Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • iOS 4.3 Bugs Abound

    Last Wednesday, Apple released the highly anticipated iOS 4.3 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. In retrospect, perhaps the update should have stayed in the oven until its official release date on Friday the 11th. While the incremental iOS update brings numerous enhancements to iOS device users–especially those with current gen. devices–Apple’s message boards are becoming riddled with complaints of bugs from some iOS device owners.

    The first issue is the mobile operating system’s performance on iPhone 3GS. While not quite the debacle iOS 4.0 was on iPhone 3G, users of the previous-generation iPhone cite unsavory slowdown upon upgrading. While there always seems to be a base of users claiming “the phone is unusable” when Apple releases an iOS update, 4.3 seems to have elicited a larger negative response from the iPhone 3GS community. Those who have upgraded their devices claim the OS has sluggish and jittery performance when compared to iOS 4.2. Some users have also noted a significant decrease in battery life. As is frequently the case with bugs of this nature, they have a tendency to be blown out of proportion. Simply because some users are reporting problems doesn’t mean 100% of iPhone 3GS users will be affected. That said, as AirPlay enhancements, Safari performance, and iTunes Home Sharing are the only new features compatible with iPhone 3GS, it might be wise to sideline the update if you can live without the aforementioned features. Keep in mind that Apple does not offer an official downgrade method for iOS. If you update to iOS 4.3 and are unsatisfied, you’ll need to take matters into your own hands (jailbreak + downgrade) or wait for Apple to issue a fix–assuming they even do.

    The second major issue to emerge post update affects 4th-generation iPod touch owners. Inexplicably, many device owners are experiencing graphical hiccups throughout the iOS UI. These errors–which are being described as “interference”–seem to primarily affect the lock screen, but are present in additional areas of the OS as well. Users are reporting “snowy” and “animated outlines” around pop-up notifications and other areas of the lock screen. While not all 4th-generation iPod touch owners are experiencing the problem, the issue does appear to be quite widespread. As graphical errors are certainly more perceivable than supposed dips in performance, it is likely Apple will address the issue sooner than later.

    The third and final issue–while not directly tied to the mobile versions of iOS 4.3–affects Apple TV. It would seem post iOS 4.3 update (technically recognized as 4.2 by Apple TV) that select owners of the device are experiencing graphical woes of their own. Beginning last week, Apple TV owners started reporting screen flickering when using the device with some televisions. In the ensuing days, the tech community traced the problem to HDTVs, which attempt to convert the 720p output signal from Apple TV to 1080i. In rarer cases, some users have reported their Apple TVs have become permanently set at the 480p “Auto” option post update. Unlike the two previously mentioned issues, AppleInsider “*reports*”:http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/15/fix_in_the_works_for_apple_tv_screen_flickering_issue.html Apple is currently preparing a software fix to address the issue.

    Unfortunately, it seems releasing software updates plagued with bugs of varying degrees is becoming more of a common occurrence at Apple. What are your thoughts on recent software quality control? Have you experienced any of these issues on your own devices? Comment “*here*”:http://blog.smalldog.com/article/ios-43-bugs-abound/ and let us know.

  • iDonate Your iPad

    This Tuesday MacNN “*reported*”:http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/03/14/ipads.to.be.given.to.low.income.district.teachers/ Apple has launched a program enabling those upgrading to an iPad 2 to donate their original iPad to a good cause. As opposed to flipping a 1st-generation iPad to recoup the cost of an iPad 2, Apple’s program connects iPad owners with those who really need it. In a partnership with Teach For America, Apple’s program matches donated iPads with educators in low-income school districts.

    The program–which is featured prominently on Apple’s retail store “*page*”:http://www.apple.com/retail/ –links to Teach For America’s “*site.*”:http://www.teachforamerica.org/ Currently, information on the program is relatively scarce, though it appears that interested iPad users need only drop their 1st-generation iPads at a nearby Apple Corporate Store. Upon receipt of a donated iPad, Apple will wipe the device, prepare it and bring it to a needy local school district.

    Teach For America has yet to disclose whether or not donations will be tax deductible, though as it is a 501C(3) organization, it is likely they will be. While for a good cause, the program has sparked some initial controversy given the fact that 1st-generation iPads are barely one year old and still amazingly capable devices. While it is likely Apple and Teach For America will release more information on the program in the coming days, those immediately interested should contact their nearest Apple Corporate Store.

  • Apple Named World's Most Admired Company

    For a forth consecutive year, Apple has been ranked The World’s Most Admired Company by Fortune. Boasting an overall score of 8.16, the company ousted Google, Berkshire Hathaway, and Southwest Airlines, once again claiming the number one spot. Cited for its steady release schedule and continued innovations, the Cupertino giant continues to set the standard in the tech industry.

    Although the announcement of Steve Jobs’ second leave of absence caused stocks to dive earlier in the year, the combined successes of products such as the original iPad, iPhone 4, and most recently iPad 2 have proven incredibly lucrative for the company. So lucrative, in fact, that Apple has nearly doubled its quarterly profits since this time last year. With competing computing companies such as EMC and Hewlett-Packard trailing by nearly two points, Apple cleaned up–scoring number one industry rankings almost across the board. Apple ranked first in all of the following “Key Attributes of Reputation” with the exception of Global competitiveness, which went to HP.

    * Innovation
    * People management
    * Use of corporate assets
    * Social responsibility
    * Quality of management
    * Financial soundness
    * Long-term investment
    * Quality of products/services

    The vast majority of these statistics came prior to the announcement of iPad 2. Though sales figures have yet to be disclosed, Apple’s new tablet had a tremendous launch and first week. Assuming the company continues to innovate and update its computer and mobile products to the same degree of excellence, it will be a shoo-in for Fortune’s award in 2012.

  • MAC TREAT #150: Reordering AirPort Preferences

    BTV, LAX, JFK, IAD…no, I’m not talking about those kind of airports–though JFK’s new T5 is pretty cool–I’m talking about wireless networks. If your Mac goes everywhere with you, it’s a safe bet it has joined several wireless networks in its lifetime. You may have even joined multiple networks in the same building if you live in an apartment complex or a dorm. Your machine keeps a record of every network you’ve joined, and in the case of encrypted networks stores passwords in your Keychain. Though OS X does a fairly good job of retaining which networks are used most frequently, occasionally things can fall out of sync. If your Mac consistently joins a neighboring wireless network instead of your own when starting up or waking from sleep, it’s time to reorder your AirPort preferences.

    Doing this is easy. Simply launch System Preferences and select Network. Choose AirPort in the left column if it’s not already selected, then click the “Advanced…” button. In the window that rolls down select the AirPort tab. Here you’ll see a box listing Preferred Networks. Your most used networks should be at the top of the list. If you don’t see your primary wireless network in the immediate list, scroll down until you find it. Reordering is as easy as clicking the Network Name and dragging it to a different position in the list. To ensure that your Mac is making quick and reliable connections rearrange your networks so that your top three are in the proper order. For instance: Home, Office, Coffee Shop. If you see old networks in the list that you don’t envision using again, you can delete them by highlighting and clicking the minus sign. If you need to add a new network manually or edit the settings of an existing network press the plus sign or pencil respectively. There are all sorts of other preferences that can be adjusted in this panel, though some can have detrimental effects on your system if not configured properly. Experiment at your own risk.

  • _Dear Friends,_

    I think I might be too old for red-eye flights. Boy was I beat by the time I got back to Vermont on Tuesday. I headed out to California on Sunday for meetings in Cupertino on Monday, and left that evening for the flight back east. By the time I got back to Vermont at 10 AM on Tuesday I was a zombie. Matt was smarter and stayed another day in California before making his way back east.

    One of the things I like to do in airports and on planes as I travel is watch how many people are using Apple products. My unofficial poll taken over the 25 years or so that I have been observing, is that Apple is really firing on all cylinders now. I saw iPods everywhere, I saw more people with iPhones than any other phone, and for the first time, I saw a good percentage of folks pulling out iPads to read, play games, etc. on the plane. It used to be that I had the latest technology, and people would want to see what I was using, but now everyone is using Apple gear!

    This is even the case down at the Vermont Legislature. I have been down at the statehouse the past two days testifying on health care reform and how the legislation they are debating is really an economic development bill disguised as health care reform. I was in a meeting in the President of the Senate’s office, John Campbell, and I noticed a Dell on his desk. I made some sort of snide comment about the Dell, and he said: “wait a minute, here’s my REAL computer” and reached into his briefcase and pulled out a MacBook Pro that he told me he purchased at our South Burlington store.

    I am still amazed at the accessibility of the Vermont Legislature. Today was a busy day at the state house and I drove up, parked directly in front of the state house, put a few quarters in the meter and walked into the the people’s building where citizen legislators were doing the people’s work and working hard to solve our state’s problems. I have never been prouder of these public servants or my state.

    It has been iPad mania once again as we received the first shipments to each of our stores which promptly sold out within an hour. We have been getting additional shipments but we have such a long back order list, that just as soon as they come in they fly out. It is simply amazing how popular this product has become in such a short time. One of those back orders lost out on instant gratification because I upgraded my iPad before I went to California. One of my promises to myself was that I was going to be one of the first to play with all the new toys from Apple, and I intend to keep that promise.

    My first impressions of the iPad 2 are all very favorable. It is lighter, thinner and faster! I love the new cameras and used FaceTime to talk to Grace from California. I’ll be taking the iPad 2 with me to China in April to try out new accessories and to take further advantage of FaceTime to show products to my team, and to communicate with Grace.

  • iTunes Music Store and Sound Quality

    According to the rumor mills, Apple is in discussions with some record labels to sell higher-quality versions of the music it sells in…

  • iOS 4.3 Bugs Abound

    This time last week, Apple released the highly anticipated iOS 4.3 for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. In retrospect, perhaps the update should…

  • iDonate Your Original iPad

    MacNN today reported Apple has launched a program enabling those upgrading to an iPad 2 to donate their original iPad to a good…

  • iOS, Meet Flash

    Tired of seeing the lego-like block symbol when you try to browse your favorite Flash-based website on your iOS device? Wallaby, a program produced by Adobe (the creators of Flash itself), may change all that.

    Wallaby is an experimental program that turns Flash-based content into HTML5, basically making the content viewable on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Currently, the quality and performance of Wallaby is questionable at best, but once all the kinks are worked out, this tool may make your devices much more versatile on the Web.

    Flash is currently a proprietary closed solution for displaying some types of Web content. Most content in Flash is in the form of Web video. YouTube, Vimeo, and most other video websites–as well as some Facebook games, some splash pages for websites, and a whole lot of games–use Flash extensively..

    The reason you don’t see many issues on your iOS device on websites is because Web developers have actually made non-Flash-based versions of their websites. These versions may or may not look the same, but they have the goal of making their content viewable on lucrative mobile browsers.

    Web developers pour tons of time and money into making Flash-based websites that look great on Web browsers with Flash installed. After all this time they spend on the Flash version, they then pour tons of time and money into a non-Flash-based version to satisfy people who either don’t want to or don’t have the capability to run Flash.

    Wallaby has the capability to streamline a lot of the process needed to convert a website to a version compatible with browsers that either don’t have Flash installed or don’t support Flash. For this reason, Wallaby is awesome for those of us who frequent Flash sites but can’t use them on our spiffy new iPads.

    Just to note – Wallaby is not yet out of development; it is still considered experimental and may never see the light of day as a real tool, so take all of this with a grain of salt and hope for the best!

  • iTunes Music Store and Sound Quality

    According to the rumor mills, Apple is in discussions with some record labels to sell higher-quality versions of the music it sells in the iTunes store. The store’s offerings are currently “CD-quality,” which for more than twenty-five years has meant digital audio captured at 44.1 kHz sample rate and 16-bits available per sample. Apple is looking to up that to 24-bit audio and will, I assume, charge people to upgrade their libraries much as they did when they switched from 128kbps to the current 256kbps they offer. I’ve been looking around and all the usual comments are popping up about greed, sound quality, the death of audio quality and quality music, the relevance of any of this with a public that almost solely uses crappy equipment to listen to music, and so on.

    One thing pretty much everyone agrees with: Apple’s change from 128kbps DRM-encoded music to the current 256kbps non-DRM format was significant. Pretty much anyone can hear the difference on pretty much any equipment. In fact, some studies show that more people could tell the difference when the tests were done using low-quality playback devices such as earbuds and small speakers than with high-end gear. This certainly raises an interesting point for those who ask if audio quality matters when people are listening to earbuds and those on the other side who wonder why you would spend a lot of money on a good stereo. The conclusions are obvious: good-quality audio and good equipment make for better sound.

    So what about the switch from 16-bit to 24-bit? My take is exactly that: so what, at least mostly. For the vast majority of recorded music, 24-bits is a non-issue, for one. Anything recorded using less than 24-bit technology will see no gains at all. The source material is fixed and cannot be improved upon. This basically means that for everything recorded before about 1997 (release of ProTools 24-bit) and even for most mainstream releases recorded after that until very recently, there will be no inherent benefit going to 24-bit.

    Now, some material will certainly be remixed and remastered and sound better, but even in those cases the majority of improvements, if there are any, will be from artistic choices and not from increased audio quality. So don’t rush out and download the whole Rolling Stones library again just because it’s 24-bit. When they recorded Sticky Fingers, for instance, the state of the art allowed for about 75db dynamic range in the studio and around 60db on a mastered LP. That doesn’t even push 16-bit technology to its limit, and that was the maximum, in practice.

    Most recordings use much less dynamic range than the maximum available. And that’s something to realize: it’s only in extremely dynamic material recorded natively in 24-bit that the 24-bit material will be perceived as superior to the listener. A Ferrari and a Jetta both get you home at the same time if you drive 55 mph. And then of course come all of the usual arguments about earbuds and small speakers, and that while 256kbps sounds pretty good with 16-bit, it will likely have a bigger effect on 24-bit recordings, and so on. If Apple really wants to improve things, they should start offering everything in uncompressed 16/44.1. That would certainly be a real step forward.

  • Just a TRIM

    Solid state drives (SSDs) are advertised as better than standard hard drives, and in most cases that’s true. There are no moving read/write heads or spinning platters, so there’s no time wasted while the drive rotates around to grab the next data fragment. Plus, the lack of moving parts means better battery life on portable systems. However, due to the way data is stored on a solid state drive, you will see a higher performance gain on reading data than writing it. Loading applications and documents will take almost no time at all compared to the same retrieval on a hard disk, but writing large amounts of data may not be that fast. The reason is because of the way a SSD stores data.

    Picture a large storeroom with a row of shelves, and each shelf contains a row of egg cartons. Near the door of the storage room is a large whiteboard with a list of what is in each of the egg cartons. Any time someone needs to store some information, they write it on a slip of paper and put it into an empty spot in an egg carton, then go to the inventory list and mark down the location of that note. When someone needs to find a note, they consult the list so they know which egg carton to go to. If you no longer need a note, you go to the whiteboard and erase the reference to the note so others know that space can be reused. Seems like a decent system, right? Well, there’s one issue: No one ever goes into the shelves and does any housecleaning, so you have rows of egg cartons full of old notes that aren’t being used anymore.

    When you delete a file, the directory portion of the file system (the whiteboard) is updated to show that the file is no longer needed so the space it takes up can be reused. However, the data is not actually removed from the hard disk (unless you specify a secure wipe, which is outside the scope of this article). For a standard hard drive, any existing (unused) data is overwritten by the new data in one pass, so to the user it’s transparent. Because of the way the memory cells work on a solid state drive, data cannot be overwritten; the storage cell must be emptied before something else can be put there.

    Data on a solid state drive is stored in blocks, with each block containing multiple cells. Data can be written to each cell individually, but data has to be erased by the block. Remember those egg cartons? To save a note, you find an empty spot in an egg carton and drop the paper into it. To replace one of those pieces of paper, however, you have to remove every piece of paper from the egg carton, temporarily store them in another egg carton (known as a cache) dump all of the notes, then put only the notes that are still in use back into the original egg carton. Now there are empty spaces so you can save your new note, but two extra steps were needed just to store it. Since it all happens in a matter of microseconds, it doesn’t typically become a problem for small files, but when you start dealing with large files (such as editing movies) the slow-down in writes can become very noticeable.

    This is where the TRIM feature comes in. TRIM, while capitalized, is not an acronym for anything; its purpose is to trim old data from the SSD. The operating system will watch for idle times (when no data is being written) and signal the drive to erase any storage locations that have been marked for deletion. Later, when data needs to be written to that space, there is no wait time since the space is already empty. The TRIMming happens in the background while you’re doing other things, so you aren’t even aware that it’s going on.

    A lot of newer solid state drives either have TRIM support built in or the vendor has made a firmware update available to enable it. TRIM does not happen automatically, however; the drive needs to be told by the operating system when it’s safe to trim. Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Linux 2.6, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD already have TRIM support, but Mac OS X support was not scheduled to be included until version 10.7 “Lion” later this year. It was recently discovered that the newly released line of MacBook Pro “Thunderbolt” systems run an updated build of Snow Leopard that includes support for TRIM. As of the time this article is being written, the only drives supported are the ones Apple ships with the system, but that may change in the future as Apple evaluates other brands.

    There are utilities available to do a manual TRIM on operating systems that do not have support built in; however, some of them could cause data loss if not used properly, so I will not mention them here. They fall under the category of “if you know how to use it, you’ll know where to look for it.”