12 Month Windows

As my few readers know, I used a Moto X for while - twice. The first time was the 1st gen Moto X which ended up going back to Motorola because AT&T was dumb. I then waited until the next release round as I discovered that they would be releasing a new Moto X sometime in the fall. It was released around the same time as the iPhone 6 and 6+. I got the 2nd Gen Moto X and I loved it, yet I still returned it and replaced it with the massive iPhone 6+, which is certainly no slouch. If you were just to compare the internals of the two devices you would think that the iPhone 6 and 6+ has quite an advantage over the Moto X - but as Apple liked to advertise with the release of the original iMac, specs aren't everything. It's what you do with the specs you have. So, if I'm using an iPhone 6+ why would I be saying that the Moto X is the best smartphone on the market currently? Why would I have sent that beautiful piece of technology back to Motorola instead of simply continui...

One of the best hardware features on the MacBook (Air or Pro) is the trackpad. It's likely the best one on the market. It's accurate, it supports multi-touch, and has an excellent texture. It works like a dream on the Mac side of things, supporting gestures which allow quick navigation within the operating system. On the Windows side of things, it's much different. Obviously the hardware feel doesn't change, but the way the hardware interacts with the OS is drastically different. Gone is support for gestures and multi-point input (outside of a two-finger right click). None of the Windows 8.1 specific gestures function with the Apple built driver, so you're kind of stuck in this weird limbo experience. If you don't know what the trackpad is capable of in Windows 8.1, then you don't know what you're missing out on, but if you are aware of what is possible, then you will feel a little frustrated at the lack of ability to perform the quick actions to ...

After much searching of the interwebz and finding no easy solution, I decided to start poking around myself. So the symptom is that you're running Windows on your Mac via Boot Camp and you setup iCloud mail in Outlook 2013, but when attempting to setup the iCloud contacts folder as an Address Book the check box that says "Show this folder as an e-mail address book" is grayed out and cannot be checked. As reference, I'm running a Late 2013 15" MacBook Pro retina with a discrete graphics card (which has nothing to do with this issue, but full disclosure and all that), but I've found this issue referenced multiple systems (including non-apple systems). The solution, it turns out, is far easier than anything I found online. Perform the following: 1. Right click on the Windows button (Windows 8.1) or click on the Start Button (Windows 7). 2. Open Mail control panel. 3. Click E-mail Accounts button 4. Click the Address Book tab 5. Click "New...

For the longest time we were fighting for the smallest, thinnest phones, laptops, and other pieces of technology. That trend appears to be reversing itself in recent years with the advent of "the phablet." When I first saw the gigantic Galaxy Note I almost lost the Coca-Cola I was drinking out my nose I thought it was so insanely huge. Now I have an iPhone 6+ and I'm officially a Phablet owner. What does this mean? For somebody who thought that the size of the Galaxy Note was obscenely over sized, I now find the size of my 6+ to be perfect for me. Perfect in ways my previous phones have been imperfect. First of all, I no longer feel as though I need to carry around a laptop and a tablet and a phone. I now have my phone, which is big enough to be a small tablet, and my laptop. It's easier to carry around than either an iPad Mini or Nexus 7 (or any of the other smaller form-factor tablets) and I find it's more useful than a tablet. I also ordered myself an iWerk...

While much is being said about the iPhone 6+ camera and it's strengths, the camera I have on my iPhone 6+ has failed spectacularly after only a week of use. Now, as with any piece of electronics, there will be failing units, my concern is that I was quickly able to find posts in various places of others having the same issues - which means there are likely others out there who are having yet even more issues who don't go onto blogs and post about their experiences. Specifically, the Vibration Reduction feature of the camera has failed so completely that it thinks the phone must be in constant motion even when it's still because it activates and creates a blurry, double image. You can even hold your ear up to the phone and listen to it click and whir inside - certainly not a good sign. I've been an Apple customer long enough that I have no doubt they will be wonderful when I take it to the genius bar later today and either repair the defective part or replace the w...

So as many of my friends predicted, I'm back on the iPhone. Twice. So let me elaborate - the first Moto X I wrote about I had to send back because I had purchased it with a two year contract on my AT&T Plan. Well, apparently if you contract yourself to AT&T now, you lose all your super-cool discounts. I had to the send it back and get my iPhone 5 reactivated. By this point I'd been hearing rumors about the new Moto X, so I decided to wait and see. When it came out, I went ahead and ordered it. I have no unkind words to say about it and Android has come a LONG WAY from it's crappy beginnings. I rather enjoyed using it. I ended up sending that one back, not because it wasn't a great phone, not because it didn't meet every one of my needs (almost), but because my entire family is on iPhones and uses iCloud and iMessages and Photo sharing through Photostream and I have a two year old that everybody wants to see pictures of all the time. Sounds li...

Since 2007 I have been carting around some version of the iPhone. Somewhere around August 7th, that won't be happening anymore. After much deliberation, window shopping, hands on testing, research, and thought I have purchased a fully customized Motorola Moto X phone. If you're interested, it's got a natural ebony back, black front and Red buttons and highlights. The screen will actually say "Welcome, Micah" whenever I turn it on. Beyond the ability to customize the look of the device and have my name engraved on it (which is possible with the iPhone as well), Android gives me features I've been waiting for on the iPhone. While iOS 8 promises to catch up in some areas, namely the ability to swipe in text as opposed to tap typing, it's still lacking in others that I have made heavy use of in my work provided HTC One. While I did consider the HTC One (M8), when I starting toying around with it, it had gotten too big. As much as I loved the one work pro...

While my initial experiment failed on me, having a MacBook Pro with Retina Display has afforded me the ability to run both Windows and Mac on the same machine. To provide myself with the best possible experience, I've been working on a Boot Camp partition so that I don't run into any issues that may arise out of the use of virtual machines. Many of the gripes I have with Windows 8.1 still stand, however the advancements in recent updates and the changes that are scheduled for future updates give me some kind of hope for the future of Windows. I'm currently using Windows 8.1 on a system that doesn't have a touch enabled display. This is, for the most part, an excellent experience. If I could make one change, it would be to the Apple Trackpad Driver. I wish it was more integrated with Windows 8.1. I've found a couple of tools that will make the trackpad work more effectively, however they always install bloatware right along with the drivers and I hate bloatware. ...

I will start this by simply saying that for many years I used Microsoft's Entourage software on the Mac as my primary email, calendar and contact application. While it didn't have all the features of Outlook, I also wasn't completely aware of what I was missing since I'd not really used Outlook by that point in my life. Entourage was discontinued after the Office for Mac 2008 release. It was replaced with Outlook for Mac. It was around that time that I switched from Entourage to the Apple Mail, Calendar and Contacts system that came baked into the OS. I never really liked it as much as I liked using Entourage since everything was kept in separate containers. Sure, the various applications could talk to each other, but if I wanted to go through my contact list in any meaningful way I had to open my Contacts application instead of just checking out contacts within the software. It was also around this time that I began using Outlook quite heavily in my professional li...

I've been a user of Apple's iWork suite for quite some time. Because Pages wasn't as feature rich as MS Word, I actually preferred it over the feature rich MS suite. Pages did everything I needed it to do as a writer and made creating basic page layout documents a snap. But today I realized that in Pages 5 they stripped out something I used heavily in my work life: Mail Merge. I have a ton of documents setup to use Mail Merge from various sources. Every year I would simply update the sources and hit merge. Done. I starred agape at the notice that said "Mail Merge is not supported. Your Merge fields have been turned into plain text." How could one of the basic features of any word processor be stripped out of their productivity suite? Have they really just given up to the point of no longer caring? Have they reached the levels of hubris that Microsoft reached in the 1990s? Is Steve Jobs rolling over in his grave? I don't know the answer to that - his ...

After a hiatus, I think I'm coming back to this blog. I am still fascinated by what Windows has to offer as it tweaks and tries to perfect the Windows 8/8.1 experience. While I am still primarily a Mac OS X user, I have installed the latest version of Windows 8.1 Pro on my 15" Retina MacBook Pro. Since the original inception of my failed experiment, there are still the nuggets of gold that I saw as potential, and initially loved, about Windows 8/8.1. Now that I'm using it more as a Desktop and less like a Tablet, I have a new perspective on how it functions for millions of people, and it's not half bad. Coupled with the release of the new Surface Pro (3) and you're looking at something that is actually appealing as a Laptop/Tablet hybrid with the power of an ultra book and the portability of a tablet. Many people note that when they compared the new Surface Pro on a scale, it was to a 13" MacBook Air and not an iPad. I think those people are missing the ...