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Apple

My new Airport Extreme is retarded and I’m keeping it.

I decide to purchase a new Airport Extreme Wireless N/Gigabit ethernet router to increase the speed of my home network and increase my mac-ness. It’s expensive ($179 retail), but on the surface it has great specs (N, Gigabit, USB for hard drives and printers). However, it’s far from perfect.

I have a number of hardwired devices in my home network (PS3, 2 DirecTV HD boxes, a WinXP homebrew “media server”, and my Macbook Pro most of the time). I had purchased a couple of Netgear gigabit switches in anticipation of going full 1000Mbps at some point. I was also using an old G4 400Mhz Gigabit Mac tower solely as a print and file server. The Airport Extreme would allow me to complete the 1000Mbps network, handle the print and file server duties, and add wireless N for the Macbook Pro as a bonus.

After some stupid moves on my part that delayed getting the network up and running with the Airport Extreme, I got my Actiontec GT701 DSL modem/router configured for PPPOE and set up the Airport to log in to my DSL provider, allocate DHCP addresses, and create a wireless network. The problem is that EVERYTIME you click “update” to make a configuration change – even as minor as changing the status light from always on to “flash on activity” requires a reboot that takes FOREVER. With my old Linksys router, it had to be something major to require a reboot.

The other thing that really bugs me is that everytime you load the Airport Utility, it starts out wanting to run a setup wizard. You have to choose “manual setup” first before proceeding.

airport-utility-rufhausen-ae That’s not the end of it. The first time I attached a USB hard drive to the Airport, I could see and browse without any problems. However, after several update/reboots, neither that drive or another I tried would show up anywhere other than in the Airport Utility. I was ready to throw in the towel before deciding to reformat one of the drives as Apple OS Extended to see if that made a difference and it did. I then reformatted my Time Machine drive and attached it as well and it worked to. It took all night to do the initial backup (I should have done that before attaching to the Airport), but it’s working.

So in spite of the initial issues I’ve had, I’ve achieved everything I wanted and then some with the Airport Extreme. I would even consider attaching the external drive I use for iPhoto and iTunes to the Airport except that I don’t think Time Machine would back it up if I did.

Apple / Gadgets / iPhone / Mobile Computing — No Comments
26
Jan 09

The Luster is off the iPhone

I’m a defender of most things Mac. I love my Macbook Pro and my iPhone 3G. However, my patience is wearing thin with Apple and it’s handling of updates and features that loyal owners have pleaded for since the release of both the 1st generation and 2nd generation phones.

Push Notification
This is the big one. Push Notification is supposed to allow background notifications of events like new Twitter messages, IMs, eBay bid updates, Facebook status updates, etc. Apple announced it would be available by September 2008. It’s still not here, but the worst part is that Apple has not said a freaking word about where it stands – for all we know, it’s been shelved. How can something this big, affecting millions of customers, and being offered by a publicy-traded company not be discussed by the company after a four month delay?

Video
Video recording for the iPhone has been around awhile. Qik has been running on jailbroken iPhones for months and there have been rumors that it was coming to the App Store for a while. So where is it? Why do we even have to rely on a third-party solution to handle something while the company that makes the phone is itself a giant in video media (Quicktime, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, video editing studios everywhere).

The Rest

Cut & Paste – I’m not all that worked up over cut & paste, but a lot of people are.
Running 3rd party GPS apps without the display being on. This is a big battery hog and a pain in the ass.
GPS apps with LOCALLY STORED MAPS. It’s ridiculous to expect that we’ll always have data access thru the cell network whenever we want/need to access GPS.

I’ve been avoiding jailbreaking the phone in order to get Qik and some semblance of background notifictions, but I’ve about reached the end of my rope.

Apple / iPhone / Mobile Computing — No Comments
12
Jan 09

Nuevasync adds color-coding and read-only calendars to Google/iPhone sync

Nuevasync, which offers a free (at least for now) service for syncing Google Calendars with the native iPhone calendar app, has just announced some new features.

From their announcement:

“Support for multiple, separate calendars on Apple iPhone and iPod touch devices is here! Now you can tell which appointment belongs in which calendar, add appointments to the calendar of your choosing, and filter your display to show only events from a specific calendar. What is most important of all, your calendars each get their own color. We are currently phasing this feature in: if you don’t see it on your phone yet, you will very shortly.”

You can now also select read-only calendars like holidays, sports schedules, etc. for inclusion on the iPhone calendar.

I’ve been using Nuevasync for a while, and in spite of a few short service glitches, it’s a great service. It essentially gives you Exchange-like calendar syncing, but with Google Calendar.

Apple / Mobile Computing / Review — No Comments
14
Dec 08

Detroit Free Press Macbook Review

While searching for injury reports on the Lions for my upcoming Fantasy Football game, I came across a nice review of the new Macbooks by Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press. It also breaks down why he tells people to just ‘get a mac’.

Apple — No Comments
12
Dec 08

Google Chrome for the Mac is coming along

VentureBeat has some details on the progress of the Mac version of the Google Chrome browser. According to a Google spokesperson, “We release early and often and while we are working hard on the Linux and Mac versions, the Windows version is ready so we want to get it to users as soon as possible”.

There are additional details on the Google Code Page for Chromium.

Source

Apple — No Comments
11
Dec 08

Apple Rising – Apple “stock” rising in the Enterprise

According to Business Week, Apple is quickly gaining ground in the enterprise. Citing a study by the Information Technology Intelligence Corp, Apple is gaining in both the desktop computing and smartphone areas.

Among the findings:

More than two thirds of respondents – 68% – said they will allow their employees to use Macs as their corporate enterprise desktops in the next 12 months, a rate double that of an earlier survey.
Half of all survey respondents said they plan to increase their integration with the iPhone as an alternative to Research In Motion’s Blackberry as mobile email device.

Full Article

Apple / iPhone / Mobile Computing — No Comments
10
Dec 08

Revisited: Gmail and gCal on the Iphone – Part 1

Note: The information here is not new. However, from reading forums, etc., it seems as though that a lot of people still aren’t informed as to the best way to utilize Gmail/gCal with the iPhone.

If you don’t use Exchange with your iPhone and want cloud-based email and calendaring, Apple’s solution is MobileMe. Known startup problems notwithstanding, there’s nothing really wrong with MobileMe if you don’t mind paying $100/year. However, if all you need out of MobileMe are email and calendar syncing between your desktop, iPhone, and a web client, then Gmail and gCal already have it covered.

Continue reading →

Apple / iPhone / Mobile Computing / Web Development — No Comments
9
Dec 08

iPhoney for iPhone Web App Development

I’ve not developed any web apps for the iPhone (beyond installing the very cool wptouch iphone-friendly WordPress theme for this blog). However, I do appreciate the continuing value of web apps for the iPhone. I just came across a very cool OS X app that acts as an iPhone simulator for web apps called iPhoney.

iPhoney simply runs Safari in the form of an iPhone, and allows you to choose between Webkit, iPhone, and custom user agents.

Here are the full “iPhacts” from the iPhoney home page:

Test your iPhone-enabled Web 2.0 applications and compatible web sites.
Open any website that works with Safari (use Safari 3 beta for the most accurate experience).
Rotate to see websites in either portrait or landscape orientation.
Show or hide the location bar for a full-screen iPhone experience.
Simulate the iPhone user agent, to test browser redirection scripts.
Zoom out to see how your current pages might look while zoomed out on iPhone.
Turn off plug-ins (including Flash, but note that they all turn off (including QuickTime).
Automatic updates with Sparkle, so you’ll always know if there’s a new version.
And of course, open source code so you can contribute to iPhoney’s rapid development.

Apple / iPhone / Mobile Computing — 3 Comments
8
Dec 08

Washington Mutual iPhone Web App shows us why Web Apps are still cool

Washington Mutual (WaMu) has rolled out an iPhone-optimized version of their web site. It pretty much lets you do all of the basic account management stuff the full version of the site allows, except you can’t view canceled checks. This is a great example of why web apps for the iPhone aren’t going away as some have contended.

iPhone web apps have a number of advantages over native apps, including but not limited to:

Rapid development using existing web development skills/bodies.
Use of existing web application infrastructure (i.e., no additional costs).
Avoidance of the time consuming and magic-8 ball logic of the App Store vetting process.
Seemless application updating.
Things like phonegap will eventually help bridge the divide between web apps and native apps by taking advantage of the iPhone’s hardware features.

I currently have home screen icons for 5 different iPhone-optimized Web Apps (Digg.com, ESPN, WaMu, Flickr, and Dropbox), plus a few other mobile web sites that are in need of an iPhone-optimized version, including the DirecTV Scheduler and cnn.com.

Apple / iPhone — No Comments
8
Dec 08

iPhone market share grew 327.5%

via Apple 2.0

leaning iphone 3g (clean) We’ve known since October, when Apple released its latest earnings report, that the iPhone had a bang-out summer – shipping nearly 7 million units in the quarter, up from just over 1.1 million the year before.

But it wasn’t until Thursday, when Gartner Research issued its smartphone sales report for the third quarter of 2008, that we learned just how well the iPhone did vis-a-vis its competitors.

Apple’s (AAPL) share of the worldwide smartphone market leaped 327.5% in Gartner’s survey, catapulting past Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile to grab the No. 3 position and putting it within striking distance of Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry for the No. 2 spot.

Smartphones running on Nokia’s (NOK) Symbian operating system are still No. 1, with nearly 50% market share, but they lost ground as Symbian sales shrank for the first time, down 12% for the quarter.

Apple’s results would have been even more impressive – and would have knocked RIM off the No. 2 perch, as Steve Jobs claims - if Gartner’s researchers hadn’t reduced the iPhone’s quarterly sales numbers by the more than 2 million units that Apple shipped before the end of the quarter but were still sitting in inventory.

Gartner’s preliminary sales figures – listed both by vendor and by operating system – are available in its press release here. But they are easier to visualize in the bar graphs, pasted below the fold, that Ars Technica’s David Chartier has helpfully produced. See here.