Weekend city outing

I went down to the city this weekend to do some shopping. I took my bicycle with me as I was planning to get off a train at half way point, and ride home along a river. 

Brompton is a great bike for this kind of walk about (or ride about, I should say).  It doesn't take up space on the train, and I don't get told off when I walk into shops with the bike fully folded.

My Brompton waiting for a train

The reason I went to Perth was to get a cable to connect a digital camera and iPod and iPhone. 

We have been using a class set of iPad as workstations for our digital photography classes for the past few weeks. Students take photos during the class, drop images onto iPad, do some post shooting adjustments, and print out images.  

We have adopted this work flow initially as a way to deal with an issue of not having enough computers in the classroom, but it has turned out to be a good simple process for students to follow than stuffing around with computers.

Anyway, as some kids already got their own iPod or iPhone, I thought that it will be handy, if we can do the same thing with other Mac devices.

So here I was at the Mac store explaining what I want to do to those friendly Mac people wearing blue Mac T-shirts, reminding me of people working at the Disney Land. 

I was soon disappointed when those blue elves working for the magic kingdom were telling me that it is not possible to connect a digital camera with iPod or iPhone. 

Apparently, the process only works with iPad not with anything else.  With iPod and iPhone, photo images have to go to a computer first, then transfer the images to each device by synching through iTune, the process is so slow and inflexible to me.

I asked them why it works with iPad but not with other Mac gadgets. They said, they don't know.  It seems to me that Apple's hardware compatibility is just so elementary. 

Perhaps Apple has become too greedy, and wants us to buy all of their products including  those overly priced Apple specific accessories which only work on certain devices.

Didn't Microsoft got sued for something similar?