Posts Tagged ‘apple’

Installing Older Versions of Apps (e.g. NPR One) on Older Versions of iOS on a New Apple ID

Monday, December 7th, 2020

Hmm… quite a long gap between blog posts… again. It’s amazing how time flies.

Here is a quick workaround I figured out today on how to get an old version of an app installed on a new-to-you device that is running an older version of iOS than the minimum required by the current version of the app. (Run on sentence much?)

My specific situation: I just got an old iPhone 5S, it’s actually a hand-me-down-and-back. I wanted to run some streaming audio on it in the kitchen. Unfortunately, one app, NPR One, required a minimum iOS version of 13. The last major version of iOS for the iPhone 5S is version 12.

The Apple App Store will prompt you to install the last compatible version of an app (from App Store >> Account >> Purchases), but ONLY if you had installed it previously under your Apple ID.

I didn’t want my real Apple ID sitting around on a device with a “throwaway” PIN, so I had created a new Apple ID with a secondary (actually tertiary) email account I have. This brand new account did NOT have the NPR One “purchased”. So I was stuck. Or was I?

My workaround was to log into my primary Apple ID on the new-old phone, then go to the App Store and install NPR One from “Purchases”. The App Store happily prompted and allowed me to install whatever older version of NPR One is supported by iOS 12. This worked great.

Then I logged out of my primary Apple ID on the old phone, logged back in with the new disposable Apple ID, and I was happy to see that the application was still there!

I am crossing my fingers that this old version of NPR One will continue to stream for 2-3 years until I do another round of waterfalling device upgrades.

P.S. Weirdly, this ended up forking my Wallet. I had my Wallet items on my regular phone under my regular Apple ID, and a copy of Wallet (except credit card, I think), on my 5S phone under it’s new “not secure” Apple ID. I manually removed the Wallet items from the 5S. I guess this is a design feature, except, I didn’t want someone picking up this old phone from my kitchen and going wild spending my collected loyalty points!

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Disappointing Out of Box Experience of Gateway Netbook… in 2011!?

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Every once in a while I get a reminder of why Apple is able to make 10 times as much money per computer than everyone else.  The end user experience is incomparable. From the moment you walk into an Apple store, through to the point where you use the device, someone has thought about your experience.

I just had the opportunity to setup a brand new (entry level) Gateway netbook.  There’s nothing special about it. It has an Atom processor and Windows 7 Starter edition. After opening the box, plugging it in, and following the on screen prompts, things seemed pretty good.  Then, it required a reboot to finalize the settings.

It took literally 30 minutes from reboot until I was able to login.  Literally.  It felt like 10 times that long.  I wasn’t really watching what it was trying to do, but whatever it is, it is embarrassingly long.  There aren’t any install options, this netbook is exactly the same as the  rest in the pile, so virtually all of this time should have been done before it left the factory.

So, that’s my first impression of that computer, and Gateway. Sitting around and waiting.  And no, this didn’t include the Windows updates that I did later in the evening.  Actually, this reminds me of the time I setup a Gateway laptop for a client – that was a disaster also, IIRC, I had to drive around the neighbourhood trying to find blank CDRs in order to get past the required initial backup – they had included some low end blank CD’s, one or two of them were bad!

First impressions count.

 

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Posted in annoying, Apple, computers, user experience | No Comments »

Open .pages file for Printing from Windows

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

A little while ago someone asked me for help in viewing and printing a .pages file that they had received by email.  In this case, there was no intention of editing the document, she really just needed to print it.

Here’s the deal:

– A .pages file is produced by one of the applications in Apple’s iWorks office productivity suite.
– A .pages file is actually a zip file with a few files in it.
– If you rename the file from .pages to .zip, then open the zip you will see some files and folders.
– Inside one of the folders you will find a PDF file preview (and JPEG)
– View and print this PDF.

And you’re done!

Sure, sometimes you need to edit the file, the right way to do this would be to get the sender to export the file from Apple iWorks to a format that a Windows user would be able to use, such as Rich Text Format (.rtf) or Microsoft Word (.doc).

Get used to receiving these files, Apple computers are everywhere…

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Posted in annoying, Apple, documents, printing | 3 Comments »