Wednesday, May 5, 2010

TheAppleBlog (5 сообщений)

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News, reviews, walkthroughs, and real-life application of Apple products
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  • How-To: Sync AVI Files to Your iPhone

    Whether you've had them floating around on your hard drive for a while, or you've been meddling in the torrent side of life, you probably have a few AVI files somewhere on your Mac. The trouble with AVI is the iPhone and most native mac applications don't understand what to do with it.

    To get an AVI into iTunes and then onto your iPhone, there are two methods you can use, both of which work equally well. However, both require downloading additional software.

    Method One: Export from QuickTime

    This method is fairly easy as you don't have to learn to use a new program. On the other hand, I prefer to use method two below as it doesn't take quite so long to process each file, in my case anyway. To use this method, you will need either QuickTime 7 Pro, which costs $30, or QuickTime X (part of the Snow Leopard package). You will also need to download Perian, which is a free preference pane and enables QuickTime to play AVI files, among other file types.

    1. Once you've downloaded and installed Perian, open your AVI file using QuickTime.
    2. QuickTime 7: To convert the file to a format which your iPhone recognizes, choose File > Export… then select a format from the dropdown list; MPEG-4 or iPhone are the best options to choose for this purpose. Choose where to save the new file and hit OK. QuickTime X: QuickTime X can send the file directly into iTunes, which saves a bit of time in the long run. Choose Share > iTunes… and you'll be presented with three size options. Sometimes only iPhone will be available to select, but this is fine because that's where we want to watch the AVI. Click Share and QuickTime will export the file directly into iTunes.
    3. You only need to continue with this step if you used QuickTime 7 previously. Once your file has been exported to your hard drive, all that's left to do is drag it into iTunes, where it will be added to your library and can be synced to your iPhone.

    Method Two: Convert Using ffmpegx

    As I mentioned before, I prefer this method over the other because I find it faster. Also, using specialist conversion software can get you all the customisation features of QuickTime 7, without the price tag. The application I use is ffmpegx, which is shareware, but can be downloaded for free for our purpose with no limits or expiration dates. It also offers many options for conversion, including a whole host of preset options.

    1. Download and install ffmpegx and the additional files it needs to run.
    2. Drag and drop your AVI file into the From box in the left pane to have ffmpegx locate and open the file.
    3. Click Save As… and choose a file name and location for the converted file.
    4. In the To box in the right pane, click the downward arrow to access a dropdown list of preset file options. Alternatively, use the tabs at the top of the pane to access full customisation options.
    5. Click Encode and the program will do the rest. You can queue up additional files while that one is encoding if you wish.
    6. When the file has been converted, drop it into iTunes to add it to your library and put it onto your iPhone.

    So there you have it: two ways of adding AVI files to your iPhone. I encourage you to try out both methods to find the one which works best for your needs. Or, perhaps, if you know of a better way, post it in the comments below for everyone to try out.


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  • PC Games on Your iPad, Courtesy of HTML5

    The iPad is already a strong entry in the mobile games realm, with its large, high-resolution display, touchscreen interface and support for external devices like keyboards. Plus it has the iPhone/iPad development community cranking out innovative games all the time, too.

    In addition to all that existing gaming goodness, it looks like you might very soon be able to play a whole host of your favorite PC games on the platform, too. Not natively, of course (though ports of classics seems to be the thing to do these days), but via game streaming service Gaikai, which, much like OnLive before it, aims to remove the steep hardware barriers associated with many advanced video games.

    Gaikai was shown running on an iPad (on Touch Arcade), and playing World of Warcraft on the device. Whether it’s a good thing to put WoW in the hands of addicts wherever they happen to go is another question entirely, but the promise of PC games running untethered on a device in your lap is intriguing indeed. I’m not a WoW player myself, but Starcraft II is landing late this July, and I somehow doubt it’ll be accompanied by a native iPhone port at the same time.

    But will the gatekeepers at Apple allow Gaikai to invade its playground? The move could potentially have serious consequences on the App Store’s economics, since conceivably, Gaikai could stream any game to the iPad and other Apple devices, not just ones sanctioned by the Mac maker. Gaikai’s Dave Perry says Apple basically can’t block the service.

    The reason being, Gaikai is HTML5-based technology. That means that its browser-based player will work fine on mobile Safari out of the box, unless Apple goes out of its way to shut down access to Gaikai specifically, which would fly in the face of certain recent correspondence by Steve Jobs himself regarding the closed nature of Flash versus the open nature of HTML5.

    Gaikai shows the way to sidestepping iCensorship altogether, at least in terms of streamable web content. At this stage in the game, Apple has basically painted itself into a corner wherein it has to condone anything done using the HTML5 standard, versus rich media that uses browser-based plugins like Flash and Silverlight. It won’t work for all apps (like the one that allows you to sync wirelessly, for instance), but it should allow content providers to publish whatever kind of iPad and iPhone-targeted material they want without blocking fears.

    We’ll see the Gaikai North American beta launch in the comings weeks, and then we’ll find out just how much openness Apple can tolerate. Hopefully it’s just enough to see me playing Civilization 5 on my iPad this fall.


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  • Commentary: Things Just Got Ridiculous in the Apple/Adobe Conflict

    When The Steve talks, people listen. This includes the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. Both want to weigh in on section 3.3.1 of the iPhone OS developer agreement. Although the agreement has been out for weeks, the Adobe/Apple conflict has now found the eye of multiple agencies in Washington according to this NY Post rumor.

    Have they been under a rock the past three years? Didn’t the FCC inquiry regarding Google Voice get the iPhone on their radar? No. But apparently Steve’s letter got them all excited.

    Their “concern” (if the NY Post rumor is true) is that somehow Apple is “forcing” developers to use only Apple approved development environments and therefore are locking out companies like Adobe from the iPhone app development platform. Talk about missing the point! There’s a heck of a lot more important things concerning the iPhone for the government to inquire about.

    Of all the concerns to have…

    I don’t think it’s a major stretch to say most iPhone developers are much more concerned about Apple actually approving their apps rather than what development environment is used to write the apps. Apple wants stable and reliable iPhone apps and by restricting the development tools, it protects its market share by protecting the iPhone and insuring developers don’t use middleware like Adobe’s Flash cross-compiler. Apple’s terms are clearly stated in the developer agreement and developers don’t have to develop apps for the iPhone. There are plenty of other platforms out there. Developers, of course, can use “web apps” which were the only type of apps available the first year of the iPhone. The mystery and randomness behind which apps are approved and which are either not approved or put in purgatory (Google Voice) hasn’t become a concern of either the DOJ or FTC.

    If this, why not that?

    If these agencies want a piece of the iPhone pie, how about looking at other aspects of the iPhone ecosystem? Apple isn’t just locking out Adobe from iPhone development, it locks out other companies from various parts of the iPhone OS as well. The Fed got all in a huff back in the late 1990s about users being able to choose the default browser and search engine on the Windows platform, but iPhone users are stuck with only a limited choice between Google and Yahoo searches on their iPhone. Browser choice is limited as well. Sure, you can use an app like Opera, but if you want to make it your default app for web links you might as well go pound sand. Why is this limitation of choice OK on the iPhone but not in an OS like Windows?

    While the Feds are looking at the bundling issue, why not open an inquiry into the bundling of iLife with all new Macs? As a buyer, if I want to use, say Adobe Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements, I still have to have iLife installed. I can’t buy a Mac without it. Other products like Adobe Reader are completely unnecessary on the average consumer Mac. Same goes for Google’s products such as Picassa or Chrome. AOL will want their 2 cents when AOL Instant Messenger and Netscpe were supplanted by Safari and iChat. When Microsoft does these “forced defaults” on Windows machines, it’s been a subject of inquiry, but when Apple does this on the iPhone and the Mac platform, how is it not a concern? Mess with Flash though, and you have two federal departments jockeying for inquiry rights!

    To even consider going after Apple for any antitrust issues is outrageous when they have less than a majority of the market as Charles reported recently. How can any company be accused of anti-competitive behavior when they don’t even have a majority of said market?

    These agencies, of course, are also ignoring how Adobe Flash became the preeminent multimedia format on the Internet: through their purchase of Macromedia as well as other buyouts that killed all other competitors to Flash. Microsoft’s Silverlight pales in comparison to the ubiquity of Flash on the Internet. The DOJ had their chance to weigh in on this issue back in 2005 when they didn’t object to the Adobe purchase of Macromedia. The fact that the iPhone won’t ever run Flash apps is the DOJ’s and Adobe’s own fault. They had their chance to get involved. They made this problem and Apple’s fixing it.

    What is this really about? An argument about multiple federal bureaucracies trying to make a name for themselves by attacking a popular product. Apple has done nothing wrong here and section 3.3.1 is mild compared to other things Apple has done. Maybe some powerful federal bureaucrat’s kid is really upset at not being able to play Facebook games like Farmville on their iPhone, and thus, here we are.


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  • How-To: Use SSH to Investigate Folder Sizes

    Sometimes users can let their Home folder get out of hand and slowly kill any remaining hard drive space. I like to use Apple Remote Desktop if I need to find out who’s using up too much space with their Home folder. I don’t want to just remote in if someone’s working on the machine so SSH works perfectly for this.

    Enable SSH

    If SSH isn’t enabled on your target machine, send this command through Apple Remote Desktop as root.

    /sbin/service ssh start

    This will enable SSH until the machine is rebooted.

    Start an SSH session

    Open up Terminal and make a connection to the target machine using its IP address.

    ssh 10.0.0.1

    If you’re in an Active Directory environment like me, enter the password that matches your current username you’re logged in with. Otherwise your SSH command will need to pass along a username that exists on the target computer. Something similar to the following.

    ssh 10.0.0.1 -l admin

    Explore the hard drive

    Once you’ve successfully made your connection, check out the disk space with the following command.

    df

    For our situation, the disk0s2 is what we’re looking at. The HDD is getting pretty full.

    In my situation, I know that the most space is probably being wasted in the Users directories so lets head there and get an idea of what’s going on.

    cd /Users/

    Now let’s run the DU command and see what users have the biggest folder.

    sudo du -sh *

    You will be prompted for your password, and it may seem to go slowly, but you will get a nice list showing you the size of everyone’s Home folder.

    Looks like we’ve found some Home folders that need to be purged. This is also easy to do using Finder but sometimes you can’t disturb the machine and Terminal is perfect for that.


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  • TAB Welcomes: Andy Boothe

    I’m a programmer who decided somewhere along the way that he could write words as well as code. After much study, I’ve determined that English isn’t so different from C or Java. The punctuation’s a little different — code has more semicolons — but it’s all just storytelling. English uses words; code uses bits. There’s more of each in the other than you think.

    Well…that’s true of most writing. But the topic of my first article for TheAppleBlog is myself, which is unfortunate because myself is my least favorite topic. Seriously, what do you say when you have 500 words to impress the world? I’m tempted just to post my resume and have done with it, but I won’t. I’m not sure what I’d do with the other 493 words, anyway. (“I’m awesome and you should hire me.” has turned out to be a surprisingly effective Curriculum Vitae.)

    Instead, I’ll just let you know that I’m a software developer, with experience developing software for Fortune 10 companies, startups, nonprofits, and many things in between. At some point during all that software development, I also found time to go back to school for a graduate business degree from the University of Texas at Austin, which was an experience that I am still recovering from. I used that degree as an excuse to go on sabbatical from software to manage investments for a large seed-stage Venture Capital fund in Austin, Texas, where I live, and I very much enjoyed looking at startups from both sides of all kinds of tables while I was there. But now I’m back in software, so no, I can’t help your company get funding. Sorry. But I’m sure your company’s really cool, though.

    It’s also worth mentioning that I’m a big-time Apple nerd. I’m typing this on my 17″ MBP, which is currently backing up to my Time Capsule, which is in turn busy keeping its friend, my iMac, nice and warm. And without my precious iPhone, what would I compulsively check my pockets for every time I stand up? And that iPad-shaped hole on my bookshelf needs filling badly.

    Since I’m a developer, one of my favorite things to write about is software. (Yes, I’m incredibly fun at parties, thanks.) So, I’ll be writing a lot of how-tos about things like iPhone apps and how to make your iPhone do things it is and isn’t generally supposed to do. (As a rule, I’ll also post source code for my how-tos, which will hopefully be useful to TAB readers.) Since I’m a geek, I’ll also be writing about how to integrate the iPhone SDK with other things you use on a daily basis, like Twitter and Facebook. And since I’m an opinionated geek who likes to play businessman, I’ll also be speculating about what on earth Apple and friends are doing and why it’s smart or stupid.

    Anyway, I am thrilled to be joining the incredible TAB team and getting to meet and greet with other Apple fans. If you just can’t get enough of my writing (heh), then you can find more on my blog, or just follow my stream of consciousness. Please do say “hello” if you stop in!


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