The Syncing Apple

http://picasa.google.com/mac/

Is it time to give up on iPhoto?

1 Mint
2 PCalc Lite

two great apps to have on your phone, and they don’t cost a dime.

Meanwhile, I’ve got SimCity for the iPhone and it’s everything they claim it is, only downside is that it can’t run in the backgroud. I no longer need a port for the Mac.

Genghis7777 has a great roundup of 2008 Newton Developments. I haven’t used my Newton much, but I’m actually considering taking it back up again since the iPhone is not able to track all the notes and things I need to keep around. There is still a strong community, still developing and making the Newton relevant in 2008. The newton does things that the iphone may never do; it’s strange that something with so much more power is still fundamentally missing the boat.

The post over at My Apple Newton is worth the read, if just to prove that the newton is still here.

It’s way way easy to make your mac running Leopard into a NFS Server. Check your firewall settings.

If your iPhone won’t connect to Gmail when you first try and set it up, use this link http://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha to resolve the issue. Found the pointer over at the Apple Forums.

Just used the new MBP for about 4 hours. The new new ‘all one big button’ trackpad is really annoying. I had my thumb down at the bottom of the ‘pad trying to click a button that just isn’t there anymore. Having to remember to click the entire pad is just really…. weird. Too weird. Other than that, the machine is amazing. Incredibly fast and quick, and the screen is very, very nice.

My wife just purchased an iPhone 3G, but she still uses Windows XP (I can’t get her to give up that ThinkPad). I’ve never experienced iTunes/iPhone syncing on Windows so I was curious to see what was going to happen when she plugged it in to her laptop. If she used a Mac I’d have her start to use Address Book and iCal, but what happens with an iPhone user on the PC? I know she really wanted to sync photos, but again, she uses Picassa- there is no iPhoto for XP. It turns out most of her actual PIM data is now on Gmail.

Out of the box, iTunes seems pretty smart. It will sync photos using just the photos it finds in the “My Pictures.” Nice. For Contacts and Calendar, it wants to use Outlook (if you have it installed). It will allow you to choose Gmail for contacts, but not for calendar.

Looking for a solution for the calendar, I came across just the thing. A free service that lets you use the OTA Exchange push syncing, but it links to your Gmail or Plaxo account. The company that is doing this is Nuevasync. The service got some good call-outs over at PainintheTech.

I haven’t tried this (I use a Mac) but someone has the iPhone syncing on Linux (looks like ubuntu based). There is a lot of info about the iPhone/iTunes pairing and syncing via USB over at the site.

I got my account on Boxee today. Installed it on my mac, and I’ve been enjoying it all day. Really amazing interface with some cool social features. This is what we are working towards at work (but with linear tv). The hulu assets are what really make it compelling.

Now that the emulator is up and running, you need to get familiar with adb - the Android Debug Bridge - and start poking around at your device.

I found ADB back in the latest SDK, and used it to connect to my emulator. You can start a shell and poke around. I want to get networking up on the emulator– without connectivity this whole enterprise is pointless.

Find your device first:

$ adb devices
List of devices attached
emulator-5554	device

Start a shell:

$ ~/work/android-sdk-mac_x86-1.0_r1/tools/adb -s emulator-5554 shell
# ls
sqlite_stmt_journals
cache
sdcard
etc
system
sys
sbin
proc
init.rc
init.goldfish.rc
init
default.prop
data
root
dev
#

Reading Materials

I just ordered some Android books: Hello Android & Unlocking Android. They both have PDF versions available right now.

Once you have build Android on your Mac OSX (I have Leopard) following the Google directions, it’s time to start it. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds, as I couldn’t find any docs that talked about this, except for this page that talks about the emulator in the SDK.

In your droid repo directory, this will start the emulator:

$ out/host/darwin-x86/bin/emulator -system out/target/product/generic -kernel prebuilt/android-arm/kernel/kernel-qemu

From there, you are back to working with it just like in the SDK.

Android is OpenSourced, and you can build it yourself on MacOSX or an Ubuntu machine. THis is not the emulator, but real Android OS running on your system.

http://source.android.com/download

Has the directions.

Check out the known-issues page before giving up- there are some rough edges.

10/22 Update: watch out for your file system on the mac, you need to have one that is paritioned and formatted with case sensitivity, I just found out:

~/work/mydroid [558]$ make
build/core/product_config.mk:229: WARNING: adding test OTA key
build/core/main.mk:58: ************************************************************
build/core/main.mk:59: You are building on a case-insensitive filesystem.
build/core/main.mk:60: Please move your source tree to a case-sensitive filesystem.
build/core/main.mk:61: ************************************************************
build/core/main.mk:62: *** Case-insensitive filesystems not supported.  Stop.

So I’ve been happily using Zimbra as my primary mailserver for a couple of years. My host recently changed IP addresses, and I took the time to update zimbra to the latest release. Two things tripped me up.

First, this upgrade, unlike any other, refused to complete- the LDAP wouldn’t start after it was upgraded. Searching for the error, the forums on Zimbra pointed to DNS issues. Perhaps it was taking a bit longer for my new A records to propagate… but a dig found them correct. I resolved the issue by putting an entry into my hosts file on the server, which allowed LDAP to bind the new IP and the upgrade completed.

Second, I soon discoved that using the WebUI (which is the only thing I ever use, it’s so nice) that I couldn’t send any mail- every address was ‘rejected’ - back to the forums, where I quickly located this nice page, which explained the issue. It was the ZimbraMyNetworks - it contained the old ip address of the server, and since it had changed, it thought the UI (which is running on the server itself) was trying to relay. Following this page I updated the ZimbraMyNetworks settings and switched host networks.

The two best things about zimbra are the price, and the support- by both the community and the developers. I’ve rarely come across such complete docs and support pages for such a complicated piece of software. They really do an excellent job. I hope Yahoo keeps Zimbra open for the long run.

We are gearing up for some iPhone development, so these look marvelous.

Photoshop UI Elements


OmniGraffle UI Elements

I was fortunate enough to pick up an EEE 901 for a work project and have spent some time with this machine. I chose the Linux version with 20G, which comes broken down into 2 different ‘drives’ (they aren’t really SSD drives, just chips that plug into the ePCI sockets, but they emulate real PATA drives). The first drive is 4G, the 2nd is 16G. The 16G is replaceable and some people can even remove it and replace it with 1.8 hard-drives (the type used in iPod and MacAir) if their 901 comes with a ZIF socket. Asus carved out the space to hold a 1.8 drive, so they must have been planning for something like this.

The Xandros distro that comes on it is really boring, so I replaced it with Ubuntu Hard Heron. There is a site with good information an a tweaked distro to adapt to the short screen and limited real-esate. People have hacked together a nice replacement kernel that gets back most of the functionality (multi-threading, networking (need to build drivers), soft-keys etc.).

AFter I had Ubuntu working I took the extra step and loaded on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix which is just a series of packages that change the UI. Canonical put this out to address the growing netbook market. The UI works much easier with the 901 (which has tiny, tiny keys and bad trackpad) and selecting and launching apps is easier. There is no reason for the traditional menu-bar UI used on traditional desktop computers.

As for the EEE 901 itself, it’s a mixed love on my end. The size and raw speed are nice. The slow SSD disk is bad, the tiny keys are much too small to use for typing anything but URLs or simple commands, even then, you are prone to typos unless you have the hands of a 10 year old. The trackpad is sloppy and the pad’s buttons require to much force. I’m using the device for work that won’t require much input on the keypad, so I’m not so worried. I’m getting the MSI Wind soon and I’ll compare that to the 901 when I’ve had it while.

It looks like on Friday hermitworks released a video showing a patched version ioquake for the iTouch/iPhone. No word is this is built on the opensource toolchain or the Official SDK, but I bet its jailbroken.

Upgrading to Leopard 10.5.2 fixed many sync issues with iDisk, however, is stopped syncing all together on my ibook. This ars article has some good tips on fixing sync issues w/ iDisk.

How-To: Truly reset your .Mac sync data

I’ve never been happier with a device than I have been my my iPhone. However, there is one huge problem. You can’t write your own software for it (this doesn’t count) , or even hack some existing software that someone else wrote. OK, at least you can’t do those things without using a process called jailbreak, and then you can’t even update your iPhone without worrying that you’ll lose everything you’ve installed on your it. Recently Android was announced by Google as a device platform, not a device implementation. They got other people on board. But the killer piece is that you can go out right now and download a full SDK for OSX, Linux or Windows. It includes a full emulator to test your code and even a plugin for eclipse. And you can code in Java. Why did Apple skimp on the SDK for the iPhone? February is a long way away. There is probably a legion of people out coding for Android tonight that would have been working on iPhone apps had Apple released a SDK. Some are already wondering if the iPhone can be put to better use….

Can it crush the iPhone? Maybe. In 2008, when there are HTC devices running Android for $99 (or even free) at Sprint, who is going to pay $400 for an iPhone? When they build a dozen different form-factors of Android devices how can the iPhone compete? I suppose there will always be a market for iPhone as long as they function as video iPods, and as long as Apple keeps us locked into iTunes. But Android is using webkit! That’s half the reason I bought the iPhone. Here is a deeper look at the Android stack. Plus you can win some of the $10 million they are giving away for cool applications written from now till March 2008.

After getting my iPhone, I thought I finally wouldn’t need or want another device for long time. Too bad it only took two months for that sentiment to disappear.

A screen grab of the SDK running on my Mac….

I’ve been in search of a quick, simple and modern image editor for the Mac. For far too long I’ve been dragging around Photoshop 7, simply because I know I can use it to quickly do what I want. But what I need to do is limited. I want to resize and scale photos, add text (watermarks) to them and maybe overlay one or two. Maybe take a PDF and rasterize it to a thumbnail. I deal a lot with screenshots and adding hi-lights to them is about the most complicated task I ever need to do.

I’ve looked at the Gimp for OSX and recently Acorn (which seems totally alien to me- couldn’t get it to do the most basic things) and have been frustrated, till today. Banging away at google I hit upon Imagewell. The people at XtraLean put this app out, and it is exactly what I was looking for (and it works fine in Leopard). It has a crazy price (free for basic stuff- and what it does for free is amazing) and is only $20 bucks to unlock the more advanced features.

It easily passed my acid test- I was able to download it without a bunch of questions and i could use it right away. I pulled in a PDF and was able to quickly resize it to the size I needed and save it out as a png. Very easy and intutive. Intrigued, I went back to their site and looked around the Forums and stumbled across their concise and short screen casts, which quickly illustrate the cool things you can do with this app. I think I’ll buy this one and can leave Photoshop 7 to finally wither away.