A Website And Podcast You Can Trust
Pah, who needs the regular crew to deal with the world of Apple and the tech we like when you can have GazMac from the Mymac.com podcast and Tim Robertson from the Techfan.com podcast. Discussing headphones, amazon, patents and Top Gear.
Continue reading → Essential Apple Podcast 9: Aren’t We All Just Techfans?
Apple appears to be going above and beyond with its differential privacy initiative. The company has an understandable interest in knowing what people think. It helps them help Siri anticipate what people will think or ask before those people realize it themselves. At the same time, Apple has this thing about not wanting too much information about its customers. Thus was born Apple’s Differential Privacy plan, announced a couple of weeks ago at WWDC and defined in one article as a ‘statistical method designed to reap useful intel from big piles of data or protecting personally identifying information therein’.
Continue reading → Differential Privacy in iOS 10 to be Opt-In
With one of our regulars working out the best placement for a lawn chair and the other riding around southern France looking for property we put together a list for guests to come on the show and ended up calling GazMaz from the MyMac show. We discuss the week after WWDC and a whole lot of other tangents as well.
Continue reading → Essential Apple Podcast 8: GazMaz was our first choice… honestly.
Your iTunes Store problems on Friday were not yours alone. The iTunes Store, plus Apple’s App Store, the Mac App Store, and iBooks Store suffered unscheduled downtime at the end of the work week.
Recently I’ve been embracing the paperless way of life whenever possible. I’m on-line for filling out time sheets, saving copies of bank statements for my account manager and numerous other tasks, most of which are performed using the rather excellent Scanner from Readable. Now Dropbox have gone ahead and added a scanning feature to their latest iOS update to make like easier.
Continue reading → Dropbox iOS Update Adds Scanning Features
With the recent rumours that Apple might be eliminating the audio jack on the next iPhone we may soon be looking for Bluetooth headphones to replace the standard ones that Apple supplies.
Now I have no issue with Apple’s earbuds other than I’ve never had a pair that managed to stay inside my lug holes for any extended period of time. In fact I often notice folks walking along nonchalantly sporting the famous white earbuds that appear to be glued to their ears without any issues and it has always caused me a pang of jealousy.
Continue reading → Review: Jabra Move Wireless Bluetooth On-Ear Headphones
No one could complain that WWDC wasn’t packed to the rafters with new features. With so much to discuss instead of our usual episode we’ve gone ahead and done a 2 parter Barry, Karl and myself discuss the points of WWDC whilst going decidedly off topic in places. Spectrum vs C64 and alternative uses for a hot tub amongst others.
Continue reading → Essential Apple Podcast 7: WWDC Special “Rock Paper Scissors Coffee Tea Beer”
So now we know Apples plans for the watch for the fall thanks to the recent WWDC event. Just in case you missed it here’s the round up from WWDC
Apple really feels that people who are using Apple watch love it, particularly for quick glances, information and quick interactions and have taken heed of the frustrations of launching an app and waiting. In their own words “our top focus is performance.”
Continue reading → Watch OS 3 – The Watch OS we’ve been waiting for?
So let’s talk about tvOS and Apple TV. Last fall we introduce the next generation of Apple TV and for the first time developers had a modern platform like iOS to develop for in the living room.
With only hours to go before WWDC, which just happens to be 30 minutes after Microsoft are doing their E3 announcement, here is our stab at decoding the invite sent to developers
Continue reading → Decoding The WWDC 2016 invite / Predictions
I love my Apple Watch. There, I said it. The device has had many detractors since it was first announced, some of them reasonable and some not. Personally it is the best watch I have ever owned. The two main reasons being Apple Pay and notifications. Obviously all of its other functions are also valuable, but these two features really make the device invaluable for me.
Continue reading → Third-Party Apple Watch Straps That Won’t Break The Bank
Amazon may be taking aim at Spotify and Apple Music. A Reuters report that says the seller of almost all is getting ready to launch a full-on, stand-alone subscription music service.
Continue reading → Rumor: Amazon Working on Top-Tier Streaming Music Service
In a recent article published on iMore, Rene Richie makes a very valid point regarding the recent comparisons between SIRI and Amazon’s Alexa. The tech press does seem to have a massive love for Alexa from Amazon without ever seeming to quantify the slight issue that if you are outside the borders of the United States of America then ‘Hey Alexa’ gets you “diddly squat”.
I know that most tech publications are US-centric but I have even started noticing a few UK publications gleefully lamenting the fact that SIRI can’t compete with Alexa when it comes to digital assistants… if you omit the rather tiny issue of it not being available that is. Yes Alexa is soooooo much better, I mean it must be, it’s not made by Apple so QED better, right? If we had ever had the opportunity to try it I’m sure it would be better…
I had this problem when recording “the essential apple show” on my iOS device when using Garageband. When you start to record anything in Garageband you can only record for 8 seconds. For the musical types this might make sense but for those like me who pick up and fiddle about with things, its confusing. Here’s how you increase the recording time in Garageband.
Continue reading → How to increase the recording time in Garageband for iPad or iPhone
Having never really used Time Machine before now I thought it was high time that I put the spare HDD I have lying about to use. Well more like I’m debating formatting my system to do a clean install of Lion and wanted a local backup for a change. I’ve also included updated information for what folders to exclude from Mavericks and Yosemite backups.
From a combination of my own Time Machine disk space experiences and putting in some research to make your backups as lean as possible without loosing anything critical, here are my recommended area’s to exclude from Time Machine Backups.
Continue reading → What Folders To Exclude From Time Machine Backups