Friday, July 27, 2007

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) (11 сообщений)

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  • The curious case of how bad AT&T sucks Episode 2: Just the Internet - every last bit of it

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    First AT&T botches what is probably the most significant activation event in mobile phone history, and now they're including the complete data records - and I mean complete - in the first iPhone-related bills they're sending out to customers. Both David Pogue and John Gruber are reporting that their first post-iPhone bill from AT&T includes multiple pages (6 for Pogue, a whopping 45 for Gruber) of every chunk of data they downloaded for the account period. Now this isn't a rational listing like "nytimes.com, tuaw.com, goapeshirts.com," no no - every graphic downloaded from every page and the time and data of every message sent and received laid out in tree-obliterating detail that could only appeal to a rabid accountant.

    Considering that every iPhone data plan includes the term "unlimited," no one can really figure out why AT&T went to all the bizarre trouble of listing all this information out. Is it some sort of vague warning for how much we might have to pay should they decide to threaten us with billing by kilobyte or megabyte? Did some AT&T billing engineer think that, since we're downloading 'just the internet,' we'd like to see detailed records of every bit and piece of what we're downloading? Or does some accounting intern simply have a grudge against a tree farm somewhere?

    Whatever the case, this latest AT&T blunder reminds me why Apple likes to keep things locked down and under control. No one's going to want to read this stuff, but at the very least: if they just had to make it available, they should have included an announcement with paper bills that this detailed data usage could be accessed online. After all, the vast majority of iPhone customers probably have at least heard of the internets, so they would arguably have little to no problem accessing this useless bundle of info via AT&T's online account access.

    Ugh - you just can't find good help these days.
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  • iPhone Tales of Woe: Booting to Single User

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    A short while back, Digg hosted a link to this crashed iPhone showing single user mode. In that case, the error message stated that the iPhone couldn't "exec /bin/sh for single user: No such file or directory." Now that the iPhone has been thoroughly hacked, this error has evolved somewhat.

    Last night, TUAW friend DrunkDwarf crashed his iPhone but since he'd actually installed a copy of /bin/sh his error was somewhat different. Instead of complaining that it couldn't find /bin/sh, his iPhone simply... ran it. Not that this was much better news. Without a keyboard and no way to attach one, DrunkDwarf was a bit out of luck. He ended up having to do a restore.

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  • TUAW Tip: Put iPhone's File System onto your Desktop with sshfs

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    TUAW has talked before about sshfs, the secure shell file system, and MacFUSE, the OS X implementation of FUSE (File-system in USErspace). So it's not huge news that you can use MacFUSE/sshfs to access the files on your iPhone but it might be an option that you've overlooked. It's certainly convenient. You can open a Finder window and treat your iPhone as another disk drive.

    To make this happen, you must first enable ssh on your iPhone. Then, install MacFUSE and run sshfs, which will prompt you for the Server name (enter the iPhone's IP address) and Username (use "root"). Authenticate and, boom, you're good to go. The iPhone appears in your Finder source list as a new connected device.

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  • iPhones now in all Apple Stores (US)

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    After opening weekend's sale of 700,000 270,000 iPhones, most of the US Apple Stores were sold out. In fact, by July 5th, all but two US Apple Stores had been depleted of iPhones. Today, ifoAppleStore is reporting that all US locations are stocked with phones.

    If you've been waiting for your local store's supply to be replenished, it looks like your wait is over.
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  • iTunes Japan: Free Friday Update

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    Every week, the Japanese iTunes store updates later than the stores for the rest of the world. Because of this, the iTunes Single of the Week for Japan lags behind other countries. Here is this week's offering for you to download and enjoy.

    Japan 今週のシングル: Wireless Code by Astro
    Astroは、東京都を中心にアンダーグラウンドシーンで異彩を放つ7人のラップ集団。耳ざわりはあくまでポップでありながら、ジャズ、エレクトロニカ、ロックなど他ジャンルの要素をふんだんに散りばめたハイブリッド•サウンドが斬新だ。またshing02、降神らとの共演で知られるMC達による圧倒的なライムとスクラッチの絡みにも注目。"Wireless Code"をフリーダウンロードで。

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  • MailSteward archiving app for just $34.95 at MacZOT today only

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    After I realized that I needed to find a way to archive and search the healthy amount of email I deal with in Apple Mail these days, I finally decided on MailSteward. There are indeed a number of email archiving options available (and Hawk Wing's list is probably still as good as any), but MailSteward's powerful array of features and ability to search the archives it creates won me over.

    If you're looking for a similar solution and MailSteward just might be it, today is a great day to make the jump: software discount site MacZOT is offering the MailSteward for just $34.95. That's a savings of 30% off its normal price of $50, so it's a good opportunity to finally get into the habit of archiving all that mail that you can't entirely delete just yet.
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  • iPhoneiGTD: View your iGTD tasks and projects on your iPhone

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    I first discovered iPhoneiGTD through Leaflets, another iPhone web app launcher we found, but I didn't dig into it until now. After tinkering around, I can say that I totally love this web portal for viewing the tasks and projects I'm tracking with iGTD, in my opinion the best GTD (Getting Things Done) app available for Mac OS X.

    The catch with iPhoneiGTD is that you need to be synching your iGTD data via .Mac. Like the impressive Webjimbo, which allows you to view, edit and create Yojimbo items over the web via a browser (with an iPhone-optimized option coming soon), iPhoneiGTD accesses your iGTD data by tapping into your .Mac account, though users are assured that neither your .Mac login nor personal info are recorded or stored.

    As you can see, access is mostly limited to viewing your tasks via contexts and projects, though the plus button acts as a clever workaround for creating new tasks by allowing you to email yourself a task in the form of a subject + any notes you'd like to include. By setting up some kind of an automatic Apple Mail-to-iGTD trick like Brett Terpstra's Jott2iGTD, you could possibly turn this email function into a real automated solution if you leave Mail and iGTD running on a Mac somewhere. Otherwise, using iGTD's rich importing and keyboard shortcut abilities, you could easily process your tasks out of Mail manually once you're back on a Mac.

    No matter how you slice it, iPhoneiGTD is a great solution both for GTD enthusiasts and those simply wishing the iPhone had some kind of a tasks app (assuming, again, that you have a .Mac account). Like iGTD, iPhoneiGTD is provided as donationware.
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  • Why the iPhone should tank

    Filed under: , , ,

    Doctor Macenstein has a very good commentary up: even though he's a happy iPhone owner, he wants the iPhone to fail. Fail miserably. In fact, he was cheering on the news during the earnings announcement yesterday that Apple completely missed their analysts' fever dream-induced goal for iPhone sales. Why would a man (woman? Did we ever find out what the Doc's gender was?) who's invested $600+ in a phone want it to not sell well? If you're like me, you might answer that, "because he's crazy." Everyone knows success is always good for a product-- if the iPod had failed, we'd never have had the Nano, the Shuffle, or, for that matter, the iPhone. So if Doc Mac wants to wish the iPhone wrong, he's a loony.

    Or is he? He makes good points-- lower-than-expected iPhone sales might make Apple nervous enough to get in gear on pushing new software features and updates out, and get that price point dropping for the rest of us. And on the price point Doc's especially got a point-- when Apple was asked if there was going to be a lowered price point, they actually cited customer satisfaction as the reason not to drop it. In other words, if people are happy with the iPhone (and Apple is convinced that they are), there's no reason to change it.

    With AAPL doing so well, Apple has a chance to sit back on their laurels and let the AT&T payments roll in. But any self-respecting iPhone user shouldn't let them take it. With a happy customer base, Apple has less incentive to fix those "little" problems like copy and paste and a missing iChat Mobile.

    Update: My good colleagues point out that the iPhone missed analysts' goals, not Apple's.
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  • Create iPhone ringtones from iTunes previews

    Filed under: ,

    Today's iPhone hack-du-jour uses iTunes preview files for ringtones. As you probably know, iTunes freely offers short audio samples of its entire library. You can easily download these samples from iTunes and install them onto your iPhone as custom ringtones. Since your iPhone is authorized to your account, you'll be able to play back these otherwise protected audio snippets as ringtones. Here are the steps to take to make this work for you:

    1. Create a new playlist. Drag unpurchased songs from the iTunes store into your playlist. The songs will retain their "Add Song" buttons and their price within the playlist.

    2. Export your playlist. Select the playlist in the sources column. Control-click/Right-click the playlist name and choose Export Song List from the pop-up menu.

    3. Save the playlist as plain text. Select Plain Text from the Format pop-up and save the playlist file to your desktop.

    4. Open the playlist file. It is a tab-delimited file of columns, so you can open it up in Excel (my preference, make sure to option-drag the text file onto the Excel icon) or a text editor like TextEdit.

    5. Locate the file URLs. Each file URL appears in the final Location column for each line. Copy the URL.

    6. Download the files. In Safari 3.0, open the Downloads window (Windows->Downloads). Paste the URL into the Download window and allow the file to transfer. Your computer must be authorized to your iTunes account. You may want to try playing back the file in QuickTime Player just to be sure it downloaded correctly. If you're not a Safari 3.0 user, use your favorite alternate such as curl, wget, or so forth.

    7. Rename. Give the file a more meaningful name than, for example, "mzi.rwgtaash.aac.p.m4p". Retain the .m4p extension.

    8. Upload to the iPhone. Use your favorite method (iphoneinterface, sshfs, sftp, whatever) to copy the file to /Library/Ringtones on your iPhone.

    9. Select the ringtone. On the iPhone, navigate to Settings -> Sound > Ringtone and select the new file. The ringtone will play back as you select it. Please note that some newer releases (including Nicole Scherzinger's Whatever U Like--thanks Drunk Dwarf) do not work as ringtones. I'm not sure why.

    Congratulations, not only have you added a new 30-second custom ringtone to your iPhone, but iTunes usually picks the best 30 seconds of any song for its preview. Enjoy.

    GeekNote: If you've got curl installed on your iPhone, you can curl the URLs directly to /Library/Ringtones.

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  • Rumor: The new iMac keyboard

    Filed under: ,

    Our friends at Engadget have posted several photos of what may be the rumored super-slim, aluminum keyboard that will accompany the new iMac. It's very thin indeed, and the keys look like those of a MacBook. I imagine typing on such a thin keyboard would be annoying, but I've never tried it, of course, so who knows.

    The strangest feature is the Command key with no Apple logo! What's going on here?

    We can't confirm that this is the real deal, so viewer beware.
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  • The iPod and the "product transition"

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    Perhaps the most interesting and mysterious two words heard yesterday during Apple's big conference call were "product transition." The biggest surprise of the call was that Apple was setting its profit guidance much lower than expected, and the two big causes they gave for doing that were "higher commodity costs" (because they believe they got a good deal on iPhone components this quarter) and these mysterious "product transitions." So what's the deal there?

    Almost unanimously, the analysts are predicting a product shakeup, specifically in the iPod family. Ars says multitouch is coming, Forbes suggests that Apple tipped its hand to upcoming product changes, and Apple Insider has Ben Reitzes, who was the first analyst to question the low guidance, suggesting that an iMac redesign or "ultra-portable" may be in the works.

    But the majority of analysts say it's the iPod that Apple will focus on. The iPod has been waiting in the wings, watching the iPhone and OS X get all kinds of pretty updates, and call it what you want-- the halo effect or trickle down-- the iPod is ready for a refresh. ThinkSecret comes right out and says it: we'll see a 6G iPod as early as the first half of August.

    Whatever this "product transition" might be, odds are we'll hear about it sooner than later. Apple's execs made it clear that by the time they did another call in October, everything would be made much clearer.
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