Tech – Page 7 – jjmarcus tech solutions

The big move: Lion, iOS 5, iCloud: all at once?

I overheard someone telling her story of the upgrade and how long it took, etc. One of her pieces of advice wast to upgrade the devices first and the computer last. That doesn’t sound right to me. What say you? Is the upgrade process pretty straightforward? I am proceeding cautiously after my experience with upgrading my last phone and have it slow down to mud.

You can upgrade the phones just by updating your iTunes and then plugging in the phones, but to get the full benefit of iCloud, etc., I would do upgrades in this order: Lion > iTunes & iPhoto > iPhone & iPad.

The upgrading is really as easy as I sketched out in the newsletter, but if you’re sketchy about it, I can give you some guidance as you go through. Just make sure you have a backup of your Mac. It will backup the mobile devices before upgrading to iOS 5.

All reports are that iOS 5 works just great on phones going back to the iPhone 3GS, so it’s unlikely that your device will get sluggish, but we can troubleshoot after the fact.

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

J2 News: Buy, Sell, or Hold

What a fantastic bunch of new toys and tools to talk about! Since Lion, iPhone 4S, iOS 5, and iCloud have come out, we have some recommendations to make. Here goes:

iOS 5: Go get it!

The free update to iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches is nothing but awesome. Better notifications, better messaging, faster camera access, readable web pages in Safari, and location-based reminders… Whew. I’m really pleased by the whole lot of features. Run, don’t walk, to update your iTunes to 10.5, and then plug in your iPad or iPhone (3GS or later).

notifications

You’ll be invited to begin updating your device to iOS 5.0. Agree to the license, yadda yadda, and it will start downloading. Might take a while, depending on your internet speed, and then iTunes will start applying the update to your gadget.

The entire process can take between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on how much stuff you keep on your phone or tablet, so set it running when you can be without your little digital lifeline for a bit. (I know. I get the shakes too, sometimes.)

iPhone 4S: Can I have mine now, please?

4sphoto

The camera: Best-in-class.
Performace: Darn right I want two processor cores in my pocket.
That voice control thing. Magic.

(Many of you already have Siri Assistant on your phones, because we put it there, starting about two years ago. As of today, that older version is defunct.)

I chose not to pre-order my iPhone 4S, because I remember the 3GS+MobileMe debacle two years ago. As eager as I can get for the latest-and-greatest, I don’t need it badly enough to justify downtime. But anyone ordering from now on will receive the phone long after iCloud is in full swing, thus enabling some very cool features, including photo sync between devices.

It’s so worth mentioning that iPhones, even older ones, bring a great price on Craigslist, and newer ones can be easily sold to Gazelle.com, an incredibly easy place to unload your old gadgets.

Lion: Hold Til Ready

OS X 10.7 “Lion” is lovely. A tasty chocolate coating around a very solid, nutritious walnut of a system that was 10.6 Snow Leopard.

They called me Coleridge in pre-school.

Lion

Most people will want to upgrade to Lion, and will be very happy with the new system. Installing is easy: If you have Snow Leopard, and you keep up with Software Updates, you can buy Lion for $29 from the Mac App Store in your Dock. It will install itself right in place, restarting when it needs to.

Many features in Lion are refreshing, especially the full-screen modes available in many apps. Schedule us at j2mac.com and we’ll show you how to use multi-touch gestures, recover auto-saved versions of your documents, and organize your workspaces!

Auto-resume of apps and documents after a reboot is easy to get used to. Scooting around your workspace with a trackpad instead of a mouse is the wave of the future. Apple has reduced visual clutter, and aimed at keeping their users productive. (Some of the prettiness in Lion I can do without. A lot of it I turn off, grateful there’s a switch.)

But Lion is still young, and a bit wobbly. We’ve found instabilities in iChat and elsewhere, and some things just don’t seem to work like they should. A second update, 10.7.2, just hit on October 12, and we are hoping it will clear up some of the inconsistencies.

Another issue affecting long-time Mac users is that programs written before 2006 won’t run on Lion. At all. This includes Microsoft Office 2004 and Internet Explorer. Good riddance and all, for sure; but a lot of you don’t have Office 2008 or 2011, and at least one office still needs IE for the Mac for time tracking.

We’ll look at iCloud in a sec. It’s very slick… and it requires Lion. I’ve upgraded my MobileMe to iCloud, so because I can’t live without Address Book syncing between all my computers, I am going to have to upgrade my second laptop this weekend. I just have to go through my applications and figure out what I need to export from those older programs. Most newer Mac users won’t have to deal with this process at all, but we are happy to help those who do.

Organizations with a bunch of Macs should hold off for now, until a hardware or software upgrade requires them to move forward. For businesses using a Mac server, I’m also officially recommending against upgrading to Lion Server until at least 10.7.3.

iCloud: The point is moot, the cloud is yours

iCloud is the very worthy successor to MobileMe. If you are using MobileMe, you will transition to iCloud services by June 2012. If you have a new iPhone or iPad, or you update to iOS 5, you’ll be living in the iCloud.

When it launched, iCloud had some trouble, and I couldn’t sign up until a day later. But everything seems clear now, and I am so far very pleased by iCloud’s function: Photo Stream syncs your photos from iPhone to iPad to iPhone. The Find My Mac feature could recover your computer from theft.

It does appear that all your MobileMe configurations will continue to work until next year, so if you are hanging onto older phones and computers for a bit, you don’t have to be rushed about making the move. Give us a call at 210-787-2709 or email our new Help Desk! at help@j2mac.com and we’ll make sure it all goes smoothly.

In memoriam

Jobs

Steve Jobs is directly responsible for my livelihood, my passion for technology, and even many of my hobbies and pastimes. Even for this 1984-baptized Mac geek, computers were clunky, nearly pointless contraptions until Steve returned to Apple in 1997. (Perhaps the internet helped a little.) I may no longer be the Apple fanboy that I once was, but I’m awed to have witnessed this fundamental change in our civilization that this one guy helped usher in.

“If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Your man in the cloud,

Jonathan

Switching to iCloud

Are you going to send out a general ‘move to icloud’ info sheet? Before I move I sure would like to know how to handle the things that no longer sync, what to utilize, etc.

I’m trying to change over myself, but they’re blocking everyone at the moment. As soon as I am able to do it, I’ll know what it looks like. Apple has a FAQ, by which we know that the transition should be mostly transparent, at least until June of next year: http://www.apple.com/mobileme/transition.html

When we know more, I’ll post something.

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

How Can I Access My Files on a Different Computer?

I’m out if town, and need to access my documents on my home iMac from the laptop I have with me. How can I do that?

Mac on Mac action

1) File Sharing: You can easily get to files on the iMac when you are at home with your laptop. All you do is, on the iMac, make sure File Sharing is on: Apple menu > System Preferences > Sharing. Then, on the MacBook Pro, go to Finder > File menu > New Finder Window > left sidebar > Shared section. Click on the iMac, and to the right, click Connect As… Enter the user name and password you use on the iMac (it’s nice to standardize these on all computers). Here’s Apple’s more complete tutorial on File Sharing.

Mac File Sharing

Also, you can turn on Screen Sharing in that same System Preferences pane, and then the button Share Screen… will appear next to Connect As…

2) Back to My Mac: You may have the Back to My Mac part of the MobileMe service set up in System Preferences > MobileMe > Back to My Mac. If that’s working, your iMac will appear on your laptop, in that same Shared section of the left sidebar of your Finder windows, even when you’re not in the house. Note: Back to My Mac is notoriously finicky about routers; unsurprisingly, it plays very smoothly with Apple Airport devices. See item (1) for getting to your stuff once you’ve found your Back-to-My-Mac-enabled Mac.

3) iCloud: This fall, Apple will evolve the MobileMe service into iCloud The cost will change to free, and syncing files and photos between your computers will be one of the flagship features. One can look online for some previews of how iCloud will work.

4) Dropbox: This to me is the winner. Until iCloud appears, and perhaps even after, my favorite way to see my files everywhere is called Dropbox. There are other services almost exactly like Dropbox, but they don’t have its simplicity, accessibility, and widespread adoption. I use Dropbox to synchronize not just my documents, but also my secure databases, shopping and task lists, and frequently used text snippets. Some of our clients share and sync their QuickBooks company files with their bookkeepers.

Dropbox illustration

Dropbox’s pricing is either free for 2GB storage, $10/month for 50GB, or $20/month for 100GB. (That’s a referral link: you and I each get an extra 250MB of storage, up to a 10GB limit!) The iPhone/iPad app is free, and the iPhone word processor I’m typing this on now is $5, and syncs with Dropbox.

5) LogMeIn: Finally, the best free service for remote screen-sharing is LogMeIn. It has a good, albeit $30-pricey, iOS app, and I use it and the web app all the time to help clients. Until this year, LogMeIn Free only offered screen control of your remote computers, but recently they added the awesome feature of being able to access and download files from a remote machine, even to your iPad. This is not sync à la Dropbox, but very useful nonetheless.

Any of these solutions is easy and cheap to implement. I keep Dropbox and LogMeIn going all the time. Call me if you would like further guidance.

Quick fix: If you can’t see server files

If you can’t see server files or log into a workstation with a network account, here’s a troubleshooting decision tree:

Can you browse the web on the server?

If no, check all network connections in the back of the server, make sure other computers are on the Internet, and possibly reboot the router.

If yes…

Can you see your main data drive(s) on the server desktop?

If no, call a pro.

If yes…

Try this:

Open Server Admin in the Dock.
Under the server’s name in the left sidebar, click on AFP.
Down below, click Stop Service.
Then count to 10, and click Start Service.

Once you’ve restarted AFP (it means “apple file protocol”; you are just toggling file sharing), try logging into a workstation.

If no dice, call a pro.

If you have to do this more than twice a year, and everything else is working — you don’t have regular power outages, for example — it would be good to get your server checked out.

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

J2 News: Prevent Someone From Becoming You

If you got my last newsletter, you know that this is the year when we all — the whole internet-using universe — become targets for bad hackers. We’ve already learned how they will try to get at our Macs. Now we need to look at how our online accounts and identities are vulnerable. Please at least read the first section, on passwords.

Got GSP? Picking a Good, Strong Password

You know how, recently, you might see a spate of emails from a friend that you know are junk — invitations to off-shore pharmacies and the like? And then that same friend emails everyone in his or her address book, to the effect of, “Sorry, someone hijacked my email!”?

Well, that happened because your friend had a password that was too simple, too easy to crack, and someone cracked it and took control of the mailbox.

This intrusion is not just an inconvenience to your friend and the people in their inbox. If someone has your email password, they can get passwords to ALL of your other online accounts, including possibly banking. And hackers make money — more than you might think — by acquiring access to things like passwords, online accounts, credit card numbers, etc. (Hackers commit other kinds of crimes, too, but let’s continue.)

How do they do it? I’m not a hacker, but I can abstract it: The bad guys have their computers scan the internet for, say, @gmail.com addresses. Then they point other software at the Gmail servers, and run software to try to log in to known accounts by guessing all the possible password permutations. Unless you’re famous and being specifically targeted, they’re not researching the names of your kids and pets. They just run through the dictionary, and common names, and number sequences (e.g., “1234”), and their bots work really fast. If your password is more simple than what I’ve outlined below, they can guess it.

Here’s a real disconcerting site, which I found by googling “crack gmail password.” There are others.

So, I’ve already posted this, but it’s well worth restating:
Please — as in, umm, now — please create a Good, Strong Password for your email and any other important online accounts.

A Good, Strong Password contains:

at least 10 characters of both letters and numbers
at least 1 capital letter, preferably in the middle
at least one non-alphanumeric character, preferably in the middle
no recognizable names or words.

Microsoft words their recommendations slightly differently, and offers one tip for creating a password. I like their suggestion of choosing a memorable phrase and building the password from there. I even think that choosing a full sentence with capitals and punctuation might be a good way to remember the password; a bunch of recognizable words would be safe-ish. I also like passwords that are easy to type, as long as they don’t contain keys in order, such as “fghj.” Here are some other tips.

I have met every different kind of personality when it comes to creating and remembering passwords. And believe me, I have every sympathy for people who feel they have more important things to do with their brains. Unfortunately, we have come to a time when, from here on out, you either keep your digital stuff locked tight, or you get your life messed with.

Keeping Track

The natural question that follows is, how do I keep up with all my passwords? Fortunately, your Mac has an excellent built-in device for this, called the keychain. Several software packages are also available for Macs and PCs. Check out my full write-up on the keychain and other options.

Do the It’s-Really-Me Two-Step

There is another method to lock your ID even tighter. It’s called “two-factor” or “two-step” authentication. Not every service offers it, and I won’t lie and say it ain’t for those who like to keep technology simple. But Google has rolled it out, even to their free accounts, and it is as smooth as I could expect something like this to be.

You dance the Google two-step like this: When you sign into a new computer — or every 30 days on your usual computers — besides accepting your password, Google sends you a text message with a code. You have to enter that code on the Google web site to continue.

Google two-step verification

Also, for all your other apps that access your account, such as an email or calendar program, Google will generate a single-use “application” password that you only have to enter once; it will get stored by your computer or phone, and if said device gets stolen, you can revoke permission.

“Gosh, this sounds like fun!” you’re saying. You can’t wait for us to come over and show you this awesome new computery thing. Just wait! There’s more…

Google offers a couple of backup verification methods in case you can’t get a text: You can receive a voicemail with the code, or your phone can run an app that generates a code for you, or you can carry a piece of paper with 10 “backup” codes on it. Really, I’m not kidding.

They also will do a retinal scan and test your DNA against a sample they keep in a cryo-vault… OK, that time I was kidding.

Enabling Two-Step Verification for your Google account is in your Account Settings. It’s a bit of a process, and I recommend reading carefully each step of the way.

Facebook also does this login two-step now, which is good because 750,000,000 accounts are a terrifically big honey pot, and we all know someone whose account got hacked. Go to the Account Security section in Account Settings, and make it look like this:

Facebook Account Security settings

Facebook should already know your cell number, and will text you a code to enter.

I dearly wish more services were doing the two-step. Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Apple iTunes — they should all get on this bandwagon. But the smart ones are at least starting to require Good, Strong Passwords.

Welcome to the Age of the Hack. Don’t shoot the messenger.

J2 News: Hell Is for Hackers, or Shields Up!

Hackers poster I hope y’all won’t mind if I say that I consider information in this and my next newsletter really important. It doesn’t matter where you learn how to protect yourself from hackers, but I hope you do take a few minutes to do so.

Because this is it. This is the year your Mac might get hacked. I’ve promised over the years that I would tell you when it happened, and now I’m telling you: It can happen, and unless you’re careful, it will happen to you.

Oh, hey, while I’m being all Mr. Sunshine, guess what? Your email password is gonna get hacked, too.

Damn.

But that’s not to say you can’t protect yourself. I’ll deal with securing your online identity in another email. Right now, let’s talk Mac.

Malware has come to the Mac. It has appeared with several names — MacDefender, MacGuard, MacProtector, MacSecurity — and it looks like this:

MacDefender malware fake alert screen

It enters your life as a browser pop-up window, so far mostly frequently on pages resulting from Google Image searches. Then the malware gets you two ways:

By warning you that your Mac computer is infected, it entices you to buy the advertised software, which doesn’t exist and is only a decoy to sucker you into divulging your credit card.
Meanwhile, it installs a background application that shows you material of questionable taste to make you think your computer is infected, which hey, now it is!

It does not do some of the other horrors perpetrated by its more skeevy cousins, such as hijacking your mail program to spam your contacts, or reporting all your keystrokes back to its masters.

Golly, isn’t humanity awesome? All this because we wanted to see other people’s cats playing piano.

I’m not going to go into the differences between viruses, trojans, and other malwares. But since I just had to look it up, I’ll share that this nastiness is not a “virus,” in that does not replicate itself. Call it a hybrid, scareware with a trojan horse back. A pretend threat that relies on human nature and user action.

Speaking of user action, stopping this stuff is, at the moment, still really easy, using the same basic best practices all computer users should follow. Windows users have had lots of time to learn to ignore such nonsense. Now the Mac community gets to learn the stop-drop-‘n’-roll and the duck-‘n’-cover. Shall we?

Don’t Click the @%#$! Button!

I know, that “Cleanup” button, however ungrammatical, is tempting. Don’t. Just don’t. Simply close the window with the usual small, round, red button at the top left.

Ummm… Don’t Give Your Money to Just Anyone

‘Nuff said.

Don’t Enter Your Password Unless You Know Why

When you want to install software or make a change to the Mac system, you are asked for your password. Even if you never chose a password on your Mac (and you should do so), you’ll still get the dialog box asking for one. This, I think is one of the primary reasons the Mac is still the safer system. Any aspiring malware that wanted to corrupt your machine completely would have to request your password. Microsoft could make Windows much more secure by adopting this feature.

That said, some variants of this recent menace do not need to ask for your password to install themselves. They can’t get past your own user folder into the root of your system, but they can still be a pain.

The Mac message “[This thing you just downloaded] is a file downloaded from the Internet” is also a layer of protection. Windows has similar warnings. Error messages are worth reading. Don’t be afraid you won’t understand them. Apple is pretty good at speaking them plainly.

Tell Safari Not to Be So Trusting

Open Safari.
Click on the Safari menu by the Apple, and click Preferences…
Click the General button in the toolbar.
Turn off the option called ”Open ‘safe’ files after downloading.” As it says, “‘Safe’ files… include disk images and other archives,” and these can contain application installers.
Close the Preferences window.

Run Software Update

If your Mac is running Snow Leopard, you’ll get Security Update 2011-003 with your next software update, which you can run manually from the Apple menu.

The Security Update is Apple’s first foray into malware-removal. It is almost entirely transparent: It updates its database in the background, learning about and blocking new annoyances on the fly. It depends on Apple to keep abreast of current threats.

Side note: If you don’t have Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and your Mac is newer than 2006, for $29 it’s well worth it! Even with 10.7 Lion coming out this month, you’ll have to have 10.6 to have the Mac App Store from which to download 10.7. So you might as well.

Kill It If You Got It

If you do end up contracting a bug like this, you can follow these instructions from Apple to remove it.

Moving Forward

Finally, I gotta include the obligatory Mac fanboy defensive-sounding junk here at the end. In truth, malware has appeared on Macs before, especially before OS X. Also, there has been at least one virus. But for reasons mentioned above, they were never able to propagate. (I have never bought into the “security through obscurity” theory that too few Macs exist to make worthy, valuable targets. Shouldn’t 5% of all computers be infected with around 5% of all malware?)

This recent scare was a new breed. It was designed to look like Mac software. And it caught a lot of people. It didn’t do a ton of damage, though I’m sure many folks got their cards ripped off. For now, I reaffirm my belief that we don’t need anti-virus software running on the Mac. But this recent baddie is insidious, and obnoxious, and I doubt it’s the last of its kind.

J2 News: Reality & Rumor

Nothing like a good Apple keynote to stir it all back up again. Last month, Jobs and Co. unveiled their next generation software, with good, solid material for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and even for this new-fangled internet the kids are on about all the time. And what’s all this 3G/4G stuff?

I gotta admit, until Apple made their big June presentation, this year had been ho-hum for this nerd. New iPad — yeah, cool, whatever, but wasn’t there supposed to be a whole mess of tablets, each cooler than the next? Meh. Even when they finally shipped, they failed to impress.

Then we got a faceful of geek downers: WikiLeaks persecuted, Sony’s networks disabled, and hacks and security breaches every day. Unfortunately, it’s time for me devote a whole ’nuther couple of newsletters to the darker side of the Internet. I am even gonna beg that everyone either read ’em, or otherwise educate themselves on keeping their data secure.

Party on, Steve! But I want to do the FUN STUFF FIRST!

The Mobile

For the phone and tablet, we’re getting a bunch of new features in the fall. You can read about all the goodness in iOS 5, but among my favorite bits are quicker camera access, wireless syncing and backups, notifications all grown up, and instantly legible articles in Safari. Bold & italics in email, too… Hey, anyone wanna know how I just did that on my iPad?

There are some hot ’n’ heavy rumors about built-in voice control and voice-to-text transcription. These goodies, as well as turn-by-turn navigation, already distinguish Android from the Apple devices. Perhaps these boons will be bestowed upon the iFaithful this year. Perhaps typing on the iPhone will no longer suck quite so bad.

Perhaps iPhone will come with a flying rainbow gumdrop pony.

One other credible guess is that a new iPhone will hit in time for the holidays. Nerds and analysts predict a refresh of the current phone, with faster “4G” Internet.

By the way, in case this whole “3G/4G” thing has you muddled, you’re not alone. The phone companies have deliberately confused you. Here’s the scoop:

”G” does stand for “generation,” not of the iPhone, but of cell phones in general. It mostly refers to the internet on your phone.

1G was the first consumer-affordable cell phone network. Remember the big bricks in the 80’s, with fat rubber antennae and batteries with lives shorter than a ballpark hot dog?

2G was the first digital cell network. Think your first cell phone: candybar-size, with a black-and-grey screen. Made phone calls, and we thought it good. This second generation eventually featured the mobile internet. The first iPhone was advanced 2G, featuring slow, but functional, web surfing.

3G is where most of us are now. Darn good internet, serving most people’s needs. The second, third, and fourth iPhones have all been 3G.

The term “4G” is controversial. It actually refers to a specific standard for super-fast wireless internet… that doesn’t actually exist in the real world, at least not in a commercially available form. The cell phone companies, unwilling to wait for this tech to become viable, have instead rolled out networks that are indeed faster than 3G, and called them “4G.” The nerds have moaned and groused, but they don’t got the money, honey.

Make sense? All the other major cell phone manufacturers and carriers have successful 4G [sic] products. The main beef with the current lineup is real sad battery life. I want to guess that this issue prevented Apple from releasing an iPhone in June. If they can get a faster phone, with a faster connection, and uncompromised power supply, they’ll have the competition beat once again.

Credit to Engadget’s primer on the subject.

To date, the iPhone models have been iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3G S (for “speed”), and iPhone 4. Most pundits are guessing at “iPhone 4G.”

If you own an iPhone 4, and don’t find yourself thinking, “Gosh, I wish this was faster,” then perhaps you’d want to wait ’til next year for an upgrade. Owners of older phones might look to the autumn to renew their contract and get a spankin’ new subsidized jobby. And remember, you can always ditch your old phone on sites like Gazelle for a tidy sum.

(Another prediction calls for a 4G iPad this autumn, but I bet against it.)

The Mac

lion logo The Mac operating system is getting a big makeover, too. Mac OS X 10.7 is nicknamed Lion, and I will spare you any feline puns now. You’re welcome.

The big new features, coming to Macs in July as a download in the Mac App Store (!) are listed here. I am curious to see whether the average Mac user takes to things like full-screen apps and document grouping, but Auto Save, Versions, and Resume rank up with Time Machine and Spotlight as major moves forward: imagine never ever losing work again! Perhaps it won’t be fail-proof at first, but I like to imagine it’ll be close enough to save our collective butt consistently.

On the geekier hardware side: The latest refreshes of iMacs and Pro laptops feature the new, blazing-fast Thunderbolt data port, and this is big news for the near future of computing. We want to move stuff quick between computer and backup or other storage. Conventional hard drives feel slow, and so does USB, compared to the new solid-state drives (SSD) that started appearing in the first MacBook Air in 2008. SSDs are now common, though still comparatively expensive; Thunderbolt connections will increase demand for faster storage, which will bring prices down.

What this could mean for you: getting hundreds of pictures and videos off your camera in seconds, copying high-def movies to your media jukebox in a snap, and backups happening so quickly you don’t even think about it.

Last I heard, inventory of Mac minis, MacBook Airs, and Mac Pros is dwindling, and I think we are getting ready to see at least new Mac minis with Lion Server and Thunderbolt. I have been holding out for a new media server and a new laptop. I’m saving up!

I also want to state here and now my own most ridiculous prediction: a slim rack-mountable server appliance to replace the Xserve (R.I.P. 2011). I want a solid-state drive to boot quickly, and two 500GB hard drives for data. And I want Windows guys to pee themselves when they see it.

As to when I recommend you upgrade, it’s easiest for me to hold to my recommendations for prior versions: If you really need to, OK, but if you can hold off until Apple’s goes through a couple of revisions, you’ll increase your chance of a smooth transition. Server owners, especially, should wait at least until 10.7.2 or thereabouts.

The Maybe

The real curiosity in Apple’s presentation was iCloud, an online service to succeed MobileMe, and then some. It will cost exactly nothing.

The things iCloud purports to do include:

sync your contacts, calendar, and other data
store documents for easy access on any device or computer
automatically backup any photos taken on the mobile devices to the internet, making them instantly available on all your other devices and computers
automatically sync anything you purchase in iTunes between devices.

In addition, for $25 a year, we’ll get iTunes Match, which will be a bit of magic I’ve craved for years — the ability to store music I already own so that you can play it anywhere. This will not be limited to stuff I’ve bought through iTunes. Any mp3 or AAC file I have on any computer will either be uploaded to Apple’s servers, or matched against a track already hosted by iTunes.

As I mentioned in this blog post, Apple’s history of online services has been at times spotty, ill-conceived, or poorly implemented. This time, they seem to be serious about learning from their mistakes, and their new giant data center in North Carolina speaks to a new dedication to keeping our stuff safe and accessible. ICloud sounds like a serious, considered utility aimed to solve some very real, very new problems.

That said, “cloud computing” means using all of the online services pertinent to one’s work and lifestyle. Apple mostly creates solutions for individual consumers, and just a few for businesses. Just as MobileMe never became “MobileUs,” iCloud is not intended to be “weCloud,” and the marketplace for online solutions for businesses large and small continues to grow and thrive. Besides the obvious lifestyle applications, I’m totally jazzed to see how businesses can use all this shiny new Apple tech to keep bringing in the bacon. We know we’ll have a good soundtrack while we fry it up.

In a couple of days, I’ll put out two security emails. Please stay tuned!

“Alert!!! My email account was hacked :(“

On Jun 29, 2011, at 12:40pm, a client wrote:

You may have received an invitation from me to join Deal Whale. I DID NOT send it! Please DO NOT register! It is BAD! So sorry!

Yep. It’s happening to tons of people every day, and it’s very disconcerting. If someone has your email password, they can get passwords to ALL of your other online accounts, including banking. The way to prevent it is to use a Good, Strong Password on all your online accounts.

A Good, Strong Password contains:

at least 10 characters of both letters and numbers, + at least 1 capital letter, preferably in the middle
at least one non-alphanumeric character, preferably in the middle
does not contain a recognizable name or word.

Please change your password on email and any other important online accounts. Another good thing to know about is Google’s “Two-Step Verification” method. It works like this: When you sign into a new computer — or every 30 days on your usual computers — besides accepting your password, Google sends you a text message with a code that you have to enter on the web site to continue.

I just did this myself, and I’m impressed by how well thought-out it is. It might be a bit more than most people want to truck with, but the reality is that we are all gonna be stuck using more serious methods of protecting ourselves online. If you want to know more, give me a call.

I’m going to post a longer thing about hacking and passwords and Mac security, but I want to get this out there.

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

Just a bit more rationale for choosing cloud services

I just composed this email to a client, and thought it would be a useful posting — good for a quick pasting into future proposals.

Benefits of online services

In brief, working online, or “in the cloud,” simply means using an application on the Internet using a web browser, as opposed to one that resides on your computer.

I’ve looked for a really good video to explain “What is the cloud?” in simple terms. This one from salesforce.com is good (ignore the loud-ish music and sales-y tone). And here’s one by Rackspace’s Lew Moorman. Both come from a business perpective, but it is easy to translate into a non-profit context. Also, here’s a blog post about nonprofits and “cloud computing.”

A quick sketch of recent history: Within the last four years, the internet has become a proliferate garden of services, with readymade options for collaboration and communication. The last two years, especially, have brought affordable and powerful features to organizations, saving tons of time and money while allowing workflows that simply weren’t possible before. Most obvious, as Google Apps users already know, working on the web allows any user to do their work from any computer or mobile device, anywhere in the world.

Prior to these innovations, organizations frequently turned to database developers to create proprietary, bespoke solutions. These were, of a nature, expensive, hard to manage and upgrade, and difficult to use offsite. Even worse, because they were created by an individual or a small agency, getting support for or adding new features to the software could be frustrating and costly, or downright impossible.

Online software is typically designed more generally, to be used by people in many different industries. We shouldn’t assume this means it’s less powerful. In fact, because it has lots of users, it has give all those people a lot of reason to come back. (With conventional software, or custom database, the developer already has your money, and you’re only paying them once. The next time they actually have to impress you is when they have a new version out, and you’re going to pray it is better than the last version, while you fork over your dough once again.) So cloud applications are designed to be plain but potent.

I suppose my favorite bonus of online software is that I don’t have to install or update anything on my computer, and I don’t have to wait for entirely new versions to get new features; they just show up!

Here are a couple of examples of cloud applications. I listed these because they were pertinent to a particular client, but also because I think they are good examples of cloud apps. Also, it’s worth mentioning again that Google Apps Marketplace is my go-to directory for such services.

Insightly.com is a tool for Customer Relationship Management, or CRM. Other popular CRM apps are ACT! and Salesforce. They are targeted at salespeople, but helpful to anyone needing a shared database of contacts and projects. Insightly offers tagging of contacts, Google Docs, and email messages; linking contacts by relationship, organization, job titles, and miscellaneous associations; and project and task management. It also integrates with Google Apps to simplify user management (i.e. one place to add users and change passwords). There are other similar tools out there, but I’ve been satisfied with Insightly’s mojo.

Oh, yes — Insghtly is FREE.

Mailchimp.com is a flexible and friendly bulk mailing service. It has many features that I appreciate, but my favorites are: using a custom web page to build a newsletter, so it looks how you like it; demographic information on subscribers, based on public information available via social networks and the like; clever techniques for knowing who opened your email and when; and methods to prevent your newsletters from being tagged as spam.

I also find Mailchimp’s pricing to be more reasonable than others’.

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog