MacWorld has an article outlining the new camera features right here.

The biggest feature in iOS 5 is iCloud which takes over syncing duties from MobileMe and it effectively frees you from syncing your devices to get contact, calendar, photos and other updates. From my experience, it still requires a sync (at least at this point) to move music, videos and podcasts back and forth. I like keeping these in a central repository on my iMac, but we’ll see what happens after Apple gets this stuff moved to the cloud as well.

Because of iCloud, you have to update all your Macs and PCs. Updating your Macs requires an upgrade to Mac OS X 7.2 Lion. Snow Leopard is right out. You need to upgrade anyway unless you have some software that just isn’t compatible. PCs require Vista or better (what isnt’?) and the iCloud control panel from Apple. Everyone must upgrade iTunes to 10.5 or you won’t be asked if you want to upgrade. So all told for Macs, that’s about a 2 GB download per computer just to get ready.

So now you’ve upgraded your computers and you’re ready to update your devices. iTunes is running, you plug in your first device and it asks you to upgrade. You click OK. iOS 5 gets downloaded (700+MB) It backs up your device successfully it query’s Apple’s servers and because it’s the first day, it waits and waits and waits. But finally you get a connection. In my case and that of many others, we got an error saying that our device couldn’t be updated and to try again later.

Fortunately, you don’t panic. You try again later. It fails again later. But after some long suffering (God’s all about building your character, you know), the update happens, a restore takes place and then all of your apps, music and videos get reinstalled. If you take the waiting times out, the update took about an hour.

I got everything back intact. After a day with the stuff, this is a marvelous upgrade. The movable keyboard on the iPad that makes the keys smaller and closer to your thumbs is a dream come true! Location based reminders are awesome. I only have an iPhone 4 (poor pitiful me so I haven’t tried Siri, Apple’s speech recognition software, but the demos I’ve seen from impartial people look like something out of the 21st century.

I’ll add more in the coming days, but I’d love to know your thoughts and your experiences so drop me a line.

10/14/11

MacWorld is reporting that Apple has done something on their end to fix the installation woes a lot of us have been having. Check it out here.

But the thing that’s unnerving is that they now display “Top Stories” in your Home page. They decide what a top story is based on a contributor’s relationship to you, (I noticed that my brand new posting got top billing so “self” is a prime relationship according to them. So much for being first in the kingdom of heaven.) and how many people comment or like a particular posting.

I have real friends on Facebook. I care about them and I don’t want the service to decide how interested I should be in what they have to say. Facebook has time and again made changes where they assumed that they knew best on what I want to see or how private I want my information to be and it has always been the reverse of what I want and therefore it is always contrary to good sense. I kid! I kid!

Google+ and Twitter are looking better all the time.

It’s good to blog again. Stay tuned for more if you like.

Addendum:

Facebook included a new feature to help with what you may really want to see. It’s a subscribe button. The catch is, it’s on each of the pages of people you are friends with or fans of. So now you have to go to all of your friends to make individual changes. Before, if one of the pages you followed annoyed you, you could block that material as wanted which is far more useful. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it!

So, yesterday afternoon, it was necessary for me to reformat my system drive. So I did this from the install disc (you have to choose Disk Utilities from the Tools menu of the Installer) and installed a fresh copy of Snow Leopard. When that booted up, it asked me if I was coming from another Mac and it gave me four options, one of them being a Time Machine backup on another volume (my connected external hard drive). I merely selected by backups and let it churn away. Since all of my programs were backed up as well, when it was done, I had a fresh new Mac exactly with everything intact and running just like it was the night before. Three easy steps and that was it while I watched a movie in the other room.

Try that with Windows 7! This would have easily taken a week or more as you reinstalled applications, searched for license codes and entered them in. Windows may be catching up to the Mac with user interface issues, but it is still built on an ancient foundation of mud and straw.

The confusion that drive letters cause help keep IT support people employed. Please, for our sakes, don’t get a Mac! The economy would crash due to massive unemployment.

It’s also good that you can only have 26 drives attached to a PC. Having too much choice and flexibility like Macs have has been shown to accelerate productivity among former Solitaire players.

Internet Explorer 8 was a disappointment to me. I don’t browse as much in Windows as I do with the Mac, but one thing I could not put up with was the inability to turn off searching from the address bar, even though there is a seperate search bar in IE8. IE7 and previous versions had this feature. Nothing is so frustrating as typing in a local IP address of something that may or may not be up in the address bar and having MSN Live search in vain for 192.168.1.xxx. Dumb! Typical Microsoft. They was probably some revenue involved there. Computer user, Microsoft must really hate you.

It seems like the most noticable change might be a speed increase for java enabled pages. A complete list of changes can be found here. So check it out tomorrow at firefox.com!

One is The Right Stuff. I’ve owned every home video release of this classic movie. There was the pan and scan version on VHS. Then they released a widescreen version on tape. The second DVD I ever bought was a flipper where you had to flip the disk in the middle to finish it. Finally a two-disk version came out in dual layer format that let you watch it straight through except for the bathroom break for those who failed to plan ahead for this nearly 3 1/2 hour epic.

But for blu-ray, I haven’t heard a single peep on the web sites I frequent. I did drop my DVD into my blu-ray player and it does look very good. But what detail am I missing? What authentic textures of the 40′s and 50′s are being ignored in the mere 480 lines that bad ol’ DVD offers? I have to know!!! I even went to amazon.com where you can usually find a popular unreleased title that you can sign up to be notified about, but it doesn’t exist for this title.

Meanwhile, wack-a-doodle titles like Starman and Blue Thunder are being released this week from that decade. I tell ya, if I ruled the world…

The first six Star Trek movies are on sale at amazon.com for $70 and I’m holding back. I have most of the DVDs, but after seeing the 2009 version, I’m loathe to spend money on what seems to me to be less than excellent material. We’ll see. It is classic sci-fi.

I’ve wired my house for gigabit ethernet. I’ve found this to be more than four times faster than even wireless n. I was able to move a multi-gigabyte file from one Mac to another in less than a minute at roughly 400 Mb/s (megabits per second: a megabit is 1 million bits. 8 bits make a byte. Megabytes and gigabytes are abbreviated with a capital B thus: MB & GB. A byte is what it takes to represent one character or in a computer.)

I do hope that someday, WiFi will surpass wired networks in speed. Cables and wires are the bane of our technological existence. But this bit of news is disappointing to that end.