Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

That's the thing. Has a similar problem with my contacts on the last iOS. Just didn't want to work and I'm not a complete technical dufus. Got very irked and I decided to just delete everything and manually enter them into one device for sync to others. Took forever, but ultra satisfying having everything with the right naming conventions and numbers/addresses on any device.

use chrome? It's so much faster than safari

Chrome's vile. And also slow.

I found a fix on the Apple site for which you needed the Dubug menu to be activated so I did that, restarted Safari to continue with the fix and it stopped happening.

Weird but it's sorted now.

I have iCloud across two macs an iPhone and two Apple TVs and it works perfectly... i really dont see why everyone finds it so hard.

ICloud is root of the evil. Since its introduction everything's fucked. Especially iPads. Typing, even on iPad2, has some serious lag.

Ive just not bothered with iCloud. Thought it was a waste of time and it doesn't even cover that much without having to spend money with apple.
Fuck that

ICloud is root of the evil. Since its introduction everything's fucked. Especially iPads. Typing, even on iPad2, has some serious lag.

Agreed. I used to have some semblance of a working calendar that other people could see. ICloud screwed that up and I spent days trying to figure out a workaround.

What even IS iCloud? I haven't bothered finding out yet.

Over teh internetz storing that syncronises between devices in theory seamlessly providing you with all your stuff, wherever you are. Contacts/Music/Photos/Documents/Whatever - on your iPhone, your ilaptop, your iDesktop, your ipad, your iwhatever else. And the theoretical beauty is that it does it all in the background on its own over wifi.

Except that it's not that simple. First off, the amount of free storage is very limited - which is absolutely fair enough. However as you may have seen from the above posts and a cursory Google search, it seems to be buggy as fuck at the moment and have caused no end of annoyance to a large number of people.

Fairy nuff, seems like something I can do without.

And if you're too hasty, it can overwrite your Google contacts on your device(s).
At one point I wiped my iPhone's contacts clean and haven't noticed it. Only when I wanted to call my wife when I went to pick her up from work and realised that I don't remember her number...

But of course you knew it anyway right? Right?

And who does remember number nowadays? I don't even know mine.

I use iCal on both my laptop and iphone and have been very happy doing so for the last couple of years, and they automatically synchronise every time I plug my phone in. However life is getting increasingly busy and it would be really useful if my girlfriend and I could see each other's calendars in the same place (mainly because I'm always forgetting what I've been told...). She doesn't really use a computerised calendar at the moment so isn't tied into anything. My guess was that google calendars was the best bet but is there an easy way of syncing with iCal so that I can download her schedule onto my phone/computer and my schedule gets uploaded to the same calendar? If not is there a good alternative that we can use across devices?

+1 to above post

mainly because I'm always forgetting what I've been told...

Especially that bit.

Also with you. But I'm unlikely to get my using and electronic diary any time soon.

I think my gf would, if only to plan weekends. I work funny shifts including weekends and we live in different cities. She'd probably like to be able to see my diary to plan who's going where, when.

I use iCal on both my laptop and iphone and have been very happy doing so for the last couple of years, and they automatically synchronise every time I plug my phone in. However life is getting increasingly busy and it would be really useful if my girlfriend and I could see each other's calendars in the same place (mainly because I'm always forgetting what I've been told...). She doesn't really use a computerised calendar at the moment so isn't tied into anything. My guess was that google calendars was the best bet but is there an easy way of syncing with iCal so that I can download her schedule onto my phone/computer and my schedule gets uploaded to the same calendar? If not is there a good alternative that we can use across devices?

Check out Busycal. Integrates nicely with Google, uses the local iCal database (so iCal still works), better interface than iCal, pretty good support info. It's not perfect if you have people updating invitations, but it's better than iCal. Downside is it's a paid app, but I have come round to the view that you always pay one way or another.

I've finally turned iCloud on. Does everything sync automatically at once, or will it take time? I can't see all my calendar items online yet, for instance.

Anyone know of a way to get a windows laptop to see and be able to access a mac os extended formatted external hd without paying £50 for mediafour macdrive?

I used this one:
http://www.catacombae.org/hfsx.html

Cheers, just put the laptop off but I'll give it a go over the weekend.

I was wondering if anybody might be able to help me with my external hard drive problem:

I've recently got an iMac, and wanted to back up using my Seagate FreeAgent external hard drive. I was a little ignorant and just plugged it in. It asked me if i wanted to use time machine, so i said yes, and it wiped everything off it, including the software bits, and is now just backing up stuff using time machine. That's all very good and well, but it means i can't use it to occasionally transfer the odd film or something (that i could do before), and i don't really need a million copies of my hard drive an hour apart from the last god knows how many weeks.

I was wondering if anybody knew of any software i can put on it to use this external hard drive with my mac, or if there is anyway of tinkering with time machine to change the settings - i've tried but to no avail.

Your help would be much appreciated!

To do it properly: Partition the drive using Disk Utility and assign one of the partitions as your backup and the other as you "transfers" partition (use OS Extended as the format unless you plan on mounting the drive on a PC too).

To do it easily: Although the drive will be indexed by Time Machine which reads/writes to the one folder within it, you can still drag/drop to the disk as normal (avoid naming/touching the one existing folder in there AT ALL).

^Thanks so much for the advice JonoMarshall, shall give it a go!