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On Storage, Backups, Announcements and More

Morning all

After a brief conversation with Glyn Dewis last week, I thought it would be a good idea to put together some information/advice on backing up and general data storage strategies. A lot of this advice will be aimed at the independent photographer’s out there using Macs for their business, but equally, much of what I’ll be saying will apply to other home and business users. I’m putting the finishing touches to the first of these today for publication tomorrow, and would like to ask that you share them with as many people as possible. As a long-time support guy, I’ve seen too many people with no idea about backups and storage that have lost all their personal data. While it might not seem that relevant to the average home user who does a bit of email, Internet browsing, word processing etc. try to imagine losing every photo that is on your computer, forever. With a small investment, and very little effort, most users can protect themselves against this, and I’ll show you how tomorrow.

Tomorrow is Announcement day of course, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Apple will be showing off. I expect updated iPads and notebooks (Apple don’t call them laptops by the way – they get too hot to put on your lap and we wouldn’t want any lawsuits would we?), but I have a feeling there may be at least one new device. There’s talk of larger iPads (I can see that happening, but not this time), the iWatch (possible, but I’m not sure Apple are ready to enter this market just yet) and the much talked about TV (I think there’ll be something on this tomorrow, perhaps not the expected […]

New Products Imminent, and Webstore Update

Well, finally after waiting for several weeks, the invites for the next Apple announcement have come out. The press are expecting updates to most of the range (iPad, iPad mini, MacBook Pro, Mac mini) as well as a release date for OS X 10.9 Mavericks, but quite frankly we’ll settle for iPad! The announcement is set for next Tuesday, October 22nd, and we’ll update you on the day with as much information as we can.

Apologies for the lack of updates recently, but we’ve been working hard with clients on projects as well as spending a lot of time developing new features for the Web site. Coming soon, we will be opening up our own webstore, where we’ll be selling a range of products that we recommend to our clients. That’s all going on in the background, and as soon as we’re in a position to open the store with an initial range of products we’ll let you know.

 

iMessage in iOS7 Causing Problems

Since iOS7 came out on the 18th of September, we’ve seen many clients with problems sending iMessage’s. What we’ve noticed is that you may not be aware that iMessage isn’t working, as you don’t seem to get the exclamation mark over the Messages icon like you did in iOS6 (not sure if that’s an issue, or a deliberate change by Apple at this stage). However, if you check in Messages you may see that some sent messages are still “Sending” or have a status of “Message Send Failure”.
There’s a couple of points to note:

Under iOS6, Messages reverted to SMS if the iMessage service was unavailable for whatever reason. Under iOS7, this has been switched off (you can turn it back on in Settings/Messages – Send as SMS) by default.
iMessage has had some minor issues over the past couple of days, but this should only have affected a minority of users.
There may be something else causing this that at this stage Apple are unaware of.

Our experience has been that turning the phone off fully and restarting kicks iMessage back into life (although you will have to go in and manually resend the messages that have failed). However, we have also some users who this procedure has not worked for. The solution for them has been a little more complex. This involves resetting all the network settings on your device, meaning that you will have to re-enter wifi passwords for any wireless networks you wish to join. It does, however, seem to resolve the problem now for those users who send a lot of messages, so use it at your discretion. If you find another solution, please leave a comment! I expect Apple will release an […]

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    How to Continue Using Your iOS Device With A Broken Home Button

How to Continue Using Your iOS Device With A Broken Home Button

It happens to the best of us, but what should you do when your Home button stops working and you can’t get an appointment at an Apple store for a week? Or perhaps you’re weeks away from the end of your phone contract and don’t want to have to spend a chunk of money on a costly hardware repair? Well there is something built into iOS that allows you to use your device (almost) normally without a functioning Home button.

If you go into Settings/General/Accessibility you’ll find a section named Physical & Motor. If you turn on AssistiveTouch, you’ll get a little dot on your screen.This can be dragged to a position on the screen that is most convenient for you.

When you click the dot you’ll be presented with a little menu that offers you a way of clicking the Home button (without actually clicking the Home button). There’s also quick way of doing screenshots and multitasking if you go in the Device section of the menu (which of course also require you to have a working Home button).

What You Should Do About iOS7 Today

At 6pm today, Apple will release iOS7 for those devices that are capable of supporting it. Whilst many people will be eager to download and install it, please read the following before going ahead.
Leave it at least one more day
Typically when major releases become available, the world and his dog will be attempting to download it immediately. Apple’s servers will be incredibly busy, and it’s likely the process will take a couple of hours per device during this initial mad rush. For previous releases, I’ve always been eagerly checking repeatedly on the big day desperate to see the improvements Apple have made. But, after several years of experience, this year I will be waiting till tomorrow. The thinking is that, by tomorrow morning in the UK, the initial rush will be over, and the majority of the US will be asleep, so I’m expecting the servers to be starting to respond normally. In the past, this has reduced the upgrade time (including downloading the new software) to around 30 minutes, a much more realistic period.

That said, I’d be tempted to suggest leaving it a week or more for many end users. iOS7 has been in testing for a few months now, but it’s inevitable that bugs will be found in the coming days that hadn’t been seen in the limited testing the developer community is able to do. Unless you really need to upgrade (and I’d question whether anyone ‘needs to’), it might be prudent to wait until the first updates are released, probably in a week or two, dependent on what bugs or issues are found.
Prepare your device now
When it does come to upgrading, whether its today or in a week or two, one common […]