The new parts

Clockwise from top left I have:

• Sanwa Ball Top Joystick JLF-TP-8Y – I went with Pac Man yellow for my ball top, but the original red iCade ball will fit too. Make sure when ordering that you don’t get the widely-available 8YT version as that comes with a metal plate attached which is apparently a pain to remove. If you’re interested in what the letters and numbers in the name mean, there’s a good explanation in this Shoryuken forum post.
• 8 x Sanwa Snap In Pushbuttons OBSF-30 – these need a 30mm hole in the control panel to fit them whereas the iCade stock buttons are 28mm so you’ll need to widen those holes a little with sandpaper or a sanding tool. They have a slightly convex top and are far quieter with a much lighter tap required to trigger them. The lip around the buttons is pretty much the same size as the stock buttons so they should all fit okay. I went with red, yellow, white and black to match the iCade’s panel designs (didn’t fancy blue).
• 5 Pin Joystick Cable JLF-H – one end plugs neatly into the new joystick. The other ends will need to be attached to the wires that currently run from the circuit board to the stock joystick, either by soldering or using a screw terminal. I went with the latter because I’ve never soldered anything in my life.
• Sanwa Octagonal Restrictor Plate GT-Y – this is the ‘gate’ that restricts how the joystick moves. The joystick actually comes with a square gate that can be rotated 45 degrees (see my iCade review) but I’ve read that octagonal is the way to go for total control.

Total delivered from Gremlin Solutions: £50.36. Birthday, remember?

You’ll also need a few tools:

• the hex allen key that came with the iCade (or similar)
• Phillips screwdriver
• small flathead screwdriver (if you’re using a screw terminal)
• possibly a Security Torx screwdriver – my iCade control panel had two Security Torx screws but I read that other modders had no such screws in theirs. I guess Ion changed the design at some point. Security Torx heads are like regular Torx heads but with a pin in the centre that requires your screwdriver to have a hollow tip.
• soldering kit or 5-way screw terminal
• sandpaper or a Dremel sanding tool
• a cable tie

Let’s get cracking

First we need to open the control panel. Remove the sides of the iCade and turn the control panel upside down to reveal the screws you need to remove.

There’s 16 in total, including those pesky Torx screws (if you don’t have them it’s just 16 Phillips head screws). Keep them in a dish!

Then rest the iCade on it’s back and lift off the panel carefully.

You need to remove the wires from the switches but before you do so draw a diagram of the underside of the board and note which coloured wire is attached to each button; they all have one black ground wire as well, you don’t need to note that.

Mine were tough little buggers to remove and nervous sweaty hands didn’t help, so I used my Leatherman pliers to grasp the necks of the metal clasps and tug firmly.

The black switches need to be removed next. Pull gently on the tall strut holding each in place and you can wiggle them out easily.

Finally unscrew the nuts and slide the buttons out; some of those blighters are tight but rest assured that none are glued on even though it bloody well felt like it.

Before you remove the joystick, take a look at the iCade’s circuit board; where the joystick wires are attached there should be the directions printed in tiny lettering on the actual board. If so, great. If not (highly unlikely) then before removing the stick take a note of which of the coloured wires is attached to each directional switch on the stick.

Now pop the ball and dust protector off, remove the four screws and keep hold of them for later; then slide the stick out and cut the wires as close to the switch connector as you can so you have some spare when soldering/connecting.

The new buttons need a wider hole, by a couple of millimetres. I have no sanding tools so I got some sandpaper and did it by hand which was easy enough but took me about an hour, and boy did my wrist hurt the next day.

You’ll also need to sand the hole for the stick by a millimetre or so, to fit the lip at the base into it.

The buttons clip in easily; make the re-wiring easy on yourself by aligning the buttons so the switches beneath line up the same way. Then, looking at the buttons so SANWA is printed the right way up, clip the appropriate coloured wire onto the left contact and the daisy chain of black wires onto the right contact.

The joystick is a little trickier. Technically it doesn’t matter which orientation you mount it so long as you connect up the wires appropriately, but our hand is forced because we need enough room to clip on the 5-wire bundle safely. The best position is to have the stick connector (or PCB) facing the iPad, towards the back of the case.

However, if we just rotate the entire stick to achieve this, the iCade’s screw connector gets in the way of the stick’s plastic moulding; you can see them sticking out either side in the first image below. Therefore, we have to mount the base with the protruding mouldings top and bottom. That would place the PCB on the left or right side, so we have to rotate that as well, to take account of the stick mount rotation.

Don’t worry, it’s easy :)

Unclip the existing square gate from the stick (again, note that this gate can be rotated forty-five degrees into a 4-way stick if you prefer). The PCB and four switches are all one piece and can be lifted off together, rotated ninety degrees and replaced. Then attach the octagonal gate (or your original if you’re happy with that) and you’re done.

Position the stick so the PCB faces up towards the back of the case, making sure the mounting ring sits properly in the widened hole, then attach it with the four screws that held the original stick.

Nearly there! All that’s left is to connect the directional wires to the 5-wire bundle. It’s best not to clip it on just yet, so that you don’t risk pulling on wires while making the joins.

Because we rotated the connector and the switches, we need to re-map the directions and as luck would have it there’s a brilliant guide to doing just that available here, which for ease of reading I’ve reproduced below with full credit to the original creator, rtdzign.

The guide shows the view of the stick from beneath. With our PCB in the top position we want the bottom left picture. I have a Sanwa stick so on the 5-wire bundle I need to connect yellow to the UP wire, green to DOWN, red to LEFT, orange to RIGHT and black to ground.

You’ll have noticed there’s 4 black ground wires coming from the circuit board. As the stick uses a common ground you only need to use one of those four, doesn’t matter which; you should tape up the ends of the others so there’s no chance of metal contact in the future. I’ve read of people merging all four into one and connecting that, but I preferred the simpler way.

I used a screw terminal but if you fancy a spot of soldering then you might like this soldering guide on the Touch Arcade forums.

So, got your wires all connected up? Time to clip them onto the PCB and then fire it all up and make sure it works.

And assuming it does, you’re done! I got it right first time, thankyouverymuch :)

Grab a cable tie and tidy up that bundle of joystick wires, then tuck everything in neatly, make sure nothing’s trapped and start screwing the case back up, casually tossing into the bin any Torx Security screws you may have encountered along the way…

I have to tell you, the difference is huge. It was well worth the effort. Games like Pac Man, Silverfish HD, Hard Lines and Forget-Me-Not are so much more pleasurable due to the improved accuracy of the U/D/L/R directions with the octagonal gate; your high scores will improve, guaranteed.

The buttons are a different world. A feather-light press is all that’s needed and when hammered they make nothing like the cacophany the stock buttons do, plus you don’t feel like you’ve been for a workout. In something like Super Crate Box where reaction speed is key (thanks to the crazy big collision box around your character), the hair-like trigger on them is superb.

If you’re on the fence about trying this but fear of cracking the iCade open is holding you back, rest assured if I can do it, you can*.

Thanks for reading, and good luck!

* By the way please don’t hold me to that. It really is simple but if you’re disasterously bad at stuff like this and you go ahead and try it and screw it up by doing something stupid like cutting all the wires at the wrong ends or something, all bets are off and I will deny any legal responsibility to my claim that “if I can do it, you can”.

But seriously, you probably can.

Related reading:

1. My quick review of the iCade for iPad It was my birthday last weekend (36 if you must...
2. normal service will be resumed shortly! Just a quick post to say that while I do...
3. the new apple store, covent garden Featuring: - 20 shots of Appley design gorgeousness - an...

Such apps are not new but until now I’d had no interest; Alfred caught my eye with a bold, friendly design and a lot of recommendations. It’s available in a basic free version here with an optional ‘Powerpack’ for £15 that massively expands what it can do.

To really get the most from Alfred you need the Powerpack but you should definitely grab the free version and give it a whirl; I upgraded within five minutes of seeing what it could do and haven’t looked back so this review is based on features it provides – but not all of them, there’s just too many.

(All the Alan Partridge fans reading: insert your own “I wonder who got the powerpack?” gag here –>   )

Typing alt-Space brings up the Alfred box into which you type your command or keywords. Typing an application name launches it, like Spotlight; typing a URL or part of a bookmark opens your browser and takes you there; if you want to search the web Alfred offers a selection of search engines then performs the search; it can control iTunes, send emails, perform calculations, manage your clipboard history, search for and perform actions upon most any file on your computer – and that’s just ‘out of the box’.

By installing 3rd-party extensions in the form of Shell Scripts, AppleScripts or Automator Workflows, Alfred can integrate with many popular applications including Wunderlist, Fantastical, Things, Evernote, Spotify, and Omnifocus. You can even tweet from it. The Alfred user community has come up with all sorts of other cool computer stuff you can do with extensions, many of which are collected on the Alfred site here; have a browse and see if anything that you do often has an Alfred shortcut. If it doesn’t, just create your own.

If all of this still sounds a bit “so what?” then you’re thinking what I was thinking when I first read about launchers. I mean, what’s wrong with the Dock, right?

Alfred is quicker, less distracting & more comfortable

For a long time my Dock had been loaded with around twenty apps and four folders. I would have liked a less full Dock but I found that it was more annoying to have to go looking for them when I wanted them than it was to have the Dock looking a little busy.

Then I got a Magic Trackpad for my iMac. I like it in principle but it’s definitely suited more to gestures than it is precision; It’s probably no coincidence that around this time I started investigating apps like Launchbar and QuickSilver that I’d heard a lot about; I wanted a better way to get to apps than through precise mouse movements.

In the end I didn’t see the point installing and learning to use something new that I could approximate for free by using Spotlight to launch apps that weren’t in the Dock. Spotlight’s cmd-Space shortcut is easy to remember and type, and entering a few characters of an app’s name is far quicker and easier than invoking a new Finder window and navigating to the app and double clicking.

Having got used to launching apps via Spotlight like this, trying Alfred was like opening the floodgates as it grants the same easy access to almost everything you do regularly on your computer, and considerably more elegantly.

How could Alfred help you?

Here’s a few examples of how I use it day to day:

I rarely type URLs into browsers now, or search via the Google box in my browser (although I still don’t remember every time). I can connect to my other Mac via Screen Sharing with just two keystrokes (‘ss’) instead taking a good ten seconds of focus to do it manually. When working on my site I often use the same selection of apps so I’ve set an Alfred keyword that opens them all at once.

A very useful shortcut that I’m using daily is for Wunderlist. Things I need to remember occur to me all the time; sometimes I try and record them with Siri and then get frustrated with Siri when I have to correct everything it got wrong; sometimes I remember to launch Wunderlist and create a new reminder; and most of the time I do neither because they’re both too much effort and then I forget.

With Alfred I type ‘wl remember to do that thing’ and go back to whatever I was doing while Alfred sends that off to Wunderlist in the background, displaying a Growl to confirm receipt. My fingers don’t leave the keyboard, I remain in the same app environment and I stay focussed on whatever I was doing. All I have to do is remember to check Wunderlist…

Another example: I’ve been playing a lot of Skyrim recently (like, hundreds of hours of it) and occasionally need to look something up online. I’ve saved the two best Skyrim wiki sites as custom searches in Alfred and given them both the keyword ‘sky’. Now when I need the low-down on that Chillrend blade I looted I type ‘sky Chillrend’ and Alfred offers both wiki sites as possible actions. Rather than search one at a time I’ve set a keyboard shortcut to ‘action all results’ with ctrl-Return and both open in the background.

And then there’s the customisation and options; most of the keyboard shortcuts can be altered (although you should try the defaults first because they’ve been chosen deliberately); you can change the fallback search sites Alfred will offer to search with if it doesn’t recognise any keywords in your query; Dropbox syncing to sync extensions and settings across multiple Macs running Alfred; you can even style the Alfred box how you like it or download themes other users have created (my own attempt is available here – what I said earlier about Alfred being elegant obviously goes out the window if you go with a Sex Pistols colour scheme).

Alfred also learns quickly; the more you use it, the less characters you need to type before Alfred knows what you want. Using this I’ve trained it so that when I start typing ‘ph’ it offers Photo Mechanic first because that’s what I’ve picked the most when I’ve typed in just those two letters in the past, whereas if I continue to ‘pho’ it offers Photoshop first.

The finishing touches to an already wonderful app are the friendliness of the small team behind it and the support of an enthusiastic community providing extra functionality in spades. Every question I’ve tweeted at @alfredapp has received a prompt and helpful response and there are both official and unofficial Alfred tips sites to pore over.

Grab now, buy later

A full review of Alfred would take ages and I’ve really only touched on a very small set of the functionality; suffice to say it is extensive. The wealth of possibilities may seem overwhelming or you may be reluctant to give up the mouse. Don’t worry – it scales beautifully to users of all proficiencies and your mouse hand will definitely thank you. In fact, at first it took me by surprise how liberating it was to remove so many constant mouse interactions; even small movements down to the Dock are hassle compared to Alfred once you get into the habit.

If you use a Mac regularly I think you’ll love Alfred. Grab the free version now and see how long it takes you to resist the Powerpack and open up it’s trove of possibilities. It really does change the way you use your computer.

(Okay that last line sounds so much like a radio sponsorship blurb but I assure you this is from the heart, not the wallet; I love using Alfred so much I want you to as well – no kickbacks here.)

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

Related reading:

1. a quick look at Cathode for Mac OS X Cathode is a fun alternative to the Terminal utility for...
2. my mostly positive review of Hipstamatic Disposable Hipstamatic Disposable brings some fresh ideas to the iPhone photo...

For those who don’t know Terminal (and nobody would blame you if you don’t) it’s used for accessing the command line of the computer. The command line is kind of one level of sophistication up from the system’s guts. When you do something in the graphical user interface of your app, the resulting commands come here to do their thing; you can make the computer do anything you want from here, including committing computer suicide, making it an intimidating place for the inexperienced.

(I know pretty much zero about working with the command line except what I copy and paste from reputable sites when I’m jailbreaking. I have gathered that ‘sudo’ is a powerful and oft-used command that makes something ‘do’ something, so I allowed myself the luxury of smiling knowingly at the recent Penny Arcade guest strip about that one, although I probably shouldn’t have.)

So whether you’re an occasional user or you pretty much live in the command line, you may appreciate Cathode for putting a friendlier face on it than the cold, blank stare of Apple’s Terminal.

clockwise from top left: three preset display types, plus one with custom tweaks to make it glitchy

You can tweak almost every option on the screen including font family, size and colour ; background and foreground colour; monitor curvature and reflection opacity; rate and opacity of the scan-line; character flicker; a whole bunch of retro sounds you can turn off completely if you like, including a beep every key press just like the movies; you can even put an iSight photo of yourself at the keyboard into the screen reflection.

It’s all completely cosmetic but it certainly makes digging into the command line on a Mac a much more enjoyable experience. At the moment I have a setup inspired by the Swan computer in Lost:

This is just a slightly tweaked 'Viti Green' preset

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

Related reading:

1. My quick review of the iCade for iPad It was my birthday last weekend (36 if you must...
2. why you should install Alfred for Mac right now Alfred is an elegant and crazy powerful launcher application for...
3. my mostly positive review of Hipstamatic Disposable Hipstamatic Disposable brings some fresh ideas to the iPhone photo...

After much hair-pulling and XBMC-forum-surfing I found workarounds and posted about them (here and here). I stuck with using Playback to get my media available on the network, but I missed the lack of cover-art and metadata (which Playback doesn’t support). And then eventually my XBMC install became quite unusable after something, somewhere, stopped it from reliably connecting to anything at all. After all the jiggery pokery trying to get streaming working again I had no idea what I’d done and I gave up.

I switched back to streaming to my Xbox 360 via Playback even though: the 360 sounds like a jet engine taking off; it drinks electricity like water on a hot day; and it doesn’t show metadata or cover-art (whether you’re using Playback or not). It just streams the video, but that’s all I wanted at this point.

Enough!

Yesterday I had the house to myself and I decided to start over.

According to the AppleTV menus I was running OS 4.1.1, a comparatively archaic version. You may have noticed that for some reason Apple’s naming conventions for their iDevice versions of iOS and their ATV versions of iOS do not match, although for a brief time around iOS 4.3 they came in sync. I found a great post on Firecore’s forum that explained it. The current version of that post is reproduced below for ease of reference:

Firecore forum post explaining iOS naming conventions for ATV2 vs iDevices

It turns out that the ATV2 OS version 4.3 is the most recent version that supports untethered jail breaking, and that version also adds Airplay support for many 3rd party apps, not just Apple’s (try it with AirVideo from your iPad – just awesome). There is currently a tethered jailbreak for 4.4 (which is the equivalent of iOS 5.0.1 for iDevices) but trust me, you’d be better sticking to untethered if you value a quiet life.

UPDATE: When I performed the jailbreak only the 4.3 version supported untethered, but the latest Seas0npass includes an untethered jailbreak for 4.4. The major differences are AirPlay Mirroring from the iPad 2 but seeing as I only have an iPad 1 I am sticking with my 4.3 jailbreak for now.

I downloaded Seas0nPass from Firecore’s website, performed the jailbreak to 4.3 and all went well. I reinstalled XBMC Version 11 (Eden) which adds greater stability and also a new, easy-to-do streaming solution called AFP that supposedly works well with Lion. Well, it didn’t work out for me.

Although XBMC showed me an AFP connection to my networked computers, and although I’d turned AFP on and set up the folders I wanted to share, XBMC wasn’t seeing any shares. I appreciate it’s a work in progress and that maybe I missed something, but after trying all the other usual methods and coming up with a whole bunch of not-much just like last time (some folders shared, others didn’t, don’t know why, can’t be bothered to work it out any more), I decided that XBMC is still far too flakey to get stressed over and started looking at Firecore’s ATV Flash solution.

(For clarity – my Playback shares still worked but it doesn’t send any metadata like cover-art and that’s the main reason I like XBMC; ATV Flash does use metadata, so it won my favour.)

It’s a $30 bit of software that gets installed onto the ATV at the click of a button (unlike XBMC which requires installing either it or NitoTV via the Terminal, which can be a bit fiddly). The main difference between it and XBMC is that ATV Flash sets up shop in the AppleTV’s existing dashboard, maintaining the Apple-y feel; interactions all use the existing Apple UI. It’s pretty cool.

I’d had a look at ATV Flash before, when it was in beta, and had been suspicious of paying for software that does something that XBMC does with greater customisability for free. However, I was at the end of my tether with the implications of ‘free’ for now, and Firecore promised that setting up shared media would be as simple as making sure File Sharing was turned on in my Mac’s settings.

It worked seamlessly.

I appreciate there are people complaining in their forums that it doesn’t do this, doesn’t do that, glitches with streaming, etc, but the same is true throughout computing – some people’s setups will play nice and others won’t. My experience so far has been flawless, touch wood. We streamed a movie over wifi from my iMac to the ATV and it was smooth and uninterrupted (the movie itself, Insidious, was fun but kinda stoopid). It has a couple of areas I’d like to see improved, such as the ability to scrape for movie metadata based on a folder name rather than a media-file (because all my movies reside in their own named folder within a Movies folder) but apparently features like that are coming, and updates do seem to be quite regular.

So: it didn’t crash, it was ridiculously easy to add my computer’s shared folders, and it all feels like it’s part of the same Apple experience.

You do have to buy before you try, but they have a 15-day money back guarantee. I can’t tell you how well that works because I won’t be needing it. For $30, I’ve hopefully found my final ATV2 streaming solution.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

Related reading:

1. How to stream to XBMC on an AppleTV2 from a Lion Mac using Playback XBMC for AppleTV 2 stopped connecting to my media when...
2. Another way to stream to XBMC on an ATV2 from a Lion Mac On my AppleTV 2, media sharing to XBMC was broken...
3. adventures in softboxing: sunshine and daisies Featuring: - off-camera flash lighting with a softbox - experiments...

As iOS photo apps go it’s as accomplished as you’d expect from Synthetic. However, despite how much fun it is to use, it’s quirks may put you off in the long term. I also have a bit of a problem with the in-app purchase model, and there seems to be a bug that causes unpredictable crashes. There’s lots I want to talk about because the app deserves it, but this is a fairly long post so you might want to get comfy, send it to Instapaper, or skip to the end…

First, some context

You may already know that I love toy camera photo apps. I know there are those who balk at the irony of emulating retro photography on a digital camera (and that’s fine, although if you’d like to share such opinions in the comments below, please don’t) but I really enjoy using them when they are done well, an achievement which is as much about the user interface and experience as it is about the final output. I loved the simplicity of Instagram until their 2.0 update left their filters feeling kinda neutered so I went back to Hipstamatic to sate my fetish for digital toy camera emulation.

The original Hipstamatic (App Store link) is the archetypal toy camera app: a detailed skeuomorphic UI that replicates the front and back of a plastic camera; interchangeable lenses and films; and a realistically vague viewfinder. Where it suffers is the abundance of choice – over 260 different lens and film combos alone. Thankfully, there are now settings to disable films, lenses or flashes you don’t like, plus a ‘shake to randomise’ feature that only uses filters you’ve approved for inclusion. This is how I use Hipstamatic now – launch, shake and snap – it’s quicker than hand-picking a combination and introduces an element of surprise when the resulting photo pops up.

Enter the D-Series with it’s crazy new ideas

The new app, Hipstamatic Disposable, keeps up the tradition of wonderfully detailed UI design but deviates from the template in a couple of significant ways.

First, instead of one camera into which you load different lenses and films, Disposable introduces you to a fictional range of disposable plastic cameras called the D-Series, each with their own effect and a slider to alter the intensity of each shot.

You get three cameras for free

Choose from a range of extra cameras

Each camera has it's own realistic packaging

The app comes with two camera types pre-installed with a third free if you connect to Facebook (this is just to provide a network of friends to share cameras with, and no other purpose; more later). As in Hipstamatic, further cameras, or rather effects, are sold in-app via their HipstaMart where each camera hangs on a rack in its own cute cardboard-and-plastic retail packaging, just like Star Wars figures; like I say, they’ve put a lot of care into the details.

Currently four of the purchasable cameras are priced at 69p (99¢) for unlimited uses – that means that when the camera is ‘used up’ the camera itself respawns and you can start another (the included cameras are also unlimited); three further cameras/effects are priced in bundles with limited uses; nine uses costs 69p; 36 uses is £1.49 and 99 uses is £2.49. When those cameras are used up, that’s it. More on this feature later.

Swipe through active cameras or navigate to other screens

Print sets from completed cameras are collected here

Select a print to see metadata and sharing options

The second big deviation from photo app tradition is that each of these cameras has 24 frames available to shoot and you don’t get to see any of the photos you’ve taken until you’ve shot all 24 frames, at which point the shots are processed and presented to you – just like the old days! From here you can save either the entire set or just individual images to your iPhone’s Photos app; by default the app automatically saves the entire set to Photos upon completion but I’ve turned that off while I test the app for this review.

Highlighting individual images shows you metadata including who shot the image, which camera was used, the intensity slider setting, location and date. One for the real camera users out there: the intensity slider appropriates f-stop numbers for the scale, from 2.8 up to 22. Nice touch.

The 24-shot nature means that, yes, I’m likely to often end up processing cameras that contain images from weeks ago as I drift between cameras taking ages to finish one; that could be frustrating if you value chronological order in your Photos app, but it’s not the end of the world.

Much more importantly, it brings a new sense of fun and discovery to getting ‘films’ back weeks after shooting them (just like the old days!). The sense of glee at re-discovering shots you’d forgotten ever taking has almost completely died out with the slow extinction of film cameras and the rise of digital, so kudos to Synthetic for bringing it back.

Also, such a limitation makes for a superb motivation to find projects that I can shoot in 24 frames – and then make them count; necessity is the mother of invention and all that.

Personalise each camera with a name and sticker

Sticker designs are bold and fun; names default to the date

I like the vertical design but it can be awkward to use

One of the most enjoyable aspects of using this app is the real attention that’s been lavished on every stage of the process. Every camera is so lovingly rendered they beg to be used. When you first pick a camera you get to name it, perhaps for the event you’re attending, but hey, why not call it Lord Percy? This is incorporated into the retro-inspired label you pick for the camera shell, each with three choices of colour scheme. The camera layout itself is nice and obvious, using a vertical orientation with the viewfinder at the top, the effect slider, flash, and a large friendly shutter release button below.

So, what if you don’t want to use the same camera for 24 shots before trying a different one? No problem – you can have more than one camera on the go at any one time (another reason you may want to name the cameras), switching to a different camera whenever you fancy.

The effects generally mark a welcome move away from the grungy extremes of Hipstamatic. Some will be familiar to Hipsta veterans such as the BlacKeys 44 and Foxy X69 (both premium purchases). An effect slider adds some variety; for example, on the Rodney ZX9 it adjusts the amount of zoom applied to a ghosted double-exposure that overlays your shot; on the Unicorn MG it controls the opacity of the rainbow-coloured light leaks.

The majority of effects are pleasing to my eye in some way although of the purchasable cameras I’d say they’ve definitely picked the right ones to charge more for; at least if you only go for the 69p options you’ve not lost much if you don’t use them often. But remember, once you’ve picked a look you’re stuck with it for 24 shots so pick well!

At the bottom of this review I’ve posted some of my favourite shots from the test reels I made while writing it. They aren’t going to win any awards but they might give you some idea.

The Invitations screen if you're Billy No-Mates. Like me, usually.

When starting a camera you can invite friends

Joining a camera invitiation from my brother

Disposable also has a social feature in which you invite friends via Facebook to start a shared camera (I know, I know; I hate Facebook too). Each invited participant starts a new camera and shoots images on their own phones. When all the cameras are finished everyone’s images are pooled, resulting in an album that gives a much wider range of moments than any one photographer would have captured. It’s Synthetic’s in-app version of having everyone dump their digital pics in a Flickr or Facebook event pool, basically.

(At least, I think this is how it works – I encountered some serious problems while exploring the social feature which I’ll explain shortly)

I love the idea in theory but it feels best suited to social events and I’m an antisocial bugger so there will be few such opportunities for me to make the most of it. However, I can see this being a big hit at a wedding or a party so long as there’s at least a few attendees that are Facebook friends and have the app (which is free of course, so no excuse there). In fact the more I think about how well this would work at events the more I think that social animals are the real target market.

For this review I asked my brother, all the way back home in Glasgow, to download the app and we shared some shots using the MegaZuck 84 camera. Or at least we tried to when we weren’t experiencing an appalling, almost non-stop…

… CRASH!

This is a real stinker; this version of the app (12, according to iTunes) has some unidentified issues which can cause a regular crash – as often as 10-20 seconds into launching the app. Although the app had been completely stable for several hours while I tinkered with it on my own, shortly after I connected with my brother via Facebook and started a camera with him I experienced my first crash and they kept coming. While we were shooting our cameras we had the same experience, no matter what we tried.

Once we’d both managed to complete our reels and our images were downloading to the other’s phone we continued to experienced crashes, but later on once my app stopped receiving new images from him it became almost completely stable again with very rare crashes.

Incidentally, the one camera we both managed to finish together despite the crashes isn’t displaying 48 images as I’d expected it to. There are 19 of my images, 8 of his. That doesn’t even add up to 24 so I’m not sure what’s going on there.

Later on I accepted two invites from him to start new cameras; I think he sent these earlier and I just didn’t get them amidst my crashiness. I was able to finish both cameras with just one crash towards the start both times. At this time he wasn’t using the app so perhaps it’s an active connection to another user that causes it.

(UPDATE, 24th Dec 2011: this morning my bro sent me a camera invite and started shooting on it himself and didn’t get a single crash. Later, when I accepted the invite and started shooting I didn’t get any crashes either. However, in both cases the other user wasn’t using the app at the same time. I still think it’s related to an active connection – or maybe the bug is related to server-side software as opposed to bugs in the app code, and has been fixed already?)

Either way, there’s lots of complaints on Twitter and the App Store review page so it’s the sort of thing that will probably be fixed very soon and then perhaps I’ll be able to work out how it’s actually supposed to work. Worth bearing in mind for now.

My niggles

… are a bunch of things that niggled at me but wouldn’t put me off completely. I just think that if they did it my way it would be that little bit better, obviously.

First, you have to shoot with the phone in the vertical position; if you go landscape the camera doesn’t auto-rotate. This fits with the ‘phone-as-toy-camera’ metaphor (real film doesn’t detect orientation) but limits how you can use the app; getting the lens very close to a horizontal surface (e.g., for a shallow depth of field effect) is harder and I found that surprisingly often it’s more comfortable getting the shot you want by turning the phone sideways. I know I could rotate specific prints once saved into the iPhone’s Photos app, but that’s just hassle, man.

Between Hipstamatic and Disposable I prefer the vertical alignment of the D-Series controls and also the fact that the viewfinder is close to the iPhone lens. However, I’d prefer it more if unlocking the auto-rotate ability was an option for those of us willing to break the illusion of a real toy camera.

I’ll briefly list my other niggles, in no particular order:

• prints are square but the viewfinder is ever so slightly rectangular – wider on the horizontal. I was disappointed when I first realised my prints weren’t the same; there’s so many square camera apps on my phone that the variety would be nice.
• on some cameras, particularly the Dreamy, moving the effect slider around didn’t appear to change anything noticeably
• the only option to connect with friends is via Facebook. I would dearly like to delete my Facebook account forever but apps like this (and websites that choose to use the Facebook login APIs exclusively) force me to keep it hanging around. I asked @Hipstamatic if there was any chance of adding Twitter for friend connection and they replied that there was a chance, but not quite yet. They’d be mad to leave that on the back-burner.
• in-app, you can view individual images with their notes but you can’t tap again to make the image full-screen on black and zoom in on details; you can in Hipstamatic and it would nice to have it here.
• when shooting you can’t tap to set the focus or exposure point. You also can’t pinch to zoom but that really would break the metaphor so that’s fine. However, the camera’s getting to choose the focus and exposure so why can’t I? S’not fair.
• once you’ve purchased cameras, you can’t change the order they are listed in your camera bag. I like to organise things in a way that makes sense to me; just needs an ‘Edit’ button.
• if you start a camera and then don’t use it and want to remove it from your active cameras, you can’t; make sure you pick the right camera and the right name.
• similarly, you can’t decide to have a film processed with blanks left; you could choose to do this in real life so technically it should be there, right? ;)

(okay, the last two are really picky. I realise the option to end an unfinished camera would rather kill the mood but what if there’s a handful of event snaps at the start of a camera and then you have to shoot 20 unrelated snaps just to get access to them? Nnnngg, dammit)

About those IAPs

As mentioned above, some of the purchasable cameras (effects) in the app are not unlimited. These limited-use cameras follow the real-world metaphor that when they’re done, they’re done, and you gotta buy new ones.

When I first heard about this idea of charging per shot in a digital camera app, I was pretty damn outraged. In the original version of this post at this point I went on for several paragraphs wrestling with outrage versus the fact that the prices really won’t break the bank and the app is free as it is and even a 36-pack will take so long to get through it may as well be ‘unlimited’, but then again it still doesn’t assuage my disapproval of charging per shot for digital, and so on…

(At current prices I calculated the use per 24-shot-camera at 7p each for the 9-pack, 4p for the 36-pack and 2p for the 99-pack)

As I considered and reconsidered, I slowly realised that… actually… I find it strangely appealing that in this fantasy world of the iPhone-as-disposable-camera I have to pay for opportunities to use a particular model of camera and then shoot all the shots before I get any back. It does actually lend a certain sense of importance to each frame you shoot, because you’re paying (hardly anything whatsoever) for it.

And I hate that I have to admit this because I do think it’s a dangerous precedent to set for IAPs in photo apps simply because unlike film, digital photos don’t incur a cost-per-shot in the same way; however, I’m forced to admit Hipstamatic Disposable actually gets away with it purely by virtue of the effort that’s gone into maintaining the illusion of reality throughout the experience.

So don’t anyone else get any funny ideas.

I should add that although I haven’t verified it, I think that when Synthetic first released the app their rates for the IAPs were not as good value as they are now and may have been pressured into bettering them by user complaints. So long as they spread the love with a mix of unlimited and limited IAPs in future I could live with grabbing a 36-pack of my favourite premium cameras. I doubt I’d run out any time soon.

In conclusion

Realistically this won’t completely take over from the other apps I use daily due to the convenience of their one-shot nature, but the enjoyment I get from using the D-Series cameras is such that I want to find ways to use them; I’ve got a couple of cameras on the go right now and I’m looking forward to the day I get them all back, whenever that may be.

And the IAPs? I still think it’s a bold step to charge users per shot to take digital pictures but look; the rates aren’t bad for the actual usage you’ll get; it makes some crazy sort of sense in terms of the whole package; and, perversely, it really does immerse you in the experience of using the D-Series cameras, which is what I’ve been raving about throughout this post.

Sadly, at this time it certainly seems to me that the social features, which appear to work in principle, are the cause of such a persistent crash bug that I can’t recommend using them – my brother was so unimpressed with a crash every ten seconds that he’s not bothered to launch it again since he completed one shared camera with me. If it had been my only experience of the app, I’d have deleted it by now as well.

So overall? It’s such a fun app with such new ideas to change your iPhone snapping that you’d be daft not to give it a go and see how it might fit into your day. Maybe just wait until they fix the crippling crash bug first (or stay well away from the social features until they do).

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything (except about how fake toy camera apps are the reason proper photography is dying and all that stuff) I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

D-Fault, f/x 2.8

Dreamy

D-Fault, f/x 22.0

D-Lite, f/x 22.0

Rodney ZX9, f/x 22.0

D-Lite, f/x 22.0

Unicorn MG, f/x 12.4

MegaZuck 84, f/x 22.0

Dreamy, f/x 22.0

Related reading:

1. Instagram 2.0 review: Insta-grumble Instagram has been my favourite iPhone photo app for about...
2. my latest iPhone toy: hipstamatic (UPDATE: if you’re reading this you might be interested in...
3. My quick review of the iCade for iPad It was my birthday last weekend (36 if you must...

I mentioned in passing that I’d removed my copy of Instagram 2.0 as it was so awful and replaced it the earlier version from my iTunes. I’ve noticed a lot of visitors coming to the article via a Google search for that exact process so I thought I’d make it a little easier to find.

Before we start, a warning

There’s a few issues that will stop this working. You need to have an older, authorised version of Instagram on your computer already so if you updated to 2.0 via your iTunes software on your computer, or you downloaded the update on your phone and have since synced with your computer, or you never synced the old version with iTunes at all (some people never connect their phones to their computer after the first activation apparently) then you’re most likely not going to be able to revert. Sorry!

Secondly, this is probably going to stop working once iOS 5 is out. iOS 5 introduces wireless syncing to iTunes which means that if you download an update to your phone then once you get home and join the same network as your iTunes computer that update will automatically sync back to iTunes, over-writing the old version of the app.

There is also a feature now available to US iTunes users called Automatic Downloads. This automatically downloads to your computer any purchases you make on an iOS device without needing to sync. You can turn this feature on or off within iTunes. I haven’t been able to work out if it also automatically downloads updates that you’ve downloaded on your phone. Hopefully not.

How to do it

Okay, caveats out of the way. Assuming that the version of Instagram in your iTunes library is the older version, delete the 2.0 version of the app from your phone right now. Don’t worry, you won’t lose anything except your Instagram login settings which you enter when you re-install the app. All your photos are on their server and in your Photos app.

When you’re absolutely sure you’ve deleted 2.0 from your device, connect it to your computer and let it sync. It will likely not sync back the previous version of Instagram at this point because it knows you deleted it from your phone and assumes you don’t want it. When it’s finished go into the tab for selecting which apps sync to your devices and select Instagram. Sync again.

Now you should have the previous version of Instagram – or at least the version that was on your phone last time you synced with iTunes. Happy old-school Instagramming!

Back up

At this point we want to future-proof ourselves. Head to your iTunes Media folder, find the Apps folder and locate Instagram. It will be called something like ‘Instragram 1.x.x.ipa’ (mine is 1.8.7). Create a folder on your Desktop (or anywhere you like) called App Backups (or anything you like), then hold down the Alt key and drag the Instagram app into that folder. You should see a green + sign to indicate you’re copying the app, not moving it.

The idea is that if you now accidentally overwrite the original app in your iTunes folder you can replace it with your backed-up copy and re-sync. And truth be told I have no idea if that will work, but logic dictates it should do and it’s better than nothing!

UPDATE

Melissa posts in the comments that it even if you updated in iTunes or already synced, all may not be lost:

It’s also possible to roll back to version 1 even if you *have* updated the app in your library…

On a Mac at least. iTunes will throw the old version into your Trash folder. Just retrieve it from that folder (I just copied it to my Documents folder), delete the new Instagram from iTunes, and drag and drop the old version into iTunes to add to your library. Then sync! Works a treat :)

That’s going to be very good news for some of you, I reckon!

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

Related reading:

1. Instagram 2.0 review: Insta-grumble Instagram has been my favourite iPhone photo app for about...
2. iPhoto libraries and Dropbox – a warning! You may be considering syncing your iPhoto libraries between various...
3. if you like Hipstamatic, you’ll love these There’s dozens of retro processing apps in the App Store,...

This week it got a significant 2.0 update adding new filters, live filter and tilt-shift previews before you take your photo, and the option to remove the borders which can change the feel of an image dramatically. It’s also faster and saves much bigger images. Overall that’s a fantastic bunch of new features to add to my favourite photo app.

However, before long something felt very amiss and on closer examination I discovered that I really don’t like it so much after all.

What’s not being mentioned in the press coverage but hasn’t escaped many users on Twitter is that the update also removes three perfectly good filters, Apollo, Poprocket and Gotham; the remaining filters have all been tweaked and feel somehow less than they were – a couple are almost completely different now; most frustratingly the tilt-shift effect has lost a crucial editing option so that at certain settings the effect is ugly to the point of being unusable.

Pictures speak louder than words

I deleted Instagram 2.0 from my iPhone shortly after updating and synced the prior version from my iTunes computer so I could do a comparison of the two as I suspect plenty people will be interested (read how to do this here). Even if you’re not that bothered about these changes you might be surprised by some of them.

First of all, here’s the example image I’m using in it’s original state, along with the 3 filters that have been removed:

Clockwise from top left: original, Apollo, Poprocket & Gotham

These were all pretty good. I didn’t use Poprocket so much, but Apollo was lovely. Gotham in particular offered a high contrast alternative to Inkwell and was especially good for bright, low contrast scenes (for a better example, see my photo here). Now there is only Inkwell remaining for B&W aficionados and anyone who likes their B&W moody and punchy is out of luck.

Now let’s look at the four new additions:

Clockwise from top left: Amaro, Rise, Hudson, Valencia

I can see the variations but seriously, are Amaro, Rise and Valencia anywhere near different enough to each other? Even using this one scene, the removed filters were far more distinctive.

Next, the old and new tilt-shift screens and resulting effect. Look carefully at the transition control.

Tilt shift controls

Tilt-shift results (original & 2.0)

Both versions allow you to set the size, angle and location of the ‘in focus’ area but the old version also allowed you to feather the transition from soft to sharp and back again using the slider to move the secondary outlines around the focus zone. The new version does not give you this control. Instead, as you pinch to expand or contract the focus zone the app respectively softens or hardens the transition but even at it’s widest it’s pretty noticeable.

In the above example shots the focus zone is the exact same size but I’ve been able to feather the transition in the original version, on the left. If you click on the image to see it larger you’ll notice the new version created a transition that so hard it’s pretty much unusable.

And now the pièce de résistance or, in the Queen’s English, ‘the piece of resistance’:

Filter comparisons

XPro II (original & 2.0)

The new XPro II is a little brighter and contrast is reduced, and in the sky you’ll see that the colour toning is very different.

Lomo-fi (original & 2.0)

Lomo-fi is also a little darker but with more shadow detail (reduced contrast). The characteristic blown highlights are gone, leaving something with much less character.

Earlybird now has more shadow detail but is somehow flatter and yellower. (UPDATE: as you’ll read below, this is also the only filter that the Instagram guys have acknowledged is different, for some reason)

Sutro (original & 2.0)

Sutro: where do you start? This isn’t even the same filter any more.

Toaster (original & 2.0)

Toaster is another one with reduced contrast. The original seemed to glow out of the centre and this one is very flat with a hint of a blue wash.

Brannan (original & 2.0)

Brannan feels largely the same; I’d say this one of the few examples of an improvement, with a bit of extra detail and toning in the highlights, and it’s almost imperceptibly punchier.

Inkwell (original & 2.0)

Inkwell is the only B&W filter on offer now. It’s been brightened slightly which brings out some shadow detail but blows the sky in this shot. I’d say this is an improvement on the previous, flatter version but the lack of a punchier B&W alternative is a real shame.

Walden (original & 2.0)

The new Walden a kind of yellow wash that flattens the contrast, and has lost it’s subtle but pleasing desaturation. It’s quite different.

Hefe (original & 2.0)

Hefe is now a little darker and has lost it’s characteristic warmth.

Nashville (original & 2.0)

Nashville had a nice washed out 80s fashion photo feel. The new version has lost that and is too contrasty as a result.

1977 (original & 2.0)

1977 also used to have a washed out feeling but has lost it and increased in contrast like Nashville. Notice also that the textures in the original version (see the ‘film blotches’ about two thirds of the way up on either side) are absent in the new version, I’m thinking because they didn’t play nice with the live previews.

Lord Kelvin (original & 2.0)

Lord Kelvin (or just Kelvin as it’s known now) is completely different. This is such a departure that it really made me think about any possible technical reason to make these changes.

Across the board distinctive elements of each filter have been compromised. Filters that were washed out are now more contrasty. Filters that were contrasty are now more washed out. They’ve all drifted towards the same look.

Instagram said that all the filters have been completely re-written to work with the new live preview system and to output far higher resolution images, and it seems to me the re-writes just haven’t nailed the original look. I have a feeling this may be for technical reasons, that the new engine for live preview just can’t support certain features like textures. I suppose it’s also possible the Instagram guys wanted to make some tweaks deliberately but if they did then that’s not cool in my opinion. Users preferring the social side may not mind much, but I had some favourite filters that just don’t feel the same at all and I know I’m not alone.

The higher resolution output also contributes subtly to the loss of character. Instagram seeks to replicate old school film and camera effects which almost all thrive on their lack of perfection. The original version’s lower res lent a barely perceptible softness to the finer details which helped sell their retro film pretensions, a quality which is noticeable now by it’s absence. Every image Instagram 2.0 produces is as full of detail as the original image and that’s a problem. If there was a way to cheat a little imperfection back into the details somehow that would be interesting.

But the big problems are the changes to the filters and the tilt-shift tool. I think the latter is something that could and definitely should be changed and if you’re reading this, guys, that would be awesome. However the filters have been changed, and for whatever reason, they just aren’t quite on the money yet, some painfully so.

And as for the new filters, they feel so similar in tone that the loss of the Instagram Three is even more keenly felt as they were so full of character, something which the whole selection now seems to lack a little of.

For the time being I think I’m going to go back to the last version I have saved in iTunes (again, instructions here). I know I haven’t ever had to pay anything to use this app and so it’s not like I’m particularly entitled to ‘my’ app, but I didn’t really take the Instagram guys to be the iOS incarnation of George Lucas either – and I still don’t really because I love the app too much. I’m hoping they hear some of the feedback and see what they can do with it.

UPDATE

22nd September: The @instagram Twitter account just posted this link to notice of an update to 2.1 coming soon. Two notes relevant to this review:

Earlybird looks more like old version
In v2.0, the Earlybird filter was altered slightly. This was unintentional and in v2.1 we’ve restored the filter back to its original state.

Tilt-shift has softer cutoff
We noticed the blur on tilt-shift in v2.0 was more intense when applied after capture. In v2.1, we’ve made the tilt-shift preview consistent between screens and less intense.

I’m surprised that Earlybird is the one being singled out given how different nearly all the other filters are. I also don’t think there’s any need to do anything with the tilt-shift except put the transition/gradient slider back in.

ANOTHER UPDATE

25th September: I notice now that the Instagram support page contains a couple of references to both the missing filters and the Tiltshift gradient tool:

I can’t find the Gotham, Poprocket, or Apollo filters
The Gotham, Poprocket and Apollo filters were replaced by 4 new filters in V2.0 of Instagram. We understand that there are fans of these filters in the Instagram community and in future releases we hope to introduce improved versions that capture the essence of these filters.

I can’t adjust the tilt shift gradient
In designing the new camera interface, we strived to keep the app as simple as possible. In keeping with this, we thought it was a reasonable tradeoff to remove the ability to adjust the tilt shift effect. If you have feedback on this feature, we’d appreciate if you could send us an email with details.

I’ve sent a detailed but polite email to them outlining my main concerns with the filters, the live preview feature and the tilt-shift tool and if you feel strongly about any of these I would encourage you to do the same – but do be polite! Nobody responds well to an angry or abusive email.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE

September 26th: I mention in the comments below that you can’t change a filter after you shoot like you used to be able to, and that having to choose before you shoot ruins the spontaneity. I’ve been playing with the app today and I’m happy and a trifle sheepish to admit

I was wrong!

You can choose a filter before you shoot if you want but after you shoot you can also change your choice, so it’s the best of both worlds.

This large oversight of mine actually makes me slightly less disappointed in the update. But only a little bit, mind… ;)

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

Related reading:

1. How to replace Instagram 2.0 with Instagram 1.x.x A lot of people feel like Instagram 2.0 ruined all...
2. my mostly positive review of Hipstamatic Disposable Hipstamatic Disposable brings some fresh ideas to the iPhone photo...
3. My quick review of the iCade for iPad It was my birthday last weekend (36 if you must...

The key to migrating is moving the database, comments, tags, images, and everything else associated with the existing PP posts and importing them into the new WP database using it’s own Import function. I’m going to be using a plugin I found at ElevenTwentySix, their PixelPost to WordPress Exporter plugin. They ask for a (required) $14.95 donation which goes to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

So this is my diary of making the move, which may or may not be successful.

13th August, 2011

19:55

I’ve downloaded the plugin from ElevenTwentySix. It comes with a Read Me that gives some background to what you’re about to do and some advice about how to set it up, including a very handy reminder to reset the MySQL database of your new WP site before starting; there’s likely to be some clutter in there if you’ve been toying with the template before migrating.

I’ve also downloaded the latest version of WordPress, created a new MySQL database for my WP site and entered the details into the WP config file. That’s all uploading right now into a folder on the root of the server. Once WP is set up I’ll likely leave it there and run a redirect from the current homepage, as this is really easy to set up in the Admin area now.

23:42

Okay, some good news, some bad news.

Bad news first – I installed WP and uploaded a couple of Graph Paper Press themes I wanted to try out, Uno and Base. Actually, Base is like a parent theme and Uno it’s child theme – I wanted Uno, but needed Base too. Well, something weird happened and I got a load of errors at the top of the page with either of them loaded, so I’ve worked out it must be something to do with Base as the default WordPress themes don’t cause the error. I’ve got a question in at the GPP forums asking for help. They’re usually really great with support.

Good news! I took the plunge with the PixelPost export plugin. You drop the plugin into the Addon folder in your PP installation, activate it and use it as per instructions. There’s a couple of variables you can tweak and I think I’ll be coming back to those, more on that in a bit. The process creates your .xml files that you need to then import to WP. Importing them in WP is a breeze. You go to Tools-Import and select the WordPress Importer, then work through the .xml files one at a time (if you have multiples like I did).

Bit of a problem: I found that some media wasn’t being imported. Towards the end of the importing I was getting error messages after every .xml file. However, all 650 posts are now listed in the Posts page, including titles, text content, tags and categories (I have comments disabled). I had a look in Media Library and found that, as expected, only half my images had arrived.

Looking through the .xml files that had the problems, and the list of failed image names themselves (which I copied to Simplenote as I imported), it was pretty obvious what had happened. When I first started posting to my photoblog I named the images ‘myglasseye X.jpg’ where X was a progressive number. When PixelPost called the images, the URL parsed replaced the space before the number with %20, so no problem. However, the .xml file recorded by the PixelPost exporter left the space in, and so the WordPress Importer wasn’t able to download the images.

The handmade solution to this was to open in a text editor all the .xml files with the problem and do a search for ‘_myglasseye ‘ and replace with ‘_myglasseye%20′. Saving these new files and importing them again managed to successfully grab the missing images but didn’t duplicate any other content it recognised from the last import. Clever.

And that’s where I’m leaving it for tonight.

15th August, 2011

13:45

Oh dear, it’s all going horribly wrong. Turns out my crafty %20 replacement plan didn’t actually work at all, and it left me with empty image files and no actual image. Sent an email to Jeff Mahoney, the creator of the PP Export plugin, and he has been an absolute star and talked me through what I need to be doing to solve it, which is:

- delete all the XML files I’ve been using and start over.
- reset the WP installation using the phpMyAdmin process he outlines in the Read Me
- run the Export plugin again, using the existing ‘bad’ image filenames
- create a duplicate of the ‘images’ directory and rename all the bad filenames from ‘myglasseye XXX.jpg’ to ‘myglasseye_XXX.jpg’.

(I did this step by downloading the images directory to my Mac, renaming it ‘imagesfixed’, using Automator to rename the bad files and uploading this directory to the root of Pixelpost alongside ‘images’.)

- go into the XML files and do two Find & Replace actions; the first to change ‘myglasseye XXX.jpg’ to ‘myglasseye_XXX.jpg; and the second to find all references to the ‘images’ directory path and replace it with the ‘imagesfixed’ directory path.
- run the WordPress Import tool.

And according to Jeff, this will absolutely work.

Sadly I can’t give it a try yet because I’m having serious issues with my Graph Paper Press theme of choice, Uno. I have Base (a parent theme) and Uno (a child theme) installed, and something in Base is causing a whole bunch of errors that stop the site working properly:

Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: open(tmp/sess_a356eddf2bd83a7f635e4d2c9c49b70b, O_RDWR) failed: No such file or directory (2) in /home/XXX/public_html/mge-wp/wp-content/themes/base/library/functions/admin-js.php on line 2

Warning: Unknown: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (tmp) in Unknown on line 0

While it does look like there’s an error in the .php file mentioned in the report, that looks fine in Coda so it’s more likely that either there’s a dodgy PHP setting on the server, or the theme got corrupted between me downloading it from GPP and uploading it to my site (which I did twice). Or it could be both! I’ve got the support team at my host (the excellent Fused Network) and the guys at GPP looking at this now. Fused were able to fix it temporarily with some PHP tweaks server-wide but the error came back within hours so they’re looking at it again now.

Can’t progress till this is fixed really so I’ll let the experts do their job!

17th August, 2011

I’ve been ill with some hideous stomach bug last couple of days but my website installation issues are now solved after the great guys at Fused analysed what was happening and found that neither their server nor the GPP theme code was hard-writing a tmp save file path that was required by the theme to work correctly. If that path is written by either the theme or the server, the bug does not occur.

It seems that most servers do have it written which means that the theme usually works ‘out of the box’. However, on the rare occasion that the path is not written by the server, the theme fails because the theme doesn’t correctly write the path itself. GPP don’t seem to acknowledge that this could do with some work on their side, and were happy to leave my hosts to fix it at their end.

Either way, it works now and all I have to do is do the PP Import process again. Having said all that, I’m not really a fan of Uno after all. Who puts their logo top centre in this day and age?

8th September, 2011

09:06

Well I’ve kind of let the wind go out of my sails. The latest is that I have successfully overcome my idiotic ‘spaces in the filenames’ problem with lots of help from the creator of the PP-to-WP plugin, who is a righteous dude in my estimation.

Sadly the only WP theme I’ve found that is remotely suitable for a photoblog, Uno by Graph Paper Press, has proven itself to be quite awkward for anyone coming from PixelPost, which is still pretty much the template for how to do a photoblog. Sorry to be harsh, but putting the navigation backwards, the way they’ve done it, is madness. I’ve begged them to accept it’s the wrong way round and I’m told it’s gone into the Suggestion Box, which doesn’t fill me with confidence but I expect they have other things to be doing. I just don’t think they really understand photoblogs as opposed to blogs…

Having said that, they are trying to help me fix my own installation the way I’d like it, where they can. The problem is that to really kick it into shape requires some serious mangling of PHP which is well out of my sphere of expertise (I can do CSS and HTML, sort of, but that’s it!). So if anyone out there is a PHP whizz, let me know. In the meantime I’ll continue to plug away on the GPP support forums, which continue to be very helpful.

Next update or post I write will probably be a description of how to fix up certain things in Uno that need changing, once I’ve got them working myself. I’m also planning to write a design document for GPP to try and convince them there’s a market for a proper PixelPost-user-friendly photoblog theme. If there’s anything you’d like to see in such a theme regarding features or customisability, please get in touch!

Related reading:

1. Attention PixelPost users: Graph Paper Press to release photoblog themes for WordPress in 2012 Graph Paper Press got in touch to let me know...
2. Graph Paper Press release their first photoblogging theme Graph Paper Press's first photoblogging theme, Retouch, is here and...
3. it’s tinker time I like to mess about with my websites – gives...

I’ve had an eye on the usual forums and spotted another method of doing the same thing which also has the advantage of being free and of being able to take advantage of your meticulously organised fanart, posters and .nfo files, something I don’t think Playback does (if it does, please let me know how in the comments).

This alternative uses WebDAV and an application called MediaMaster Server, which is free on the Mac App Store – and seeing as this post is really just for Lion users, that shouldn’t be any barrier to entry. I believe the app is actually meant as a free complement to a paid iPad app for streaming media to your iPad, but it also happens to work nicely with XBMC.

Here’s how you set it up:

1) Download the application and launch it.

2) Click ‘Select root directory’ and navigate to the folder that contains your various media folders. For example, all my various types of media have their own folders, and all of those reside in my ‘Media’ folder on my external drive. That is the folder I’ve used as my root directory.

3) In the settings tab, give yourself a username and password, and click on ‘Secure HTTP’ if you want a secure setup. I left the port as the default.

4) Click the master switch on the left to ON.

5) In XBMC go to setup a new share and navigate to the option that lets you fill in WebDAV (HTTPS) settings.

6) The network address is the local IP address of the computer that’s running MediaMaster Server – for example, 192.168.1.60 (don’t copy that, it’s just an example! Find your own IP address in the Mac’s System Preferences under Network)

7) The port, username and password is whatever you selected in step 3

8) With these details filled in, save it as a source and select it for use. It should detect the various folders within your shared root directory and ask which one you want to use. From here on just set up your folders as unique sources such as TV, Movies, etc.

One thing I’ve noticed with my setup, and it may well be to do with me having a recent nightly build of XBMC as opposed to the approved version, is that scraping is painfully slow. It only needs to do it once, of course, but if it’s taking it’s sweet time you could wait until bedtime before setting it running and in the meantime just access your files through the Videos>Files route in XBMC.

So if you’re having Lion/SMB/XBMC/ATV2 woes you now have two options for getting your media centre up and running again! Good luck and thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

Related reading:

1. How to stream to XBMC on an AppleTV2 from a Lion Mac using Playback XBMC for AppleTV 2 stopped connecting to my media when...
2. Adventures in AppleTV streaming: switching from XBMC to Firecore’s ATV Flash I've had a lot of issues with XBMC on my...
3. One way to fix an iTunes ‘Error 1013′ Last night I was updating my iPhone 4 to iOS...

I’ve been using a jailbreaked (is that a word? should it be jailbroken?) AppleTV 2 and XBMC to stream media from my Snow Leopard Mac for about a year now. It’s awesome.

And then Lion came along and broke it.

Like many people, I was using the SMB method to get media to the XBMC installation, but Lion apparently uses a new, Apple-made variant of the SMB protocols which the XBMC and/or the ATV2 doesn’t like. Now, there are ways around this by switching to NFS for example but I have had no end of hassle getting NFS to work properly despite a lot of input from friendly folks like memphiz at the XBMC for iOS forums. I presume I’m doing something wrong, but it’s beyond the scope of my technophilia right now and in the meantime I need a way to watch my media.

Enter Playback by Yazsoft. It streams all your stuff to a variety of devices, such as PS3, XBOX 360, even XBMC and Plex installations, through UPnP. There’s other software that does similar things, such as Connect360 and Rivet, but Rivet doesn’t work on Lion and besides, it just got end-of-life’d (thanks for nothing, guys!) while Connect360 is kinda ugly on your 360 as it doesn’t respect your folder structure and dumps the entire contents of every folder into one long list. Yuck.

Playback, on the other hand, is Lion compatible and when I read it supported XBMC, that’s all I needed to know.

UPDATE: I should have added in the original review that there is one drawback to Playback – it doesn’t support metadata or artwork. That’s half the joy of XBMC, I know, but at the point I wrote this it was media only or nothing at all. In the latest Dharma version of XBMC for ATV2 they’re trying a new method for connecting to your Lion machines but it wasn’t playing nice with my setup for some reason; you may still find Playback useful.

So, if you’re on Lion, using XBMC on your AppleTV 2, and need a simple solution to fix the streaming, try this:

1) Download the Playback demo
2) Set up the preferences so that it’s got access to your media folders
3) Go to your XBMC app on your ATV2
4) Go to Videos and set up a new share
5) Click Browse
6) Select UPnP Devices
7) When the Playback installation for your computer appears, select it (in my case it was SithLord Playback)
8) Select the folder you want to use as a source (in my case I have a Films folder and a TV folder – you can only do one at a time so pick one for now)
9) Give it a name within XBMC
10) Save it

If you have multiple folders you want to share, repeat steps 4 to 10.

Now check it works. I haven’t found a way to make it appear in the TV or the Movies menus that XBMC displays as default, but everything is findable via the Videos menu, no problem.

Once you’ve got it working and you’re happy with it, head back over to Playback and buy a license, which is £10. Until then it limits your streaming to 30 minutes at a time and 2 videos per day.

Now, full disclosure, I’m hoping to get a free license for writing this blog about the app (see here), but I didn’t let that sway my opinion of Playback. This morning it has proved to be a painless way of getting ATV2 XBMC streaming working from my Lion iMac, and has the added bonus of working on my 360 as well, just in case I temporarily brick my ATV2 with further tinkering in the future (it’s happened before!).

So I hope this helps anyone that’s having trouble with their ATV2/XBMC since updating to Lion. Ideally I’d like to get my NFS shares working at some point but in the short term Playback has most definitely been a head-ache free alternative – with that caveat that artwork and metadata don’t show up.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

Related reading:

1. Another way to stream to XBMC on an ATV2 from a Lion Mac On my AppleTV 2, media sharing to XBMC was broken...
2. Adventures in AppleTV streaming: switching from XBMC to Firecore’s ATV Flash I've had a lot of issues with XBMC on my...
3. One way to fix an iTunes ‘Error 1013′ Last night I was updating my iPhone 4 to iOS...