Yesterday Apple announced their latest device, the iPad. The anticipation for this event was great, but the let down was even greater.
It’s basically an over sized iPod. In short, it’s a device without a place. The iPad is too big to easily carry around with you. At 9.7 inches, it won’t fit in your pocket. Since it runs iPhone OS and not full blown OS X, its quite limited. For me this just doesn’t fit in my life anywhere. If I’m on my couch and want to check my email or surf the web, I can simply reach into my pocket for my iPhone. It’s small enough that I almost always have it on me (except when its on the charger, because it needs serious battery life improvement, hopefully in the next generation) If I need more than that, I’ll get up and grab my laptop. I don’t see an in between, where I’ll feel the need to use a device that is somewhere in the middle.
The ipad:
won’t support multitasking
doesn’t have a camera
is on AT&T’s crappy network
there is already a Kindle app for iphone
can’t even make phone calls (however may be VOIP capable)
has no flash support
This is great for gadget junkies, where more=more, but my moto is less=more.
Maybe I’m wrong, and the iPad will show me a spot in my life that has been severely lacking, but somehow I doubt that.
To set it up, go to System Preferences, Desktop & Screen Saver. Under the list of available screen savers, click the plus icon and select “add RSS feed”.
Paste in your RSS feed and click OK.
The pictures at that RSS feed should now show up as your screen saver (provided you gave a valid picture RSS feed).
NOTE: I have had a few problems with this process. Sometimes when you paste the RSS feed in, and click ok, it gets stuck validating the feed. I tried again, and it worked, so I’m not really sure what the problem is.
These instructions are for those of you who wish to tether your iPhone to your Mac. This only works on iPhone OS 3.0 and 3.01 (NOT 3.1, yet). Jailbreak or extra fees to AT&T are NOT necessary to make this work!
Select Install Now to download and install new profile.
On iPhone interface, go to Settings -> General -> Network -> Internet Tethering.
Set Internet Tethering to On.
If prompted that Bluetooth is off, select Turn on Bluetooth or USB Only according to your preference.
Internet tethering is now enabled, connect your iPhone to your Mac via USB or Bluetooth to start connecting to Internet through the iPhone as tethered Internet gateway modem. While using this feature the top of your iPhone screen will glow blue to notify you tethering is active.
Its best to visit on your computers browser, so you can reference the settings while entering them into your iPhone.
Select your country.
On your iPhone go to Settings -> General -> Network -> Cellular Data Network
Scroll down to the MMS section.
Enter the data from the Mobileconfigs website in the appropriate fields.
Restart your phone.
To verify MMS is active, go to the Messages application, create a new message. Next to text entry box, you should have a little camera button, where you can select a picture to attach to your message. If not, something went wrong with your setup.
My visual voicemail stopped working after I enabled tethering. Here are the instructions to fix visual voicemail:
Go to Settings -> General -> Reset -> Reset Network Settings.
NOTE: Do NOT use the Settings -> General -> Network -> Cellular Data Network -> Reset Settings. If you do this your tethering will stop working and have to be setup all over again.
After the short reset, iPhone should be able to be used for MMS, Voicemail and Internet tethering.
With all the hype about MMS finally coming to the iPhone, I finally have to rant…
I’m sure most of you are familiar with SMS, a technology that allows you to send 160 characters at a time, that was first introduced in 1992. MMS was the next evolutionary step, that allowed people to send not only text, but also pictures and/or audio, and is generally limited to 100-300 KB’s. Email, on the other hand, allows you to send messages FAR GREATER in size and content. Typically limited to 20-30 MB’s!
So why is it that people are so into TXT’ing and sending MMS’s? Can you all see you are playing into the pocket books of the carriers? They charge on both ends of the messages, sending and receiving. SMS is typically 20 cents and MMS is typically 50 cents. That means carriers get 40 cents per SMS and $1 for each MMS! Outrageous! Yet everyone can’t wait to be able to send them.
Whats even worse, are “smart phone” users who have unlimited data and email access, who STILL send SMS and MMS message!
I don’t think most people realize they CAN do email on their phone without a data plan. Just about every carrier has what is known as a SMS or MMS to email gateway. This means you can send a SMS to an email address, or receive email to your SMS capable device. Here is a list of addresses to do this on the major carriers in the USA (number = your 10 digit mobile number):
The transition to Apples newest operating system, Snow Leopard has been mostly good, but there has been a few bumps along the way.
My first problem is that the contextual menus sometimes disappear without clicking. At first I thought it was a botched upgrade, so I did a clean install with a newly formatted hard drive, but the problem was still there. I posted on the apple forums, and found that others were having the same or similar problems. So far there is no solution.
Finally, the RSS screensaver that I LOVED is missing in Snow Leopard. Here is a picture of it in Leopard, but if you go to screensavers in Snow Leopard, its just not there. It was great because I had a subscription to my online photo gallery on all my machines. Whenever the screensaver would fire up, I would see all of our latest pictures around the house. I can’t figure out why Apple would remove such functionality.
With all of these problems, I’m still quite happy with the upgrade.
Here’s an easier way to share the screens of other Macs on your network. The screen sharing feature is just an application. It resides in /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app. You can drag that to your dock for easy access.
If you launch it now, you will get a box asking you for the IP address of the machine you want to connect to. But if you want to simplify things, you can use Bonjour to show you a list of all machines on your local network. You will need to launch terminal and enter:
In Snow Leopard, Apple downgraded the installation of Flash to an earlier version (version 10.0.23.1), which is known NOT to be secure and is NOT patched against various security vulnerabilities.
This list is NOT comprehensive or complete. Its just the changes I have observed or find interesting.
Change search locations. Change the default behavior of Spotlight to have it search the currently selected folder or your most recent search location. Go to Finder -> Preferences -> Advanced -> change “When performing a search:” to “Search the current folder”.
Spell checker in TextEdit. Can be controlled in TextEdit preferences.
Airport menu now shows signal strength of available wireless networks.
Minimize apps onto their doc icon, instead of the right side of the doc. Go to Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Dock -> select “Minimize windows into application icon”.
Activate Expose from the dock: Click and hold an application icon in the Dock and all the windows for that application will unshuffle so you can quickly change to another one.
Expose shortcuts: With all windows visible in Expose, you can press Command-1 to arrange the windows by name or Command-2 to arrange them by application. Pressing the Tab key will cycle through all the running applications. Press the spacebar while pointing at a window to expand it.
Expose windows are now highlighted with a blue outline when mouse over.
More reliable disk eject.
Restore deleted items to original folders.
Scroll though stacks and navigate folders in stacks.
Faster shutdown and wake-up.
HFS+ read support in Boot Camp.
Screen recording functionality built into Quicktime Player. Seems to only support the main screen, not external monitors.
Date in menu bar.d
Screen saver shuffle.
Multi-Touch gestures in older Mac models.
Preview intelligent text selection.
Location awareness: Snow Leopard can determine your time zone from information provided by your Wi-Fi hotspot – in your Date & Time preferences, choose Time Zone, and tick Set Time Zone Automatically
Descriptive Screenshot filenames: Instead of “Picture 1,” you now get “Screen shot 2009-09-04 at 11.26.49 AM” (It seems they didn’t follow this same goodness with their screencast recordings. Always hope for their next patch?)
