DjMagra's stuff 'n' stuff

As we all well know, Apple’s iPhone 4 is the current must-have gadget. As a self confessed Apple ‘fan boy’, I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on an iPhone 4 since it was first announced.

As I’m a Telstra Business customer, I have been patiently waiting for Telstra to allow for the iPhone 4 to be distributed amongst it’s business channel. For some reason, they have made the decision to release the phone only to their consumer channel first – and despite my having some pretty good contacts within Telstra itself, I have had to wait to get my hands on it.

I did try to purchase one in the Apple Store last week – but apparently they can only sell to Telstra’s non-business customers so I had no joy there!

So yesterday, as I was wandering around Brisbane CBD with some time to spare, I decided to try calling into the Telstra T-Life store to see if they have any in stock. I know from previous experience that they can in fact sell to business – even if they are likely to screw things up (again, have had that experience).

I was quite pleased and excited to hear that they did in fact have iPhones in stock – only to be cut down seconds later and explained that they are only prepared to sell these to new – and not existing customers!!

I was amazed! Talk about a blatant disregard for existing loyal customers. How many of these existing customers must Telstra be loosing every day who get disgruntled with this response and walk next door to a Vodafone / Optus store and buy from there?

I’m tempted to even look into the legality of this. Telstra are openly discriminating against a particular demographic and refusing to sell them a product that they have in stock. If anyone has an insight into this I would be very interested to hear.

I recently picked myself up a new 15″ MacBook Pro. Beautiful, beautiful machine. One of the pre-requisites that I had when buying this was that I got the High Res 1680 x 1050 screen with it. And oh my, am I glad that I did!

Some people may think that the extra $140 for a few extra pixels is overkill. However, I can assure you that once you start using it, you will agree that it’s not. This screen is so beautiful and such a joy to work with. I now notice that when I move to any other machine, be that my 24″ iMac or Kassie’s identical MacBook Pro (without the high res screen) that I think they look really pixelated and small.

If you are in the market for a new MBP, please, please do yourself the favour and buy this screen.

I’ve been using a new model MacBook Pro quite a bit recently and I have finally figured out what all the hype is about the MacBook Glass Trackpad. There are so many different shortcuts and time saving tips that make this a true joy to work with and really does leave you scratching your head wondering what the hell every other laptop manufacturer out there is doing.

I thought I would share some of the tips I’ve picked up recently as I know that a lot of people aren’t aware of these features.

• One finger is for regular movement of the cursor.
• Two fingers in either an up-down or side-to-side motion functions like the scroll bar allowing for easy navigation within an application, on web pages and in other documents.
• A turning of your fingers rotates objects such as photos while a pinching motion will zoom in or out on the page or object.
• Three fingers swiping side-to-side works like as forward and backward navigation and is just outstanding for web browsing or even navigating around within the Finder.
• A four-finger swipe side to-side brings up the application switcher, (similar to Cmd-Tab).
• Four fingers swiping up clears the screen of all open windows for easy access to the desktop, while a swipe down opens up the Expose view of all open windows.

I wrote the other day about how much I want to get my hands on an iPhone, but, that until the day comes that I can just walk into an Optus store to buy one, without having to sign up for a contract and wait a few weeks on delivery like they’re currently offering, that I was going to wait and see if any other mobile company made a move. I was actually expecting 3 to sign a deal that would be cheaper and better than anything Optus, Telstra or Vodafone could offer.

Today, right from left of field comes the dark horse. Virgin Mobile (who are part of the Optus Group) have announced that they’re going to carry the iPhone with the following plans:

• Customers will be able to bag a 8GB iPhone 3G for $0 upfront if they sign a 24-month contract at $70 per month.

• For the $70 monthly fee, customers will receive $520 worth of calls and text, and 1GB of data download capacity.
• Customers can upgrade the monthly download capacity to 2GB by paying an additional $15 per month.
• 16GB iphone $100/month, $520 calls, 5GB data

Hopefully I’ll have a 16Gb white iPhone from Virgin over the next few days!

I’m starting to run out of patience. I’ve tried about 6 times to buy an iPhone in the Optus store in Brisbane. I’ve tried other stores outside of the city in what I thought would be quieter places, but, still no joy. I even tried the Apple store in Sydney last night to no avail (apparently you have to start queuing at 7am and you might have one by lunchtime there!).

Yes, I could sign myself up for a contract with Optus that would guarantee me a phone when stock came in, but, I’ve decided that until I can just walk into a store and pick one up, I’m going to hold out, in hope that perhaps 3 will announce a deal that they are carrying the iPhone with a data plan that rocks (yes, iPhone data plans in Oz suck!).

The longer it goes by, the harder it is not having one. In theory, given I’ve lived in London since the original iPhone went on sale, I’ve been living in a readily accessable market for a long time without having one, and it sucks! I might just have to bite the bullet this weekend and put my name down for one and wait on that call!!

WOO!! Apple have just rolled out television to iTunes Australia! The news isn’t official yet but, it’s a very promising start. I’m not all that interested in TV shows myself, but, I really can’t wait until the iTunes movie store comes here, it’s going to make life so much easier for me! Roll on my plans to install an Apple TV and setup a whole media centre for myself at home!

I’ve long toyed with the idea of moving over to shoot with RAW images, however, other than a few little tests here and there, I haven’t really seen how I can benefit from the move. Barry has been at me for a long time to make the jump, but, it took me until Sunday, at an Apple Aperture presentation to make up my mind that it’s time for me to make the jump.

The jist of the presentation that made me decide to jump is available in this tutorial on recovering shadows and highlights using Aperture. I toyed around with a few settings last night whilst I had my camera tethered to Aperture, and between White Balance selection and highlight recovery in RAW, I’m now sold!

I’m a huge fan, and a huge user of the wonderful Gmail, which I use as part of Google Apps for my domain. However, I’ve been longing, and I mean longing, for as long as I can remember, for an efficent process to sycn and manage my Gmail contacts on my mac. Recently, SpanningSync have introduced Contacts sync alongside their really neat little Google Calendar Sync application, but, I have yet to try this out. However, it would appear that there is no longer a need. Google have just announced, via their mac blog that they have just introduced Address Book Sync, to go in hand with the latest OSX 10.5.3 update. I’m going to be tidying up my Google Contacts today, and heading home to try this out later on this evening to see how it all goes.

Remember however, if you are going to go do this today, to back up both your Address Book and Gmail contacts first, as it has the potential to go wrong and cause you lots of pain!!

So, a bit like Dublin Bus, you don’t see anything here for ages, then I come out with a whole heap of new posts! I suppose at some stage I should probably come up with a decent post about what I’m up to and how I’m getting on over here in Australia, but, for now, this is what I’ve got.

I’ve just heard about a new Mac application that makes browsing and using my most visited site, flickr a whole new experience. Flickery from Eternal Storms Software allows you browse and use flickr from an iPhoto like interface. It looks very, very cool. Whilst the application is currently only in beta (and is not actually available even for beta download at the moment), it does look exceptionally promising, and something that I could end up spending a lot of time using!