Jambo Journal

More iPhone Carriers

2008-05-12T13:01:00.002-05:00

via DarinFireball, more carriers to offer iPhones in Singapore, India, the Philippines and Australia.

More iPhone Deals

2008-05-07T13:56:00.000-05:00

MEXICO CITY, May 7 (Reuters) - America Movil AMXL.MX said on Wednesday it would sell Apple Inc's (AAPL) iPhone across Latin America this year, a deal that could extend its lead in the region over Telefonica TEF.MC.

Mmm, why is AAPL falling?

Re: The Vista Schoolyard Bullies........

2008-05-07T11:54:00.003-05:00

(via DB, Bynkii.com )I actually agree with Matt on how Vista is being picked on by everybody. Most users out there aren't very in tune with technology, and often regurgitate the same opinions and generalizations they hear everybody saying. I believe Vista is actually a decent product, and the problems with it's launch probably weren't worse than XP when it launched.

However, I'd like to point out some issues:

"I ask you, how many Apple users do you know that own a 3 year old Mac, and install Leopard on it?"

The answer is, many many people. As John C. Welch mentions Leopard supports Macs as old as the G4 867MHz, which was introduced August 13, 2002( Lowendmac ). That's more than 5 years old. I'm running Leopard on just such a machine, and it doesn't feel any slower than when it was running Tiger.

"First of all, in the little experience I've had with Leopard, I've had horrible hardware compatibility issues with printers, especially older printers (which just work natively in Vista) when setting up customer offices on consulting jobs."

This of course is true. I hate dealing with the old printers as well, and Windows definitely is much better at supporting the older printers. The problem is, the majority of these printers were Windows GDI printers. The manufacturers of these printers moved more and more functionality to the Windows drivers to save on hardware cost. ( LinuxPrinting ) As a result, these printers are much harder to get working outside of Windows. Thanks to the Linux community, many of these printers can still be 'forced' to work with OS X. The good news is that many of the new printers on the market now are supported in OS X.

"To me, this is a horrible thing. Having lots of vendors make parts for your system provides you a much greater variety of options, as well as driving prices down, the beauty of competition."

It's great for prices, but not so great for stability. This is also one of the reasons it is difficult for Microsoft to control the stability of Windows. Although MS certified drivers is supposed to remedy this.

"This is one of the reasons why owning a Mac has been so notoriously expensive."
Well, this hasn't been true for a long time. You really have to compare systems spec by spec. Comparing a $500 DIY PC to a $2500 Mac Pro is not fair to both the PC and the Mac. Since Apple starting using more commodity hardware in their systems there hasn't been a large difference in price for comparable PCs and Macs anymore.
ComputerWorld: Mac vs. PC cost analysis: How does it all add up?
System Shootouts: $3200 Workstation Shootout

"Why aren't all the open source people crying foul of Apple? OSX is based off of Open BSD, which is open source."

Like one of the comments pointed out, OS X is based on FreeBSD. In which the BSD license allows "[r]edistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification." Also, people aren't complaining because Apple does contribute back to the Open Source community. The Apple Open Source page provides access to Open Source code modified and used by Apple, as well as links to various successful Open Source projects like Darwin, Darwin Streaming Server, Bonjour, and WebKit.

"This, I'm sorry to say is Microsoft's fault for daring to tell everyone what they hoped to accomplish in their next OS release, starting back in the very early days of the first Longhorn 4000 build series."

Although Microsoft seems to do this quite often. I understand that MS has a lot of business customers that demand to know long term road maps of MS technology. But if these announcements repeatedly fail to materialize, perhaps MS should be a little more cautious next time.

"It is a fantastic, stable OS that is a huge step in a direction that Windows has needed to move in for a long time."

I don't know about fantastic, but I believe it is moving in the right directions with stability and security. Although, I'd recommend Matt and any MS developers read Peter Bright's article, "From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X" ( Part1, Part2 ) Peter points out many valid points as to why Vista is getting such a bad rap compared to Leopard these days.

Vodafone to sell iPhone

2008-05-06T03:28:00.001-05:00

Vodafone announced that it will sell the iPhone in Australia as well as "in the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey." via http://www.smh.com.au/

Safari 3.1.1 Update

2008-04-16T17:04:00.002-05:00

Safari has a new update that fixes the previous security flaw exploited at the infamous CanSecWest contest.

Apple Mac pilot program at IBM Research

2008-04-16T17:01:00.001-05:00

via Roughly Drafted, Interesting article about IBM's experiments in migrating to a less Windows centric work place.

OS X Invisible Bit

2008-04-16T16:58:00.002-05:00

via Daring Fireball,

The invisible bit is metadata. In the same way that every file and folder has metadata such as created and modified dates, it has a boolean “invisible” bit. Files marked invisible are still readable and writable, they just don’t show up in the Finder or in Open and Save dialogs.

John Gruber also lists various methods for manipulating the invisible bit.

Mac Wireless Keyboard / Mouse FAQ

2008-04-09T22:11:00.002-05:00

This article is very helpful if you have the Apple Wireless Keyboards / Mice, and need to access some of the boot time shortcuts.

Leopard Server Upgrade Hanging

2008-04-07T15:46:00.003-05:00

If you've tried Upgrading to Leopard Server and had the system get stuck with a Blue or Gray screen atboot time, this may solve the issue.

You basically need to remove this file: /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle

This Apple Support article also covers some other possible solutions for Leopard to not boot.

BootCamp 2.0 Right-Clicking

2008-03-28T13:45:00.002-05:00

Prior to BootCamp 2.0 you needed to install Apple Mouse Utility or Input Remapper to get Right-Clicking working on the trackpad ( by pressing CTRL+Click ). With BootCamp 2.0, Right-Click on the track pad is built-in, although not as nice as in OS X.

Using a trackpad, place two fingers on the trackpad and click the trackpad button.

AppleCare Perks

2008-03-28T13:25:00.002-05:00

Did you know you get a copy of TechTool Deluxe with your AppleCare Agreement? Just follow the link and enter your Serial number to download.

TechTool Deluxe is a nice tool to help diagnose possible hardware issues with your Mac.

Hint: Get you Serial number by going to Apple Menu > About This Mac ; then click on 'Version' twice to display the Serial number.

Aperture 2.1 Update Released

2008-03-28T12:49:00.002-05:00

Today Apple just released a 2.1 update to Aperture 2, which was released not too long ago.

1st Gen MacBook crack

2008-03-27T23:33:00.003-05:00

I thought it was just me... but apparently many people are having the same crack develop on the bottom right of the laptop. Time t o call in my AppleCare insurance.

MacBook Air Hacked Again...

2008-03-27T23:28:00.003-05:00

Among an Ubuntu Linux, a Windows Vista, and an OS X laptop, the Apple MacBook Air was the first to be hacked in the CamSecWest hacking contest.

Kind of disappointing considering that OS X is supposed to be more secure.

Reset Drupal Admin Password via MySQL

2008-03-27T12:41:00.003-05:00

Execute this SQL command in MySQL either from the command line or from a tool like PHPMySQL to reset the admin password:

update users set pass=md5('NEWPASS') where uid = 1;

'users' may be prefixed by something like ' drupal_ ' depending on your setup.

ArsTechnica on Safari 3.1 for Windows

2008-03-25T13:17:00.001-05:00

Nice write up of Safari 3.1 on Windows.

The Macalope on Roger Kay's BW Article.

2008-03-21T12:02:00.003-05:00

Roger Kay claims, "It's little surprise then that reports of Mac viruses have been rising steadily."

mmm... wonder if anybody can list even 1 virus on the Mac.

via DaringFireball, CNet

Safari Screenshot shortcut

2008-02-26T22:35:00.003-05:00

Just found a cool little shortcut key by accident. In Safari 3 ( I'm not sure about previous versions ) you can hit the Apple + I keys to mail the contents of the current browser window. Alternatively you can go through the menus File > Mail Content of This Page. The cool thing is the entire contents of the page will be mailed and not just what is currently visible.

The contents are sent as HTML rather than an image, so this may not be helpful if you are trying to troubleshoot some browser bug.

New MacBook / MacBook Pros

2008-02-26T10:29:00.003-05:00

New MacBook and MacBook Pros have been released, with some speed bumps and increase in storage. MacBooks now support up to 4 GB of memory though.

I wonder if the previous MacBooks will take the 2 GB SODIMM modules as well...

16 GB iPhone

2008-02-25T14:15:00.003-05:00

I'm not sure when exactly this was released, but it looks like there's a new 16 GB iPhone available now.

Update: According to Wikipedia, this was released Feb. 5th 2008 along with a 32GB iPod Touch.

Leopard Stacks: Fixed

2008-02-20T17:33:00.003-05:00

Just noticed this from reading a PC Magazine post about Leopard 10.5.2 update, Stacks have been fixed in this update. You can now set Stacks to display the folder icon rather than the latest file in the stack. And as such, the previous hack to have a static icon for the stacks is not needed.

You can just right-click on the Stack and select "Display as Folder". You can also use Get Info on the folder and paste a new icon for it. Toggling Display as Folder / Stacks will update the icon displayed for the Stack.

However, if you like to see the stack of files behind your drawer icon you still need to use the Stack Hack.

PC Magazine: Mac OS 10.5.2 Write Up

2008-02-20T17:31:00.001-05:00

Nice little review of the latest Leopard update, from PC Magazine of all places...

iPhone's business play

2008-02-09T16:12:00.000-05:00

The biggest complaint about the iPhone since its sale has been that it is not business friendly compared to competing products such as the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phones. Mainly "business friendly" means "integration with Microsoft Exchange" as that it the predominant enterprise email server. These business power users often cite push email as the killer app on their smartphones.

My thinking is that Apple certainly realizes this and would be foolish not to go after the business users. That's why it has also allied itself with Yahoo, a notable Google competitor. There are a few iPhone widgets which use Yahoo's webservices instead of Google's, so there's no doubt there's a close relationship between Apple and Yahoo.

And iPhone does have push email. It's Yahoo Mail. But which company ever uses Yahoo Mail? That's true, but don't forget that Zimbra was recently purchased by Yahoo, and Zimbra's groupware suite offers a viable alternative to Exchange.

Could this help propel the iPhone into the enterprise space?

But as you know, last week Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo (just today Yahoo's board rejected the offer). Now that's a powerful play by the Redmond Giant, one that could transform the tech landscape. But that also threw a monkey wrench into relationship between Yahoo and its partners such as Apple. What will Apple do if Yahoo is gobbled up by its nemesis? The plan to bring the iPhone to business users may be stalled.

iChat AV tip

2008-01-30T11:23:00.000-05:00

iChat is one of Mac OS X's best features and with the Leopard upgrade it's even better. My family use it to videoconference with my parents living overseas. However, my parents often complained about the degrading audio and video quality during our iChat sessions. On my side everything would look crystal cleal.

Using the Connection Doctor, I noticed that the remote end would see degradation when my local bandwidth rises up to 500+ kbps and the remote bandwidth stays around 300+ kbps. When I set a bandwidth limit in iChat preferences to 500kbps then everything was fine. Now our iChat sessions are a much better experience.

Yahoo and OpenID

2008-01-18T17:03:00.001-05:00

Since the recent reshuffling of Yahoo's executive team, the company has started back on a road of innovation. Yahoo is releasing more and more of the technologies they use, opening up their API, and now they're embracing OpenID. It's a good sign for the company, and hopefully for their stock price.