After this post I’ll be switching to a weekly format as my explorations wind down (or become less public at any rate).
- Airdrop is really interesting. On my iPad I turned it on, then on the iMac I searched for Airdrop in Spotlight. The first result was the Extensions panel as part of System Preferences, which didn’t help. Then I remembered that Airdrop was on the left Favourites panel in Finder. Sure enough, there was my iPad, and it was ridiculously easy to transfer a few JPEGs and MP4 files. So fast, and so, so much better than what I have to do on my Windows machine with a cable and iTunes. This is a very tangible example of how Apple’s ecosystem works better the more Apple stuff you have. They could of course enable iTunes to act as a Airdrop bridge on Windows, but they won’t.
- I transferred a .MTS file (a type of video file) over to the iPad, and got this interesting prompt (above) saying I needed an app from the app store to open it, or I could put the file in iCloud. I selected the app option, and I’ve been staring at the app store loading for over a minute. I don’t think it worked. Interestingly, my iMac said that my iPad “declined my request.” I tried again twice more, and the “Get App” button never worked. Looks like I’ll just use Handbrake to transcode to MP4 to go this route. It would be slick if Apple did a transcode to supported formats when you did the Airdrop…
- In an attempt to solve a multi-year problem with static audio coming from my Roku 3 when we use the headset jack in the remote (it’s a long story), I’ve bought a pair of Bluetooth headphones. I paired them with the iMac easily, and the impressive part was that I hit play on Google Play Music and it just worked. I thought for sure I’d have to go into the audio settings and change the output for the audio, but I didn’t. That’s slick.
- So the keyboard used to allow me to control Google Play Music, but now when I’m in Chrome, listening to music, and I hit the Play/Pause button, iTunes opens. Hmm. I poked around the Keyboard Preferences settings and I don’t even see the media control keys mentioned. I’ve since rebooted and now the Play/Pause button no longer triggers iTunes. Must have been a temporary thing.
- I had to look up this support page to understand the keyboard shortcuts. How would anyone know that ⌥ meant the option key? Why doesn’t Apple put it on the keyboard? They put the icon for the Command button…
- And speaking of keyboard shortcuts, that keyboard icon above with the circle and the arrow pointing to the upper-left…it “feels” like it’s a power button, but it’s nowhere on my keyboard. This Apple article references a power button, but unless I’m blind my keyboard doesn’t have one. Did Apple keyboards used to have this key?
I wanted to put a logo in the movie, so I poked around and it wasn’t immediately obvious how to do it. I did a quick search and found this January 2015 video where she’s using iMovie 10.0.5. I don’t have the button she references to activate picture in picture. I searched through every option – no dice. Another search, and I find this article from July 2015, only a few months old. It references iMovie Advanced Tools, which it says are in iMovie Preference. Only the preferences screen I see is completely different from the screenshot in this article. Did Apple overhaul iMovie 10.1 in a big way? Anyway, I spent a bit longer and found it’s under Video Overlay Settings > Picture in Picture. Once I set it, the end result was perfect. Talk about a long way to go to get the answer though!- After doing this logo test, I hit Command+Q to exit iMovie…and it hung. Several minutes later, it’s still hung. I had to Force Quit it. You know, given the fact that wanting great video editing software was a driving factor for me to try a Mac, the instability in the app is pretty disappointing. I hope that my ratio of projects to problems changes over the coming months…
New to this series? Start the journey with day one, or go back further to why I wanted to buy a Mac in the first place. Here’s how my third week went.