Monthly Archives: April 2016

iTunes, iCloud

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I am a user of Apple Eco System and I pay (willingly) for some “Cloud Storage” services. I also pay for the following devices:

  • Phone
  • Computing Devices (Laptop / Desktop)
  • Streaming Media (Apple TV)
  • Watch

When I say I “pay” for the things above I mean both in terms of money (one time for the devices and recurring for the service(s)) and also time & effort. The time & effort in mind is the more “expensive” part of this whole deal. But the value I get from this is worth it to me.

My digital library consists of:

  • A little over 4K songs (there ar esome duplicates that I need to sort at some point) – stored locally on external drives and in iTunes
  • About 50 movies – in iTunes and, most of them, also in physical DVDs / Blu-Rays
  • “Some” pix – stored on 2 different flickr accounts, iCloud and locally

I do believe I cloud have gone to another camp (Android / Google) had I access to a different Smart Phone when I got my first Smart Phone. I got the iPhone as my first Smart Phone back in 2007. Which was a bit weird because I was one of the last person to get a Cell / Mobile phone that I personally knew. The reason I claim I could have gone to a different camp is that that iPhone was the very first Apple Device I ever owned. Never before that time had I ever personally bought or owned a Apple Product. I did use iTunes (on my PC) to organize & play music.

Since getting my first iPhone I have now switched to MacBook for my laptop (which is also my primary computing device – both personal and for work), iMac for my family Computing Device (which I only get on to keep updated and “clean”) and a Mac Mini for my multi-monitor desktop.

I do consider myself to be an early adopter of “technology” but I do the adoption with the least amount of monetary / financial investment as possible. While I was the first of my friends to get a Smart Phone, I have gotten the fewer actual Phones than most of my friends. Once I get a device I tend to keep it for a while.

– manzoor

Death

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Death has been on mind lately a little too much. More so than usual.

April 9th, ’18 – Not sure why it was on my mind when I first those words above, but today I am writing specifically because of a recent death, but more generally because . . . . .

All life will eventually end in death. That is a fact. For us, human beings, death probably has more of an affect than it does to most other beings. Or so we think / believe. Our religions don’t even mention the after life for beings that are not human.

My own personal experience with death came when I was not 10 yet. A great grand mother of mine passed away after a long illness. She was very close to me and my family. But being the age that I was, I didn’t really feel the loss that I should have felt. I was more caught up in the whole “process” of dealing with her death. We went and visited her grave almost everyday for the next few days (maybe weeks). At least the next 40 days at least.

Not till very recently did I find out that some of my friends didn’t necessarily experience the death of someone close to them at as an early age as I. Not sure why I was so surprised.

Death on the Living

While

Early Death?

If there really a right time from one’s life to come to an end? Not too long ago the life expectancy for humans used to be about 30~40 years. Now that is twice as long.

Irrespective of how long a life is the appropriate length, I suppose life that choose to end ourselves are examples of early deaths.

The other day I heard something about only 26 people surviving from attempting to take their own lives by jumping of the golden gate bridge. Most, maybe all 26, of them said later that they wished they had not chosen to jump the very moment they did.

– manzoor

cocoapods

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While I try to figure out why all the available PODs seem to be written in Objective-C (and not Swift) I need to make notes for using Objective-C (in addition to using CocoaPods) in my iOS App(s).

Pre-Req:

  • Xcode
  • cocoapods
  1. Create (and save) a Project
  2. on a Command Line Shell cd into the location of the App
  3. Run “pod init”
  4. Edit the “Podfile” that is created
    1. add the specific POD Framework entry
    2. Uncomment “use_frameworks!”
  5. Run / execute “pod install” (from the command line)
  6. Close the “Project” and open the “Workspace” (.xcworkspace file)
  7. If the POD Library is in Objectve-C, will need to follow the next few steps (to create a Bridging Header)
    1. Right Click on the Main Folder for the Project and Create / Add a New Objectve-C File (call it anything you want)
    2. Follow the flow till it asks to “Configure an Objective-C bridging header”. Definitely choose / select this option
    3. There should be a couple of files that gets created / generated. Delete (or not) all the files except for the one that ends with “-Bridging-Header.h”
    4. Edit the “-Bridging-Header.h” file to add the “import” for the POD Library
    5. Now to use the POD Library in any class, just add the “import” in the class file(s)
  8. that should do it

– manzoor