I tried out the Drop Tech Case for iPhone 6 from gumdropcases.com . [Disclosure: MacMAD received a review copy of this product.] Gumdrop makes a variety of case sizes and styles for various devices. This particular case fits the iPhone 6 or 6s.� It currently [Oct 2016] retails for $39.95.
Like many rugged cases, the Drop Tech case is a two-part case with an inner and outer case. In this case, the inner case is hard plastic, and the outer case is softer and more resiliant. This is opposite of some cases which feature the softer case on the inside. I think the inner and outer cases are a good idea, but don’t think it makes much difference which is on the outside.
Immediately on opening the package, I encountered the problem of how to open the case to install it. There were no printed instructions. I visited the web site and watched the install video, which still didn’t make� it clear. I had to email the company.
To install or remove the case you need to stretch the outer case over the inner case. The outer case is quite rigid when new and difficult to get hold of.� The tip I got from Gumdrop was to open the flap that protects the lightning connector, and begin to stretch the case at the thin section near that connector. With this hint, I was able to open the case.
The Drop Tech cases are available in a good selection of colors. It’s nice to be able to get something that differentiates your phone from all the other phones out there. There are two bad things that can happen to your phone. First, it can get broken in a fall or similar accident. Second, it can get lost. Bright case colors help you see your phone, say, in a dark restaurant and make it less likely it will get lost.
Back of the case has heavy texture and bright colors
The case has plastic flaps that close off external ports on the phone. It won’t� make your phone waterproof, but it should certainly improve resistance to rain.
Bottom of phone with protective flaps over ports.
Pros
Sturdy case protects against drops and other damage
Built-in Screen protector
Nice choice of colors
Removable Belt clip/holster/stand included (not shown)
Cons
Expensive (more $ than some Apple cases, which set the standard for high prices)
Too thick for many pockets and purse slots
Impairs access to Touch ID (a problem shared by many iPhone cases)
Difficult to install or remove
Bottom Line
If you are the kind of person who breaks your phones or subjects them to a lot of drops and falls, this is a good case for you. If your usage pattern is more gentle, this case will probably be unneccessarily bulky.
The following is a transcript of a disucssion we had with a prospective Mac user about Quicken financial software.
Sue:
Hello, I have been considering purchasing a Mac for a long time, but am reluctant to do so because I hear that Quicken does not work well on a Mac. Can you provide any information regarding this issue?
Dennis:
I have been using Quicken on a Mac for years and while they had some problems a few years ago the new release of Quicken for Mac 2016 works fine. I would not hesitate to purchase a Mac because of a perceived problem with Quicken.
Jamie:
My wife is a heavy Quicken user and she was not happy about Quicken for the Mac. It works well for a new user, or a light user, but if you are used to advanced features on the Windows version, you’ll be disappointed.� The solution we came up with is to run Quicken for Windows on the Mac using Crossover. That combination has been very faithful and reliable, and I’ve had no complaints from the wife. Crossover is an emulator. Unlike BootCamp or Parallels, you don’t need a copy of Windows, and [therefore] it will be cheaper.
Sue:
Thanks for the great input. How would you define a “heavy” Quicken user? I use it for downloading transactions, sending online payments, and sometimes for transferring funds. Also, will I be able to transfer my Quicken info from my PC to a Mac?
Jamie:
The Windows Bill Reminders feature allows you to estimate bills. The estimate can be based on your credit card balance. This feeds into the “Bills Projected” feature which shows you your upcoming cash flow. The Mac version accepts only fixed, exact estimates, therefore the bill projections can be wildly incorrect.�� The Mac version requires you to enter some amounts as Debits or Credits, which many users will not understand. The Windows version did not. � Quicken has a conversion tool program to convert data from Quicken for Windows to Quicken for Mac. Get this — it only runs on Windows! It is riddled with errors and won’t work on some older Windows systems (XP). I eventually got it to run. It spewed error messages, but eventually produced output.�
Here is direct quote from Quicken tech support: “Converting from Windows to Mac often takes a long time and can be complex. We offer a free service to help with the conversion process. If you send us your data file we will do some of the conversion for you and send you back a file ready to be used in Quicken for Mac 2015. It will save you some time and make the conversion easier for you. ”
We did NOT send them our data.
After conversion, there were many problems and issues, I think mostly with various securities and transactions(e.g. mutual funds). [Edit: These problems were realtively minor. The reason we gave up on Quicken for the Mac had more to do with day-to-day usage and relearning.]
Sue:
Ugh. That sounds way too frustrating for me, thus adding to my reluctance to purchase a Mac. Thank you for the info.
Jamie:
But, none of that was a problem using the Windows version of Quicken on the Mac in Crossover.
We’re trying something a bit different this meeting. So you don’t have to take notes, we’re putting the presentation on-line. And we’re doing it the Apple Way – using iCloud. You should be able to view these links on Mac or iOS. They are Keynote documents.
After clicking one of these links, you will be able to view the slides in your web browser, or you can download and open a copy in Keynote. Here’s what that looks like in iOS:
Email is one of the most basic services that people expect on their Mac, iPhone or iPad. It is also one of the things that many beginners have trouble with. If you have a good understanding of your own email accounts you will have an easier time using all on-line services.
The Basic What’s What of Email
Email Address
An email address is a string of characters that the email system can use to send or receive email. Usually an email address belongs to a single person or to a company.
Email addresses must be in this specific format:� The first part is a username then one at sign: @, then a domain name. Email addresses must not contain any spaces.
Email addresses are usually given in all lower case.
When you create a new email address, always create it in all lower case
However, the part of the email address after the @ is not case sensitive for the purposes of sending email. So, mail sent to any of the following addresses should all reach the same recipient.
The username part of an email address (the part before the @) is often treated as case sensitive by email clients and servers, so always use the same capitalization.
Email addresses are public. They are not secret. They should not be used as passwords.
Your Email Provider
You should know who your email provider is. It is usually a well known company.� Most people have email provided by their Internet Service Provider (ISP). Many people have email accounts with more than one provider.
Sample email addresses for common email providers:
The rr stands for Road Runner, which is Bright House’s name for their internet service.
Remember your Email Address and Password – Exactly
It seems obvious, but you need to memorize your email address and password or write them down someplace safe, preferably both. If you can’t access your email, you may lose access to other services as well. Your email account is the key to your on-line kingdom. Pay attention.
Your Email Password
After your email address, the other thing you’ll need to access your email account is your password. When you first create your email account you will be asked to create a password. You should do so very carefully, and write it down in a safe place. Passwords should be kept secret.
Capitalization of characters in passwords always matters
Do not reuse any part of your username or email address in your password
When logging on, your password must match exactly the expected password
Unfortunately the exact rules for what is allowed or required in passwords varies depending on the site or email provider you are using. The following rules are a good starting point.
Create a password at least 10 characters long
Use a mixture of UPPER and lower case letters, numbers and symbols
Avoid dictionary words and names
Example passwords:
Randomly generated: Nm4$tL&vWv
Easier to type on iOS: mtvv4$&NLW�� (don’t need to shift keyboards as often)
Too Easy to Guess: ABC.def.123
Very bad: 7/December/1941 �� (especially if that’s your birthday)
Watch out for letters and numbers that can be easily confused. Is that a lower-case ell or a one?� A zero or an oh? It might be best to avoid using these confusing letters/numbers in your passwords. Be sure to be extremely clear about these distinctions when you write down your password, so you can decipher it when you need to enter it again.
Logging On
You will want to log on to the Mail app on your Mac or iPhone. Your credentials will be your email address and password.
Most email providers also provide a web mail service where you can connect to their mail system directly without using an app. Usually this is good for situations when you want to read your mail while using someone else’s computer. However some people use email that way all the time — it’s your preference.
For example, if you have an email account through Google’s gmail, you can log on at gmail.com, or mail.google.com. There you should enter the same email address and password you created initially.
Confusion with Other Services
Many web sites, maybe most web sites, want you to log on using an email address even if that site has nothing to do with email. Why do they do that? Because it identifies you uniquely — no two people can have the same email address. That makes it easy for the site to keep you separate from all the other people using the site, and to recognize you when you return.
For example, eBay is an auction site. It has nothing to do with email. It invites users to sign in using their “Email or username”.
You may use your email address as your username on some site, and others insist on it. Almost all sites want to you to enter your email address even if they give you a different username. This is so they can use email to help you reset your password if you forget.
Here’s the important thing:
Even though you may logon to a site using your email address, that’s just a coincidence.
Do not reuse your email password at a different site – Make a new password
Ultimately you should have a different password for each site you use, e.g. one for Facebook, one for Yahoo!, one for eBay, even if you use the same email address to log on to each one. I know it can be difficult to remember these. So, you must have a system for writing them down or remembering them.� This is why password manager apps are so popular.
For Beginners: Write down your usernames & passwords neatly for each site
There’s a lot more to say about email, but this is enough for one beginner article.
Here are the slides from our presentation on Genealogy at the May 2016 meeting. Thanks to everyone who turned out in torrential rains to hear this! If you missed it, or just want to look at the slides again, here they are.
Followed by the story of what genetic genealogy revealed about my own family. (I’m providing just the slides first, followed by a YouTube video with the slides + narration, below.)
Quicken 2016 for Mac is still sadly inferior to the Windows version even going back to 2011. For one thing, it doesn’t handle scheduled transactions nearly as well.
I recently got my first iPhone after having an Android phone. What was that experience like, and were there any pitfalls?
At the AT&T store, when buying the new phone, the guy asked if I wanted him to transfer my phone data to the new phone. They have some software and cables to do this. I said no. I knew it would take a long time, work imperfectly, and I wanted to start fresh. Although there might be a couple unique things on the old phone, the important stuff was all in the cloud. I was still going to have my old phone if I needed something from it. I wasn’t trading it in or anything. (It’s apparently worth less than $10 on resale sites.)
Moto X 1st Gen to iPhone 6s, Both on AT&T
The old and the new phones – the Moto X and iPhone 6s. The iPhone is definitely larger, but not a whopper
My old phone was a Motorola Moto X, first generation. I liked it a lot, but it was two years old, and the battery was about shot. I have been a Macintosh user forever, so it is a little surprising I didn’t get an iPhone sooner. So, why now? Partly it is because of the iPhone’s superior security, and continuing announcements of serious vulnerabilities in Android. Some of these affected my Moto X and didn’t get patched promptly. On the Apple side, I did not like being at the complete mercy of on-line advertisers. Now that iOS has at least some ad blocking capability, an iPhone became a real option for me.
2nd Factor Authentication
If you aren’t using 2nd factor authentication, or don’t know what it is, you won’t need to worry about this.
I have several on-line accounts set up with 2nd factor authentication: in addition to my password to login, I must provide a code. The code comes from a text message sent to my phone, or from the Google Authenticator App running on my phone. Getting a new phone made me realize how incredibly inconvenient it would be to lose my phone for any reason. If you use 2nd factor authentication, make sure that you have backup authentication methodsfor your accounts. The backup method can be one-time codes printed on paper and stored in a safe place, or it can be a second phone, maybe a family member’s phone. If you don’t have a backup method, you could lose access to your account(s) permanently.
I probably spent more time on 2nd factor authentication than on any other aspect of getting the new phone. For most services, I had to disable and re-enable 2nd factor authentication to get it to recognize my new iPhone Google Authenticator App.
I was pleased that AT&T asked for my ID before issuing me a new phone. I’m sure that was mostly to avoid fraudulent purchase of phones, but it also makes sure that no one else gets my phone number, and thus can receive my authentication codes.
Contacts
Since I already had a Macintosh, I already had contacts from my Mac stored in iCloud. However my Android phone kept its contacts in Gmail. I have been using a Mac App called Contacts Sync for Google Gmail for some time to keep my Mac Contacts synchronized with Gmail. So, I didn’t really need to do anything special for my contacts to appear on my new iPhone. As soon as I connected to my existing iCloud account, there they were. Important note: if you already have an iCloud account, make sure you know what it is when getting a new Apple device. Don’t create a new account. You will be much better off if all your Apple devices are associated with the same iCloud account.
Apps
I went into the iPhone App store where I found the iPhone equivalent of most of my favorite apps, usually by the same developers. My favorite apps from Google and Amazon had iPhone counterparts as did social media apps, remote control apps for various gadgets, and magazine & newspaper apps.
I set up Apple Pay/Apple Wallet as the counterpart to Google Wallet/Tap & Pay/Android Pay.
I’m still looking for a favorite Twitter client. I hate the stock iPhone Twitter app.
I used to have an iPad, so I found some of my old favorite apps (paid & free) that I used to have on the iPad. Universal apps I had paid for in the past on the iPad were still available to re-download on the new iPhone without buying them again.
Music and Podcasts
Since I already had iTunes, as soon as I connected my iPhone to my computer, I was able to transfer my music, podcasts and videos to my new phone without a problem. Any music I have bought from Amazon or Google, or outside of iTunes, I have routinely imported into iTunes, so it was ready and waiting to be synced to the new iPhone.
Comparisons
I love Touch ID. This is a great feature on the iPhone. It means I can keep my phone securely locked, but it’s always unlocked for me because it recognizes my fingerprint. I didn’t know this, but you can register more than one fingerprint, which is convenient because sometimes you hold the phone in different positions. You can also use Touch ID to authorize things within Apps, such as buying from the iTunes music store, or paying at the register with Apple Pay. For example, it unlocks my LastPass password manager App. When choosing a case for your iPhone, make sure it doesn’t obstruct the home button (Touch ID sensor) at all.
The Moto X had its own convenience unlock feature.� It was based on NFC and was called Motorola Skip. The phone unlocks when you hold it near a unique physical tag. I lost two of the magnetic Skip clip tags, probably because they were magnetic, and they tended to stick to cars and refrigerators, etc. Even so, this was a pretty cool feature. However, it wasn’t in any other Android phones I know of, and is no longer offered in the newer versions of the Moto X.
I was getting annoying accidental photos and my Moto X would wake up in my pocket and do weird things. I set it to lock instantly, and this prevented it taking photos inside my pocket, or activating apps, but it could still try to butt-dial using the emergency dialer. There didn’t seem to be any way to prevent this. One time it dialed “9116”, which is disconcertingly close to accidentally calling 911. So far, I haven’t seen this happening at all with the iPhone. I think it’s because waking up the iPhone requires a physical press of the home button — not just a vibration and/or a screen swipe.
The new iPhone has WiFi calling and “HD Voice”. I’m happy about anything that can improve cell phone voice quality. On Android, I made WiFi calls using Google Hangouts. That improved audio quality and allowed calling from areas with poor cell coverage, but added some annoying latency (delay). I’m not sure I’ve used WiFi calling on the iPhone yet. It’s enabled, but I don’t know how to tell if it’s really working other than by visiting someplace with no cell service that has WiFi. HD voice is apparently enabled automatically on AT&T on compatible iPhones with iOS 9.2. My calls sound really great so far on the iPhone.
The Moto X had an AMOLED screen, with a cool notification feature. It could wake up momentarily in a minimalist, low-power, monochrome mode where it just shows the time and any texts, voice mails, etc. This mode can be activated by just moving the phone, so it is very easy to check the time. You don’t need to unlock your phone to see the time, or check notifications. Even though the display was usually blank, all you have to do is get your phone out of your pocket and look at it to see the time. The motion of doing so was sufficient to activate the time display. Again, this was a feature of this particular phone — it’s not present in newer versions, other Android phones, or the iPhone.
I really miss this feature of the Moto X:� buttonless time display
I miss Android’s back button in the lower left. The iPhone doesn’t have this. The same functionality is available in apps, but it is located in various spots on the screen, instead of a consistent location.
I think the App permission system is nicer on the iPhone. In iOS, you can enable/disable App notifications and permissions whenever you want in Settings. On Android, you have to either accept an App with all the permissions it wants, or ditch the entire App. iPhone apps can nag you when they want to access something, but you don’t have to grant access.
For notifications, the iPhone lets you decide whether each app can issue notifications at all, can make a sound, can put a notification badge on the app, and whether it can show on the lock screen. Nice. The Android notification system is less flexible for the user.
On Android, I was being nagged to upgrade apps which suddenly wanted access to my camera or microphone, when this was never needed before. There was no way to get the update and still say no.
Many of the newer Android phones are just too damn big for me, so that was one factor in choosing the iPhone. I’m not a fan of these giant phablet phones. The Moto X was modestly sized and fit in my pocket. The iPhone 6s is very close to the same width, but is maybe a half-inch taller than the Moto X. The iPhone is thinner, so overall, reasonably sized.
The iPhone fits in two more rows of icons than the Moto X. That’s another eight icons per home screen. Nice. That’s partly because of the phone being bigger, and also because it doesn’t have the redundant Google Search bar on every page. I do wish I could place the icons where ever I wanted instead of having them autofill from the top.
There really isn’t that much difference in the experience between high-end Android� phones and the iPhone. But, I think the iPhone 6s is the best phone for me right now, and I’m happy with it.
