blog.arcsource.com

Pandora
Download for free from the iTunes Store
Forget about searching for streaming radio stations, that’s so 20th century. Pandora lets you CREATE your own radio stations. Just tell it the name of a song or artist you’re in the mood for and it starts playing. As it plays, you can thumbs-up or thumbs-down songs to teach the software what you like. You can even create multiple stations. Works from your computer as well, so you can listen to and edit stations from your computer and then listen to and edit them on your iPhone. This is THE killer iPhone App. If you only download one thing for your phone, make it this.

PangeaVR
Download for free from the iTunes Store
This is the application I use to show off just how nifty the iPhone is. Download and view thousands of gorgeous panoramic photographs. Navigate with your finger, zoom in and out with pinch, rotate your phone to switch from panorama to portrait in real time. Very beautiful. I was showing my architect friend some shots of Barcelona and she said Park Güell was even more beautiful than she remembered.

Shazam
Download for free from the iTunes Store
Ever hear a song and wonder what it is? Wonder no more. Just hold your phone up to the speaker for 15 seconds and you’ll have your answer. You get the artist, song title, album, even a link to purchase the song from the iTunes music store. In my experiments, this even worked in a crowded restaurant with the music barely audible. I don’t know how it works, but it’s darned impressive. The application even keeps a list of songs you’ve found so you can download a whole day’s playlist when you get home.

1Password
Download for free (for a limited time) from the iTunes Store
Entering passwords on the iPhone is a pain, and even worse, it can’t offer to remember passwords for you. This nifty little application can store and manage all your passwords so you don’t have to. It can even sync with your Mac! I quickly set up the Mac application and extracted all the passwords out of FireFox and Safari. I was then able to sync them to my iPhone. Now my iPhone knows all of the hundreds of passwords my computer knows! It’s only free for a limited time, so if you’re interested, download it now and check it out.

Remote
Download for free from the iTunes Store
This one’s from Apple and should have been included with the phone. You can use this to remotely control iTunes playback on any Mac on the network. If you have music playing from your computer, you can use your iPhone to browse through your whole song collection and fully control iTunes, including pause, volume, fast forward, track navigation, artist navigation, even assigning star ratingss to songs!

Yelp
Download for free from the iTunes Store
For those not aware, Yelp is an amazing website that allows users to write reviews of local businesses. This application uses your iPhone’s location-aware functionality to show you Yelp.com reviews of local restaurants, bars, banks, gas stations, and other small businesses. With your iPhone and Yelp, you never have to go to a bad restaurant again!

Now Playing
Download for free from the iTunes Store
Also using your location, Box Office shows you show times of your local movie theaters. You can search by theater, or by movie. It shows synopses, reviews and ratings from RottenTomatoes.com, and links to YouTube trailers. When you’re on the go, you can quickly and easily find a movie and even email details to your friends!

Ever noticed that keeping up with all your favorite news sites and blogs takes too much time? RSS is the solution.

RSS In Plain English

Got it? Good. Now get thee a Google Reader account!

File under: oops

Google accidentally let their mail sending server’s security certificate expire. When you go to send an email, you will see an alert message that reads “Unable to verify SSL server smtp.gmail.com”.

Hopefully Google will fix it soon. In the mean time, we can tell our computer to trust the server in question.

This should work for all Mac users running Apple’s Mail.app. If you’re using another mail program, the solution should be similar. Worst case scenario, you can always use webmail.

For those of you interested in the technical details, the server certificate expired on July 29th, 9:58:57 AM PT. They are authorized by Thawte Premium, one of the oldest certification companies. Originally based out of South Africa, Thawte Premium was acquired in 1999 by Verisign in the US. Google pays a small annual fee to this security company, who in exchange will vouch for Google. They basically are there to prove that when your mail program connects to smtp.gmail.com, you really are using one of Google’s servers and not somebody else pretending to be Google.

I’m sure Google is already scrambling to fix this, but in the mean time, just 3 mouse clicks will fix it on your computer. If you don’t see any error messages when sending mail, you don’t need to do anything.

I’ve blown away by syncing with iPhone, MobileMe, PowerBook, Google Calendars/Contacts, Yahoo! Contacts. I’ve spent the past 30 minutes syncing contacts and events all over and everything is being synced instantly.

My iPhone, PowerBook and three Cloud accounts are all up to date pretty much instantly and all the time now
MobileMe eMail, Contacts and Calendars

Hardware:
PC: Intel PowerBook running 10.5.4
iPhone: 2G running 2.0 software

Here’s what’s being synced:

—————–
Business Email
—————–
Syncing:
eMail - Online access, IMAP to PC and iPhone via Google Apps
Calendars - via Google’s shared calendars with my personal Google Account

Google Apps:
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/index.html

—————–
Gmail Personal
—————–
Syncing:
eMail - Online access, IMAP to PC and iPhone
Contacts (via Apple Address Book Preference. As soon as iPhone has been connected to PC, this option becomes available; a hack is also available)
Calendars - via BusySync - This is currently working flawlessly; changes are reflected on PC and Online instantly.

BusySync:
http://www.busymac.com/
http://groups.google.com/group/busymac?lnk=
http://blog.busymac.com/

—————–
MobileMe
—————–
Syncing:
eMail - Online access, IMAP to PC and push to iPhone
Calendars - Push to iPhone, near instant updates with PC

http://www.apple.com/mobileme/

—————–
Yahoo!
—————–
Syncing:
eMail - Mail is push to iPhone for free. Requires Pay account for POP and IMAP on PC, which I do not do.
Contacts - via Apple Address Book Preference

http://www.yahoo.com/

—————–
Notes
—————–

Since I use a laptop, obviously updates don’t occur when laptop is not on. When it is, everything updates near instantly.

I added a contact to Yahoo! contacts and within 15 seconds, the contact was also in my Google Contacts, on my iPhone, on my online MobileMe account and in my Apple Address Book

The same was true when I added an event to my ArcSource calendar. Within 30 seconds, the event showed up on my Personal Google Calendar, iCal, and iPhone.

Despite Apple recently reneged on the “Push” moniker for macs (but not the iPhone), everything is being synced without pause.

I’ve heard that a lot of IT consulting firms aren’t so knowledgeable about iPhones. Maybe it’s because we all love Macs, but all the ArcSource techs are advanced iPhone users and we’re happily assisting our clients to get the most out of their iPhones. If you’d like help setting up your iPhone, please let us know.

For our more advanced users: You’ve got your iPhone all set up, you already know how to load music or movies, you have your addressbook and calendars all syncing, and you’re starting to get faster with the keyboard. It’s time to take it to the next level.

ArcSource proudly presents: Intermediate iPhone Tips.
This episode: screenshots, customized contacts, and rebooting.

Super Secret iPhone Screenshot Trick
With the new iPhone 2.0 software Apple quietly released a not-very-well publicized new feature: screenshots! Now you can get a screenshot of a weird error you’re seeing and send it to your tech, you can prove to your friend that their website doesn’t work from the iPhone, or maybe you just want to show off your home screen configuration.

All you have to do is hold down the home button and press the power button. Your screen will flash white and the picture will show up in your Photos. It’ll even sync to your computer, just like a picture you take with the camera.

Custom Contact Photos and Ringtones
By adding custom ringtones to my contacts, I can instantly know who’s calling as soon as the phone rings. I can even put a face to a name with contact pictures.

To assign a ringtone to a contact, open up the person you want to edit, and at the bottom of the list of phone numbers it will show Ringtone: Default. Just select the ringtone you’d like for that contact and the next time they call, you’ll know exactly who it is.

To set a custom photo for your contacts, click the edit button and then click Add Photo. You can take a picture of them with the camera, or select a picture from your library. I’m fond of taking pictures of people on the phone, so that way when they call I get to see them calling me.

Have You Tried Rebooting?
Any of my clients know that the first thing I always ask before troubleshooting a problem is “Have you tried restarting?” A simple reboot will fix 90% of the computer problems out there. This seems to be true for the iPhone as well. Wireless isn’t connecting? Mail isn’t downloading? Application crashing? Try rebooting! It’s easy to do, just hold down the power button for about 4 seconds until you see “Slide to Power Off”. Slide it across and your phone will shut down. To power it back on again, just hold down the power button for 3 seconds.

I hope you find these tips useful. Next time maybe we can talk about how to create ringtones from an MP3? Or how to rip DVD movies to your phone? Post in the comments which one you’d like me to cover next.

I’ve been a .Mac–uh, MobileMe–user ever since it was called iTools and it was free. Apple has revamped it’s .Mac service to include complete integration of calendars, contacts and email. Using the MobileMe sync along with .Mac IMAP email means that I can have my essential data anywhere.

The web based calendar interface for MobileMe is almost like using iCal on my Mac. A little slower, but it is a web app after all. Also, I’m using BusyMac to keep the Google calendar up to date so that I can share my work calendar with my co-workers. So I should have my calendar data just about everywhere. The only way I could get more access would be if a zepplin were to constantly fly around the SF Bay Area with my calendar scrolling on it.

It gets even better with my iPhone. The new push (or whatever Apple is calling it now) feature has got to be one of the best features ever provided for a mobile device. This morning my MobileMe account synced on my G5 at home and by the time I got to the office the calendar items I entered had showed up on my iPhone. Without ever using a USB cable or connecting it in anyway to my Mac. I set my MobileMe to sync every hour so I should be relatively up to date. When I had my original US Robotics Palm Pilot with 128 K of memory, I never imagined that not only would I eventually get an insanely great device but that I would also ditch my serial cable.

How sweet is that!?

The full details are not yet known, but Manuel Caballero has just given a presentation at Microsoft’s BlueHat security conference. Apparently, an enormous security problem in IE 6 and 7 has been discovered, a so-called cross-domain vulnerability. There are already proof-of-concepts and very likely real-life exploits as well, for IE 6, 7, and 8. Other browsers might have a similar vulnerability as well, but it’s not clear yet whether that is really the case, so if you are still using IE, this might be a good time to switch to a different browser, like Firefox or my personal favorite, Opera.

Does your Apple Mail feel sluggish? Then this is the command you should execute from the Terminal (after making sure Mail is not running):

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\\ Index vacuum subjects;

This is a safe command to run; it clears out deleted emails and improves the overall speed of Mail.

If you’re curious about what’s going on when you do this, please have a look at the blog posting over at the guys from Hawk Wings, where the inner workings and effects of the command are discussed in detail. They also have a ton of other good information to make Mail more productive, so go check them out!

Adobe’s April update for their Flash player is also included in Apple’s latest Leopard rollup to 10.5.3, so if you have that installed you don’t need to worry. Everyone else, no matter what platform, should check the installed version and update to 9.0.124.0 (or later), if necessary, as some security holes have been fixed in this latest release.