Tag: iphone

Technology

iPhone4 and FaceTime

petewareLeave a comment

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.

Technology

iPhone and Snow Leopard Server’s failure to communicate

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A few months ago I was complaining about not being able to synch my iPhone with Snow Leopard Server. Today, I realized that email push wasn’t working either!
This ARS Technica article iPhone and Snow Leopard Server’s failure to communicate provides more detail.

Imagine if the iPod worked with a Windows machine but not on a Mac. Would make zero sense, right? Amazingly, this scenario describes the current reality with the iPhone and Apple’s server edition of its Mac OS X operating system. Mac OS X Server has some great features, such as podcast production and collaborative wikis. But from the perspective of iPhone compatibility, it’s one of the worst server OSes available.

This ZDNet Snow Leopard Server review mentions the same problem:

For example, Apple told us that the new Mail 2 server software supports push notification to iPhones. But we couldn’t get this working in our lab tests. This Apple document describes push email support on the iPhone but does not include Mail 2 push configuration.

Technology

Syncing my iPhone with Snow Leopard Server with Address Book — Not!

petewareLeave a comment

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.