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Documents To Go (with and without support for Microsoft Exchange attachments) is one of our favorite applications for turning your iPhone into a home office. But it's not anywhere near complete and it has some formidable competition in the form of Quickoffice Mobile Suite, another premium offering.
If you're in the market for a document editor and creator, this video will give you a peep at what Documents To Go can offer in its first application release.
Brian Cooley gives us the scoop on the LA Auto Show, we help you recover songs from a crashed iPod, and Bonnie Cha reviews the BlackBerry Storm.
Watch the show on CNET TV.
Things We Crave
Hands on with the new Xbox 360 dashboard
2010 Lexus RX gets update, new Remote Touch controller
First Look
Best of the Web
SearchMe and Google Voice Search.
Quick Tip
Stop MSN or Windows Live Messenger spam
Your video calls
Iyaz sent a video about stuttering problems in OS X Leopard. Brian Tong noted that many other users reported this problem on Apple's message boards. Some say they fixed it by downgrading from OS X 10.5.5 to plain old 10.5. Some even resorted by downgrading to 10.4. BT noted that some folks have found that switching from the audio jack to digital and back temporarily solves the problem.
Your calls
Our caller had some 40,000 slides to scan in. Using ScanCafe for example, that would cost over $9,000 if you send it to a service. WikiHow has a tutorial with eight different ways to attack this problem, including using a video camera. You could also adapt a flatbed scanner to scan slides, or a buy a scanner just for slides.
OS X can read files on NTFS hard drives but it can't write to them. Use Macfuse to make OS X capable of writing to NTFS hard drives.
To recover files off a dead iPod, you can try some revival methods. If those don't work, take the hard drive out of the iPod and put it in an enclosure. You'll need an enclosure for 1.8-inch Toshiba Drives, like this one. You could also buy an old iPod off eBay that has a good battery but a bad hard drive, and then transplant the good hard drive into it. Then if the drive is damaged, use some free software to recover the files. My favorites are photorec or PC Inspector.
Looking for a PC alternative to buying a MacBook? Take a look at our 5 Best laptops.
Our caller with the dead Audiovox LCD TV screen probably needs a new TV, but if he's willing to try to fix it himself, here's some guidance on fuse problems that could be helpful.
Holiday Help Desk!
Don't forget to watch the Holiday Help Desk, Friday, November 28 from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT, at CNET TV. You could win an iPod Touch.
E-mail us!
Whether it's a regular text note, or a recorded video question, you can send it to cnetlive@cnet.com. Keep your videos to 15 seconds or less, post them to a Web site like Youtube, and then e-mail us the link.
It's our first episode with video questions. Thanks to Dylan, Mark, and er, ultimatebuster for submitting questions. Keep 'em coming to cnetlive@cnet.com. (No attachments please)
Watch the show on CNET TV.
Things we Crave
SureFlap recognizes your pet via its RFID tag
First Look
Best of the Web
Insider Secret
Your video calls
Mark's questions - Here's a link to Missing Sync. Also, BT had some good news in the show about RIM's developments for
Dylan's question - Here's an article on how to speed up Time Capsule.
Ultimatebuster's question - Brian suggested editing the registry for Sigmatel or purchasing an adapter like this one
Your calls
If your fans on the MacBook are running too much, try smcFanControl or Fan Control 1.2. If you're like Matthew, and your case is turning blue, take it into Apple and ask for a switch.
Here are the best 5 MP3 players as rated by our reviews editors.
Hide users from the welcome screen in Windows XP. Here's the link.
E-mail us!
Whether it's a regular text note, or a recorded video question, you can send it to cnetlive@cnet.com. Keep your videos to 15 seconds or less, post them to a Web site like Youtube and then e-mail us the link.
iTunes: now with 100% more everything.
You know how sometimes you get a huge mound of dishes piled up in the kitchen sink, and then something starts to stink, and it takes a long time to realize where the stink is coming from, but eventually you wash every dish and scrub the whole thing out and it takes maybe a day or two, but you're finally fresh and happy again? OK, well, iTunes is a kitchen sink full of crud, and it stinks. Apple? You need to clean that bad boy out. Trust me. We'll all feel better.
Listeners of Buzz Out Loud will have heard this rant earlier this week, but I'd like to expand on it a bit here, because iTunes is a program that a lot of people use, and it's turning into a bit of a national nightmare. Let's indulge in just a list, off the top of my head, of the tasks this former jukebox software now has to perform:
- It organizes your music and syncs with your iPod
- It's a music player
- It's a video player, which necessitates that it come bundled with QuickTime
- It indexes and delivers both audio and video podcasts
- It's a storefront that sells music, TV shows, movies, audiobooks, iPod games, and music videos
- It rents movies (and handles the requisite DRM-checking and so forth)
- It's cell phone syncing and management software
- It's the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store, handling registration, syncing, and sale of those apps
- It's a veritable set-top box, syncing content with Apple TV for playback on TV
This is one program we're talking about, here. As a result, iTunes 7.7 is a 60.5MB file. Last time I did a fresh install, about a week ago, it took me 30 full minutes to download it, complete a full registration procedure (when all I was after was iPod syncing), get it installed, index my entire universe of music and its entire universe of online content, and get it up and running. When my husband recently bought an iPod Touch, it took him 45 minutes to update iTunes, re-register, and connect the new iPod.
On top of that, with so many functions and so many possibilities for bugs, it seems like there's a new iTunes update every week. And every update is mandatory, no matter how old your iPod or how uninterested you are in access to the iPhone App Store or how unlikely it is that you'll ever download or play a QuickTime video via iTunes. It'll keep bugging you until you upgrade, or maybe stop syncing your two-year-old iPod, and when you finally do upgrade, you'll have to restart, because, I assume, iTunes has about as many functions as an operating system and has its tendrils in almost as many system files.
Yes, you can get by without iTunes if you just want media playback. I use VLC and I won't load iTunes unless I absolutely have to. (I've had the laptop I just installed it on for almost six months, and I only downloaded the darned thing so I could get at Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.) And I know there are plenty of alternative apps I can use to manage my iPod. That's not the point.
The seamless iTunes integration used to be the best thing about the iPod. And until people (bless you, Joss Whedon, but you're one of them) stop doing "iTunes exclusives," I'm going to need it or some other program for downloading those videos. I shouldn't have to live in fear of loading it, because it takes so long to launch, it's so bloated, and it's almost certain to drop an update grenade in my lap. iTunes has become anathema to Apple's simple and elegant persona, and it's time for a fix.
May I suggest, for example, iTunes Lite? Give the iPod masses a slimmed-down version for managing just the device and their music, and give them an online interface for the iTunes Store. Or start carving out features to trim down the program overall. The iPhone does not need to be managed by iTunes. It's a cell phone. Get it a separate sync program that includes the App Store and let it call (pun intended) iTunes for music the way iMovie does. Build a separate media player so we don't have to get QuickTime along with iTunes.
I know Apple thinks it's keeping things simple by offering one program with one-stop shopping. But instead, they're creating bloatware that, increasingly, people don't want to use for any shopping. Apple, get out your scrubbing bubbles. It's time to save iTunes.
A lot of folks were understandably upset when Apple released five new applications for the iPod Touch that currently exist on the iPhone (Mail, Stocks, Notes, Weather, and Maps), and then proceeded to charge $20 for the package. Now, they're even more upset. Apparently, Apple's insistence on selling Touch owners the $20 upgrade is sending some of them into an unending loop of refusal and redirection.
I SAID "No, thanks"!
(Credit: Courtesy of Apple.com)We've been discussing this a lot lately on the Buzz Out Loud podcast. It started when a caller told us that he plugged in his iPod Touch shortly after the new applications were announced, and was presented with a nag screen about upgrading, with no way to say "No, thanks." A few other people reported that they were nagged several times before a "No, thanks" button finally appeared (I guess they got out of the screen by clicking Cancel or something similar). Then people started e-mailing us tales such as this one from a guy named Matt:
"You click 'No, Thanks' and the program brings you back to the upgrade screen with only an 'OK' button. Click the 'OK' button and you're routed to the iTunes store to purchase the apps that should have been on the iPod Touch to begin with. Click back to your iPod, and you're at the upgrade screen with 'OK' again."
Users on the Apple forums (as well as some BOL listeners) report one worse--instead of the infinite loop, they actually get an error when they try to decline the $20 upgrade:
"I click "No Thanks" and an the following message keeps coming up: 'an error occurred, the iTunes store could not process your request.' "
People are unable to sync at all, because they're trapped in the "No, thanks" loop or getting the error--workarounds range from choosing Sync from the File menu to actually unplugging the computer from the Internet so you can sync (apparently the latter was a suggestion from Apple support).
Perhaps cruelest of all, the problem is plaguing users in countries, such as Brazil and Singapore, who can't even purchase the software from the iTunes store. Ouch. So far, there are at least two active threads on Apple's forums about the issue, but no indication of a fix coming anytime soon.
Technical flubs with iTunes are nothing new, but this one does seem particularly cruel to the people who are already feeling a bit shafted by the $20 price tag for, as Matt puts it, applications that should have been on the Touch in the first place. Here's hoping Apple quits kicking sand in their faces long enough to fix this glitch.
Things we Crave
First Look
Download of the Week
Apple announcements
Steve Jobs offers $100 credit to iPhone purchasers.
Best of the Web
Google Earth Flight Simulator.
Your calls
Mitsubishi will show off their Laser TV at CES 2008.
Apple's method to fix the 1418 error on iPods.
1418hell.com helps you cope with the 1418 error.
Knox's iPhone App creator. Doesn't create standalone apps though.
Access your Zune as a hard drive.
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