Friday, July 20, 2007

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) (16 сообщений)

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  • Sync your iPhone with Microsoft Entourage

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    I must admit I'm a bit surprised that this slipped past me, so I hope I'm not the only one that didn't realize Entourage can sync with the iPhone via its oft-forgotten ability to play well with Mac OS X's Sync Services. According to this Apple support doc, switching on the preference you see above in Entourage 11.3.5 or later will break down the barriers between Entourage, Address Book and iCal, allowing iTunes to unite your iPhone and Entourage in beautiful synching harmony (however, as far as I can tell, iTunes won't be able to sync your actual email accounts from Entourage).

    How well this bridge will work in practice I can't tell you; I'm not an Entourage man myself. But this might be great news for those still on the fence between an iPhone and something like a BlackBerry for whom Entourage synching is a deal maker or breaker. If anyone has been using their iPhone with Entourage, please sound off on how this setup's been treatin' you.
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  • Widget Watch: Avalanche - A free Basecamp client for Yahoo! Widgets

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    Basecamp is a popular and powerful web-based project collaboration and management service from 37signals, makers of other TUAW favorites like Backpack and Highrise. Fortunately, even though Basecamp is web-based, 37signals provides a rich API with which 3rd party developers can make all sorts of neat apps and widgets that tie into the service. A group of students did just that for a class project, resulting in Avalanche, a free Basecamp widget for Yahoo! Widgets.

    While I don't use Basecamp to any serious degree, Avalanche seems to be pretty feature-filled, offering access to all your Basecamp messages, todos, time entries, contacts and milestones. Going above and beyond, however, the 37signals blog reports that Avalanche includes features not found in Basecamp, such as auto time entry, spreadsheet generation of time reports, time estimate tracking and contact exporting (which I thought Basecamp already did).

    Ultimately, Avalanche looks like an impressive widget for a service loved by its vast and growing base of users. Of course, as with many other widgets, Avalanche is offered free from Avalanche-widget.org.
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  • TUAW poll: How much iPhone data have you used?

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    Yesterday, I wrote about setting up the iPhone with pay-as-you-go service. Without purchasing feature packs, the data plan goes for an exorbitant $0.01/KB. (With a feature pack, the data goes down to $2/MB, or $0.002/KB.) This got me wondering. It's been almost a month since the iPhone debuted. How much data have you used? My iPhone tells me that I've sent 608 KB and received 2.9 MB--although with all my resets and restores, that number is probably much lower than my actual usage. Still, that's nothing compared to our own David Chartier. He's at 12.2 MB sent and 59.8 MB received. (Data junkie!) So I'm curious. How much EDGE data have you sent and received? You can find out by selecting Settings -> Usage. Let us know in the comments how big a data user you are. Bragging rights to everyone who beats out David.

    Update: It looks like the average is currently around 150-200 MB for readers who aren't hovering around WiFi hotspots. The current high is near 2.7 GB. The few of us who have ready WiFi access are way, way down in comparison.

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  • Mac 101: Shift + F5 Autocomplete

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    Reader Goobi wrote in reminding us of this neat little trick which I thought would make a great Mac 101. As you know OS X has a system-wide spell checker. What Goobi reminded us about is that you can access that spell checker to autocomplete words in any Cocoa text field (this only work in Cocoa applications). All you have to do is type a few letters and then hit Shift + F5. This will generate a drop-down list with all the words in the spell check dictionary that start with those letters.

    A great way to use this is for words that you have a hard time remembering how to spell. For example, I can never remember how to render 'bourgeois' correctly. So here I just type in the first four letters, hit Shift + F5, then scroll down.
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  • Saving iPhone applications inside data URLs

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    This is really basically the same theory as the iPhone bookmarklets Mat posted earlier (squeezing content into a URL), but it's a little less about function and a little more about storage. Currently, the iPhone doesn't allow you to save actual files locally, but it does allow you save URLs, so the idea here is to save entire applications (or other HTML content) in the form of a data URL.

    It's a pretty wonky hack, but it works-- you can convert whole HTML pages, or even applications, depending on the URL length the iPhone's bookmarks allow, into data URLs (with the Perl script on that page if you don't want to do it manually), and then those data URLs can be loaded into MobileSafari on the iPhone, even in Airplane mode. The suggestion is made that this could allow persistent storage for web applications on the iPhone, but wouldn't that require allowing the HTML page to write to and read from the iPhone's bookmarks? Is that possible?

    At any rate, maybe it's a good thing, for a little while at least, that Apple didn't release a "real" SDK for the iPhone. Web programmers are making their code do all kinds of flips and tricks to get every bit of access they can on the iPhone. People have been talking about browser-based, OS independent applications for years-- maybe Apple's insistence that iPhone developers go through the browser will bring about that world sooner than we thought.

    [via DF]
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  • iPhone bookmarklets

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    Over at LifeClever they had the in retrospect obvious, but nonetheless brilliant idea that you can use javascript bookmarkets with your iPhone. Bookmarklets are basically little bits of JavaScript that can perform various functions in your web browser. So, for instance, del.icio.us offers bookmarklets for posting links to their site. Anyway, LifeClever has put together a list of their 17 favorite bookmarklets for the iPhone.

    These include a nice find text on this page bookmarklet, as well as others for searching on various sites, translating, YubNub, etc. These look pretty cool, and really do add some missing functionality to your iPhone.
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  • Rumor: New iMac on August 7

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    It's no real secret that an iMac update is most likely in the works, but ThinkSecret says they've narrowed down an actual date for the announcement: August 7th. As soon as two and a half weeks from now, we could be seeing a brand new iMac on the Apple Store.

    The rumors, as you may have heard, say the new iMac will sport a brushed metal enclosure, to match up to the MacBook Pros and Mac Pros out there, and other sources say the new iMac will include a matching keyboard. ThinkSecret also speculates that iLife may be released earlier than its expected October date (originally, the suite was tracking a release right alongside Leopard). But apparently those rumors are less solid than the iMac release-- iLife and iWork are both supposed to take advantage of new techs in Leopard, so it would be a bad idea to release them early just for the sake of releasing.

    As always, don't forget to take that standard grain of salt with all of these rumors. But if you are thinking about picking up an iMac, looks like it might behoove you to wait a week or two just in case.

    Thanks, Corinne!
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    http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/19/rumor-new-imac-on-august-7/#comments



  • Blast from the Past: the iPhone's ancestor

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    Apparently Apple's been thinking about this whole phone thing for a long time. Here, courtesy of Fudder, you can see an Apple smartphone design concept from the middle ages (wait, I mean 1983). For you youngsters in the audience that strange thing on the screen is called a "check" and used to be a way for people to exchange money. Seriously, for 1983 that thing looks pretty cool.

    [via Digg]
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  • Laser etching the iPhone

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    It takes a braver man than I to put a brand new iPhone directly in the beam of a powerful laser (Do you expect me to talk? No, Mr. iPhone, I expect you to die-cut), but that's exactly what the Make blog did. They etched some old school flying toasters right there on the back, and they ended up coming out pretty well.

    There are apparently a couple different engraving houses that can get this done, but according to Engadget, their buddy Phil Torrone (who did this cut) is more than happy to do it for you. So if you're in New York and want to put your iPhone under the lasery knife, give him a call.
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  • Apple rockin' up the US marketshare charts

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    Lest we forget in all the iPhone hoopla, Apple does still make computers, and they've been moving them too. According to IDC, In the second quarter Apple moved into a virtual third place tie with Gateway at 5.6% of the US market (though Gateway did ship about 5000 more units). The particularly good news is that Apple's shipments grew 26% year over year versus 7.2% growth for the industry as a whole. Other "small" vendors did well also, however, with Toshiba and Acer posting even more impressive growth numbers than Apple. Nonetheless, considering the relative lack of hardware bumps on the Mac line this year, these kind of numbers must warm hearts in Cupertino.

    [via Engadget]
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  • Apple patent: Stream iTunes to your iPod?

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    Ryan from Cybernet (thanks!) dropped a note about his find of a new Apple patent. These things spring up faster than mushrooms (or rabbits, depending on your preference for down home expressions), but sometimes they are a good indication of what Apple is at least considering producing in the future.

    This one's all about the iPod, by the looks of it, and giving it the ability to "wirelessly control and access a media server." Ryan speculates that means iTunes, which would mean that you could listen to streaming music from your iTunes install, through your iPod. But I think he's thinking small on this one-- what if Apple wanted to create an iPod that actually hooked up to AppleTV. You could sit in your bedroom watching the latest Daily Show, streaming from the AppleTV in the other room, while someone else watched the latest episode of Lost on the television. The possibilities there are very interesting-- combine a widescreen iPod with a wireless function like this (and we might as well throw in MobileSafari, right?), and you're looking at a very droolworthy multimedia gadget.

    Of course, as with all Apple patents, this is total and complete speculation-- this patent may never actually be built, and even if it is, we might be looking at something planned years from now. But it's always fun to guess at what Apple's doing next.
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  • UK iPhone reportedly functioning with Vodafone

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    Yesterday, TUAW posted about using iASign to activate iPhones on non-iPhone AT&T plans. Today, TUAW reader AJ reports that he's used iASign to activate his iPhone with Vodafone.

    He writes that at first he bought an AT&T prepaid card on ebay and used iASign to get it working. After doing a little thinking (how would he top off the card, and wasn't a US phone number going to be pretty useless in the UK?), he popped the AT&T-branded US SIM out of his iPhone and put it into an old O2 XDA handset, which he brought to the Vodafone store.

    At the store, he had them add the phone to his current Vodafone contract. When he returned home, he put the Vodafone-compliant AT&T SIM back into the iPhone, and used iASign to activate it. He reports that he's made a call using the Vodafone network although the iPhone itself still says AT&T in the corner. He's also confirmed that his Vodafone number is assigned to the phone. Visual voicemail is, sadly, a no go but SMS text messaging works fine.

    Update: This post is causing quite an uproar over at the #iphone IRC channel. Participants there suggest this method should not have worked. SIM numbers are network specific and Vodafone should not have been able to use an AT&T SIM. Specific questions that remain are: How and why vodaphone accepted the AT&T SIM and "reprogrammed" it and how the network accepted a different CCID (thanks Spoonet). More as this develops.

    Update 2: I asked another TUAW reader to try this in Canada. He writes: "Rogers wouldn't take the SIM card number since the network prefix wasn't for Rogers, i.e. 8930. Back to square one." One user, puescho, tried calling T-Mobile in Germany and was told that a technician said this was not possible.

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  • Democracy Player now Miro

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    Back in March, the Participatory Culture Foundation announced that Democracy Player would be renamed as Miro, and the change is now official with a new release of the internet video player software, version 0.9.8 . The application's image has been totally revamped, including an overhaul of the official website and logo (of course), but the new technical preview version of Miro includes a dose of new additions and fixes, too:
    • Keyboard shortcuts available on all platforms
    • New 'report a bug' menu item added
    • Veoh.com as a search engine added
    • Additonal bug fixes and UI improvements
    Miro 0.9.8 requires Mac OS X 10.3+ and QuickTime 7. Check out a demo of the software in action here.
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  • Alleged OS X worm creator disappears

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    I'm not sure if you've been following the story of "Infosec Sellout" (it's a tough one to follow), but apparently the anonymous Mac hacker has given up blogging about OS X security-- his blog has been deleted and renamed on Blogspot. Just recently, he made headlines by claiming that he'd developed a worm for OS X called "Rape.osx," that hit a known vulnerability in the OS X mDNSResponder, an open source Internet protocol used by Apple. But apparently Infosec Sellout didn't think Apple responded appropriately to his warning (and/or his site was hacked itself), and he's gone quiet.

    Robert McMillian of the IDG news service has has contact with Infosec Sellout in the past, and heard from the hacker in an email that "it was a great experiment to see how the industry could handle some honesty, which they can't. They are quick to attack the credibility of others in order to hide their own flaws." From that comment, it sounds like Infosec thinks Apple is somehow claiming to be impenetrable, but as other security analysts say, that's far from true. Still another story is that Infosec's identity was close to being found out, and he quit because of that. Apparently Infosec says that the identity discovery was a factor, but not because he didn't want to be found out, just because he didn't want his employer to be approached by "crybabies."

    Strange story indeed. Unfortunately Infosec still hasn't revealed the hack, and says he won't reveal it to Apple until testing is completed.
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  • iTunes: Free Thursday

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    Another week, another free collection of free iTunes selections. Each weeks brings a new collection of free singles and videos from around the world, from Australia to Canada, New Zealand to France. Here's what's new today.

    US Music

    US: Bubbly by Colbie Caillat
    Each week, we find a track from an artist or a band who's on the cusp of success and bring it to you, for free, as our Single of the Week. Colbie Caillat has the sound of breezy California down pat. She grew up in Southern California close to the beach and the catchy sweetness of "Bubbly" practically smells of salt water. A little bit of folk guitar, a lilting rhythm, and lyrics that tread on the border of cute make this track a mandatory anthem for summer.

    US: A Marte by Pastilla
    Each week, we find a track from an artist or a band who's on the cusp of success and bring it to you, for free, as our Canción de la Semana. Pastilla are a guitar-and hook-driven punk-pop group whose mixture of melody and ragged guitars makes them sound like the offspring of Green Day, the Cars, and the Killers. "A Marte" has touches of new wave angularity, but Pastilla are not ones to forsake a good song in lieu of style. It's a classic bit of verse/chorus/verse that reminds you why this formula is likely to never go out of style.

    US: Tenebrae: Second Movement by Kronos Quartet
    Last month, we put together a playlist called If you like Barber's Adagio. If Osvaldo Golijov's Tenebrae had been available back then, it would have been the first track. This two-movement work for strings (performed here by the Kronos Quartet) displays the neo-baroque side of the Argentinian composer's eclectic musical range. If you enjoy it, check out the rest of his new album, Oceana.

    Continue reading iTunes: Free Thursday

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  • Leave Fake Steve Jobs fake

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    The other day, I posted a little summary of the latest attempts to discover the identity of anonyblogger Fake Steve Jobs. At the time, I thought finding FSJ's identity out would be a good time, a fun mystery to solve. Many of you (most of you, I'd say) disagreed, saying that it didn't matter who FSJ was-- as long as he wrote strong, insightful (and often hilarious) pieces about what Apple was up to, you were willing to let him have his anonymity. And after hearing your good points, I have to tell you (because this doesn't happen very often): I changed my mind, and decided to agree with those who wanted FSJ to stay FSJ.

    Then, today, FSJ decided to post this, his first thoughts on people trying to discover his identity. With FSJ, you can never tell when he's joking, but he makes it pretty clear that he's had an experience he doesn't want to have. And the finger is pointed directly at Valleywag, who respond as you'd expect them to, calling the post a set of "rambling accusations."

    So here's what we're going to do at TUAW. We've heard your opinions. We've talked it over as a staff, and we've agreed: FSJ is much more fun as FSJ himself, not some writer pretending to be him. And so we're pledging, to you, not to write any more speculation, ever, about FSJ's identity. You're exactly right-- it's much more fun having him anonymous, for both him and us. He's a great insight on Apple's comings and goings, and if he doesn't want us to know who he is, we don't want to either. Here at TUAW, we're going to leave Fake Steve Jobs fake.
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    http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/18/leave-fake-steve-jobs-fake/#comments





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