Apple’s New Products

Apple announced a few new products this morning on their online Store. New iMac, new Mac Pro, and a totally new product that I saw rumored a couple weeks ago, called the Magic Trackpad.

For years I’ve had a Fingerworks iGesture pad, I’ve been using it off and on since about the 2001 timeframe. I found it to be the neatest and easiest way to navigate my computer’s interface differently from the mouse ever. I’m a big proponent of the keyboard, and hate taking my hand off of the keyboard to mouse, but for some reason I found the iGesture Pad fun to use (especially doing things like cut, copy, and paste. Fingerworks was founded 1998 at the University of Delaware (a couple miles from where I live) and produced keyboards, pads, keypads, all to help with RSI and to introduce gesture based navigation into the world. They weren’t exclusively Mac based, in fact, they worked on Linux pretty well as well, of course, on Windows. Which, back then, is what I used.

Apple bought Fingerworks back in 2005, coincidentally, when they started working on the iPad (before they started working on the iPhone. They started working on the touch tablet first). Presumably for their patents, and innovations in the technology. If you’ve used an Apple product since about 2006 or 2007, you’ve used Fingerworks-based technology.

Two finger scrolling, three finger swipe, pinch to zoom and pinch to un-zoom, the whole Magic Mouse, the finger manipulation on the iPhone and iPad.

In this line, comes the Magic Trackpad. Which is kinda like my old iGesture Pad (which is sitting right here — not in use currently). It’s a trackpad that mimics the trackpad on the laptops.

There are, however, a couple things still missing. Like these features:

However, since that’s basically all software based, I am hoping that Apple builds that stuff into the interface now that we have the hardware. Here’s hoping.

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Categories: apple.

By Joel

— July 27, 2010 at 10:22

Apple Stores are good to me

Yesterday my wife and I took a visit to the local Apple Store, my Time Capsule had died, and since it was one of the original models, it was under a replacement program. I took the Time Capsule back, they traded my broken one for a brand new one, and I was done.

My wife, however, was a different story. You may remember from a previous post of mine that my wife dropped her iPhone4 while getting my daughter out of the car. Whoops. Cracked the back glass to shreds.

She was fairly upset, since she had it about a week. Anyway, she went in, explained what she did to the Apple Genius dudes, and guess what?

They gave her a brand new phone.

/That’s/ why I like Apple Stores.

Thanks to the Christiana Mall Apple Store Geniuses. You rule.

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Categories: apache, iPhone, review.

By Joel

— July 26, 2010 at 16:18

Reading Spam with Common Sense

Usually when I receive an email that looks like spam, I can just mash my “Send to Junk” keyboard shortcut and it goes away. But every once in awhile there is a decent looking spam that *might* be real. At first glance it won’t have an images or selling viagra, or anything like that in it, and might just look real.

This is where the common sense approach to reading email kicks in. Obviously this post it not for the expert, this is probably more of the occasional user, but maybe someone in between will find it useful.

Here’s a spam I received this morning that prompted me to write this diary:

From: Comcast

“This is a courtesy reminder that your Comcast Billing Information needs to be verified.

In order to continue using comcast services, click the link below, sign in and and follow the provided steps:

<Malicious Link was right here>

Regards,
Comcast Billing Department”

So, let’s look at this and see how easy this is to detect:

I’m not a Comcast customer. So right there, it was easy to detect.
“comcast” in the second line is not capitalized. A real Comcast email would have capitalized their own companies name.
Usually an email like this (from Comcast corporate) would tend to have all kinds of disclaimers and other nonsense at the bottom of the email.
The link that I removed was not to “comcast.com”

Now, if we get into the weeds a bit more, we can look at the headers and see where it came from.

It came from a server at a .edu. I don’t want to talk about which .edu (but it was in the United States), as I am going to try and get in touch with their security department after I get done writing this Diary.

Even more bad though — it came from the “root” account on this server, the headers even indicate what version of Linux this server was running (Ubuntu). Most likely culprit? Probably an SSH scan that compromised the root account.

Make sure you have tight controls over those SSH accounts! And use common sense when reading your email. If it looks like bull, and it smells like bull. Chances are, it’s bull.

Hopefully this helped someone.

Oh, the malicious link? Pointed you to a site that collected your usernames and passwords.

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Categories: Mail, funny.

By Joel

— July 22, 2010 at 07:36

iPhone 4. A review after practical use, part 2

Part 1 Linked here.

Buttons and other Cosmetics

The volume button, the lock button, and the silent/ringer switch all got the same industrial treatment the rest of the phone did. They work much better, have better tactile feedback and are much more defined, making it much easier to find one of these buttons in the depths of your pocket. (Like to turn the volume down on your ringer or something)

There is the single button on the front of the phone, the Home button, which they made a bit more “clicky” I would say. But the one thing about the design of the phone is, when you reach in your pocket to grab the phone and bring it out of your pocket in one swift motion while mashing the Home button, you can’t do it.

Since the 3GS had that rounded back, it was easy to feel where the backside was and hit the button. With the square design, it’s hard to tell which side is the front and back when it’s your pocket unless you try and find the buttons on the side.

This isn’t a big deal at all. It’s just a quirk that I found that I had that I’ve had to get used to.

FaceTime

FaceTime is Apple’s new “video chat” feature. You use two iPhone 4s, call each other on the phone, and as long as both of you are on Wifi, you can then mash the FaceTime button. If everything is okay, (NAT transversal, etc) you’ll shortly be talking to each other via video chat. Is it cool? Yes.

Does it work? Yes.
Have I used it? A lot.

Is it revolutionary? No, video chat has been done before. But this time it’s implemented correctly and easily. It works. You don’t have to go to Fring and sign up with an account, and then use Video (btw, Fring’s video quality sucks, and their audio is a close second). You don’t have to do anything extra. Ensure you are on Wifi, and hit the “Facetime” button. The quality is good, audio quality is good. It allows me to sit in my hotel and video chat with my wife and daughter while they are at home. My daughter can show me her picture that she drew that day, she can show me what she’s eating for dinner, she can show me her “beautiful dress” that she’s wearing. (All dresses, according to my daughter, are “beautiful dresses”.)

Could we have done this before? Yes, and still do, with iChat. But there’s two things about that. First, iChat requires more bandwidth, therefore hotel internet most of the time, can’t handle it, and secondly, my wife doesn’t always have her laptop. She most always has her phone. And since my wife is 8 months pregnant, I’m not about to make her get up to get her laptop. I have better sense than that.

I think this is a great feature, it’ll be neat if my parents get an iPhone 4 so they can enjoy it as well. Especially when it comes to seeing my new baby.

Speed

This thing is quick. If you bought the 3GS, upgraded from the 3G, or you have the 3G, or if you have the iPhone original. The new iPhone 4 is dramatically faster than the 3G or the iPhone original, the 3GS, yes, it’s faster than that, but you’d have do some some really processor intensive stuff to notice a huge difference (like compressing video). So, if you have a 3GS and want to upgrade to the iPhone 4, you need to use one of the other of the 100 new features of the iPhone 4 as your excuse to upgrade. However, if you have a 3G or the original iPhone, you will be blown away by the speed.

Think about this in perspective for a second, the A4′s rumored speed is 1 Ghz (after a cursory search of the internet, it’s the best metric I could find). Now the A4 is the same chip that is in the iPad and the iPhone. The iPhone A4 is rumored to be clocked down, to preserve battery life.

The amount of RAM on the iPhone 4 is 512 MB (as evidenced by a particular slide at WWDC, Apple doesn’t announce the RAM amounts or the clock speed in their mobile devices). I remember, in 2003, my last computer before I bought an Apple computer, was a 1.7 Ghz chip with 512 bytes of RAM. Seven years later, I have a phone in my pocket that is almost as fast, has the same amount of RAM, and as 32 Gb of storage on it. Really puts things in perspective, how things are advancing. I feel it’s impressive. (Of course, back then, I had a 1.5 Mb/s Cable connection to the Internet and I thought that was fast. Now I have a 25 Mb/s Fiber connection.)

Camera

On the back is a 5 Megapixel camera, on the front is a significantly lower megapixel camera. The front camera is primarily for taking pictures of yourself, if you are that vain, and also for Facetime. Which serves it’s purpose quite well. The back camera, with the LED flash, is for taking good pictures. The iPhone does take good pictures. Not GREAT pictures, not like Cannon 5D Mark II pictures, but it will easily replace that point and shoot my wife carries in her purse. Anything where I can carry less devices is a win for me.

Problems with the camera. The Flash is okay. If you try to take a picture, in the dark, and if the subject is close, it’ll work great. As long as the person you are taking a picture of doesn’t actually look at the flash. I don’t know why, but every picture I have taken of people with the flash at night has a weird “red-eye” effect, except it’s not red. It’s white. Making my photo subjects a bit creepy.

In low light, and if there is any kind of motion, the iPhone will blur the motion in the picture. Most cameras do this, so I can’t fault the actual iPhone.

However, if you are taking pictures during the day, morning, or evening. Indoors or outdoors, sunny or overcast, the pictures are great. It replaces point and shoots.

The other feature of the iPhone is the ability to record 720p HD video. I’ve done this several times already, recording video of my daughter jumping off the diving board for the first time and things like that. The iPhone 4 handles it just fine. The video looks great on playback on the Retina Display or even after you offload it to your iPhoto and play it on the Desktop.

Overall

I have some opinions, and this is the place to share them I guess, since it’s my blog. Overall, I like the iPhone, but I always have. The iPhone 4 is much better than it’s predecessor. I’m still not too crazy about the Antenna reception “Don’t touch this 2mm of the outside of the phone” thing, but I can overlook it by not touching it there, and getting a case. Do I think it’s a bad design? No. I understand why they did it, and it can be overcome easily, but it kinda sucks.

I’m not crazy about the glass on both sides, but according to the things I’ve read, I understand why it was done. Apparently, they did away with the plastic back because plastic retains more heat than glass, and the iPhone 4 can heat up when doing really processor intensive things like compressing video. It’s slippery and obviously, as tested by my wife, it breaks. Apple charges waaay to much to fix this issue, and I think that’s BS.

Do I think it’s a good phone? Yes.
Do I think it’s a good computer? Yes.
Do I recommend it to friends? Yes, if you buy a case with it, or at least have the cognitive ability to not touch that portion of the phone.

Overall? Good. Buy it. It rocks.

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Categories: apple, iPhone, review.

By Joel

— July 19, 2010 at 10:42

iPhone 4. A review after actual use.

Physical Design

Okay, much has been said about the physical design of this phone, it’s industrial features, it’s glass front and back, stainless steel metal band around the side that doubles as an antenna, dual camera, and an led flash. The buttons, the glass, the band, everything. It makes for a great design, feels smaller and better in your hand than the 3GS. In fact, the 3GS feels fat, plastic, and bloated. I only see two problems with the design.

One, front and back are both glass, meaning, if you drop it it might break. Even though Apple claims that the glass is harder than sapphire, if you drop the thing at the right angle, it will break. Ask my wife, who has already shattered the back of her phone after dropping it on the driveway. (Which Apple wants 199 dollars to replace the back, which is the cost of a new phone! Apple, have you lost your mind?).

Problem Two: it’s slippery. If you place your phone on something smooth, say, like in my car, I have a center console. If I place the phone on there, it slips right off. Or on the arm rest of an easy chair. This is as a result of it being glass. Neither is that big of a deal, if you just are careful about how you take care of the phone. If you buy a bumper (which Apple is now giving away for free until September 30th) it has a bit of rubber on the back edge, making it non-slip, and a bit more protected.

The Display

Just after the iPad comes out, and those of us who bought one were running around saying “Wow, look at this really big touch screen display”, then following that the Evo comes out with that big screen and people say “Wow, look at this really big touch screen display”. For instance, I have a friend of mine that went from an iPhone (o.g.) to an Evo, and he was like “This screen is huge, it’s so big!”, but I digress.

Apple comes out with this display on the iPhone 4, it’s has 4x the pixel display density of the iPhone 3GS. This results in much sharper rendering of, well, damn near, anything. Photos look great, video looks great, games look great, apps look great, but what’s the one thing you do, or view on an iPhone the most?

Text.

Oh, it rocks. If you have an iPhone (not)4, do this, and you’ll understand:

Go to http://nytimes.com. Don’t zoom in after it loads. Big newspaper website right? Look at the text, see how it’s barely readable and all pixelated? On the iPhone 4, you can read it. READ it. Right from this screen. You can zoom in on the (not)4, and you’ll be able to read it just fine, which you’d probably want to do on the iPhone 4 as well, but that’s just an illustration of how much better this display is.

After you see and use the “Retina” Display, and go back to another phone (even the iPad, or a regular computer) you’ll wonder how you ever complimented that old screen and how bothersome it is to have all that fuzzy text.

There has been some dispute about the fact that Apple calls this the “Retina Display“. As to whether or not the pixel density is actually higher than what the Retina can perceive. First off, two things.

I am not an optical engineer, and don’t play one on TV, so I’m not going to get into the argument by adding my own thoughts here. All I know is that it looks great.
It’s a marketing term people, there is a line to how pedantic you must be people.

In short, the display is quite awesome.

The Antenna

Now, the antenna has been in constant controversy since the iPhone 4 came out. Let me cover a few parts of it.

The Antenna is broken into two parts, if you are looking at the left hand side of the phone, you will see a black band. The piece of metal that is around the outside of the phone on the left hand side is for Wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS. The rest of the metal is for Edge and 3G.
It’s on the outside of the phone, for better reception.
If you touch it, right at that black band on the left hand side, the “bars” or signal on the phone degrade into almost nothing, and if you are in a weak signal area, your call will just drop.

Not really an optimum design for an antenna you might think. One that you can touch in 2mm of the phone and the call drops? Yup. I can replicate it, I can do it, at will. You know what else I can do?

Not put my pinky over that part of the phone.

Or if worst comes to worst, get a case. I got a bumper for my phone which covers the antenna and the phone works perfectly.

Now, some people have said that Apple should have never released a phone like this. Well that may be a good point, but I don’t know if that would have helped. The antenna is on the outside of the phone, okay? Any phone you grip around the antenna is going to attenuate the signal. It’s just the way it is. Apple says this, and you can replicate it on any of the prior iPhones as well as a bunch of the iPhone’s competitors.

Remember when we were kids and you grabbed the rabbit antennas on your TV? Remember how the signal would get worse when you did that, even some times when you just got close to the TV? Same principle.

The phone is a radio. Sorry. It has to retrieve and transmit, and they have to put the antenna somewhere. Apple put the antenna on the outside of the phone to try and reduce the dropped calls everyone on AT&T was complaining about.

I personally have much less dropped calls than I used to (despite what Apple said about the iPhone 4 dropping more calls), and I’m not complaining about it one bit. Yes, I can hold the phone in a certain way to attenuate the signal and make the bars go down, so I just don’t hold it like that. It de-tunes the antenna, and therefore make signal reception go down.

Since this post is running right around 1000 words right now, I’ll cut it into two posts… stay tuned for part two.

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Categories: apple, iPhone, review.

By Joel

— July 17, 2010 at 21:19

MobileMe’s New Look

I use MobileMe, no big surprise there, I have multiple Macs, iPhone, and the iPad. MobileMe keeps them all in sync, and I have no problems with it. However recently, Apple’s been working on their web application portion of MobileMe with a new look and feel to the frontpage, the login, the “Find my iPhone”, Mail revamp, and most recently the beta for the Calendar.

Mail

Let me talk about the Mail at MobileMe first. This just came out of beta, (on the web) and the features they added are very nice. First off, I think the attempt is to make it look like the iPad app for Mail. It has three columns, the Mailboxes, the Inbox, and the message pane on the right. Kinda like the newer versions of Outlook, or maybe even Mail.app (if you have the three column view turned on).

At the top there there are buttons, from left to right, they have the “Cloud” Icon (which is basically the Application switcher, allowing you to go back and forth between Calendar and Contacts, etc), the Search pane, Trash, Archive, “Move to Folder” Reply (and reply to all, and forward) and “New“. Over on the right you have the “gear” icon which is your “Preferences“, and then your account manager (under your name over there).

Mostly everything works the same as the older MobileMe web app, or the same as you’d expect from any web-based Email GUI. One thing that they did add was “Server-side” email filtering. Now, it’s still pretty limited as to the functionality, and I don’t know if there are plans to expand this functionality, however, for me, it gets the job done.

I still like the ability in procmail to use Regular Expressions to filter my email, but this works as well and it works great.

MobileMe features “Push Email” to all your Apple devices, and what’s nice about the server-side rule filtering is that emails that are filtered on the server are not pushed to your mobile device. Why do I like this? Because after I found this out, I switched all my listservers over to MobileMe and off of Gmail. I actually don’t even use my Gmail account anymore. MobileMe, is a traditional IMAP server (no “labels are actually folders” or whateverness of Gmail. (Oh and that stupid “All Mail” folder. I hate that thing) It works. It works well, and it’s fast. Gmail bandwidth throttles their connections via IMAP and POP, leading to much irritation. I use MobileMe because, once you get past my server side filters, (which are quite extensive), you get pushed to my Mobile device.

Could I do this with Gmail? Yes. Gmail does feature server-side filtering. Gmail does push email to the iPhone with the “Exchange” connector. However, not only for the above reasons, but for one stupidly simple reason in addition: When you reply to an email on Gmail, you don’t get the reply icon in your Mail client. So, basically, you don’t know which emails you’ve replied to, or not replied to until you log into Gmail on the web. Maybe this is the way they get you to log in and see their ads, but either way, it’s stupid. So yes, I use MobileMe for all my email, aside from work.

So, what’s new recently?

Calendar

The Calendar just entered a new phase of beta. When MobileMe has something in beta, when you log into the web interface it will ask you “Do you want to try out the beta?” You click “Okay”, and a couple of weeks later they make you eligible for the beta. I requested my invitation last week, and got it yesterday.

After I logged in, it asked me “Do you want to upgrade your calendars?” I clicked “Ok”. This whole process took about 10 minutes. Upgrading my calendars and everything.

It not only changed the calendars on MobileMe (which, now look just like the iPad), with the ripped edges and what not.

But they also change your iCal calendars and your calendars on your iPhone into “Caldav“. What does this mean for you?

Finally, (why did this take so long Apple? Nice job, but seriously?) you can send invites to other people on your Calendar on your iPhone. You can accept invites as well, just like the iPhone does with Exchange, if you receive a calendar invitation, you can accept or Deny it right on the iPhone or iPad with MobileMe. (This feature requires iOS 4, unless you manually add Caldav into your iPhone as a calendar)

You can share your calendar (see in the above screenshot where the “Home” Calendar has a Green button next to it? Indicating that it’s shared? You can share it with individuals or the world. (It used to be “The World”.) You can see the “Free-Busy” schedule for anyone on MobileMe (that’s in the beta, but after it comes out of beta, it’ll be normal.)

All in all, it looks great, and it works great. I’ve only found one bug (I’m in the beta, I’m supposed to report this stuff right?) it’s an html5 rendering problem with Chrome (works fine in Safari — surprise!). You even have a nice “To-Do” bar on the right. Now, only if we could get a “To-Do” feature on the iPhone, I could do away with these wonky third party apps to manage that stuff.

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Categories: apple.

By Joel

— July 16, 2010 at 08:37

Microsoft opens source code to Russian secret service

Microsoft opens source code to Russian secret service | Security | ZDNet UK.

The above is a link to ZDNet on the fact that Microsoft has signed a deal with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) access to Windows Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, SQL Server, and Windows 7.

The thing to remember about this deal is, this is nothing new… from the article:

“The agreement is an extension to a deal Microsoft struck with the Russian government in 2002 to share source code for Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2000, said Vedomosti.”

I’m not even sure that the United States Government has access to Microsoft’s Source Code, although it stands to reason… If the Russians have it, the US has it too.

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Categories: Microsoft, ZDnet, office, security, software, windows.

By Joel

— July 15, 2010 at 15:29

Plug-Ins I use for Mail.app

Attention Mac Users that use Mail.app, this one is for you.

Mail.app has a bunch of plugins that are available to it, not like Thunderbird, where Mozilla holds a repository of Plugins, Apple doesn’t do that. But there are a ton of them available on the Internet and it would be great if Apple would do something like that (like they are about to do with html5 extensions for Safari). Mail calls these plugins “Bundles” and are found in the ~/Library/Mail/Bundles directory. I just wanted to write a post about a few of the Bundles that I use with Mail.app to make my email a lot easier to use.

1. Mail Act-On

Mail Act-On, written by indev software, the same people who provide MiniMail and Mail Tags (two other great bundles that I don’t use), is an Email organization tool. Basically it allows you to tie Mail.app rules to keystrokes. So for example, one of the Keystrokes that I use is “`1″ (Backtick, 1). The rule I have tied to that command is to move whatever the current email I have highlighted to a certain folder. What I do is have most of the email that I deal with from listservers go directly to folders (on the server), and then the Mails from certain webservers and other “To Me” email goes to my Inbox. Since I use the Inbox Zero method of filtering email, I can read an email, and if I want to file it away, I use the keystroke to move it to my Archive folder. Simple, done. I can color emails certain colors, I can move emails around, etc. It’s nice, and I suggest it’s use.

2. Widemail

Widemail is a bundle that displays your email in the three column format. Similar to how the newer versions of Outlook and Entourage display your email, I find this method of email is easier to read (from left to right) as opposed to the old Outlook method of from the “Top Down“. It also allows you to color code rows two different colors so it’s easy to spot where your cursor is at.

3. QuoteFix

Quotefixformac is like Outlook Quotefix. It reformats emails for bottom posting, cleans up the cruft, removes the signature from the original message, cleans up unnecessary lines, and even prune replies above a certain indentation. It’s a nice tool and I use it to format emails the way I like them as well.

So, just three plugins I use for Mail.app, check them out, give them a shot, support the developers that made them.

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Categories: Mail, apple.

By Joel

— July 13, 2010 at 17:49

Mailing lists do not get Anti-Spam

Note: If you are subscribed to a Mailing List, and you have one of those “Auto-answer-back-auto-emailing-verify-that-you-are-a-human-by-clicking-on-this-link-really annoying-things”. You are doing it wrong.

Get a frickin Gmail account people.