Category: Tech

Netflix on iPad! Wheeeeee!

Pardon the long URL below, but streaming netflix is so freakin huge. And Apple has posted a list of HTML5-compliant sites: http://www.apple.com/ipad/ready-for-ipad/ . Sorry, Flash, but you’re no dealbreaker.

We just left Best Buy. It’s as good as I need it to be for now.

iTunes link to netflix app:
http://www.google.com/m/url?cd=4&client=safari&ct=res&ei=d463S8jfAo27twf96vK-…

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Project management and Google Apps Marketplace

I’m looking for another project-management solution. Basecamp just seems to confuse clients, consultants and staff. Definitely not a file-sharing solution. The only benefit I get is a task list with reminders. Whoopee. Their customer service is argumentative and unhelpful, and the workarounds too time-consuming. 

Have you played with Zoho Projects? 

Also, Google Apps Marketplace has just come into play. They’ve put a compelling new twist on the relatively-new-itself “app store” idea. Now, whenever I think “I need an online service that does [insert ingenious time-saving mechanism here],” I going straight to Marketplace.

I did a search for “project management”, and came up with a list of options — some free, some not. (Mind Meister Mind Mapping, recommended recently by a friend, was in there.) Then I saw the “Project Management” category in the navbar, which oddly came up with a differently sorted list with some different items.

Marketplace is interesting. The obvious immediate upside is “single sign-on,” i.e. signing into any of the listed services with your Google Apps login (in your case, the sitenb.com ID). They also list the benefit of “Google’s universal navigation.” I am definitely looking forward to imposing a consistent, extensible look between my cloud-based application — but I don’t know if that’s what “universal navigation” means yet.

I’ll admit I’ve had some problems getting a couple to work, especially with existing accounts at the respective services like Freshbooks. But I think it’s gonna be cool. By the way, I’m starting to see that Chrome should become one’s centre for all of this software-as-service, online app, cloud-tastic, web-2 stuff. Now I do all my research and reading in Safari, and all my mail, docs, invoicing, task management, and dish washing in Chrome. It’s just so springy!

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iPhone abroad redux

We are going to be in Europe for 3 weeks, and we want to have service on our iPhones. Is there anything available (even cheaper?) than AT&T?

 
I have an earlier post on the subject, but thought I'd expand a bit:

I'll say the less positive stuff first: Unless one's iPhone is unlocked, the AT&T $6/month World Traveler plan, which drops per-minute charges a bit, is an iPhone owner's only option for over-the-phone communication. 

Unlocking happens through a hack, as described in this Wired article. Unlocking and jailbreaking — alowing non-Apple-sanctioned apps — are doable and ultimately not that hard, but we recommend against these hacks on phones that are still in use as primary phones (as opposed to being sold or converted to an iPod touch).

Now, AT&T has some good recommendations for travelling overseas with your iPhone, including something I just found out, and wish I had known for my South America trip last year: their Data Global plan. This might come in handy; there was a lot of travel research I wanted to do on the fly. 

But my bestest tip for people travelling internationally with their iPhones is still Wi-Fi! It's so awesome to have a great, little internet device in one's pocket. Whenever I'm travelling, and have a moment or a need, I scan for free wireless. Café-sitting is one of my favorite touring activities, anyway. I was happy enough with this for email and chat, but now you can make free iPhone-to-computer voice calls with the Skype app [iTunes link], and supposedly one-way video chat with Fring [iTunes link].

If you don't get the World Traveler plan, do read those AT&T instructions for turning off roaming, or you can wind up with a huge bill. Even if you do buy the plan, it turns out that you get charged for any incoming calls, whether you answer them or not(!), and voicemails, even if you don't listen to them.

My technique was to leave the iPhone in "Airplane Mode," and then turn on only Wi-Fi and scanned for open networks when I needed one. I had no surprises when I came home.

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iPad … ?

LG wrote:
So, about the iPad.

Can’t wait!
Can you back up the data, same as with a lap top?

Most of the data on my iPhone is synced either over the internet (email, contacts & calendar, notes, passwords, clipboards, bookmarks) or over a cable with my Mac’s iTunes and photo management app (music, photo, movies, voice memos). Beside that material, iTunes backs up all my phone service settings and app data whenever I plug in the cable. So I just need to make sure my Mac is backed up.
What are the biggest cons?

Right now, this is mostly anybody’s guess. I could list the major gripes of Apple’s not including Flash support, which I have resolved not to miss, or a bloody camera, which decision Apple can roll up and choke on.
Cost?

Less if you wait a few months. I don’t think they’re gonna make the mistake of dropping the price in 3 months like they did with the iPhone, but eventually used and refurbished models models will be on the market.

2010 is set to be pure mobile fun. The recent massive success of Google’s Android operating system, now proliferated on dozens of phones, means that the iPad won’t be the only decent tablet for very long. New features, lower prices … good times!
Protecting the screen?

Don’t click on this pretty funny link if you’re easily offended. There are going to be enough cases on the market to make your head spin, but any i-anything owner needs to be ready to pay for screen repair. 

In other words, good luck!
I’m thinking of one for my college student.

I wish I had had one in school. I’d go for the $499 one. It’ll be plenty. (I’m going to buy the $629 model with wifi and 3G.)

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Don’t try to email a really large file

I’ve always tried to discourage people from emailing files bigger than 10MB, even if their email host says they can. Email just wasn’t built for it. Turns out, Apple Mail wants to discourage this behavior, too. Or, more likely, it just has a massive freaking bug that should have been addressed years ago.

The bug is, if you try to send an email with an attachment that’s too big for your host, Mail.app can’t get the message out the door, and it stays stuck like Winnie the Pooh in Rabbit’s door, blocking anything from coming in or out.

To continue to mix my animal metaphors, this bug coincidentally randomly bit four different clients in the same week, so I figured I’d post the solution:
  1. Quit Mail.
  2. Go to ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes.
  3. Move Outbox.mbox to the Trash.
  4. Open Mail again.
That should fix it.

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Online sketching & painting

I'm no artist, but since the iPad announcement, I have gotten excited by the creative image-manipulation possibilities opened by touch-on-a-tablet. What a cool portable canvas! 

I addition to mobile apps, some very impressive browser-based applications have come online, so to speak. All of these options give us the chance to express ideas digitally without necessarily having a computer around, or an expensive program whose myriad features we might barely tap.      

So I just wanted to name some of the good ones I know and see if anyone wants to add to the list:

Brushes has been on the iPhone for a little while, and was made famous by the artist who created a cover for the New Yorker on his phone. 

Sketchpad – Online Paint/Drawing application: My browser couldn't do this before. And it ain't Flash. 

Aviary.com: Just heard about this on This Week in Google. Aviary used to cost, but they just slashed the price clean off. Image editing, video effects editing, vector drawing, image markup, sound editing… None of the individual components of this incredible suite of tools would, by themselves, replace their desktop-installed competitors. They're kind of sluggish, and lack ergonomics like shortcuts. But it's a boon to have them available whenever, wherever. And they have a plug-in for Google Apps. 

SketchBook Mobile [iTunes] by Autodesk: Looks like the best sketching tool for the iPhone. I like the layers feature a lot. Autodesk is the developer most entrenched among architects, and SketchBook comes in way handy for marking up drawings in the field.

There are tons of photo-manipulation apps for the iPhone, like Photoshop Mobile and TiltShift Generator (both of which, by the way, also have web apps here and here), but I'll just leave off here or I'll be hunting and testing all night.

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Problems Adding Memory

> I’m trying to add memory to my iMac. I had one computer loaded with > 2 of the 1GB cards. I replaced one of them with a 2GB card, thinking > I would now have 3GB of memory. But now the computer info says I > have one bank with 2GB card and one bank “empty”. Do the memory > cards need to be the same size?

They don’t *have* to be the same size, but newer Macs with Intel Core 2 Duo processors (or older dual-proc G5s) prefer it. But if one stick isn’t registering, it’s either in wrong or the wrong kind of memory. Try shutting down and reseating the RAM.

The easiest place for Mac owners to go is http://crucial.com. Download Crucial’s little, easy system scanner, and let it tell you what to order. Their RAM is reliable and a fine value.

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Worried you might be a spammer?

Begin forwarded message:
From: <postmaster>
Subject: Undeliverable: ****SPAM****
it looks like someone has used my email address to send out spam. Aside from changing my password, do you have any advice about what I should do?

The chances are best that there is someone out there who has your email address in their contacts list on a Windows computer, and that computer has a virus. The virus trawls their address book and sends out spam to everyone, while “spoofing,” i.e. faking, the identity of the sender.

Unfortunately, it would be hard to track down the infected machine. We hear about this kind of situation pretty regularly, and it usually goes away pretty quick. Rest assured, your Mac is not a carrier of this bug.

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