The Spam Thread!

[RAMChYLD]

Hungry.

[RAMChYLD]

And so it transpires. Apple may not be putting out iOS6 for the first gen iPad after all The Register previously reported that it would be available for first gen iPads, and there was rumors of a Developer Preview released. Something made Apple change their mind

This sucks. I can't afford a new iPad. But I must For The Love Of Spot.

Difficult

---
Look at this pad,
It is so neat,
I got it 'cause,
There's a Spot title for it
You'd think I'm so leet
But not rest of the street

Screens that are big, Screens that are small,
Toy screens that don't do no nothing at all
Toy piles that touches the sky
Reckon's ten feet high

I got amps that go right up to 20
I've got gadgets and gizmos galore
You want processing power? I've got plenty
But who cares, no big deal, I want more...

I wanna be where there's Arthur on
I wanna watch Humf 20 times a day
Where I can enter a Spot contest and, you know, win

I wanna be able to buy my stuff
By just walking into a big huge toy store
Save me a ton on those, what are they again? Right, VPost fees.

Down where they walk
Down where they run
Down where kangaroos bask in the sun
Careless and free, wish I could be
Part of that world

Wish I could get on a kiddie ride
Without bein' chased off,
Where I could ride Clifford without getting arrested

Where I could play out in the park
And have a nice big picnic for one
Where I could have fun
And people won't care
If I eat pork

I wanna watch the shows I have lost
I wanna see my dear Caillou again
I wanna travel with Madeline just like before

Why won't the gods
Give me a break
Why is my life all give and no take
I wanna be, careless and free,
Part of that world

[cpd2009]

And so it transpires. Apple may not be putting out iOS6 for the first gen iPad after all The Register previously reported that it would be available for first gen iPads, and there was rumors of a Developer Preview released. Something made Apple change their mind

This sucks. I can't afford a new iPad. But I must For The Love Of Spot.

Difficult

It's a shame that Apple tries to force people into upgrades by picking and choosing what older hardware that their new OS'es run on. With Mountain Lion, the old Macbooks from 2006 or 2007 that were upgradeable to Lion can't run Mountain Lion.

Even though I do love Lilly, I sometimes think about whether or not I should have gone for a Windows Desktop PC instead. She is only close to one year old, and thus, she can run Mountain Lion. But what about the future? Will Apple pull the rug out of MacMini mid-2011 users with future OS ugprades in two or three years from now? The original iPad was released just two years ago, and already it seems that Apple is intent on letting it rot away without support as they seem to introduce newer upgraded models every single year.

Look at Safari 6, the newest version of the Apple browser. It came with Mountain Lion, but Lion users were able to get an update to the new version. That is where it ends. Snow Leopard users don't get Safari 6 at all. Neither do Windows users.

But then, I can't drop Lilly for a Windows desktop because I already invested in quite a lot of App Store software, and if I just dropped Mac OSX completely, there goes my investment. I also got two other Windows computers to boot, so a third one would seem unnecessary and redundant. Im even having some trouble with what I want to use Wendell for.



But, to the point at hand...

How slow has Eva become though? I recall that last time we talked about it in the chat, apps were constantly crashing and there was general slowness. I think you tried a restore through iTunes and that seemed to fix some things. Has the slowness and app crashes returned?

I think that if the app crashes and slowness aren't too bad, perhaps you can just keep Eva and stick with a first gen iPad.

[cpd2009]

Great...

The latest update for iMovie killed DivX AVI support.

I tried updating to the latest version of the DivX codec to see if that would help, but no dice.

I also thought that iMovie may have been bumped to 64bit, but nope. Still 32bit, which means that it should work with the 32bit DivX codec as well.


Now I have no real way of editing my videos with Lilly. If Apple really did block out DivX....

...it may push me further into making Lilly a full-on Windows PC, or turning Lilly into some sort of media hub and getting a Windows Desktop to replace her. That would mean I would have to say bye to Wendell.

Decisions. Decisions. Decisions.

[RAMChYLD]

How slow has Eva become though? I recall that last time we talked about it in the chat, apps were constantly crashing and there was general slowness. I think you tried a restore through iTunes and that seemed to fix some things. Has the slowness and app crashes returned?

I think that if the app crashes and slowness aren't too bad, perhaps you can just keep Eva and stick with a first gen iPad.

Very, very slow. To the point where the animation isn't fluid anymore.

Yes, the slowness and crashes has returned.

And well, no, I can't afford to stick with iOS 5. I've seen a handful of apps drop support for iOS 4 before my very eyes (Puffin being one of them if I recall correctly). This means that by the same time next year, all the existing apps I have for Eva would've dropped support for iOS 5 and will no longer be installable on Eva.

Provide a repository of the last version working for the iPad? No dice. Apple prefers that you pay them for a new shiny device than they paying for more server space to host multiple versions of an app.

And before you bring up Android, Google is just as bad. I was suddenly unable to install Flash 10 on my HTC-AT&T Status/HTC ChaCha because apparently, Adobe dropped Gingerbread support with the release of Version 11. Heck, a handful of apps that was previously compatible with the ChaCha no longer installs either.

[Stella Grapes]

My Mac's screen is continually blacking out, unstably depending on the angles it is set at.

The light is dying, isn't it?

My Husband: "I know what the problems with your Mac come down to. Well, your Mac sucks - in very simple ways! For four and a half years, it has failed to read even the simplest discs I've given it!"

Good girl, Amelia MacBook. You're so hilariously stubborn. :lol:

[cpd2009]

My Mac's screen is continually blacking out, unstably depending on the angles it is set at.

The light is dying, isn't it?

My Husband: "I know what the problems with your Mac come down to. Well, your Mac sucks - in very simple ways! For four and a half years, it has failed to read even the simplest discs I've given it!"

Good girl, Amelia MacBook. You're so hilariously stubborn. :lol:

Well, I think there is something wrong with the cable that connects your MacBook's display to the motherboard, such as the cable becoming loose or worn with all those years of opening and closing the lid. Because of this, the display's backlight flickers when the display panel is moved, causing the screen to "black out" like you say it is.

As for the solution, the only way to solve it is to take it to your local Apple store and see if they can either repair or replace the internal cable that is causing this issue. Since the MacBook is old though, I'm not entirely sure how much it will cost to have the cable repaired.

[RAMChYLD]

Well, Wade's right. The cable connecting your Macbook's mainboard to the backlight has worn out. I've seen this happen to various laptops, the latest being an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad R400. So Apple isn't alone on this.

And yeah, the only way to fix it is to have that cable replaced. And to do so you need to take it to an Apple Store.

---

Calling it a night. I've made major progress in my iOS app, though I still have a long way to go, and even then that's just the add screen. The list all, search and edit/delete screen still needs to be worked on.

Unlike many developers who're jumping ship on the iOS 4 platform, I'm maintaining iOS 4 support for this app to ensure maximum compatibility. This means foregoing the easy way of programming like the use of storyboards (which would have saved me two weeks where developing the app is concerned since TabViews and Screen switching is handled automatically). But sometimes you need to do what you believe in, including taking the low road and sacrificing ease of development for quality.

[cpd2009]

Very, very slow. To the point where the animation isn't fluid anymore.

Yes, the slowness and crashes has returned.

And well, no, I can't afford to stick with iOS 5. I've seen a handful of apps drop support for iOS 4 before my very eyes (Puffin being one of them if I recall correctly). This means that by the same time next year, all the existing apps I have for Eva would've dropped support for iOS 5 and will no longer be installable on Eva.

Provide a repository of the last version working for the iPad? No dice. Apple prefers that you pay them for a new shiny device than they paying for more server space to host multiple versions of an app.

And before you bring up Android, Google is just as bad. I was suddenly unable to install Flash 10 on my HTC-AT&T Status/HTC ChaCha because apparently, Adobe dropped Gingerbread support with the release of Version 11. Heck, a handful of apps that was previously compatible with the ChaCha no longer installs either.

Well, all the apps you got for Eva will drop iOS5 support at one point, but I doubt ever developer will drop it just within a year. Maybe two or three years before they all jump ship to iOS6. It just seems too early for them to drop iOS5 support since not everyone will shell out more $$$ for a newer iPad, but then again, that seems to be Apple's revenue model....

I read on the Apple Discussion Boards that performance may increase if you disable iCloud and notifications on Eva if you haven't already. Some people claim to get back the performance that went missing when iOS5 came out, while others claim they didn't do a thing to increase performance. If you did disable iCloud and notifications on Eva, then I can see it didn't work at all.

As for Android...The Spot books aren't available for it yet. They should have came up with an Android version too since Google Play has the larger market share. The BabyFirst Apps are available on the Amazon AppStore, but why did they have to limit the Amazon AppStore to US customers? It's unfair.

So if it weren't for Spot and the BabyFirst apps, I would have suggested going for an Android Tablet. But it seems that many Android devices are limited to just the version that you get preinstalled if you choose not to root the phone or tablet. No official updates ever get released it seems. There are some exceptions such as the Toshiba tablets eventually getting ICS. IIRC, HTC locked down the bootloader on your phone, so that means you can't root it easily.

Last time I checked, all my apps on my old tablet (which runs 2.3 Gingerbread) still ran fine. I need to check again to make sure.

At this point, all I can say is to do another clean factory restore. Other than that, I guess the only thing to do is go for the costly upgrade.

[cpd2009]

Keeping up with me and Davids posts, I need to say this....and I need suggestions. This post may get quite long, so get some popcorn.

Lilly, as she is right now, is a rather good computer. Not great, I'll get into that in a minute. Her purpose was to replace Jasper as the desktop computer, and to provide an ample platform to edit videos and create my YouTube Poop series. iMovie is a wonderful piece of video editing software, and it's above and beyond Windows Movie Maker. When I got her last September, I was excited, and I was glad to finally break free from the performance bottleneck that plagued Jasper. It also fulfilled my dream of Lilly coming to fruition. For a couple years before I ordered her from Apple, I was planning on her, eventually settling on a Mac Mini. She was my main go-to computer, and helped me realize how underperforming Wendell was.

Here is where I think Lilly isn't great....
While Lilly is indeed fast, at times, she still seems to run into random slowdowns, even after the 8gb RAM upgrade I gave her. Sometimes while browsing the web in Safari, I get the little spinning beach ball after using it for awhile, or after I wake Lilly up from sleep. When that happens, Safari can take upwards to 30 seconds to fully launch and be useable. I also get random program crashes too for no reason, mainly with Preview, which tends to crash when you simply browse through images. Again with Safari, reopening a recently closed tab with Command-Z causes a crash. Hardly any other program on Lilly tends to crash at all, like games or Vox, the music player.

iMovie isn't perfect either. My YouTube Poop videos can get rather complex with the effects and clip setup, and videos longer than 10 minutes sometimes have trouble exporting, and all the errors that come up seem to indicate insufficient RAM, even though I have 8gb RAM! I talked about this with David, and he thought that iMovie may be limited to 4gb RAM because iMovie is still a 32bit application. I haven't tested this theory out yet. And with the latest iMovie update, it somehow killed all support for the DivX codec. QuickTime X still plays AVI files fine, so what happened, iMovie? My encoding program, as it is, only outputs to AVI, although I have found a newer program from the same person that can make MP4 files that can be used in iMovie. I may look into that....if I keep Lilly.

Yeah...I have a small thought about cleaning up Lilly, and selling her to a Mac Store. For one, ever since I got Greta, I have been using her more for my computing needs while Lilly tends to sit idle or play music, or when editing a movie in iMovie. Secondly, I have been getting rather bothered by Apple's planned obsolescence things. It seems that Apple is throwing the first-gen iPad under a bus and leaving them out of iOS6, and app developers are beginning to drop support for iOS4 as it stands. The iOS5 upgrade only made his iPad slow, very slow, and he's not alone. I sense that Apple is crippling the older iPads to essentially force the user to shell out more cash to get "the new iPad". As I stated earlier, will Apple do the same to Lilly in the next year or two? Apple seems to upgrade their hardware very frequently now, and as a result, their latest OS upgrades like "Mountain Lion" leave out hardware that is only about four or five years old, and only focusing on hardware that has been released in the past three years. And on the software side, they can only upgrade to a certain version before Apple cuts them off, like with Safari 6. In comparison, a computer from 2007 that has at least 4gb RAM, a decent graphic card, and a fast enough C2D can easily run Windows 7.

I think Mac OSX in general is a great operating system and has excellent software to boot, but still....I'm bothered by Apple's planned obsolescence. I spent nearly $700 to purchase Lilly last year, and along with it, I got about two dozen apps from the App Store, along with an $80 license for Parallels Desktop. If I were to sell off Lilly now, there go my AppStore purchases and a Parallels license that I would no longer use and I doubt those licenses can be transferred to a new owner. Below are my scenarios I could consider....

* The first option is that I keep Lilly as is. I would regulate her as a secondary computer, and use it for video editing and music playback, and for web browsing if Greta ends up busy for some reason. I would also work around iMovie's AVI lockout, and I may have found a way already...Greta comes with CyberLink MediaEspresso, and it can easily convert my AVI files to MP4s.

* The second option is to turn Lilly into a Windows-only Mac Mini with Boot Camp. She would still be able to edit videos, play music, and be a secondary web browsing computer, but with Windows based equivalents, and would still be a secondary computer system. Wendell would end up being sold off, or given to my sister who I have been wanting to give her a new computer for a few years now.

* Third option is to sell Lilly and replace her with an All-In-One Windows PC. The All-in-One would be like option two in terms of use. Wendell would end up being sold off or given away here too.

* The most interesting option is the fourth one....Give all video editing capabilities to Greta, have Wendell become the secondary computer system, and turn Lilly into a home entertainment center thingy. Lilly would store all my movies and DVDs in digital formats, and I would use either Windows Media Center or a third party media program to play back media easily.

Lilly is a good computer, and even though she doesn't perform too well at times, I still love her a bit. But I don't really like where Apple is going with this planned obsolescence stuff. And Greta is getting all the attention now. I would love to keep her too, but if I end up selling her, I lose my investment.

Sorry if this post is long and rambling a bit, but I'm sort of depressed about this at the moment, being faced with a difficult decision.