Crossed Wires

Vic’s Blog

Posts Tagged mac

Classic Mac sounds on my mobile phone

Apr 9

Posted by Vic in Fun, Hardware

We watched WALL-E the other day. A bit of trivia for Apple Mac fans (if you didn’t already know) is that WALL-E’s startup sound — heard when he’s finished his solar recharge — is that of a post-1997 Mac computer (with Steve Jobs on the board of Pixar and Disney, WALL-E was never going to make The Microsoft Sound (: ). Coincidentally, at around the same time as I saw WALL-E I was going through that modern malaise of mobile-phone-alert-tone-taedium… So, inspired by this bit of cinematic crossover coolness, I decided to get some Mac-chime action for my handset.

The first thing was obviously to get hold of the audio file. This turned out to be surprisingly easy, thanks to Google pointing me to a piece of software called MacTracker. MacTracker is actually a reference guide for Apple products (computers all the way back to the Macintosh XL, the MessagePads, printers, displays, even iPods and mice), but part of the information it holds about the computers is their startup and death chimes.

There’s no option in MacTracker to export the audio files, but by opening the app package (“Show Package Contents” in Finder) it’s possible to navigate to where the chime sound files are stored. Then from Finder, all I had to do was zap the file to the phone via Bluetooth. On the phone, opening the Bluetooth message gave me an option to save the “music” file, which I did — this adds the file to the Music Player, but importantly makes it easily selectable in the configuration of the alert tones.

So now when I receive an SMS I hear the death chime of a Macintosh LC, and the startup sound of the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh alerts me to incoming e-mail. I’m going to apply similar configuration to my desktops: on-and-off for the last ten years I’ve been using a Homer Simpson soundbite to advise incoming mail, and it’s a bit tired now…

Next task will be to replace the startup sound on my N810 with something a bit retro-Mac! :)

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Nokia sync software for Mac!

Nov 24

Posted by Vic in Uncategorized

I managed to fill up the multimedia card on the N70 — the only thing that’s surprising about that event is the length of time it took me to do it. :)   So I went looking for ways to get photos out of the phone into iPhoto.  I can’t believe it took until the third page of Google’s responses to come up with this little treasure: Nokia Multimedia Transfer.

It would seem that the good folks at Nokia have finally discovered Mac.  Nokia Multimedia Transfer allows you to browse your phone’s contents in a Finder-like window (similar to how the Nokia Phone Browser on Windows is Explorer-like) with full drag-and-drop support, sync music from iTunes to the phone, and have iPhoto treat the phone as a camera.

I installed the software (which is still labelled as a beta) and started it up… and straight away iPhoto lit up and told me that photos were ready to import.  I had already set up Bluetooth connectivity to the phone for iSync, and the Nokia utility just used it.  From this aspect alone, the integration of this software with the OS beats the Windows experience hands-down[1].

It’s not perfect, mind…  It took a looong time for the iPhoto import to prepare (although it was looking through about 160 items, over Bluetooth 1).  It finds all the supplied stock media as well, and wants to sync that (again, not really the tool’s fault, I probably should clean all that rubbish out some time or other so that it doesn’t show up in the phone’s Gallery either).  And I still had to go through each photo to make sure the timestamp was correct and fix it if it wasn’t (there seems to be no pattern to this problem, a group of photos taken all at the same time had some with correct timestamps and others that were wrong).

Despite the problems though, it still beats sending photos via Bluetooth file transfer and manually importing them to iPhoto!  Good stuff, Nokia.

[1] Okay, so Nokia doesn’t really get the bouquet all to themselves for that… the brickbat has to go to Windows’ stupid arrangement with third-party Bluetooth stacks and how hard that makes it for Nokia et-al to write their software.

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