Category Archives: iPhone

Apple, iPad, iPhone

how do I transfer iTunes metadata about iPhone and iPad?

2 Comments

I have hit a second snag in moving my iTunes 11 library on my old Mac to iTunes 10 on my new Mac.

When I plug in my iPhone, which was previously syncing with my old Mac, to my new Mac, I get the warning that this iPhone is synced with another Mac. I’m given the option of either erasing it and syncing it, or doing nothing. I would be happy to let it erase and sync since all of the content that is on the iPhone is on the new Mac. However, the vast majority of the 64GB of content on my device is music, and I really don’t want to have to go through all of the playlists and artists and albums and configure which ones get synced.

Other than manually rebuilding this information, is there any other way to do this? All of the content that’s on the phone is on the new Mac, so I’m not trying to transfer content off of the iPhone. I just don’t want to have to go through and manually configure what syncs to the iPhone and what doesn’t. I have the same issue with my iPad 2 syncing with the new Mac: same error message, all of the content is on both the iPad and the new Mac, I don’t want to have to rebuild the list of what syncs and what doesn’t (which is about which movies and books sync).

I still have the old Mac and its old iTunes library. I would try to reimport the iTunes library, but I’ve added a bunch of content to the new iTunes library before I tried to sync with my iPhone. Moving to iTunes 11 on the new Mac is not an option. I’d rather take the time to rebuild the sync lists rather than do that.

iPad, iPhone, Mac

yes, you can move your iTunes 11 library to iTunes 10

1 Comment

I asked earlier if anyone had any pointers on moving an iTunes 11 library to iTunes 10.  I didn’t want to downgrade iTunes 11 to iTunes 10 on a single computer, but rather wanted to move an iTunes 11 library that exists on one Mac to an unused iTunes 10 library on another Mac.

The answer appears to be an almost-perfectly-unqualified yes.  Via Twitter and app.net, I got several suggestions.  I decided to try the one that was the easiest: export my iTunes 11 library to XML, and then import it into iTunes 10.  I figured if it didn’t work, then I probably hadn’t lost too much time.  It worked!

So here are the steps that I followed:

  1. On my old Mac, I launched iTunes 11 and went to File -> Library -> Export Library, and saved my library to a flash drive.
  2. After that had completed on my old Mac, I quit out of iTunes and ejected the flash drive that held the library file, and also ejected the external hard drive that housed the actual media in my iTunes library.
  3. On my new Mac, I connected both the flash drive and the external hard drive.
  4. On my new Mac, I launched iTunes 10 and went to File -> Library -> Import Playlist and selected my exported iTunes library.  It began churning away.  Since that library has ~35k items in it, it was clearly going to take awhile, and I left it to do its thing while I ran some errands.
  5. On my new Mac, I checked and everything that I was most concerned about (playlists, ratings, etc) was there!  All of my metadata had been preserved, and my media files had been moved to my new Mac’s hard drive.  (Thankfully, I had enough space.  They’ll be moved off to an external hard drive soon.)  I spot-checked several songs, playlists, videos, and podcasts, and everything was there.
  6. To confirm that I had everything, I compared the size of my new iTunes media folder with my old iTunes media folder, and discovered that the former was larger by about 8 GB.  I discovered two things that didn’t get copied over: all of my Books, and all of the application files for my iPhone and iPad.  The former is surprising, since it had gotten everything else, the latter is unsurprising.  So on my new Mac, I went to File -> Add to Library and added those books and applications back in.

Next up is to move my photo library from my old Mac to my new Mac, which should be a lot easier, and then sync my iPhone and my iPad to the new Mac and make sure that everything works.  Once that is done, I’ve got a few clean-up items to do on my old Mac, and then I can let it go to its final resting home.

Many thanks to Brian Webster for the original suggestion.  I’m pleasantly surprised that it was so easy.

Apple, iPad, iPhone

can I move iTunes 11 library to iTunes 10?

1 Comment

I have an old MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard and iTunes 11.  I have a spiffy new retina MacBook Pro running Mountain Lion and iTunes 10.  The abomination that is iTunes 11 was released after I got the rMBP, and I never upgraded it.

The old MBP is the machine that is the one that syncs with my iPhone.  It has my portable iTunes library, as well as my photo library.  I’d prefer to move everything over to my spiffy rMBP, but I also don’t want to have to upgrade to iTunes 11 on it.  I also don’t want to lose all of the metadata that I have stored in my iTunes library, such as playlists and song ratings.

I’m not trying to downgrade iTunes 11 on my old MBP.  My iTunes library has been updated multiple times (new songs, new ratings, new playlists) since I unwittingly accepted that update, so I don’t think that any of the downgrade options will work for me.

iCloud syncing is very much not an option, not least of which because my iTunes library is larger than its limit.

I realize that I’m asking for a lot here, but I’m hoping that someone might have done this and my search-fu just isn’t awesome enough to have found the documentation of it.  I’ve found plenty of documentation about downgrading, but not my scenario.

An alternate scenario would be for me to start syncing with my server at home instead of syncing with my laptop.  I haven’t pursued this seriously because there are multiple iPhones in the house (mine, my husband’s, and our household line) and I haven’t found a good solution for dealing with one iTunes library, multiple Apple accounts (and the resulting differences in which apps are available where), and multiple iPhoto libraries.  We currently have the home media server set up with a shared account (which is what is used for adding new content to the iTunes library and all playback), and we have individual accounts on the server.  Apple’s guidance for using multiple devices on the same computer is useless for this household’s use case.  So unless there’s an awesome solution that I haven’t found, it seems like it’s a lot easier and less error-prone to maintain my own iTunes and iPhoto libraries on my own laptop.

iPhone

iOS 7 sturm und drang

3 Comments

At WWDC this week, Apple showed off iOS7.  Macworld has a great overall review of the new iOS, and they’ve done some deeper dives as well.  The beta of iOS7 is visually quite different: lots of changes to the icons, the default color palette is lighter (to the point that some are questioning whether it will even look good on a white iPhone), and lots of the overwrought skeuomorphism has been removed.

Such a big visual change has, predictably, brought about a lot of sturm und drang from people who like to imagine that they’re visual or interaction designers who work on mobile operating systems.  These are always entertaining to read, so long as your tolerance for uninformed opinion and hand-wringing is high.

The most entertaining, and also the most infurating, example of the sturm und drang that I’ve discovered is “iOS 7: An Estrogen-Addled Mess Designed for 13 Year Old Girls”.  There’s probably a drinking game to be written for that article, although I fear the idea of creating one because it would likely result in alcohol poisoning while trying it out.

iPhone

the iPhone and 4000 lattes

I was at Macworld when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone.  Several of us from my then-team were in attendance, and we all sat together in the main hall for the Stevenote.  And yes, I laughed when Steve called a local Starbucks and ordered 4000 lattes.

The fine folks at Fast Company have done some deep investigative journalism and went to visit that selfsame Starbucks.  Yes, really: Because Of Steve Jobs’s First Public iPhone Call, Starbucks Still Gets Orders For 4,000 Lattes.  Thanks to Fast Company, I now know that the Starbucks employee who answered the phone when Steve called still works there, and that people years later are still calling and asking for 4000 lattes.

Funny enough, now orders for 4,000 lattes are more common, thanks to the endless droves of Apple fanboys still wanting to partake in some aspect of Jobs’s legacy. “Before him, no [we never received such an order],” Hannah says. “After he made the call, everyone copied him, prank calling our store and ordering thousands of lattes–to this day!”

iPad, iPhone, Mac

Mac users are the original BYOD

During MacIT last week, my fellow advisory board members and I gave a panel session titled “Things You Should Know: Mountain Lion”.  During my slot, I talked about the evolution of BYOD.  I couldn’t cover as much as I wanted during that time, and lots of people talked to me after the session, which gave me even more ideas about this.

The modern roots of BYOD can be traced to the iPhone.  People started buying their own iPhones and using them side-by-side with their corporate-issued smartphones.  When the iPhone gained Exchange ActiveSync support in 2008, people started ignoring their corporate-issued smartphones and doing more and more corporate work on their iPhones.  Additionally, people who never had corporate-issued smartphones now started using their personal iPhones against corporate resources.  IT had to adapt to this influx of new and unsupported devices.  Some companies began issuing iPhones (and other smartphones as well, as more competitors to the iPhone appeared).  Still others decided that it was better to let employees buy their own phones, and their IT infrastructure would just have to support it.  Bring Your Own Device suddenly became a thing with its own acronym and its own policy.

BYOD has plenty of advantages, both to the employee and to the company.  Employees get to buy hardware that they like to use.  They can consolidate onto a single device and not carry around two smartphones.  Companies and their IT departments now have fewer devices that they have to manage.

Just about the same time when we started to take BYOD seriously, and when companies were creating official policies about how they would handle BYOD, the iPad came onto the market.  It was a natural extension to BYOD to allow these new tablets onto the corporate infrastructure.  As with the iPhone, the iPad also paved the way for other tablets to follow suit.

Now, we’re seeing BYOD extended to laptops.  Companies are starting to allow their employees to bring their own laptops.  Those of us who have been Mac users for a long time look at BYOD and realize that we’ve been doing BYOD for years and years, we just never put a name on it.  If we did put a name on it, it was “sneaking around”.  Mac users have been using their personal laptops for work purposes for years and years.  Sometimes it was just when working at home, other times it was bringing it to work and figuring out what was necessary to get it to work on the corporate network.  These clandestine Mac users would trade information amongst themselves about what works and what doesn’t, what software was necessary to make everything look okay, and how to be a Mac user and not look like you were a Mac user.

I know a number of Mac IT admins who got their start in companies that were willing to look the other way when Mac users brought their laptops to work.  They became known as the IT person who could help out the Mac users, either by helping them with the right settings or software to be more functional on the corporate network, or who were willing to make the right tweaks to the infrastructure to support Mac users without impacting everyone else.  They didn’t start as Mac IT admins, and they didn’t even necessarily start as Mac users themselves, but they helped out and learned a lot by doing.  The MacEnterprise mailing list got its start several years ago, and has always had a sizeable element of trying to figure out how to get Macs to work in an environment that, at best, doesn’t support Macs, and, at worst, might be actively hostile to them.

For us longtime Mac users, BYOD has helped engender a lot of changes to IT that makes it easier for us to be Mac users.  The cloud, SaaS, virtualization, and virtual desktops have all made it possible for us to easily access data and applications that we had to fight our way around otherwise.  IT has had to adapt to support all of this.  On one hand, a heterogeneous environment can be more difficult to manage; on the other hand, happy users and a more flexible and adaptive environment can be easier to manage.

It’s a pretty awesome time to be a Mac user in the enterprise, and I think that it’s just going to get easier and easier from here.  It’s also a pretty awesome time to be a Mac IT administrator, since these skills are in high demand as more companies decide that it’s time to adapt to a changing workforce and an ever-changing array of devices that must be supported by their infrastructure.

Apple, iPad, iPhone, Mac

a memo to Notifications Center (Mountain Lion edition)

1 Comment

Dear Notifications Center,

I hate you.

I hate you because you’re that obnoxious person at the party who has to be the center of attention, even though you’re ostensibly on the sidelines.

Whenever there’s an update, not only do I have the badge on the App Store telling me that you would like attention, but I’ve also got you sitting there in my upper left corner of my desktop telling me that no, really, you’d like some attention now.  And my options are either “upgrade” or “details”.  There’s no “dismiss”, there’s no little green X.  There’s just those two options.  I can’t get rid of you without opening up the App Store, even though I’ve already decided that updating you isn’t in my top priorities right now.  In fact, on my home server, you’re always going to have a little red badge on the App Store because that server is still running iTunes 10, and if there’s anything that I hate more than you, it’s iTunes 11.  You’re a close second, though, and if I consider your iOS brother, I might actually hate you more because you’re even more obnoxious in the smaller form factor.

Oh, and I hate you because I can’t tell you that there are notifications that I never want.  I never want to be notified with sound, and you don’t even give me the option to not have sound on some notifications (I’m looking at you, Facebook notifications).  I don’t want banners, and I don’t want alerts.  There’s a reason that I never install Growl on my own, and that I uninstall it if some other bloody application decides to install it without asking me.  The only notification that I ever want is a little badge, preferably with a number in it, and maybe a bounce on the dock icon if something is truly desperate for attention.  Other than that: GTFO.

I hate you because your sort order is impossible to scan if there’s a lot of items in there.  My options are to sort manually (because I totally want to have to manage a list of apps manually) or to sort by time (because I totally care about whether I last managed an app 3 months ago or 3 months and 1 day ago).  Why can’t sorting alphabetically even be an option?

I hate you because you take up a precious spot on my menu bar, and you’ve also broken all of my muscle memory that told me that Spotlight was always the rightmost item in my menu bar.  Now Spotlight, that’s something that I use all the bloody time.  I don’t have a single application or anything else in Notification Center (go on, go look at my settings for you: everything’s listed under “not in Notification Center”), but there you are, not just sitting in my menu bar all the time, but sitting somewhere where I’d love to have something that was actually useful to me.

I want to be able to make sure that any new app never gives me a sound or thinks that it is somehow worthy of alerts or (grrr) banners.  But no, I can’t do that.  I have to manage every single individual app by itself, and I either have to remember to do that when I install the app, or wait until the app fires an unwanted notification, get annoyed by the unwanted and unnecessary notification, and then go through and do the same damn thing again where I remove all badges, alerts, sounds, and everything else.

In short, feel free to FOAD.

No love,
Nadyne.

iPhone

switching to Verizon for the iPhone 5 is a lot harder than it should be

3 Comments

I’ve been on AT&T for quite some time.  I was an AT&T subscriber back in the dark pre-iPhone ages.  And back then, AT&T was good enough for my needs, which consisted of their most basic plan.  And then the iPhone came out, and AT&T was the only provider, and I bought it on launch day.  I kept that original launch-day iPhone even though I ran into issue after issue with AT&T’s service.  AT&T is notorious for having bad coverage in the Bay Area, and that’s certainly been true for me.  The iPhone 4 came out with its retina display, and I bought it on its launch day too, when AT&T was still the only provider.

Then Verizon and Sprint began offering the iPhone.  And then my contract with AT&T expired.  And then the iPhone 5 was announced.  Sprint’s coverage isn’t sufficient for my needs, but Verizon … oh, I dreamed of being satisfied with my carrier.  So my husband and I discussed it, and decided to preorder the new iPhone and jump to Verizon in the process.

We stayed up Thursday night to preorder.  The next day, I got an email saying that my credit application was on hold.  This surprised me, because my credit rating is stellar.  I called on Saturday, and was requested to fax in more information.  I asked if they could accept it via email, because that way I could send it in instantly, as opposed to having to find someone from 1984 who still had a fax machine.  They gave me an email address, I sent it in, and didn’t get a response.

So on Monday, I called again, and was told that they needed more information.  I got the needed information, emailed it in again, waited for a couple of hours, and called again when I didn’t get a response.  This time, I was told that I had only faxed blank pages.  I obviously hadn’t, since I had emailed PDFs.  The guy said that he didn’t know anything about emailing, only faxing, and his system was telling him that I had only faxed blank pages.  I wasn’t sure what to believe, since the earlier call had told me that they had received the previously-requested information but that they needed more, and thus his response directly contradicted my previous calls.  He said he couldn’t tell me anything more, and that I needed to fax in the requested information, and that I should have an email within 10 minutes of doing so.  I pointed out that I’d never gotten an email response to my previous “faxes”, and asked when these email responses arrive.  He said that it’s 10 minutes, and I pointed out that I hadn’t received anything yet, and he didn’t have any control over it — which, on one hand, I get it, but it’s frustrating to be given an answer that has no resemblance to reality.

So I emailed all of the requested information again.  And this time, while waiting the 10 minutes that I was told that it would take for my application to be processed once they received the information yet again, I tweeted about it:

Dear @VZWSupport: You’re making it Very Difficult for me to switch to you.I’ve been trying since Saturday. Do you want me to stay with AT&T?

And they responded!

@nadyne We certainly want you to join the VZW family! Please follow us and DM me your credit reference number & or application number. ^TB

So I did.  Concurrently, I tweeted to a friend (whose tweets are protected, so I won’t quote them, but I think that the tweet is clear enough without the context of their tweet):

well, I think I’m switching, that is. I might end up staying with AT&T if Verizon can’t get their act together.

So a different Verizon agent responded:

@nadyne Our act is all together! What is going on? I want to ensure you have a positive experience! ^AE

This tweet doesn’t actually make me feel like their act is all together, given that my DM with my application number had been sent ~5m earlier, and someone else has already responded.  But yet another agent responded via DM to say that the application had been approved (finally!), and that I should call sales to complete the order.  They gave me a toll-free number, which is a different toll-free number than the one that had been in the email that started this whole mess.  I called, and waited on hold for nearly 30m.  When an agent finally picked up, they told me that they couldn’t help me, because I was calling about an internet order instead of a phone order.  But he offered to transfer me to the right department.  I pointed out that I’d been on hold forever, and he apologized and said that he couldn’t help, but he could transfer me.  So he did.  And the department that he transferred me to is closed for the evening, since apparently West Coast customers don’t need to talk to this department.

Now I’m really feeling like Verizon’s act isn’t all together.  Their online support agents gave me the wrong number to call, and their system is so siloed that I have to know what department to call based on how I placed the original order.

I called the original number that I had, from the email.  This agent is able to confirm that yes, my credit application has been accepted.  So I asked whether this delay in approving my order is going to result in a delay in actually getting the phone.  After all, I stayed up until midnight on Thursday so that I could pre-order a spiffy new Verizon iPhone.  And he said that he didn’t have access to that information, and that I would have to call the internet order department to ask that question.  I asked if he knew the hours of that department, and he said that he didn’t.  So I got the phone number, and discovered that this department is the same one that I had gotten forwarded to earlier in this odyssey, so they’re still closed.

None of this makes me feel confident that Verizon has its act together.  As I tweeted,

This really isn’t a very good start to a relationship.

I especially like that I’m going to have to pay a $35 activation fee per line for the privilege of burning 4 hours tonight, and who knows how long tomorrow, in trying to figure out how to resolve the issue that Verizon created for me.  I have to admit that, even though AT&T’s coverage sucks and I get dropped calls and no service all the time, I’m now contemplating canceling my Verizon order.  I can just go queue up on Friday morning for a new AT&T iPhone.

iPad, iPhone, Mac, Nadyne

the evolution of iTunes

I bought an iPod when they were introduced, and I started using iTunes when it was introduced.  I’ve gone through a few different iPods, and then got an iPhone when it was first introduced.  Today, I’ve got an iPod Shuffle, an iPhone 4, and an iPad 2.  I also have two separate iTunes libraries: one on the home server, and one at work.

When I first started using iTunes, most of my music library was MP3.  Upon the introduction of Apple Lossless (ALAC) and its support in iTunes, I decided to move to that in an attempt to future-proof my library.  The decision to move to ALAC had some unexpected fall out.  When ALAC was introduced, iTunes treated those files exactly the same as other supported music files.  This is mostly fine, except that ALAC files are much much larger than MP3 or AAC files, which means that you can’t store a lot of music on an iPod or iPhone.

Concurrently, that first iPhone had a problem: to get my calendar or address book onto it, I had to sync with iTunes.  Support for Exchange ActiveSync wasn’t added until much later.  My work calendar has everything on it, and so my iPhone had to sync with my work laptop if its calendar and address book were to be of any use at all.

I ended up creating a new iTunes library on my work laptop, just for syncing my iPhone.  I ripped a bunch of CDs to my work laptop, using AAC so that I’d have reasonable file sizes for use on my phone.  A side effect of this decision is that my work laptop is also the home for my iPhoto library, since the vast majority of my pictures are taken with my iPhone.

In the intervening time, though, things have changed.  My two primary reasons for needing that separate iTunes library have disappeared.  iTunes will now downsample ALAC files for use on the iPhone and iPod, so I don’t have to worry about having massive files on there.  The iPhone now supports Exchange ActiveSync, so I don’t need to sync it with my work laptop to have my calendar available to me on my phone.

The problem is that iTunes has grown in that intervening time, too.  It’s no longer just where my music lives.  It’s where I buy some music1, and now it’s where I buy apps for my iPhone and my iPad.  iTunes is the gatekeeper for how I get data onto my iPhone and iPad.  And there’s also the Mac App Store, which is tied to the same Apple ID that my iTunes account is, and so conceptually I think of them as living on the same computer.  (And yes, I do have two Apple IDs: the one that I’ve been using for purchasing songs/apps, and my developer Apple ID.)

iTunes Match could solve part of this problem for me, although I hit up against its 25k track limit.  Macworld has published a workaround for this, which is to have a separate iTunes library that syncs with iTunes Match.  This is really no different than my two-libraries-on-two-machines approach now, so it’s not very useful to me.  I hope that Apple improves this in the future, because I really do love the idea of iTunes Match.

The problem that my household has is the proliferation of devices, which has led to a proliferation of iTunes libraries.  I’ve got two Macs (one at home, one at the office).  My husband has two Macs too (also one at home and one at the office).  Our home server is a Mac, and it is the main repository for our media collection.  We’ve got another Mac in our home study.  I’ve got an iPhone 4, iPod Shuffle, and iPad 2.  My husband has an iPhone 4, iPad, and an iPod.  He’s got his own iTunes account, mostly for iPhone apps that he’s purchased.

I think that the next thing that I’ve got to figure out in with iTunes is how to contain all of this sprawl.  To date, I’ve just handled the new changes in iTunes on an ad hoc basis.  It’s time to stop and figure out how to move forward.  Is it possible for us to have just one iTunes library?  How do we handle all of the music and apps that one of us has purchased?  How does this impact our photo libraries?  I’m not sure, but I think that we’ve got to figure it out soon, before the situation gets any worse.

  1. I mostly still buy CDs. I only buy on iTunes when it’s an exclusive, or if I really do just want one track off of an album. ↩