors, traffic, etc.

    They even have a built-in GPS so you can set them to automatically know where you are and set the sound accordingly. This also enables the “find my hearing aid” function.

    There is more to this amazing technology, too. Not only does it provide hearing aid but it also allows streaming of Bluetooth content right to your hearing aids. So you can use it to stream iTunes music, phone calls, turn-by-turn navigation, FaceTime chats, etc. Apple apparently has not perfected the technology that would allow the use of the microphones built-in to the hearing aid so you do have to speak into your phone but you can hear through the hearing aid. The microphone on the iPhone is pretty good though so you could just have it on the desk and have hands-free talking.

    Live Listen is another feature to have better conversations in loud places. You can place your iOS device in front of the person you are talking to and use the microphone to pick up and stream the conversation via Bluetooth right to the hearing aid.

    Okay, I do not yet have any first hand experience with this but give me a couple weeks and I will give you a report on my first experiences with this technology. I did a lot of research and learned way too much about the hearing aid business. I ended up buying my hearing aids from Costco for both price and convenience. Also, it did not hurt that they offer the Resound Linx branded under their Kirkland brand for about four times less cost. It sucks getting old but I am very impressed that Apple has made at least the hearing part a little easier. Apple seems very committed to making technology to improve your life and I think this is a prime example.

  • _Dear Friends,_

    Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility is celebrating their 25th year this year. This organization of businesses that ascribe to the triple bottom line of People, Planet and Profit is the largest socially responsible business organization in the country. That is not even on a per capita basis and for a small state like Vermont it is pretty remarkable. I am proud to serve on their board and have served as chair in the past. Some of the largest and most influential companies in our state such as Ben & Jerry’s, Green Mountain Keurig, Green Mountain Power and Seventh Generation join hundreds of small and medium businesses in networking, educating and public policy. Perhaps it is just the small town nature of our state but VBSR has been influential in a number of important pieces of legislation including health care reform, environmental policy, marriage equality, renewable energy and development issues. Perhaps the best part of VBSR is just the opportunity to rub shoulders and talk with some of the most innovative business leaders.

    I am not a big Taylor Swift fan but I appreciate her public stand for musicians that led to Apple changing how their 90-day free trial of the new Apple Music service will be rolled out. I think that in the heat of negotiating contracts for providing streaming music, Apple figured since they were giving out a free trial that they should not have to pay the artists. Well, once Taylor Swift tweeted her opposition while praising Apple, Apple did the right thing and announced they would be paying all the artists even during the free trial period. Attaboys and attagirls all around!

    The second round of developer versions of iOS 9 and Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan came out this week and as is usually the case I noticed immediate improvements in performance and stability. In particular, the iPhone battery life seems to be vastly improved. My favorite feature, this week, of the upcoming El Capitan operating system is in Safari.  I do not like visiting a web site only to have some video start up automatically and start blaring audio content on my Mac. Now, when Safari senses auto content from a web page it indicates it by putting a little speaker icon which you can easily click on to mute the sound. The public beta for El Capitan and iOS 9 is coming up in a couple of weeks and I think you will like them!

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive features a used MacBook. Many people like to have a spare Mac around, whether it is for visitors or simply one that can be used for quick searches or projects. We have acquired several MacBooks that might be just right. These are the white unibody MacBooks that were introduced in May of 2010 and were one of Apple’s most successful laptops. These come with a 2.4GHz processor, 4GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive. We give them a 90-day warranty and they come with OS X Mavericks installed. Small Dog Electronics provides the 90-day warranty on these used MacBooks. Kibbles & Bytes readers can buy them “*Here*”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001877 in the stock configuration for $20 off at $379 OR Will has put together a great bundle by upgrading the 250GB drive to a 256GB Solid State Drive and bumping the memory up to 8GB.  This configuration gives you the reliability of a brand new SSD drive and gives you enough ram to load up Yosemite. This bundle is normally $630 but Kibbles & Bytes readers can grab one for only $549.99! “*Click Here*”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001876 to claim your bundle.

  • Back-up for what?

    Now I know as Mac user you run into the mentality that Macs “don’t get viruses” or “Macs rarely have issues”. Both of those statements are false. As a technician, I have seen viruses, adware and other forms of malware. I have also seen hard drives fail time and time again. This is not to discourage people from buying Macs. I’ve seen more malevolent malware and catastrophic failure when I was a PC tech, but these unfortunate events do happen in the Mac world. This is why backups are important, even on Macs. Luckily for Mac users, doing backups is so much easier thanks to Time Machine.

    Introduced back in the Leopard days, Time Machine is Apple’s backup software and it is pretty darn good at doing its job of keeping your family photos, music, and even software from being completely lost in the void of corrupted bits and bytes.

    With Time Machine you can store backups on your Mac’s hard drive, but I would recommend using a external hard drive. “What? I just spent a lot of money on this computer and now I have to buy something else?” That’s sometimes what I hear in response to my recommendation, but with data recovery costs ranging from $250 to thousands of dollars, $80 and twenty minutes of your time is far cheaper and simpler.

    Check out the “Wikipedia article on Time Machine”:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_(OS_X).

  • iOS History

    Apple makes some really awesome products, and I use a lot of them every day, but hands down the most valuable gizmo that Apple makes that I use every day is running iOS. iOS used to be called iPhone OS back in 2009 before iOS 4, when it was just the iPhones and iPod touches that ran Apple’s touch screen mobile device operating system.

    An iPod touch was my first real Apple product. It gave me a ton of flexibility and freedom at an affordable cost that didn’t require me to sign a contract with a cellular company. I still have that iPod touch and it’s still cranking along to this day. One of the things I’m most impressed about with Apple is the major software updates we get every year. When I purchased the device I got everything I was hoping for and more, but there were some shortcomings. If I wanted to switch from one app to another, I had to press the home button, return to the home screen, find the icon for the app I wanted to switch to, tap on that icon to launch the app, wait for the app to load, and navigate back to where I needed to be within that app. If I wanted to switch back to the last app, wash-rinse-repeat. When I was doing that regularly it would become tedious. There were some other things I couldn’t do in the old iPhone OS 3 of 2009. Skype was one of my favorite apps because it allowed me to call friends on the telephone, not tie up the home landline, talk for hours on the cheap, and not use any of my expensive pay-as-you-go mobile minutes. If I was talking on Skype though, I couldn’t do anything else on my iPod touch or the call would disconnect. If I was waiting for a call, the app needed to be open and I couldn’t be doing anything else on the device. If I wanted to listen to music through Pandora, I couldn’t do anything else; leaving the app would stop the music. I could listen to music through Apple’s music app (called the iPod app, complete with a picture of the iPod classic in the app icon) while doing other things, but that required me to sync the music through iTunes. For some of us that just feels like a bit of a process.

    Apple announced iOS 4, changing the name from iPhone OS, to be more inline with the range of devices it would be running on: the iPhone, iPod touch, and the new (this was back in 2010) iPad. There were many features, and to date, what a lot of enthusiasts regard as some of the most significant hardware updates. What I remember with no difficulty is the announcement of the iPad, where the biggest frustration of the iPhone and iPod touch, (as well as their biggest asset) of their size was addressed. With a much larger device, expanding the user interface from a 3.5″ screen to a 9.7″ screen, a more comfortable user experience resulted. I could spend hours in an app before feeling claustrophobic and limited by the size of the screen. The retina display on the iPhone was a huge deal. The clarity was beyond anything else available in a digital handheld device. FaceTime was also announced (Apple’s video chat). That reminds me how far into the future I live. All this was great, but the biggest thing missing was multi tasking. Those frustrations I described above where I had to leave an app, go back to the home screen, were going to be far behind me. All I had to do was double tap the home button and the screen would slide up to reveal a drawer with all the recently opened apps in there. I could tap any one of them and be sent to that app, generally right back to where I was. I could leave Skype running in the background if I was on a call and still play around with other apps, like checking facts or movie show times in Safari, or taking a note in the notes app. I could have pandora playing in the background while I poked around on Facebook, or any other app that I might want to use. It was a big deal. It was like Christmas. I can’t even remember anything I got in the 2010 holiday season, but I remember iOS 4 and multitasking.

    Every year there’s been huge updates that have made me even more impressed with these devices Apple makes. This has been a brief walk down memory lane for me and I have so much more to say, but we’ll continue on all that later.