Photos for Mac is broken, no way to delete photos that you have imported! FIGURED IT OUT iCLOUD PHOTOS IS BROKEN

I was just importing my photos off of my iPhone into the new Photos for Mac, Photos being the replacement to iPhoto that Apple recently released, and I noticed a major issue.

In iPhoto when you imported your photos you had the option to delete them on import. Well in Photos that option is completely gone. There is only the option to import your photos. Well I just imported 2 gigs of photos, and want to clear up the space off my iPhone. Now I have to what, delete them off my iPhone myself? Well the only way to do that is individually, and this is 300+ photos and videos!

And I thought maybe I missed something and imported the photos again, and it happily imported the same photos and put them into my Photo library right next to the previously imported photos! What is going on here?

I get that the new iCloud features are to keep all your photos forever and safe, but the idea is to keep your full sized photos in the cloud, so you can access them from anywhere, not to never be able to delete your photos from your iPhone. If that is the case people are going to run out of space really fast!

And besides who can afford the iCloud feature? Apple is charging way too much for online space, especially when Amazon lets you store your photos for free!

And the removal of a trash can isn’t a good idea either? What if you accidentally delete a file? (I was wrong about this, there is a way to view Recently deleted photos, just now a menu item instead of a section on the sidebar)

Why has Apple changed to a company that doesn’t give you a choice on how you use your Apple devices, you have to use them how they tell you to and there is no other way (exactly why I don’t like Final Cut Pro X)?

••••

Well I think I figured this out, I had to turn off iCloud Photos on my iPhone, now when I import I get the option to Delete items after Import. So if I was to keep iCloud Photos on, my phone would fill with all my Photos.

So now I had to re-import all my photos again (making duplicates in Photos) with the checkbox checked and now I can have it remove the photos from my iPhone, though this doesn’t seem to work well as it only did about half the photos the first time, and I am having to do the process multiple times to get the photos off my phone, creating duplicates in Photos every time. And now it seems frozen about half way through!

Is this seriously a feature? Being unable to remove photos from my phone? Seriously? This is a joke, if I want to store all my photos in iCloud I don’t want to keep copies on my iPhone or it will completely fill up really fast! This is completely broken! FIX THIS APPLE!

Not only that, but Apple help doesn’t work for me with Photos. So how am I supposed to figure out how this works?

Used Premiere Pro’s Capture for the first time yesterday

I was handed a DVCAM tape yesterday and work was going to rent a DVCAM deck to capture. I said I would do it myself since I have a Sony DS-20 in my office. I used to use it all the time, but it mostly gathers dust now, so it was good to give it a run, and I decided to try it out with Premiere Pro.

Now I knew that Premiere had a very simple capture engine that would work with HDV or DV, so I decided to give it a try. It has very few settings, just which capture setting, then you can set in’s and outs, change clip and tape names and capture a clip or a tape. The problem is that the tape was old, and it kept failing on the capture, and it doesn’t seem to have a setting to automatically break up clips when there is a break in timecode. After many many attempts that failed, I gave up and switched to Final Cut Pro 7.

Final Cut Pro 7 still has a much more powerful capture engine, and will in fact break up a capture if you set it to, so you get clips around the breaks, but surprisingly it managed to capture the whole 1 hour and 50 minutes in one go, not making any breaks.

So honestly I am glad Final Cut Pro 7 still runs on Yosemite, as it does still have some uses. Looks like I will need to keep a backup of this system state before the next OS which will likely break Final Cut Pro 7 completely so I can still capture DV easily if need be.

Bare Feats compared the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 with 10 other GPU’s in a 2010 Mac Pro

Not only does this card us standard six pin connectors so it will work fine in the MacPro, but in many tests it doubles the performance of a GTX 680 Mac edition! WOW!
If I had the money I would totally go for one of these, since it is literally twice as fast as the GTX 680 Mac Edition, and I currently run a GTX 670, though it does have 4 GB of RAM.
I WANT ONE SO BAD!!! Ha! Not happening anytime soon.
Your best bet for one is this one from MacVidCards which is $835 plus shipping, the cards has been flashed for Mac so you get the full startup with it (which I annoyingly don’t have with my GTX 670).

Rumors of a MacBook Air with only 2 Ports, and ditching Thunderbolt, let’s hope not

9 to 5 Mac has rumors and it’s own artist renders of what it claims to be the soon to be announced revamp of the MacBook Air.

The terrifying part, is that it has only 2 ports on it. A headphone jack and a USB Type C port. The USB 3 Port is more advanced than USB 3 with a reversible connector, that can drive a monitor and also power a computer.

I can’t even articulate what an awful idea this is. One connector means you need a hub to attach anything else to the laptop. My mom for example has her fitbit sync in the usb port, which would have to be left in the hub. And even worse is the removal of Thunderbolt.

Apple is really pushing Thunderbolt as it’s next generation connectivity, even giving up the much faster (and far superior) PCI Slots in it’s MacPro in favor of of Thunderbolt. And having Thunderbolt in the Air made it expandable to an amazing degree that would never have been possible with a machine like this, and you could use the same devices across the mac lineup. Even with it being USB 3.1, which can do 10 Gbps, or the same as Thunderbolt 1 (not 2 though, which can 20 Gbps), they should have the same ports across the whole range, so accessories are interchangeable. Unless Apple is getting rid of Thunderbolt all together in favor of USB 3.1, which to me should mean they need to go back to PCI Card expansion in later MacPro’s (and who the hell wanted the trashcan MacPro anyway), which I highly doubt, they should not do this.

I know Apple does not read this blog, nor care what I have to say, but PLEASE APPLE DON’T DO THIS!!!!

Diskwarrior 5 Issues in non standard configurations: UPDATED

Well I for one was very excited about Alsoft Diskwarrior 5, and it’s new USB Stick to run off and repair Macs, but unfortunately it has not worked out so well for me.

Now admittedly I am likely a strange case on this one. I have been trying to use it on 2 slightly out of the norm cases, and haven’t been able to to boot to the USB stick in either case. And though I have gotten it to run, it was via other means, and was not too impressed by the new 64 Bit Speeds.

The first case is my own computer, which is a MacPro 4,1, but the exception here is that I run a PC NVIDIA GTX 670 with 4 GB of RAM, so I am unable to hold down option and select a startup disc on boot, nor able to get into the recovery partition because I don’t get a screen booted until the desktop starts up. And these are the two methods to run diskwarrior from the USB Stick. The USB Stick does show up as a startup disc and I have tried starting up off of it, but the computer never boots this way for some reason.

To get it to work on my MacPro I used a competitor product in fact. Micromat’s Tech Tool Pro 7 has a way to create a recovery partition. And I was able to create it on one of my additional hard drives so as not to mess with the OS X recovery partition, and it allows you to install software there, so I installed Diskwarrior 5 and ran it.

Once running the new Diskwarrior worked fine, just like the old one, and in fact did not seem any faster. I do have a very full 3 TB main hard drive though, so it has a lot of files to check, but still it did not seem exceptionally faster than version 4.

A second place I run diskwarrior is at one of the offices that I work at (being freelance it isn’t always the same place, but I work here allot). And I got them to purchase a DVD of Diskwarrior 4.

Now I wanted to test Diskwarrior 5 here, to see if we could use it. Now while they do have one MacPro with a NVIDIA GTX 680 Mac Edition which I will be testing on later, they also have a QUO computing Hackintosh that I have been using mostly. Already to run Diskwarrior on it, I can’t boot from the DVD, but have to run from a Carbon Copy Cloner backup of the system SSD that has Diskwarrior 4 installed. Still I thought I would try the USB Stick.

And once again no, with the QUO it seems that I can’t hold down option to see the bootable hard drives, so I can’t boot from the USB stick to repair this system. I could install Diskwarrior on my backup, but would not do that with my serial number. I will test it later on the regular MacPro, just because I want to see if I can get Diskwarrior 5 to boot from the USB stick in any situation!

Now the one thing I have not tried is is the new Diskwarrior 5 Diskwarrior Recovery Maker, which updates the USB Flash to the latest OS that your system is, since new Macs have new boot requirements, but I know my MacPro can boot from 10.6.4, and I believe that is the starting system for any Hackintosh, so I though that would work for for the QUO.

I will updater his after I see if it works on the other more standard MacPro, but so far I have not been too impressed with Diskwarrior 5

UPDATE

Well I tested the Diskwarrior USB in the MacPro 4,1 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition, and it froze on the startup screen. I started it by holding down option and selecting the Diskwarrior Recovery partition, and starting up. I left it there for an hour, and the Machine was just stopped.

Here is the Startup screen. It spun for a while then froze.

And the red light was solid on the USB Key so not accessing the disc
And when I tried it on my Quo holding down option, this is exactly what happened, it showed the startup screen and spun and then froze. And the same happened when I selected the USB on my home Mac as a startup disc.
Looks like it is time to contact Alsoft and see what is going on.
SECOND UPDATE
I was writing an e-mail to Alsoft Technical support, and think I figured out the issue, and will test it soon. The GTX 680 Mac Edition requires 10.8.x Operating system to run, and all 3 machines I have tried it on have either that card or a PC GTX 670, so it is likely that the system needs to have at least that system to run. So it looks like it is time to try out Diskwarrior Recover Maker and update my USB.
My only problem is that my home system is Yosemite already. Maybe I can find a system with 10.8.5 and run it, so it doesn’t get too new of a system on it.

iOS and other Space, Apple really needs to fix this!

Apple iOS has had a serious problem for a very long time, and it seems to be getting worse, or is at least for me. There is a space on iOS devices that is listed as other, and is supposed to be data, be that document data, caches, saves or other things from applications, but it quickly becomes bloated with random crap and can actually completely fill up your device very quickly. In fact I have hit the point where iTunes is in fact reporting that I have more other space than anything else, and enough other to actually not allow my iPhone to sync! Now that is a lot of other data, especially when I last restored my iPhone only a week ago (and a complete restore in iTunes, when you wipe it, re-install the OS and then restore your data and apps from a backup seems to be the only solution to this issue.
Now here is the space on my iPhone.
And here is what iTunes is reporting when I connect my iPhone.
Over 20 GB’s over capacity!
Here is the other space specifically.
And by contrast the Apps and Music space.

Now this is nuts. This is a fresh install of IOS with a restore of my Apps, and I heavily pruned them to make space for more music (as my iPod Classic bit it recently, the horror!).
Now my iPhone won’t even sync because iTunes reports it as over capacity, and yet I have 2 GB free on my iPhone. Now as I said the only real solution is to once again do a backup and restore in iTunes, but this is an imperfect process at best. First off it doesn’t even work from iCloud (I lost 4 months of data when I tried that and had to go back to my last non-cloud backup) and my first restore of my iPhone managed to forget all of my folders and randomly install my Apps until it filled all the pages and stopped installing (though I had more apps on my iPhone before). Another restore fixed this, but it still leaves issues.
You have to re-enter all passwords. And even worse much app data is lost. Google Authenticator will be empty (even with a safe local backup to my computer) so restoring both iOS devices at once is not a good idea, as getting into the things with 2 step authentication without your second password is a huge pain! And apps like SIZER to keep your friends and family clothing sizes just loses all of it data and you have to get it again! And don’t forget to re-log into to your settings for Messages or you will be getting different parts of conversations on different devices!
So just to do a restore, not only does it take at least overnight on your computer, but then you have to spend a good deal of time getting everything working again! Honestly when I backup my iPhone I expect a full backup onto my computer (I can understand a cloud backup being only partial), not a partial backup! Why not make a disc image of the whole install, so a restore literally restores it?

Apple, you need to fix the restore, and especially fix why this Other space bloats to begin with! It has done this since iOS 1, and the problem is only worse now as Apps get bigger and people take more photos and expect to carry more music!

Alsoft has released Diskwarrior 5

After a very long wait, Alsoft has released DiskWarrior 5. It has been a long time since anything but a point update, but that hasn’t kept DiskWarrior from remaining the single best utility for Mac OS X repairs around. And I am excited to see how good this next version is, especially now that it ships on a bootable USB Flash Drive, so it can start up faster and be updated more easily (the CD/DVD upgrade process always took a while).
Check out the new features, including 64 Bit for speed, the ability to update your Diskwarrior Recovery Flash to to the latest OS X, it can even run from OS X Recovery.
This is great news, as this has always been the best repair program! I do like TechTool’s emergency repair partition feature (on my machine I created it on a second hard drive and have Diskwarrior installed), but the USB will make this really use, especially to do repairs on my wife’s MacBook Air!

Apple OS X Yosemite Kills 3rd Party SSD Support!

This is huge news that is all over the internet, it seems that Apple with OS X Yosemite has removed support for third party SSD in OS X 10.10 Yosemite. If you are using it as a boot drive with TRIM enabled (which cleans up garbage on an SSD) it will not boot of of it. This is due to a security update called KEXT SIGNING. It is possible to disable KEXT SIGNING, but if you do it does it across the board and not just for TRIM and will leave your system insecure.

Now this doesn’t affect may except power users, and neither does it affect SSD’s from Other World Computing, which do not need TRIM to work correctly.

I wonder what this means for Hackintosh’s? Probably means turning off KEXT SIGNING.

I have always waned to upgrade my old MacPro to SSD to speed it up, but just couldn’t afford it. I was thinking a Sonnet Tech Temp SSD Pro Plus 6 Gb/s Host, and one 6 GB 480gb Mercury Extreme Pro 480 GB, but that would be around $700, but would leave room for a second SSD. It would be a pain to move everything from my personal drive to a second drive, but I think not only would the SSD speed things up, but it would be great to start with a fresh system again, as my system has some serious issues that a fresh install would likely fix.

Still not something that is going to happen any time soon.

PVC on wringing new life out of an old Mac Pro Tower

Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition takes a look at extending the life of the old Mac Pro Tower.

I have been trying to do the same with mine. Have not yet been able to afford an SSD boot drive, or an NVIDIA K5000 (though I do have a PC GTX 670), and have added USB 3.

Would love to have an expansion chassis, but it almost begs the question of is it worth it to stay Mac. I would love to be able to get a MacBook Pro to keep me Mac and then build a huge PC tower with all the expansion and ports I will ever need. Thunderbolt is great, but it is expensive, and not as fast as PCI, and I would rather have all the internal storage I could have than have to get external storage.

FitBit will not be integrating with Apple HealthKit and it’s Health App

Well it seems that FitBit will not be integrating it’s Fitness data with the newly released Apple Health App via HealthKit.

You can see this very commented post at Fitbit’s Forums, where FitBit gives the following statment:

 Status: Reviewed By Moderator

We do not currently have plans to integrate with HealthKit.

It is an interesting new platform and we will watch as it matures, looking for opportunities to improve the Fitbit experience. At the moment, we’re working on other exciting projects that we think will be valuable to users. The question we want you to keep in mind when providing feedback is: What do you imagine a HealthKit integration would entail and what do you expect to get out of it?
Your voices are being heard. We’re actively reviewing your responses and providing feedback to our product development team.

Now they say they are listening and want to your feedback, but there are already 32 pages of feedback of people wanting this integration, and they do say they have no plans to integrate with HealthKit.

FitBit does have a $49.99 a year premium service called Benchmark to get better info on your fitness data, so they want to make money off of your data, but they already offer free integration with Microsoft’s Health Vault, which negates any argument about having to pay to access your data how you want to.

Health and HealthKit are one of the most exciting new features of the recently released iOS 8. It is a new central repository for your health data, that eventually will even be able to pass information to your doctor if something changes with your health. It is meant to not only work with the new Apple Watch, but with other fitness trackers and devices. And Apple even showed the FitBit app in their presentation, hoping that Fitbit would integrate.

Now I have been a FitBit user from the beginning, with an original, a One and a Force (which I returned because it was giving me a rash) and an Aria for weight, and got a FitBit for my mom as well. So I have been a very good customer. And I have even been saving my refund check for my Force to see what FitBit would be replacing it with, but this makes me think I would be better off putting that money into an Apple Watch.

I have been quite excited by the Apple Watch as it is a Fitness tracker and also a replacement for my Pebble Watch, but the one day battery life and lack of waterproofing has me quite nervous, but the Fitibt Force was not WaterProof and neither is the One.

So maybe it is time to start thinking about moving away from Fitbit. I could sell my One and my Aria and get an Apple Watch and either an iHealth Lite or iHealth Body Analysis Scale (iHealth already has HealthKit intergation from their 4 apps and 9 devices!).

FitBit really needs to get on the ball here or they are going to lose a lot of customers who don’t want to be stuck only within their ecosystem.