Recently in Product Problems Category

The launch of the Mac App Store yesterday morning brought with it many things. The long awaited Tweetie 2 (now called Twitter for Mac), and also Angry Birds, the popular iOS and Android game from Rovio.

Well, like any game loving person, the second app I bought from the Mac App Store was Angry Birds. To my dismay, the app wouldn't open. There was an error, where a file was linked incorrectly or something. Well, I made the assumption that there would be an update soon, and sure enough, there was this afternoon. Finally, the app would open. However, to my extreme displeasure, I was presented with the message that my graphics card does not support OpenGL 2.0

Little did I know that I was not the only person displeased with Rovio for doing this. I checked out the angry birds page on the Mac App Store, and saw that the rating had dropped from 5 stars yesterday, to 3 stars today. Rovio has not made any friends with this update.

There are several other games I have downloaded, all of which have run without a problem. The Incident, Chopper 2, and Flight Control HD work just fine. Why can't angry birds?

I suppose the thing that makes me the most angry is that the mac app store has no method for a publisher to post system requirements. What I'd like to see is the app store warn you when you're buying an app that cannot run on your computer, and not allow you to purchase it. That would be an ideal world.

All I really am asking for from Apple and Rovio is either a refund of my $5, or a fix to make the game work on my Mac. For let's face it, I really would rather have a working game than have my $5 back.

All for Now!

For the past few weeks, I've been trying to install the Adobe CSLive Services update for CS5. However, the update refuses to install. Every time I try I get the same error: "Couldn't install because the package was not applicable". What is this, Adobe? Why do you keep notifying me of an update that isn't applicable to my computer but I can't get rid of the icon from my menubar? I was hoping that maybe there'd be a patch for the update that would fix the problem. It's now been countless weeks since the update first showed up and I've seen no updates or changes to the problem. Hopefully a fix comes out soon for it. It's really starting to bug me.

All for Now!

So, as everyone hopefully say in my post yesterday about my tracfone having problems registering itself on the network, I decided that I would get to the bottom of the problem today. I called tech support this morning, was on hold for all of 2 minutes, gave them my information, and was put on hold yet again so that my representative could contact another department. Well, I thought that they would actually be able to fix my phone. But oh no, a few minutes later I was informed that I had to buy a new phone as my phone has a problem. Well i can't say i'm surprised, my phone has had tons of problems. But never network problems. Like not being able to connect. So i guess this means i might be finally switching to ATT some time in the future. After all, I gotta have a phone of some kind. 

Last January, i bought myself a new tracfone. Since then, i haven't really been having problems with the service on that phone except for the occasional call drop or dead zone. Other than that i've been satisfied with their service. However, last night my phone decided that the SIM in the phone was no longer registered with the network. I can't make calls, send texts, anything. Everything just fails. So, thinking that i could get the phone reactivated, i called tracfone and asked what the deal was. I was on the phone with them for maybe 20 minutes when I was notified that the department that can handle my call is not in for work on sundays. Great. So here i sit with a completely non functional phone that i can't add minutes to, send texts from, reactivate, do anything. I will call them back tomorrow and see if i can get my phone reactivated. If not, i probably will be finally making the jump and switching to AT&T. 

As you all know, I was one of the many who went out on Snow Leopard day and installed the system upgrade. So far, there have been two updates, and I am relatively pleased. However, more recently, I discovered a problem that really puts a damper on my Snow Leopard enthusiasm.

After installing Snow Leopard, I installed Adobe Master Collection CS4. Up until now, I haven't really had a reason to use Media Encoder at all. However, when I needed it, it failed on me. On my laptop, Media encoder refuses to boot. I don't know why, but it works fine in Leopard. I've heard about similar problems, but never not starting. I have reported this bug to Adobe, however I am not expecting any updated before the release of the next Creative Suite. Oh well. I guess I'll just have to use Final Cut Express instead of Premiere for a while.

All for Now!

Snow Leopard,Media Encoder,Adobe Media Encoder,Problems,Bugs,Adobe Bugs

So here's your situation:You are working on some video tutorials and find yourself in need of a decent Screen Recording tool. Well, in this post, I'll review 3, and give you a good idea of which one to use.

QuickTime Player X

Price: $29 with Snow Leopard

Almost hidden in the new version of Mac OSX is the function for the new version of the QuickTime player to do Screen recordings. It records the screen videos at full resolution, and can save into almost all fo the QuickTime formats. Pros: Comes with Mac OSX, many exporting formats. Cons: Does not record system or microphone sound.

Jing

Price: Free

Jing is an okay screen recording tool. It, like QuickTime player, does not record sound or system sounds. It does upload your videos to it's website. Pros: Free. Cons: Only saves files as SWFs, leaves it's recording window open in your recordings.

 

  Snapz Pro X

Price: $69 from Ambrosia Software

Snapz Pro is one of the best tools for Screen Recording that I have used in a very long while. It does everything from screenshots to recordings, and it takes in the system and microphone sound. It encodes all of it's videos to QuickTime .mov files. It has teh capability to only take a video of a selection of the screen, rather than the whole thing. This is the best one that I have used out of all of the ones that I have reviewed.

Some of you may be saying, "What about ScreenFlow?" Well, ScreenFlow is good to, however I made an investment in Snapz Pro, and didn't want to spend the $100 on a screen flow license. If anyone would like to contribute a review of ScreenFlow, I'd gladly post it and give you all the internet cookies you can handle.

All for now!

Free Screen Recording Tools,Screen Recording Mac,Screen Recording

Let me start by saying this to everyone who reads my blog.

If you use Movable Type, DO NOT UPGRADE TO LEOPARD SERVER!!!

The reason that I haven't blogged for the past month is due to the fact that Leopard server has more bugs than the first release of Windows Vista. It is missing almost all of the MySQL headers that allow Perl to talk to it. You have to go and download all of the MySQL header files from Apple website. That is a pain.

Once you have all of those installed, you'd think that the DBD::mysql modules required to hook perl up to MySQL would install correctly. Well, they wouldn't. Neither would DBI or any other of the data connection modules for Perl. So, after fighting with this for weeks (this is not an exaggeration. It actually took us weeks to get this to finally be useless) we decided to downgrade back to Tiger server.

After running a few basic commands, our server was back up running again in Tiger. Later on this week, I'll post a detailed instruction on how to get MovableType working on Tiger server with no hitches.

Again, if you know what's good for you, stay away from Leopard Server. Later on this year, we hope to have a working instance of Leopard server. We have another G5 tower, and will attempt to get leopard server working on that. Until we can figure out how to get it working, we'll be staying with Tiger.

All for now!

Well, I have a PowerBook G4 from a few years back. I put leopard on it, an seemed to have no problems. that is, until I tried to do a time machine backup. For a while the backups worked fine. then on one day, they just stopped working. I let it sit for several hours, ad nothing happened. It wouldn't go beyond the "Preparing Backups" phase. So, I stopped backups and deleted the backups off of my backup drive.

This seemed to fix the problem for a while, until it stopped again. I did the same steps, only it took a lot longer to delete this time.

I am at a point now where the time machine backups will not finish. It will get almost done and stop. It actually quits the utility and says that it executed fine, except it is not a complete backup, as far as I can tell. It is not big enough for it to e complete. I tried to delete it, but the trash will not go above 3 items to delete, no matter how long I let it sit there. When I do a secure empty trash, it tallies up about a million items in the trash and starts deleting them. The only problem with this is that it will take about 24 hours to delete, and I don't have that time. So, I guess that I will have to do it over the course of several nights, just letting it sit there.

I really wish I had multiple cores. It would make this whole thing so much easier.

Well, I just have to talk about Doppelganger, but Jonnie Hallman. All it is is a small application that downloads videos from Youtube. It is very similar to Tube TV, but it is only a little window that you drag youtube URL's to. It downloads them to a folder of your choosing, and id written in AIR, so it runs on any platform. I use it, and so should you!

Well, according to Movable Type, we not only need ImageMagick, but we also need PerlMagick. Well, we installed MacPorts to the server and tried to install ImageMagick+Perl. This is supposed to install PerlMagick and ImageMagick, but it didn't. So, we tried to install p5 PerlMagick, which is apparently broken according to the creator. Bummer!