New iPod nano won't charge in many accessories

Did Apple have a REALLY good reason to disable firewire charging? Electrical issues? Access to China's market? Whatever the reason, it's a big negative ...

Apple iPod nano Fourth-Generation (8GB/16GB) | iLounge

... Incompatible with past FireWire charging accessories; will not charge when placed in Bose’s SoundDock, Apple’s iPod Hi-Fi, or certain car kits...

Bet there will be a lot of surprised owners of the Apple iPod Hi-Fi and Bose SoundDock.

Update 5/5/09: The Griffin Firewire to USB converter works for me. I can use my car stereo connector again.

iPhone 2.1 - unknown application 0xE800002E - A FIX!

Update 11/24/08: With the iPhone 2.2 update I at first thought Apple had broken this in a new way, but I've also read reports that the bug has finally been fixed with iTunes 8.02 and iPhone 2.1. I'm now inclined to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, but do proceed with caution.

The bug that's been plaguing many iPhone users was not fixed with 2.1:

Gordon's Tech: iPhone application update error not resolved: don't buy your iPhone until it's fixed: "Unknown Error: 0xE800002E"

So the bad news is that Apple didn't fix the problem.

The good news is that after installing 2.1 and iTunes 8 there is indeed a fix. It works under 10.4.11 and it kept working when I upgraded to 10.5.4.

1. Upgrade to iTunes 8 and iPhone 2.1
2. Sync iPhone so you have a backup (I make a zip of my backup directory)
3. Restore iPhone to original state using the restore button on the info (a commentor says it's the summary tab) tab. This wipes the phone.
4. When the phone mounts iTunes will ask if you want to treat it as a new phone, or restore from backup.
5. Choose restore from backup. This doesn't restore everything -- but don't worry.
6. Sync (this will take a while if there's music involved) - this restores the rest.

When all is done everything should be in place. In the past the restores still left me with a lot of cleanup, but this time I only had to arrange a few icons. My passwords were largely restored, I did have to reenter my Gmail un/pw.

How do I know this solved the problem?

1. When I did this iTunes said I had no updates. The App Store on the iPhone said I had 4 updates. I actually used the App Store to apply the updates -- a process that has NEVER worked in the past and has caused many problems for most users. This time it smoothly applied the updates, and when it was done it said there were no more left.
2. Since applying the fix I have applied an app update from iTunes.
   

I assume this problem arose from one or more of:

1. DRM schemes that don't handle changes in iPhone ID when there's a restore from backup (maybe fixed in 2.1)
   
2. A permission or keychain problem arising from an OS X bug (because I've seen something similar on the desktop that breaks updates.

P.S. I need to credit a Mall of America Apple Store "genius". He thought this would work, though that was prior to 2.1. I think it really needed iPhone 2.1 and iTunes 8 to work and stay working.

Update 9/18/08: Based on the comments I can add

• It's working very well for everyone. Cookies, game scores, etc are saved.
• The icon order is not preserved -- you have to reorder your icons. I ran into this myself but only a small number were disordered. In some cases they're restored in alphabetic order. This is pretty easy to do of course.

Update 11/9/08: A commenter suggests doing a 2nd 'restore' to restore icon ordering:

...if you restore a *second* time, after the sync step, then all your icons and placements will be as they were prior to the restore.

My icon rearrangements weren't too bad, so, for myself, I'd choose to do some post-restore manual correction. If you're feeling brave and try this, please add a comment so we can see if it works for people for whom icon order restoration would be a big job.

Has Apple restricted multi-user access to iTunes 8?

Before iTunes 8 came out I wrote that the DRM issues around shared libraries would be very interesting to watch. How would Apple treat the de facto family media repository?

iTunes 8: what really matters is the household library – and its DRM

... Apple can either continue to (very, very) quietly support this arrangement [sharing of libraries], or they can make things more restrictive, or they could validate household media libraries by allowing multiple accounts to add music and supporting multiple DRM accounts in a single media library.

Today's Apple Discussions had this post along with several similar complaints ...

Apple - Support - Discussions - itunes 8 and sharing libraries between ...

... Ever since downloading itunes 8 i haven't been able use a shared library between users. Is this a known issue with itunes 8? Is there a work around? I get a file locked/permissions pop-up whenever I try to open itunes from my account. I first downloaded and ran itunes 8 on my wife's users profile...should this matter?...

Yeah, it feels ominous. I'll look for more.

iTunes 8: I find my first bug - divided podcasts

It took me about five minutes to find my first significant iTunes 8 bug.

Really, if Apple were to pay me $100K to test their products prior to release, they'd save a bundle. I have a gift for these things.

The bug has to do with the organization of podcasts.

First, look at this screen, which is what I get if I click on the abstract (older) In Our Time podcast icon. It splits In Our Time into two podcast streams, one with episodes and one without:

However if I click on the icon with Melvyn's face on it, I get this list:

So the Podcasts are in place, and my smart albums display both the podcasts and my other IOT AAC files together. The bug appears to be with a Podcast that is somehow split over time into two parts. The first screenshot displays both icons, but the episodes associated with the top icon are not displayed. If one clicks on the titlebar that seems to have no children, however, a podcast will still play.

So it's a bug.

Appigo Notebook is coming to the iPhone

I saw that the new version of Appigo's ToDo.app mentions something called Appigo Notebook. I quick Google found this: Upcoming App - Appigo's Notebook. (Update: official site)

Ahh. Yes. Good. I will be looking for it -- as soon as I get iPhone 2.1 and, I hope, get beyond the !@#$ Apple bug that prevents me from time effectively updating my iPhone apps.

Farewell Evernote, good-bye data lock.

Update 9/27/08: Toodledo has introduced Palm/Outlook Memo/Task import to their notes as CSV files. So now I can fully use Appigo Notebook.

Loving Google Reader - Shared post feed

Only a year ago Bloglines beat Google Reader in my tests. Alas, Bloglines stayed about the same (save for a very flaky beta), and Reader kept improving.

Eventually my iPhone moved me to Google Reader, and I discovered the joy of shared posts.

There are still a few things I miss from Bloglines - like the disposable email feeds, the package tracking, and the very easy to share bloglist. Overall though it's no contest now, Google Reader is far superior.

Every Reader account has one 'shared' post feed. The shared post feed is dynamically created by clicking an icon while reading a post. Here’s my shared post list. It’s not obvious or well documented, but this share has its own feed (FF reveals it) [1].

You can embed the shared post feed in web pages, such as in the side bar of my Tech and Notes blog, or in conventional web pages. Alas, the embeded Gadget doesn't show the optional annotations one can attach to a shared post. Only the web view or the feed include the annotations.

 Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to universally share the Friend feed [3], so I can only see those of people on my Gmail contacts list. Even so, it's great.

I read Jacob Reider's feed regularly, and that spares me hours of reading the tedious journals of our shared industry. Jacob reads them for me, picks out the good stuff, and shares it. I owe you some beers Jacob.

 Play with shared feeds -- you won't regret it. It's a lightweight form of blogging, without any authoring anxiety. Now if only my good friends were about 20 years younger, I might be able to enlist more of them in this shared processing and shared memory task ...

[1] Reader won't allow you to subscribe to it as a conventional feed, but other clients will. The feed shows your annotations.
[2] I'd much appreciate it if one of my readers were to try adding the undocumented feed to their Google Reader -- I'd like to know if it shows up as Shared Feed from a "friend". Please add a comment to that effect. Then you can delete it of course!
[3] Apparently due to complaints about privacy?! The default mode is private, so this feels like a user error problem.

Newest Sansa SanDisk STILL doesn't support AAC - weird

File under weird.

My SONY car radio plays AAC. My Nintendo Wii supports AAC. My wife's BlackBerry plays AAC. But the newest Sansa SanDisk still doesn't support AAC ... (note the As in AAC do not stand for Apple).

SanDisk Sansa e200 MP3 player

... Sometimes ,there are some unsupported audio format musics you like very much,such as a favourite video movie song.So ,what can you do? Don't worry,there are a lot of audio/video converter softwares which can help to solve the problem. For example ,Xilisoft Audio Converter 2.1. provides an easy and completed way to convert between all popular audio formats, such as MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, FALC, OGG, APE, MP4, M4A, MP2, VQF etc....

Yeah, right ... convert. Ever tried it? Takes ages, terrible results. I'd look at these Sansa things for my kids if they had AAC support. Does Apple pay SanDisk to avoid AAC?