One of my biggest gripes about my Nokia N93 and Nokia in general was the lack of support for the Macintosh platform. For the longest time, there was no real alternative to the Nokia PC Suite. Updating the OS on my Nseries phones is also difficult as OTA updates seem to be unavailable in the U.S. and other updates typically required the use of a Windows PC.

That has changed now. Nokia just released a beta version of the Nokia Media Transfer program for the Mac. Yay! While it doesn’t address OS updates, it is a cool way of auto-filling your Nseries phone with content as well as getting content off the Nseries.

Rather than describing the entire process of installation and functionality, I thought I’d give you a little picture book intro here:

Nokia Media Transfer allows you to use either a bluetooth connection or a USB-cable. I chose the bluetooth connection.

Strangely enough, the program found the N93 and the N95, but did not detect the N800.

You enable each device for use with iPhoto as a camera. You can also load photos to the phone, thereby giving you a ‘mobile’ photo album that you can carry around with you. While this is great for the N93 and N95, it really would have been a killer-app for the N800 considering that the N800 has a much bigger screen.

Nokia Media Transfer auto-fills your phone with music as well. I really like this feature.

Now it gets interesting, clicking the Create Folders button launches a series of Apple Scripts that are designed to create folders in iPhoto and iTunes that function is locations for the auto-fill features.

Well, it didn’t really work with me. iTunes complained, iPhoto did too.

Info boxes started popping up – the software is beta after all, so I’m not too worried about it at this point.

Once you are done with the installation process, you access the Media Transfer program through the top bar.

And here it is – running in all its beauty.

Thank you Nokia for finally making a commitment to the Mac! Me and millions of other users will thank you!

images courtesy of Apple

Apple Statement

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones. [Apr 12, 2007]

My trusted Powerbook died while I was down in Mississippi . . . but you know this already. The display died in the sense that the LCD display started to flicker. These flicker episodes got worse when displaying certain content and whenever OpenGL or CoreImage services were accessed. The ColorSync Utility produces a complete display failure. While in diagnostic mode (in the shell) the display was fine. I initially assumed that it might have been cause by a corrupt installation of OS X, but even a new install over a zeroed HD didn’t change the situation. I assumed that it was a corrupt installation because these issues were not reproduceable under the diagnostic mode, outside of OS X. Before reinstalling, however, I decided to reset the PRAM and Open Firmware. Even that produced no change.

I then went to the Apple Store in Twelve Oaks, MI on Sunday. The Genius at the store looked at the Mac and suggested the following order for a fix:

• reset the PRAM
• reset Open Firmware
• try a fresh install of OS X

I confirmed that I had already followed those steps. The Genius booted the PowerBook from an external HD, yet the issues persisted. He then had another idea. Assuming that the issues might be caused by faulty RAM (I had an extra 512 MB installed in the machine), he removed the RAM. Yet still, the display was still acting up. The Genius suggested that the LCD might be broken or the logic board with the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Go on it might be faulty.

He then told me that Apple has a new repair program. For $330, Apple will replace any faulty parts in the machine and return it to me. That’s pretty sweet, considering that previously a repair of this nature might have been more than the price of a new machine. This price is composed of a $110 labor fee and a $220 parts fee. The Apple Store in Twelve Oaks shipped the laptop off on Monday, it arrived at the repair center on Tuesday, was fixed on the very same day (supposedly, I’ll see when I have it), and is currently on its way back to Toledo. If there is no fixeable error, they will just send it back, without me having to pay anything.

Sweet.

So Apple send an email to everyone who registered to receive more information on the iPhone. Here’s what they write:

Talk to you soon.

Thanks for signing up. You’ll be the first to hear the latest about iPhone– coming this June. That gives you just enough time to think of ways to break the news to your current phone.

I’m still not sure if I’m really interested in the phone. I’ve had the chance to test Nokia’s phones and I’ve been a Nokia customer for ten years now, so I’m not sure if I’d want to make a change. I’m very happy with my Nokia N93, I’d like to test the Nokia N95 at some point. So far I haven’t had the chance.
So, I’m not super-psyched about the iPhone – I think that phones like the N93 and N95 already do everything that the iPhone offers. It’s not the phone but the OS that really might make a difference. Email is kind of bad on my N93, so that might be the ‘killer app’ for me. So, I’ll see about my next phone – especially since the iPhone is not 3G. I’m really more interested in the Nokia N95 – it has GPS built-in (which I think is neat).

Apple showcased the new iPhone today – at 499 $ and 599 $ with a two-year contract through Cingular. It sports 4 GB or 8 GB of memory, WiFi, Edge, Bluetooth as well as some innovative interface navigation features. It also runs ‘on OS X’, whatever that means. I doubt that you can load your OS X apps like Firefox or VLC on this machine. (Not that you would need to, but you get what I mean.)

One thing disturbed me a bit, though: The push email support for the machine comes from Yahoo! email. What ever happened to .Mac? Is it correct to assume that Apple went with an outside company to provide the iPhone user with push email, rather than supplying it through .Mac AND an outside source? Weird.

Via TUAW:

Skype, today, released two treats for us Mac users: Skype Beta 1.5 and Skype Video preview. Both are basically the same program with the exception that that the Video preview supports video chatting, though it is in it very early stages so it will crash (the Beta is more stable).

New in Skype Beta 1.5 is a totally new (and Macified) UI, detachable call window, the ability to import contacts from Address Book and Entourage, and a bunch more. Check out the changelog for the full dope.

Skype is free.

And now a grateful nation turns its eyes to the friendly folks over at CompUSA, who are hosting a special Mac Minutes event for U.S. college-bound students this Saturday, July 15th, at all of their stores.
From noon to 3PM, your local Apple Solutions Consultant will show you how to use .Mac and iLife to make college life more productive, less complicated, and more fun. You’ll find out how iDisk can do virtually everything a flash drive can do – except get lost, be stolen, break, or fall behind the vending machine. How you can create multimedia class projects that are sure to amaze – though we make no such assurances about the grades they might earn. How to publish websites, blogs, and podcasts in just minutes – allowing you more time for other activities, such as classes and meals. Plus lots more.
This Saturday. Noon to three. Your nearest CompUSA. Be there.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s David Chartier posted a ‘handy little app can help you make molehills out of mountains and start managing your time again’ today and caused the Macintosh community to plummet into some crap-tastic situations. It seems that the program contained somewhat malicious code – technically no problem. However, when one of the bloggers on a widely read Apple Macintosh weblog posts the program, recommends it and does not even feel the need to REALLY test it, that’s when you have a problem. Procrastinatr caused a deletion of iCal calendars and consequently freaked a whole lot of users out. Here are some comments:

Dammit! This is sure way to **** up your iCal events! I’ll admit I (stupidly) trust software downloads/mentions from TUAW… last time ever.
You TUAW bloggers are getting lazy and sloppy. You grab anything that looks like “news” and post it without even testing it.

Downloaded it because I trust TUAW. It totally f*cked up my iCal. I’m extremely angry!

yet another example of some fine blogging.
and to think that in previous posts, people actually commented to defend the “integrity” of this site.

All right. I am very disappointed at what seems to be the downfall of a once-great blog. TUAW’s quality has consistently gone down for a couple of months now and as a matter of fact, Eli and I were just talking about how TUAW sucks a couple of weeks ago.

As a consequence, I will no longer be reading TUAW.

Additionally, we as Mac users are proud of our platform’s supposed immunity to a lot of the crap that’s floating out there for the Windows world. Unfortunately, however, we rely on (formerly) cool Macintosh blogs that recommend that most helpful, coolest applications out there. TUAW has failed its readers today. I also think that TUAW is somewhat indicative of the ‘new’ generation of Macintosh users . . .