If you are like me and upgraded your iPhone 3G to the supported iOS4 when offered, you’re probably suffering the June of your discontent.

iOS4 while fine on the iPod Touch 3rd gen and the iPhone 3Gs is a disaster on the 3G for many users.  Lots of things are blamed, too many apps, use of the Exchange connector yada yada yada.

All I know is that my device which was slow but functional became basically useless after I “upgraded”.  So I looked for ways to downgrade.  The process I followed was using a Macintosh and the iPhone but I believe it can be done if your primary OS is Windows, but I have not tried that so if you do, best of luck with that.

After lots of searching, and ZERO help from Apple, I found this article on Lifehacker.  I don’t propose that there are not others, but I used this one because it was easy to follow and got me where I wanted to be.  Mostly, but more on that later.

So first step is to go to the Lifehacker article and read it.  Seriously read it all the way through.  Then print it off.  Then go to the link provided in the article and download Recboot (Mac link) because YOU’RE GOING TO NEED IT.

Here’s the one other piece that you will have recognized if you did as suggested and read the Lifehacker article before starting, specifically the last paragraph where it tells you that you will need a 3.X backup to get your world back without starting fresh.  Here’s the joyful surprise.

Apple in their wisdom to “help” you (into a migraine) has deleted all your old backups once you have upgraded to iOS4.  If iOS4 actually worked on the 3G this would be ok, but since it doesn’t you can now say ratzenfratzen%#(()@^*@(**(!!!!!

Fortunately you have a Time Machine backup, or other backup where you can easily recover a directory structure from the Library.  If you don’t have a backup, you can still revert your iPhone to 3.1.3 but you will be setting it up as a new device.  But since you’re very smart and have a Time Machine backup, pop into Time Machine and navigate to your_main_drive_HD:Users:username:Library:Application Support:MobileSync:Backup or use ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup in the Go To Folder finder command.  As you will recall the ~ means your username.

Now look carefully at the longnamed folders and select the ones that are closest to the date of when you did the iOS4 update but PRIOR.  Select the folders you want, using Command-Click for multiples and then select Restore.  This will restore the old backups to the right place.  You may get a message saying a newer folder exists do you want to overwrite?  If any backups have been done since you updated to iOS4 you will see this message and you do want to overwrite.  Remember if you have multiple devices syncing to iTunes, the folder naming conventions don’t make it easy to figure out which device which folder applies to so when you do the restore, you may be overwriting a backup for an iPod, an iPod Touch or an iPad.  This is where useful naming would have helped but Apple doesn’t provide it so you’ll have to tough it out.  I suggest that as soon as you get your iPhone restored you sync and backup all your other devices just to be safe.

Anyway, back to the show.  If you’ve done the restore properly and BEFORE running through the process to downgrade, when you get to Step 4 in the Lifehacker article, you’ll be able to select to restore from backup.  You will see all the backups available to iTunes in the drop down, so select the iPhone 3G backup with the date you just restored and click continue.  Your iPhone settings will be restored.

Slow down a second there friends, because you are not done.  You’ve downgraded and you’ve restored your settings.  Now go watch TV or read a couple of chapters because iTunes now needs to put the content specified by the settings back on the iPhone.  This will take as long as it takes depending upon how much stuff you had specified to be synced in the settings.

I would suggest you let the restore process work it’s way through before you make changes such as adding or deleting music, podcasts, TV shows or Movies.  Keep it simple.  Also remember that if you had set up iBook syncing when iOS4 was installed that setting is now hosed because iBooks needs iOS4.  Of course I live in Canada and the only thing on the iBooks store up here is the same content I’ve been able to download for years from Project Gutenburg, so iBooks at least to me is a complete waste of time.

When all is done, you should have your iPhone back to normal with the 3.1.3 OS.  Sync it up to current, make sure your mail and calendar work and you’re back in the game.

There’s lots of speculation about whether Apple will fix iOS4 to work properly on the iPhone 3G.  I have always enjoyed my Apple products, but I also believe that Apple is a business that has turned planned obsolescence into an art form.  Compared to the 3Gs, the 3G is very slow, and with iOS 4 being designed for the A4 chipset in the iPhone 4, my guess is that iOS4 is always going to suck hard on the iPhone 3G.  I should have waited to see the impact of the upgrade so I did not have to go through this time wasting effort, hopefully if you jumped too, this will help save you a lot of time.  If you have to have the functions in iOS4, then better to buy an iPhone 4 or a 3Gs and understand that in two versions whatever you have will be useless again.  And yes, I believe that that sucks hard event was well known at Apple and is a design point to get iPhone users to upgrade.  You can certainly choose to believe that Apple would never do this to a customer, and that’s fair.  If you do believe that, I have some wonderful vacation property for sale completely surrounded by water.

US carriers tend to run 24 month terms that align with the Apple obsolescence plan.  Canadian carriers are bloodsuckers and the 36 month terms are customer hostile, so expect to take a bath every couple of years.  Apple Canada has announced that the Apple Store will sell unlocked iPhone 4 units that won’t be bound to a carrier and whenever the devices show up in Canada I will go that route instead of looking at the subsidized price as a saving at the price of being shackled to the carrier.  You should do what suits you best.

It may have happened to you that over time you have run out of space on your Time Machine volume, but did not want to lost the older backups it contained.  Or you’ve received one of the Time Machine errors that it can no longer back up to your Time Machine volume and all the fixes focus on you erasing the volume and starting over, and this option doesn’t fill you with joy.  With full credit to the staff at MacWorld, here’s a great tip.

Connect your older Time Machine volume to your Mac by whichever connectivity suits the volume and your Mac.  Then without disconnecting your current Time Machine, Option Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar.  If the icon isn’t there, you can make it visible in the Time Machine pane in System Preferences.  When you option click, you’ll get the option you see in the graphic above, to Browse Other Time Machine Disks.  Select it and point to the older volume.  Now you’ll be able to go even further back in time to retrieve that critical file.

There are a lot of these option click options in Snow Leopard for menu bar icons, this one happens to be really useful.

Warning! If your iPhone is a 3G give serious thought to this upgrade as a substantial number of users have found the upgrade to more disaster than benefit. Complaints abound about slow performance and app reliability, especially around mail and calendars. My experience was so bad I’ve gone back to iPhone OS 3.1.3 on my own 3G. Users of the iPod Touch third gen and users of the iPhone 3GS have reported extremely positive experiences.

But the point of this post relates to the 3G, so unless you want your iPhone to become a beautiful rock, don’t upgrade.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Five days in and I have to say that the upgrade to 10.6.4 has been pretty darn seamless. I upgraded the MBP 17, the MBAir, K’s MBP 13, D’s MB 13, the Mac Pro octal and the little Dell Hackintosh. Every one when completely smoothly using software update except for the Dell which uses the combo updater and the good graces of Meklort’s tools.

I love the new reader function in Safari and the extension capability having installed the adblock and instapaper extensions. I was also glad to see that ClickToFlash also works in the new release. The extensions will prove more manageable than the old plugin model I can see already.

There were changes in Mail that broke most of the add-ons initially but Letterbox has been updated as has Dockstar since the first update.

iCal was also updated but in fairness I haven’t looked at it as I love the amazing BusyCal and use it by default.

All of the utilities I autolaunch work just fine (Launchbar, Textxpander, Hyperspaces amongst others). This is usually where an OS X update causes me the most grief, but not his time. In the past I have seen the dreaded bsod on update but this one was flawless. One tip I strongly recommend is to disconnect all your external devices during an OS X update. Apple notes this in their docs but not everyone is zealously reading them.

I don’t think the new release is any faster in my workflows but given the security fixes and the updates to Apple utilities it’s worth your time to do. Of course, be sure that you have a recoverable backup before making any major system changes.

Despite not having access via Technet to any of the Microsoft Mac apps (hey MS please change this!) I have been able to conduct some testing with the betas of the new office suite coming this holiday season.

Where Office 2008 was a combination upgrade (file formats, tools) and downgrade (no vba support), the coming release looks much more viable particularly if you are using a Mac as your system of choice in business.

The big change is the replacement of the much maligned Entourage with Outlook. While I don’t need to connect to Exchange for business and don’t use Outlook, my research shows this offering as significantly better than Entourage and for those who are accustomed to working with Outlook, I think you’re really going to like this change. Look and feel is similar to Outlook 2010 for Windows, and they’ve done a great job on that one. If I had to use Windows and worked in an Exchange shop, I’d be ok.

I started my testing with beta 2 and just installed beta 4 at time of this writing. The new build is more stable as one would expect and the implementation of the ribbon interface is far less disconcerting than I expected it to be. Particularly in PowerPoint when I revert to the Office 2008 version for production work, I find myself missing the ribbon interface! It’s that good. I just wish there was a ppt player for the iPad as the Keynote iPad app needs a lot of compatibility work.

Excel works nicely although I had to change the default display zoom on the Mac Pro so I could read the content. The Vba macro support works for the most part although I’ve had complex Corp Finance created macros make the boom boom.

Word is just excellent, with great performance and ease of use. I typically use the very strong Neooffice for work since we do everything in the open document format, but when I need to share something in the MS formats I pull into Word to do a quick format verify. I also like the track changes functionality when working with teammates on RFPs. It’s very simple and clean. I ran into some formatting challenges with documents coming from Office 2003 for Windows, particularly in tables and bullets but when I cleaned them up, I was able to confirm that they went back to Windows as doc files without any problems. This is critical because of the significant growth of Macs in the enterprise and the need for seamless interoperability. Microsoft looks to have some really good work here.

I’ll look forward to future betas and the final FCS release as what I see so far is a winner.

It’s now been about six weeks since the receipt of the new MacBook Pro core i7 machine. As I usually do, I went with a 17″ model again, and again chose the non glare screen option. While this means no glossy black bezel, it also means no annoying reflections off the super bright screen. I chose the 500gb drive and upgraded the RAM to 8gb. In selecting the Core i7 version I got the faster CPU and top end graphics capability.

First Impressions

This is my first unibody machine although I had bought a 13″ MBP for my wife. It feels lighter and more compact than the old MBP although technically they are about the same. The new screen graphics are really fast and the colours are amazing. I notice it most when working on HDR photos. I’m not a gamer but I do some video work and find that the machine is definitely faster rendering and even the redraws seem faster. This week I will be stress testing the machine building some content with the latest Camtasia:Mac that will include some HD video. The drive is quick enough and while the SSDs are faster the price differential is not justifiable to me.

Ongoing Use

Like the old unit I still have kernel panic issues with the eSata card that uses the Siig chipset sometimes on insertion and sometimes on removal. I am using their new drivers with my card that came from Griffin. Annoying but not a show stopper. eSata is so much faster for backups and Time Machine.

I use the machine for presentations several times a week and the mini display port adapter works great and is easier to connect than the old DVI adapter but I have more issues where it wants to mirror the screen even though I always select dual screen mode when connected. I just ran the 10.6.4 update so maybe this will improve. I also have a Targus bluetooth remote but it has become very unreliable for use with the new machine. I’ll need to see if others are experiencing this issue.

When traveling I use the machine to extend the hotel room internet connection to my iPad and iPhone and although the procedure seems to have changed since I last tried this, it works wonderfully. The new black keyboard is much easier to see in low light than the old aluminum topped one and I think I may type marginally faster on it. It’s the same keyboard as on my first gen MacBook Air and has a good feel, with decent resistance and return.

I kept the predecessor in production for just over two years and while there were few things wrong with it, other than the case starting to separate at the seams, I’m very happy to have upgraded and believe that the expense was worthwhile.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

While when buying Blu Ray movies I always look for packages containing digital downloads, they don’t always exist and this makes things tougher to get my purchased content onto my iPad and AppleTV.  Blu Ray rip tools have been on the PC for a while and I’ve had opportunity to test out three different ones for the Mac.  MakeMKV also rated highly but the current price was more than I was willing to pay for a tool I will use very rarely.  Rarely because I will only rip movies I have paid for and I don’t buy a lot of movies as I use renting as my crap screen.  Unfortunately, the crap screen needs a lot of cleaning.

So when I decided to buy software after evaluating, I bought MacBluray Ripper Pro.  It sells for $19.95 USD through the Avangate secure web store.

As you can see from the screen grab, the interface is simple.  Insert disc in drive.  Once recognized set in Preferences where you want the rip stored and click RIP.  Eject when done.  The little app is very fast and so far (six rips – told you I don’t buy a lot of movies) has performed flawlessly.   Transferring to iTunes has been more problematic as I wanted to use my Turbo 264 HD but it depends on the paid version of Flip4Mac and as I use Windows media pretty much never, this ticked me off, so I went back to the old faithful Handbrake.

Hasn’t let me down yet, although it would be cool if it used the coprocessor in the Turbo 264 HD stick.

Like they say, there’s always a catch.  You need a Blu Ray drive and Apple doesn’t offer this as an option.  I bought a LaCIE external Blu Ray recorder about a year ago so I could dump my video and audio working files onto 50GB rewritable disks.  I leave a disk mounted pretty much all the time and it’s worked out pretty well.  The LaCIE drive is overpriced and I have shied away from their products after losing several of their external drives well before MTBF, but this one has, knock wood, been reliable.

You’ll also need drivers for the drives and to make the media available.  As I have been a Roxio Toast Titanium customer for a long while, I bought V10 with the added Blu Ray support and the drive works great with media appearing on the desktop nice and quick.

MacBluray Ripper Pro comes from blumac software – more info at http://www.macblurayripperpro.com/ It’s a good product and worth the $20 if making digital copies of movies you’ve bought is important to you.  I have to admit, I’m not nuts about their use case to timeshift rented movies as this opens the door for potential theft, but to each their own.  Don’t steal movies or music.  Please.

RECOMMENDED

Don’t steal movies and / or music.  There.  Now that that’s done I can get to the point of the post.

Lately, on the odd occasion that I actually buy a movie, I look for Blu Ray versions with the digital content option to make it very easy to get the movie that I am paying for onto my AppleTV and iPad.  Unfortunately there are movies I have bought and movies that are being reissued that I want that don’t have this option.

Lots of people, including myself have written about how to get your movies off your legally purchased media into digital format that you can reuse for your personal use.  That’s not the point of this post.

When I look at my digital content, I like the metadata to be complete and the artwork to be clean.  In the past I would hunt this stuff down manually, then for audio, let iTunes do the Gracenote update.  But movies were always a pain.  I tried MetaTag X and while it could work, I more than often enough had corruption of the file occur and I found the write changes process to be really slow.  So I gave up.

This past week I discovered an amazing little tool called Subler.  It uses data from Tagchimp and makes updating metadata and artwork incredibly easy.  Open the movie file in Subler.  Type the title into the search box.  Select which of the returned options you prefer.  Save the file.  Done.

Subler has a very basic UI and does this one thing only.  But it does it extremely well.  Subler is written by Damiano Galassi.  At the time of this post, it is at version 0.97 and available for download at http://code.google.com/p/subler/ It is a Mac app requiring OS X 10.5 or later and works fine under Snow Leopard.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED