Today my new iPod touch arrived! I couldn’t wait until the iPhone was available in Germany, so I pre-ordered the iPod touch a couple of weeks ago. It doesn’t have all the features of the iPhone (no phone obviously), but I mainly wanted the great touchable user interface. You have to check for your-self, if you haven’t tried an iPhone or iPod touch yet! Connecting to my Wifi internet was as easy as expected. YouTube videos work great! Oh, happy day!

A good friend of mine stayed with us a few days. With her she brought her broken iPod as rumor had it that I was a Mac healer. It appeared to be a severe case. The iPod displayed a broken folder icon when starting up and it didn’t mount on the desktop. Even after checking with Disk Utility and DiskWarrior which had helped me with severe hard disk problems in the past, I wasn’t able to fix it. I checked some forums and the Apple discussions groups and I figured out that it was a pretty common problem that arose after some years of using the iPod. So, the only solution was to get a new hard disk.
But I wasn’t willing to give up — not yet. So, I listened to the noise of the hard drive and I could hear how the disk’s head was kind of stuck when trying to mount. As my friend told me that she was already about to toss it away, I wanted to give it one last chance. I firmly hit the iPod several times against a wooden chair — et voilà — the head of the drive moved on and the iPod started up perfectly. I checked the disk with DiskWarrior and replaced the directory but there weren’t any severe problems and the iPod played music happily ever after…

I've just installed the new Apple iLife ’06!
I ordered it right after Steve Jobs had announced it at the MacWorld Expo – I just had to have it! And it’s arrived even earlier than expected!
I’ve just rushed through the iApps and checked out the new features – I really love it! Here are just a few things that I like:

iPhoto 6 now has a full screen mode just like Aperture (dark background – no menu bar) and some nice new image effects which improve your photos. Don’t get me wrong – you can’t compare it with the adjustments you have in Adobe Photoshop, but, hey, I don’t want to import all my snapshots in Photoshop and then re-import them in iPhoto… And in full screen mode Apple has added the “compare” feature of Aperture, which is very nice. With the image adjustment panel and the new features I don’t need Aperture anymore.

iDVD 6 has some really nice new themes – I love “Road Trip” and ”Reflections” which has the look of the Apple TV ads. I’m trying to put some samples here very soon. Do you know the “Magic Movie” button in iMovie? They now have integrated a “Magic DVD“ button in iDVD which fills all drop zones automatically.

GarageBand 3: integrated Podcasting and iSight recording – all you need to create your own Podcasts and export them!
iMovie HD: widescreen HD support and themes from iDVD 6.
iWeb: well, that’ll be an extra post on this blog, soon.

Steffen – a friend of mine – has found a way to configure the Apple iSync software in such a way as to sync your Address Book and iCal with phones that are not yet supported by Apple, e.g. the Nokia N70, N90 or the Sony Ericsson W550(i). You‘ll need some basic understanding of scripting but all the rest is pretty easy and the instructions are explained step-by-step on his website: www.isync-hilfe.de (only German so far).

After my iMac G5 crashed last week (power supply out of order), my iBook’s hard drive crashed last Saturday, too. It did a good job for almost 3 years, but now really wasn't a good time to let me down… So I had to buy a new hard drive and replace it by myself (no more warranty). Man, it was a challenging job, but the Fixit Guide at pbfixit.com helped me a lot. Took me about an hour to open the iBook and replace the hard drive – if I hadn’t forgotten the little power connector in the end, which made me go through the whole process again… Finally, my iBook’s working fine again, now with the new drive even significantly quieter.