iPad buying experience
Earlier today(Friday May 28) the Apple iPad make its first appearance in Ottawa at our local Apple store. I thought I would blog my experience of buying it. I knew that I would eventually buy an iPad and was tempted to buy it from Apple online store. The fact that they didn’t allow in store pickup tempted me to wait until this morning to buy it. As I was heading to bed last night, I debated as what time I should get up. When I was in the Apple store last week they mentioned that the mall opens at 6:00AM. I awoke a little after 5:00AM and grabbed a travel mug and a couple of Clif bars and headed out the door. I got to the mall a little after 6:00AM and there was short line which continued to grow. As I waiting I noticed that they turn off the white Apple logo at night. Apple’s complementary Wifi made passing the 90 minute go by quickly. The Apple staff handed out free water and the folks at Starbucks handed out muffins. The planned store opening was 8:30 AM, which is an hour earlier than normal. Our store decided to buck the trend and open at 7:30 AM. At 6:45 AM the blue-shirted Apple staff started to work the crowd to see which of the six models that people wanted to buy. You were given a business card listing which model you were buying in addition to any accessories. The next part I found fascinating. From the internet and Youtube I had seen and heard about the Apple cheers and hype at product launches but seeing it first hand was exciting. They ran down the line and gave everybody High-fives and made multiple passes. It’s not long before you have a sore hand. It was fun. A little after 7:00 AM the white Apple logo was turned and we must be getting close. At this point you could feel the electricity in the crowd. The Apple employees had there “raw-raw” inside the store and then it was time to wait a little while longer. There were TV cameras and reporters capturing the happends. The first person in line had been there since midnight. At 7:30 the first wave was allowed in the store. Each customer was given his own personal shopper who assembled the order. Along the way there were multiple handshakes and backslapping. I grabbed my iPad and headed back for a late breakfast before starting my daily bike commute into the office. I couldn’t resist cracking the package and having a look. Very quickly, I had synced up my mail and calendar and new that the fun of the new toy would have to wait until the end of the day.
Stability of the Apple iPod touch
Time Capsule installation a success
Last night, I installed my Apple Time Capsule backup drive and it went really well. It was simple to do and fun at the same time. Apple makes the installation and configuration easy to do. The plan was to buy the Time Capsule to backup my Macbook and little else. When I flipped over to using WiFi so my iPod touch and iPhone could access the internet at home I have always faced the dreaded wifi drop problem. My iPod touch would find the wireless modem and I would surf for a few minutes and them BOOM out-of-the-blue I would get signal degradation. This was frustrating. I made an antenna out of tin foil and it sort of helped.br /br /While waiting at the Apple store for my GarageBand workshop, I started talking to concierge and explained the problem as his father had the same problem. He gave me some leads to look at. I downloaded Apple’s Designing Airport Networks guide and started to think about the scenarios. I opted to have an Ethernet connection from the modem to my windows laptop. I run another Ethernet connection from the modem to the Time Capsule. This allows my Macbook, laptop, Touch and iPhone to have access to WiFi. An added bonus is that my printer can wirelessly accessed from either computer. The wireless signal strength from Time Capsule is good. To reduce interference, I set the signal strength of the wireless modem to low. So, I now have a wireless network that I am happy with and a backup drive for my Macbook. The initial Time Machine backup took longer than expected but I really pleased that I was able to solve a major wireless problem. Thanks a href=”http://apple.com/”Apple/a.
100th Wordabble game
Today I played my 100th game of a href=”http://wordabble.com”Wordabble/a. Each day has been a lot of challenging and rewarding fun. I can say with certainty that my vocabulary has increased as I continue to learn more and more obscure words. When a href=”http://jasonplancaster.com”Jason/a and a href=”http://adamism.com/”Adam/a introduced the finger-dragging with auto-entry option I found I could play the game faster. Another feature that has become more valuable over time is being able see what words I have missed at the stroke of midnight as I use it as a way to increase my vocabulary. I would like to take a moment to talk about a couple of the more entertaining days. In one of them I was able to make use of most of the urology terms I had learned a couple of years ago. In the other game, I was using my knowledge of the various components of the heart and lungs. I can say that I have enjoyed each days whether it had 200+ words or less than 100 words. In the high value games it was frustrating to find 50% of the words. When there were fewer than 100 words I would scratch my head and wonder if that four letter jumble of letters was indeed a word. In most cases it would be a new obscure word that I would park away for future reference. I’ll close off this entry by thanking Jason and Adam for my first 100 days of fun playing wordabble.
Wordabble
I thought I would blog about a new game available for the iPhone and iPod Touch which has me excited. The folks at a href=”http://www.fusionbay.com/”Fusion Bay /arecently developed a game called a href=”http://wordabble.com/”Wordabble/a. Using the touch interface of the iPhone/iPod, you locate words hidden in a 5×5 block of letters. What I like about the application is it is easy to use, intuitive, fun and addictive. You can play the game in three modes, a timed game, a marathon session or you can download the game of the day and challenge your friends and family. At any time you can submit your scores to see how fair with other players. I like the way the application cleanly and smoothly presents the challenge of finding the words. I say check-it out!
iPhone 2.0 Software Update
I like the iPhone 2.0 software update as it offers many new features and builds on the things offered in version 1.1.4. The ability to delete multiple messages at once, the “push” feature, improved map support; the scientific calculator and the AppStore make the negligible cost I paid worthwhile. Over the weekend, I downloaded four applications, Things (a productivity app), WeatherBug, Units, and Remote (controlling iTunes on your computer from your iPhone/iPod touch). A news release from Apple today said over the weekend 10 million applications were downloaded from the AppStore.br /br /Getting the iPhone software was a bit of a challenge. It took me a while and a bit of frustration to learn the trick. I had assumed that once I had bought the software it would download automatically. This was not the case. Every time I tried to download the software the orange download icon would spin for three seconds and then disappear. A 225 megabyte download should take longer than three seconds. It could be that the servers were busy so I attempted the download a couple of times an hour without success. I checked the Apple discussions area and was pleased to learn that I wasn’t the only experiencing this problem. There is an expression that trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result is a definition of insanity. On a whim, I tried something different and that was to plug the iPod touch into my computer at which point iTunes asked if I wanted to download the update. This was the trick. Sweet! The orange download icon spun for 15 minutes and the download was done. From this point on the upgrade was routine and I was finally happy and relieved to experience the new powers of my Touch.
Apple – WWDC – iPhone coming to Canada
On Monday, I received some much expected news from the a href=”http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/”Apple WWDC conference/a. Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone 3G would go on sale in Canada on Friday July 11. This was exciting news. During the day I had been infrequently been following his keynote speech through posting on macworld.com blog. a href=”http://jasonplancaster.com/”Jason /aand I talked about the WWDC but it would take until the evening before I had a chance to listen to the keynote speech. I was stoked when I found out that my cellular phone carrier will be selling the iPhone. I am hoping that they will release the contract details in a couple of days. There is one thing I am eager to explore and that is, the GPS capabilities of the iPhone which was only very briefly demonstrated during the speech. It would be sweet to be able to use it when a href=”http://www.geocaching.com/”geocaching/a.br /br /One of the applications that they featured is me.com that is described as “Microsoft Exchange for everyone else.” It is a subscription-based website that allows you to keep your mail, contacts, pictures and documents in sync not matter what device you are using. I have read the web pages describing the product but still not sure if I would ever need the functionality that it offers. I’m curious what others think of the product.br /br /Hmm, only 30 more days before the iPhone arrives…
