Google Currents Review - iOS

I was excited about Google Currents, especially about it's Google Reader support. I currently use Reeder and Early Edition 2, and I was sure Currents would replace them all.

What's the deal with Google Currents? Imagine my surprise when I saw this:

Apparently, you need to add your Google Reader feeds one by one! Unless I've missed something, this is the worst support of Google Reader that I have ever seen. I haven't even tried it to see if it actually supports syncing with Google Reader (i.e. if I read a story on Currents, will it disappear from Reader).

This is pretty bad... So long Google Currents...

iTunes Match is about to go live?

The music settings in ios5 have a new iTunes match option.
Turning it on results in a message you need to enable it on iTunes on your computer (so much for a computer-less environment).

Can't wait to get home and check this out.

Update: The iTunes Match on the iTunes Store is still "Coming Soon". Hope that it's really soon.

The iPhone cannot be synced. The required disk cannot be found. - on a Mac - Solved

Well, I thought that iPhone on a Mac would work without issues. Alas, that is not the case.

Yesterday, when trying to sync (wirelessly or wired), I got this annoying error: The iPhone cannot be synced. The required disk cannot be found.

It took me a couple of hours to find the solution on the web. I did find a few solutions, though they required tons of work (search for a problematic app and remove it, etc...).

The simple solution (OS X - Lion) is this - run Disk Utility, select your HD, and click Repair Disk Permissions.

It took half an hour, but solved this issue completely.

Do make sure to back up your machine regularly though. I have no idea if this could actually damage your data.

Airplay Mirroring on iOS 5 with iPad 2

This was one of the features that I was waiting most for - Airplay mirroring with iPad 2, using Apple TV. I wanted to use this feature for playing games on the TV,  as well as FaceTime.

Here are the results so far:

Fifa 12 - wouldn't work at all - got stuck at the game loading screen.
Zombie Highway and Asphalt 6 - working, but with a lag. In Asphalt 6 I kept crashing, and ZH wasn't that good either.

FaceTime was OK, with a slight lag also.

I guess it would work nice for presentations and such, but for video games, it appears to slow.

What do you think?

Cannot Sync Notes to iCloud in iOS5

Among the few issues I had while upgrading to iOS 5, one of them was pretty annoying - my iPhone couldn't sync Notes to my iPad.

I'll start at the beginning. My iPhone 4 kept failing to install iOS 5, so I installed my iPad 2 first. When I set up my iCloud sync for Notes, I was prompted to create a .me email account to be used for syncing. I did so, and it looked like it was working. When I opened Notes, I had an Accounts button, and there I could choose iCloud. Also, in Settings -> Notes, I could choose iCloud as the Default Account.

Later I successfully upgraded my iPhone, and set it to sync notes, but when I went into Notes, I noticed that there was no iCloud option. Furthermore, on my iPad, if I'd go to Settings -> iCloud -> Account, I would see an Advanced section at the bottom, with my .me account, but it was missing from the iPhone.

What I did to solve this was on the iPhone, go to Settings -> iCloud, and click Delete Account (make sure you have everything backed up!!!), reboot the iPhone, and set iCloud again. This time everything worked great, and I got the .me account added to my iCloud settings.

Air Display for iOS / Mac Review

Air Display allows you to extend your desktop to an iPad / iPhone. As simple as that. You only have to be on the same network for it to work.

You can either mirror what you see on your main display (but you would have to lower your resolution to that of the iPad), or have your iDevice act as a secondary screen.

Some useful examples. If you want to show a web page or document to someone outside your office, you can simply drag the window to your iDevice, and take the window with you (make sure to disable the screen saver first!).
If you want to see Flash enabled sites on your iPad, this is also possible, through this screen sharing.

You cannot type in the secondary screen, unless you have an on screen keyboard there as well. However, you can click, right-click, and scroll.

One important thing, which I was not aware of. As it is an extension of your desktop, when you switch desktops on your Mac, you also switch the desktop on the secondary screen (iDevice). This means that if you want to use Air Display to constantly show the same thing while you continue to work on your Mac and switch desktops, it won't work.

Anyway, I highly recommend this to anyone needing a second screen, and that already has an iPad. It works pretty fast (at least on my setup)!

iTunes link