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Upgrading the iOS on an iPad or iPhone used to be a case of plugging in to the Mac or PC that hosts your iTunes library. iTunes always needed to be updated to the latest version in order to supply the latest firmware. Your mobile device was tethered to a computer. What about those people who don't own a computer, or moreover those people who don't want to own a computer? The iPad had such promise until the realisation hit that you still needed a desktop or laptop in order to set the thing up!

With Apple's iCloud and update over the air, this is no longer a requirement. I took some screenshots of my iPhone's update to 5.0.1 last night. It's such an easy thing to do, just click to continue. It took about five minutes to download in the end and another few to reboot and install. No problems at all.

Today, like every other Apple nerd, I updated my iPhone and iPad to iOS 5. I wanted to post a few screenshots of the new initial configuration screens.

Once your iPad reboots (mine took a few goes and I had to enter recovery mode followed by a full restore) you'll see the following:

This weekend, my daughter had some homework to do using a 10x10 number grid. But there wasn't one in her homework pack. I decided to make one for her. I'm not one for doing work manually when we can get a computer to do it, so I wrote an AppleScript to get Omnigraffle to create one. Here it is.

My MacBook Pro has been a constant source of joy to me since I got it. It's got a fast processor, has an awesome screen, runs Lion perfectly. It's got all the connectivity I could want too. I'm not new to Macs by any means, but this one is a little stormer. Well, mostly. It could have been a little quicker on the disk front. Waiting a few seconds for an App to load is ok, but when you're running a number of virtual machines in VMware Fusion, it could get a little wearing. The disk IO was actually slowing down processing sometimes and that's not good.

Thanks Apple. I'm one of those people who actually use keyboard autorepeat!

Open a Terminal session (from Launchpad of course..!) and test that autorepeat isn't working by holding down a key... See!? Bet you'd not even noticed that subtle change. Here's how to re-enable it on Lion. In your terminal session:


defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false


That's it. No reboot or anything sinister like that.

It's rare, but as I've discovered when using Microsoft products on a Mac, it is possible to crash parts of the OS. I've written a quick tech note on the command line way to recover without a reboot. (After all, OSX is UNIX!)...

If Finder crashed, giving you a beach ball over a disk window:
sudo killall -KILL Finder

If the dock crashed:
sudo killall -KILL Dock

The menubar (where the clock, batter indicator, and so on live) crashed:
killall -KILL SystemUIServer

In a previous article, I talked about how easy it is to stream iTunes music (and movies) about the network using AirPlay. I didn't cover mobile devices such as the iPad or iPhone, and I'll be dealing with them in a third article. They're good as remotes and we need to talk about AirPlay with those devices as a source of media. Before we cover that, I wanted to explain how you can stream Spotify and other non-iTunes music around the network too.

I've used SlimDevices (Now Logitech) Squeezeboxes for years, which is why I'd previously had very little interest in the Apple alternative. Since getting an AppleTV, I've become more interested in the wireless streaming of music about the house using AirPlay. The technology is built into iTunes, the Airport Express WiFi base station and, of course, the AppleTV itself. It's so simple and flexible to use that I'm regretting messing about with the Squeezeboxes previously.

The new iOS version 4.2.1 for iPad and iPhone brings with it multitasking. I could debate whether this is true multitasking or not (it's not) or whether Apple's model is sufficient for a mobile device where battery life is important (it is). But other blogs have done this pretty well already. So here I'm going to concentrate on one specific feature that is hidden but can change the way in which you manage your device battery life.

Last weekend I went to Curry's. I handed over a not-inconsiderable amount of cash and vouchers and left with a brown box. Quite a heavy brown box for it's size. When I got home, the kids were fascinated. "What's in the box?", "Is it a present for me?". No, my dear children, it's a present for ME.