Apple : Apple brings Universal Studios movies to iCloud |
- Apple brings Universal Studios movies to iCloud
- Tutorial: How to get more from Spotlight
- Opinion: Tech constantly evolves - yet so much stays the same
| Apple brings Universal Studios movies to iCloud Posted:  Apple has secured a deal with Universal Studios to allow users to access digital movie purchases via iTunes in the Cloud. Titles like Knocked Up can now be easily re-downloaded across an individual's iOS and iTunes-enabled devices, if the same account is in use. Apple had announced that movies would join music, books and apps as part of the iCloud service during the new iPad 3 launch last month. Spanner in the worksHowever, the plans were undermined by a previous contractual arrangement with HBO, meaning Universal and Fox titles were excluded from Apple's new offering Apple insisted it would work out the details as soon as possible and iTunes users are now reporting the restrictions on Universal movies have been lifted. It is also thought that the company is in negotiations with Fox to ensure titles from all of the major studios are on board. |
| Tutorial: How to get more from Spotlight Posted:  How to get more from SpotlightAs OS X has matured and iOS has entered the equation, it's becoming increasingly clear that Apple's vision of the future of computing aims to ditch much of the baggage of the past. The mouse is on borrowed time, replaced by gestural interfaces that enable you to manipulate content more easily. Also up for the chop is the entire file system, which Apple is slowly edging towards the exit, to be replaced by app-specific file sandboxes and contextual system-wide searches. If we look back at the history of Apple's operating systems, this process began in earnest with Spotlight. In 2005, Mac OS X 10.4 introduced Spotlight, providing a central location for searching your entire Mac and also providing results in an intuitive and grouped manner. Over time, Spotlight has wormed its way through the system. It's now used to power searches in Finder windows, to unearth messages in Mail, and for searches in various other apps. Throughout, the aim is to enable you to find information merely by typing a couple of words into a search field, rather than laboriously picking your way through myriad nested folders. But there are issues with Spotlight. It can be slow, the Finder window interface for setting up searches isn't particularly intuitive, and if you use a cloning app (such as SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner) to regularly make a copy of your data, all the files on your external drive will also show up in Spotlight. It's all too easy to pick the wrong one, launching something on your backup rather than your Mac. We provide some tips for taming Spotlight. We'll look at the initial settings you can define in System Preferences as well as creating custom searches that can be stashed in Finder's sidebar for later use. How to customise Spotlight's settings01. Prune results lists
Launch System Preferences (from the Apple menu) and click Spotlight (under Personal) and then the Search Results tab. If you see document types you don't use or care to have in Spotlight results, uncheck the relevant boxes, in order to streamline the Spotlight menu. 02. Reorder categories
When using the menu bar, Spotlight search results show a 'top result' but other results are grouped by type. Drag categories to reorder them. If you often search for PDFs, drag 'PDF Documents' towards the top. If you launch apps via Spotlight, drag 'Applications' to the top. 03. Adjust key shortcuts
By default, Spotlight offers Command+[Space] for triggering the system-wide Spotlight search from the menu bar, and Option+Command+[Space] for a Finder-window search. Click the checkboxes to disable either shortcut, or use the menus to have the Spotlight shortcuts use function keys. 04. Create custom shortcuts
To use different custom shortcuts for Spotlight, click inside one of the two shortcut fields and press your shortcut. The field should change to reflect your new setting. If you stray from the defaults, ensure you don't use shortcuts that clash with any other application. 05. Block locations or drives
Spotlight indexes all it can. To block it from certain files, folders or drives, drag them into the Privacy tab within the Spotlight pane, or use the + button to add items. This is worth doing for backups; also, adding and removing a drive forces a re-index if Spotlight's gone screwy. 06. Test it out
Use your shortcut (Command+[Space] by default) to bring up Spotlight. Type a word to search for. The list will be filtered as you add more characters. You can use the cursor keys to navigate the list and [Space] to get a Quick Look preview of any selected item. Hit Return to launch. 07. Start a Finder search
Use Option+Command+[Space] (or your alternative shortcut) to bring up a Finder window with a blank Spotlight search. Type your search into the box at the top-right. To narrow further, click the + button and use the menus to choose a criteria, such as 'Last opened date is today'. 08. Save a Spotlight search
To store a search for later, click Save and give it a name. By default, saved searches are stored in /Library/Saved Searches, but you can save them anywhere. For very quick access, check Add To Sidebar and you can access your search from any Finder window sidebar. |
| Opinion: Tech constantly evolves - yet so much stays the same Posted:  Change, but so much stays the sameSometimes it strikes me how remarkable it is that technology manages to move so fast, and yet in some ways stay exactly the same. I came across this paradox only last week, when I invested many hours programming with a protocol that's nearly 30 years old for a piece of DIY hardware that encapsulates both old technology and new, in a language that's very modern. I was writing an editor for a SID-chip synthesizer that uses MIDI to talk to the computer. MIDI, the protocol that many digital musical instruments use to communicate with each other and your PC, is absolutely ancient. It started life in the late 1970s, and the 1.0 specification was first published back in 1983. Even the latest hardware synthesizers sport two of MIDI's distinctive five-pin DIN ports, one for input and another for output, and with just a couple of fat cables, you could send note data, timing information, custom information and control signals directly over its 31.25kb/s serial connection. It's slow and cumbersome, but despite the passing of a whole human generation, nothing has ever quite managed to replace it. Even when there's no visible sign of MIDI from the outside and digital musical instruments are capable of generating high quality polyphonic sound from low power ARM CPUs, there's a good chance MIDI is still there, busily humming away to itself somewhere beneath the surface. And so I found myself digging into binary mathematics, splitting bytes into nibbles and casting significant bits as I tried to write an application to send data to and from an iPad via a synthesizer. I was even using a modern language to encapsulate these MIDI commands, which just made things worse. In between worrying about objects and scope, I had to accommodate memory offsets for system exclusive data, timing issues for messages sent in parallel and data loss during transmission - all problems you'd expect from an earlier generation of digital computing, not a device at the vanguard of the post-PC revolution. The trusty old MIDI protocol is still around for one very important reason: it works. It might not be the best option after being shrink-wrapped into RTP and sent down a USB cable. It might be too restrictive and only work with cables of a certain length. But it's precisely those limitations that make it good at doing the job it was designed to do, and it has proved this point by remaining relevant while the world around it has completely changed. Moving on for the sake of itThe point I'm getting to here is that operating system developers shouldn't be too eager to throw those aspects of their usability out in the rush to make everything look 'touchy'. This is happening with Linux, with both the Gnome and Unity desktops, and Windows 8 looks to be taking plenty of inspiration from touch design. OS X is also likely to incorporate more and more iOS features as time goes on, although I think the gesture support from the Magic Trackpad is quite neat. Thinking different is a good thing, but being objective is more important. Especially with Linux, those old paradigms have lasted not because they looked brilliant, or because they gave the user all the features they wanted. They've lasted because they simply worked. That's why so many people continue to use Vim and Emacs, staring at monochrome screens and crib sheets of keyboard shortcuts. Yet they are two text editors that should utterly confound a generation that thinks in 3D and DPI. MIDI could be replaced by the Open Sound Control protocol (OSC). It's immensely flexible, fun to work with, and solves nearly all of the problems I mentioned earlier. But this flexibility also makes it difficult to work with, especially for musicians. They don't care how difficult MIDI might be to program behind the scenes - they only care that when they connect a MIDI source to a MIDI destination, things happen. You can't easily do that with OSC, and many traditional desktop users can't easily do the equivalent desktop tasks with their new Unity or Gnome Shell desktops. That certainly doesn't mean they're wrong in what they are trying to do - Mint's awesome Cinnamon update to Gnome is a great example of this compromise, and has the potential to catapult this Linux distribution into the stratosphere because it appeases so many people unhappy with a vanilla Gnome. It just means desktops shouldn't be making their brave new ideas the default option. It's like forcing synthesizer manufacturers to only support OSC. Instead, new technology should try to convert people from the old way to the new way, carefully convincing them of the advantages, so that when they go back to MIDI or Gnome 2.x, or Windows XP, or mice and keyboards, they wonder how they were ever able to use them. Until that happens, we're all stuck hacking away at old technology embedded within the new. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from TechRadar: All latest Apple news feeds To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment