Pete Ware

I’d been surprised about Apple emphasizing FaceTime in advertising. I don’t think it’s very compelling — I don’t know enough people with an iPhone4, I rarely have a Wi-Fi connection when I want to talk to them, and I don’t find video chats very compelling anyway. After all, how often do you video iChat or Skype?

Anyway, TechCrunch had an interesting perspective about it when they compared it to a scene from Mad Men (official site. They are getting people to make an emotional connection with the iPhone rather then the analytical one of feature X vs. feature Y.

I grabbed a simple, free pixel editor for Mac OS X called Paintbrush.  It seems adequate for my simple needs which are usually just adding  a note to a screen grab.

You can make it the default for opening an image by an existing image with Command-I and changing the “Open with” to the application and clicking the “Change All…” button:

A cool mockup/rumour guide about the alledged Apple Tablet:

I have some contacts I wanted to share with other people so I figured let’s put them into Address Book Server on my Snow Leopard Server. I moved the group on to the server and everything was great. Contacts show up in Address Book on my macbook.

I synch my iPhone as usual. Next day I get a call from a familiar number but no name (I can’t remember phone numbers if my life dependent on it)! I check the contacts on my iPhone and none of the ones I moved are there!

After much fiddling and googling it turns out it doesn’t work! That doesn’t make any sense. How could Apple fail at something so basic? I imagine they want the iPhone to sync remotely to Address Book Server much like iCal and mail. Reasonable philosophy but it doesn’t do that! In the interim, I’d expect iTunes to be able to sync — after all, it’s in your address book. Not only that, they already handle Google sync using CardDAV, right? So why isn’t it in iTunes until they get it working on the iPhone!

From ForkBombr:

> Sadly, this isn’t the case. Address Book Server works beautifully between Macs. It’s fast and reliable. However, the iPhone OS doesn’t support CardDAV, the technology behind Address Book Server, meaning these contacts cannot be synced over the air to an iPhone like iCal or Mail data.

And the relevant discussion:

> ABS does not sync OTA or have push changes. The iPhone supports LDAP access. This means you can lookup contct info stored in your WGM for users in your company. It does not support CardDAV.

ABS is Address Book Sync; OTA is over-the-air; WGM is Work Group Manager (aka Apple’s LDAP server); CardDAV is how to share contact information.

To reset Xcode to the default settings:

$ defaults delete com.apple.Xcode
$ rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Xcode

First, I dislike having a lot of popup windows so I set the layout to “All-In-One” to keep most things within a single window:

And my usual indentation style:

I like having the files autosaved on build:

=

From How to make /opt visible in Mac OS X Finder:

$ sudo SetFile -a v /opt

I’d looked into SproutCore and sort of liked the idea. I see Apple is doing more with it — the gallery of MobileMe looks pretty cool.

Here’s an interesting video (jump to the 20min point and listen for about 20min) that argues why we should move more business logic to the browser and use a higher level framework like SproutCore.

I’d noticed my Apple Mail wasn’t always getting new messages in a timely manner. My iPhone would frequently get it before Mail!

• Setup gmail, apple mail account as per google’s suggestions
• These imap settings from google combine how gmail works with Apple’s mail. Read the extra details and the settings make sense.
• It took 25 minutes to download all the email

While I was at it, I went ahead and setup syncing with google calendar. Recently, Google and Apple improved it so it could be two way:

• Enable Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal

Finally, it turns out that contact info between Apple’s Address book and gmail (and Yahoo!, for that matter) are doable: