I dont know about you, but I’m not big on reading manuals unless I’m truly stumped.
When Apple introduced the long awaited ‘cut, copy & paste’ feature to the iPhone, it seemed straight forward enough to use – tap the text area to activate the selection popup, choose your selection method, move the ‘grab points’ to select the text and use the relevant popup to select cut/copy/paste. Simple enough. I’ve never felt the need to know any more than that, so I’ve never bothered looking any further into how cut/copy/paste on the iPhone works. However, I just accidentally stumbled upon a shortcut. This isn’t even documented in the iPhone manual anyway – I checked.
Just double-tap where you want your selection to start, then without releasing your finger, drag to the end of your selection and you can cut out the first couple of steps. Handy.
When I came to choose a case for my iPhone 4, I couldn’t find any reviews of the incase Snap Case, so here are my thoughts on it for anyone else that might be considering one.
First, a little background as to how I acquired the case. There has been a lot of publicity regarding the signal attenuation problems with Apple’s new iPhone 4 handset. In my humble opinion, it has been blown way out of proportion, mostly by people who don’t even own an iPhone 4. To be totally honest with you, I have experienced the so-called ‘death grip’. At my desk in the office where I work, I’ve always had a low signal. 3G is a distant dream, and a middling 2G signal is pretty much the best I can hope for. When I bought my iPhone 4, holding it in my left hand facing me (note: I only hold it like this when texting or emailing), the signal bars would indeed begin to decrease, and after a few seconds the signal would disappear completely leaving me with ‘No Service’. At home, however, where I have a strong 3G signal, I could never replicate the problem. I suppose what I’m trying to say is: Yes, it was a real problem, but not one demanding as much attention as it did. I suppose it comes with the territory for Apple. They have a tendency to generate huge amounts of hype around their product releases that even the slightest of problems will be met with huge amounts of negative feedback.
To address this negative feedback, Apple launched the iPhone 4 Case Program. This program provided those who experienced the signal attenuation problem with a free case. Either an Apple iPhone 4 Bumper, or a third-party case from a given selection. Evidently, I opted for the incase Snap Case Clear.
As nice as Apple’s bumpers are, the ‘naked’ iPhone 4 really is a beautiful piece of design work, and it seemed a shame to cover it up. The clear hardshell case allows all of the iPhone 4′s glass and stainless steel components to remain in full view, whilst providing a reasonable amount of protection. Precisely what I was looking for.
Continue reading 'Review: Incase Snap Case for iPhone 4'»
Update: 28/07/2011 – I followed this exact procedure to restore my (Snow Leopard) iTunes library into a fresh installation of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and it worked perfectly.
As I wrote in an earlier post, my iMac recently had a well overdue reinstall of everything. Whilst this is good news for the most part, it does cause problems with things like iTunes. I was particularly concerned about losing my iPhone backups. I needed to get my iTunes library back to how it used to be, including all my preferences, iPhone applications and backups. How do you do this though? The only bit of information Apple provide on their website is how to migrate your data from an old mac to a new mac, when you have both machines available. What if your old mac is your new mac? I didnt want to restore a Time Machine backup, as I wanted to ensure this was a fresh start, and not be bringing a load of stuff over that I wanted rid of. The migration assistant was of no use either.
Google wasn’t much help initially, but I did eventually come across this gem.
Whilst, like Apple, that article does discuss the process of copying from one physical machine to another, the process described works just as well when copying from a backup. In my case, I backed up the entire hard drive contents of my iMac using SuperDuper! before I wiped the iMac clean. So I had every file I’d ever need, including old system files.
A friend of mine recently bought a new MacBook Pro, and asked me how he could transfer his iTunes stuff to it from his G4 iMac. As he was not familiar with the Terminal, or Unix/Linux commands, I gave him an expanded version of the above article. If you’re in the same boat, here is the full process he followed to ‘restore’ iTunes:
Continue reading 'Migrating iTunes/iPod/iPhone from Old Mac (Backup) to New Mac'»