v5.0 was a bad update.

but we don't really care because we WANTED it. when we want something, if it causes a bit of pain we talk about it with others and then the apathy of expectation kicks in when we just take it on the chin, we have become used to things failing. like the planet for instance.

we can't through money at something that does operate on the proposal of money, we have to make a mental shift away and check ourselves why we need to consume new stuff.

so iOS5.. . sure, it's got all the bells and whistles that we were wanted but we didn't need it taking out the content on our devices and in my case i have a problem with my iphoto11 crashing every time i try and load and import.

i'm in the studio on a sunday wanting to play catchup mode and my productive mac experience is waning at the moment - it's hard to remember the time when windows was like this all the time.

i guess i've got used to apple normally picking up the ball. on this occasion they have dropped it. like everyone in the world of apple i'm sorry for the loss of steve and his fight against cancer, that's a given.

so let's not make this about steve and the wonders that gentleman bought to the digital world we frequent these days. he made computers do the heavy lifting and gave us devices that just worked.

so what went wrong with this push..

testing basically. developers have had iOS5 betas for months and months so they could integrate features and be ready for this new push no doubt but it's up to us as the users on this occasion to take the hit.

in the grand scheme of things i guess they have gotten away lightly in that we can restore from backups but i'm hearing more and more from people how they have lost contacts and media.

that's not good enough - especially when your talking about iCloud. at this moment in time i'm sitting looking at an iPhoto 11 issue with importing pictures, i try and enable iCloud in the app and it crashes.

basically, my productivity tool is acting like one. it's always at the moment that you need something to work does it decide that it's time to eat the digital dust. i'm really happy to have notifications.

i'm glad they have it baked in like that, but really did we get so used to not having notifications (ok, i used boxcar/push anyway) when other platforms did, was it really hard for apple to drop that walled garden for us to be notified about our actions in our social grids? and this is the triple whammy for me - integrating twitter.

i could go down many avenues with this but i really think that apple did not think this through. are they testing the capacity of twitter, trying to break them or trying to admit that finally twitter is actually going to stay around, do they have vested interests in it - who knows, who cares.

for me the problem lies in the fact that millions of people that were not on twitter finally find it baked into settings. i'm not adverse to more users and more people using a platform that i frequent a lot i'm just surprised that apple pushed all these things at once.

i actually find it quite arrogant that we have this expectation that well, it's more data we can test to see if our scaling is working just to then release a sodding iPhone 4s which nobody can actually activate around the same time!

and now that the world of the crackberry is in the toilet we can expect a bunch of trackball pushing obsessive sms types filling up the iMessage tubes with streams of material.

at least when they were on their own network we had a bit of breathing room. we need independent networks, we need different options.

i for one personally do not want one cloud solution, it has to be multiple methods of input on different carriers to different servers and different clouds - while we are at it let's start really looking at optimising those heat bearing servers and server centres and stop pushing cooling air around.

rant over. you failed me today apple.

wanna share content between devices?

i often take photos on my ixus 200 IS camera which takes wonderful point and shoot snaps with a side order of 720p video.  the ipad i use when i'm mobile for reading news feeds and watching videos on is also fantastic at allowing me to play with photos on the move.  i use photoshop express.

using a nifty usb widget i can put my sdcard from my camera into the bottom of the ipad and copy the pictures across from my point and shoot, edit and then using photo transfer app (good seo name that) - once edited i throw them across the wifi network to my ipod touch to then blog using the posterous application.

the previous posterous application did not seem to like the ipad so we will see if the new one from posterous spaces (3.0) works any better.  also, this transferring malarky will vanish (probably) once the cloud from apple is live in the coming month(s) - of course it does depend on if you have network and bandwidth in the area you are transferring the content so it might not die as quick as i might have thought.

quick tip here about using vnc with lion.

after upgrading to lion i noticed that my vnc mocha client application on the ipad just dropped me at the login screen of the host machine i was connecting too. after some research i found that they have beefed up security in lion that you can no longer just set a vnc viewer password and connect. you have to fully pass the login and password credientials of the user account your connecting too to view the screen.

while this is great for security it can mean that your sending out your login and password over the air (if wifi like us) to your main account so please do watch that. personally i'm using a vpn between the two so it causes me no problems.  we use vnc mocha (a free vnc client) to watch the desktop on the main mac pro for greenscreen key issues and to be able to remote control the shot and recording.

i hope this helps someone.

quicklink | makayama

a unique (i doubt that) hardware accessory which allows you to radically improve video capture with the iPad 2 (i doubt that too) It turns your iPad into a complete studio. Use tele- and wide angle conversion lenses (i have issues with the glass here but we will see) attach microphones and lights (yes, this is useful) - Use a tripod for super stable shots and much more. comes with a free app (interested in the tripod adapter and the app of course!)

i'm quite interested still thou aside from the sales pitch in getting one of these for the studio and i'm wondering if it will take an ipad 1 as well.  i'll have a scout around the website to see.  really like the idea of using it with a standard mount and having my led light on the top for some more fill light if needed or a standalone plinth setup to use with keek.com - i wonder if keek would be interested in sponsoring one of these and an ipad2? - i'm sure we could do some neat videos at antenna with this for static shots.

overall thou, this is not ground breaking because the ipad2 camera is so generally bad.  the only saving grace is the way that it will stand up, attach to a tripod and the lighting the subject for recording from a plinth.  for those features it's worth the £30 ish price.  maybe, adding a hotshoe mic would be nicer on the audio that's debatable and i'm not sure, unless i came across some dirt cheap lenses if i would both with the wide angle lense feature.  i think it's cool that they offer that slide on and off feature i just hope that the ipad 3 will bring along some better glass and optics and give the ipad a much better camera.

thanks to aloox2 for finding this

*update* - a day or so after this post someone stepped forward and sent me a £30 itunes voucher that enabled me to install lion on my macpro (i actually downloaded it to the mac mini too so both are done - same ip you see i think) so i'm all up and running perfectly on lion with minimal fuss - i had a problem with wifi but that seems to have sorted itself out now.  also bought some apps i really wanted so look out for that group of reviews for that too! :) - it really set up my friday so thank you! :)

it's been out a while now and finally all the software updates that i needed to be able to make sure that fibrecamp can run without problems seem to have been released - i've updated my blackmagic intensity drivers, i'm hoping wirecast 4.0.1 will work with going to 4.1 (until that 60fps bug thing is sorted) and desktop presenter is all present and correct.

problem i have is that i do not have any money to purchase and download lion from the new fangled appstore as i'm broke.  so, i offer you this.  i'll record you a video review of your website and tell you what you can do to improve it.  i'm looking for a barter price of at least a £25 itunes gift voucher that you can gift me (dmouse@gmail.com is my address for itunes) and i can have the video done in a day or so.  i'll need to run it through some test sites and applications as well to give you feedback on speed etc of your site.

i did start to do video reviews on fiverr but i think that a video review is worth more than £4 that i was getting from fiverr after costs! ;)

shoot me a tweet @philcampbell if your interested in getting a site review from a social media perspective and what you can do to improve the engagement, speed and general layout of it (i'll be looking at what it looks like on mobile too btw)

£25.  that's a bargain right?