Macgasm

People are excited about the iPad. There is no question about that, but are we going to see more app rejections because of this? Apple has policies that don’t quite make sense to the outside world. We can’t get replacement mail apps or replacement SMS apps for the iPhone. We don’t get the Google Voice app because it duplicates iPhone functionality. So, what will the new trend be for the iPad?

The iPad is being promoted as the ultimate eBook reader. Apple is launching their own iBook Store, so does that mean that all of the books that are currently in the app store will be removed? What about Readers like Stanza or, more importantly, Amazon’s own Kindle app? Apple is going after the eBook market aggressively, so it seems like a logical extension that Apple would want to eliminate their competition.

Sadly, if Apple were to reject apps like Kindle, Stanza, and Classics, this would ruin the iPad for a portion of the potential user base — even myself. I am currently planning on purchasing an iPad. As a Kindle user, all of my books are in the Kindle format. If I lost access to my library of eBooks, I would be less than pleased. We are still a few weeks away from the launch of the iPad, so let’s hope that Apple doesn’t try to assassinate the competition.

Article By: Cesar Garcia

As any other iPhone user, I need some apps. At first, I tried out a bunch of free apps, but after some time I gave in. I journeyed over to the for-pay side of the App Store. All that polish, all those big titles, all those non-fart apps. I have grown as an iPhone user, and I need more. Then, I think “Ok, it’s just this time,” and “It’s just $0.99. There’s a whole bunch of free apps that will continue making me happy,” and I get passed that one, but then I come back. “It’s just another one.” Another $0.99… $500.00 later, you realize that it wasn’t just one.

This is the case for a lot of people. Well, not all these people live in the US, so some are probably getting hit with “International fees” in their credit card. In Portugal, and even though we do have a PT iTunes Store, the money goes directly overseas. My bank keeps cashing in on those fees for every app I get. 500+ apps later, at a mere 0,42€ every time (that’s what banks “usually” charge here), it already adds up to +200€!!! Just in fees! Hopefully I’ve been wise enough to have (at least) 70% free app buy rate, so those 200€ decrease drastically. Still, I had to find a better (cheaper) way. Insert iTunes gift cards.

As most know, you can gift iTunes money to people. Buy an iTunes gift card, e-mail it to someone and they can redeem that money into their iTunes account. Every purchase from then on bills their iTunes balance — not the credit card. These gift cards extend to apps as one would expect, so you just have to offer yourself the gift card. Boom! International fees from app purchases avoided completely. You’re still charged the fee for buying the card, but if you buy a “big” card (iTunes tops at 50€ per card) you can buy a whole bunch of apps, fees free, before you need to reload your account with another gift card.

I asked around, and most my friends either didn’t know about the fee at all (They’re kinda pissed now) or they had never thought of this. So, as obvious as it may seem, I still hope it helps some of you “International people”, save a couple of coins!

Photo Credit: penguincakes

I use MobileMe to keep my data synced on all my Macs that I use.  I like the fact that I can go from Mac to Mac and have my Address Book, Calendar, and many other native application’s data all synced.  This is good and bad at the same time.  In the past five years it has been good in keeping all my data synced.  However, that all changed last week.

When I went to look up a phone number in my iPhone I noticed that my Address Book Groups were all gone.  The addresses where still there, but the groups were gone.  So, I said to myself, “There’s nothing to worry about I have it synced with MobileMe.”  I’ll just stop the Address Book sync on my iPhone, and then I’ll re-sync and everything will be back to normal.  Well I did this, and my addresses came back, but the groups were still missing.  I still didn’t panic.  I thought to myself, “When I get home I’ll stop MobileMe from automatically synchronizing with my iMac.”

I got home and turned on my iMac, and I stepped away for a moment.  When I returned MobileMe had already ran.  So, I opened my Address Book, and my groups were gone.  At this point I started to panic a bit.  Now you might be saying to yourself, “Why’s he panicking?  He must have a local backup.”  That’s where you’d be wrong.  Because everything synchronized with one another I figured I didn’t need to make a backup.  My only guess is that the Address Book Groups were deleted from my iMac, and then synced with MobileMe.  Which in turn pushed it down to my iPhone.

I had one last chance to recover my Address Book Groups.  I turned on my MacBook, and before MobileMe could run I stopped it.  I opened Address Book, and all of my groups were still there.  I then exported my entire Address Book to my desktop.  Next I ran MobileMe.  When it was done I opened Address Book, and low an behold my groups were gone.  So, I reimported my entire Address Book, and now my groups were back.  I ran MobileMe again, and when it was done my groups were still in Address Book.  I then checked my iPhone, and all of my groups were there as well.  Lastly, I ran MobileMe on my iMac, and the Address Book Groups were put back.  All is well in the MobileMe Kingdom once again.

As I’m writing this I realized that if MobileMe had removed the groups, I could have turned to my Time Machine backup of my iMac.  From here I could have also restored my Address Book Groups.

The moral of this story is, always backup.  My over confidence in MobileMe’s ability to keep everything synchronized blinded me to the fact that I still should backup my data.  Has this happened to you?  Do you use MobileMe to sync your Address Book, Calendar, etc., or do you use Google for this?  I’d like to hear your experience with a synchronization gone awry.  Tell your story in the comments section below, or how you use Google or another service for synchronization.

Photo Credit: File:Address Book Icon.png

Creative’s get the thought process that goes into creating something that’s great. Non-creative’s see or hear something and think, I could do that for half the price. Well I’ve got news, you probably can’t, and if you don’t believe me you should probably watch this video.  Jim Reeks fills us in on the process of creating the sound effects that are still present around the OS.   Reeks was responsible for coming up with some of the sounds we hear today on our Macs. It’s a pretty interesting video and I recommend giving it a watch. The intro isn’t in English, but the interview is English, so don’t give up during the intro.

There’s a bunch of interesting insights in the video, including what it was like to be working on audio at Apple while they were being sued by the Beatles.

OMT in San Francisco #3: ‘Let it beep’ from One More Thing on Vimeo.

Giving disadvantaged kids technology and teaching them how to use it in the classroom is a great way to increase a students academic ability. A documentary released by PBS shows a group of Bronx kids who were failing to meet grade requirements. Through the use of laptops in the class room, they were able to turn around their academic careers. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Instead of focusing on the positives, a bunch of people are pointing fingers and the administration’s use of Remote Desktop to monitor a child’s use of the computers.

I can see why there’s concern, but most of the negativity around the article is misguided.

I was once told that the majority of discontent people feel personally or vocalize to others is often based on misunderstandings and confusion. Surely, it’s not always the case, but the idiom has proved valuable to me in the past. If someone’s confused about something, or they’re making assumptions about something, there’s a good choice their will be a disconnect between the people giving the message, and those who are receiving the message. So lets clarify some stuff about the hoopla over a Bronx school spying on it’s students with Remote Desktop.

In the video below, there is no evidence that the administration is monitoring the children through their iSight camera. Instead, they show students using Photobooth as a mirror. The student opened Photobooth. Remote Desktop shows the monitor exactly how the user is viewing the monitor. Anything opened or running is revealed to the user on the other end. Secondly, a green light turns on when the computer’s iSight is active. Students would be aware of the camera turning on and off. There’s no video monitoring going on here. Move along!

It appears in the video that laptops are used within the school, and students have the option to sign them out to complete homework. They aren’t given to the students, nor do the computers belong to the students. This situation parallels corporate practices. Employee’s don’t own their computers, and they’re fully aware that there is monitoring software on their computers. This is nothing new, and it’s certainly not going to be changing any time soon.

There are only two gray areas that I see in this whole video. First, were the students and parents made aware that there’s monitoring software on the computers? If they weren’t then there’s a problem. Second, having male administrators monitoring female students is a little bit iffy if you ask me. I’m not saying that the people portrayed in this video are using it nefariously in anyway, but it’s pretty certain that there’s potential for problems as students start moving to senior class levels. I’d love to see female administrators monitoring female students, and male administrators monitoring male students, because you just don’t know. With all the “Sexting” going on these days, an administrator might stumble on something by accident, and if that happens, you can be sure lawsuits might be filed by a student’s parent.

Watch the Video Below

Via 9 to 5 Mac

Parallels, the makers of the popular desktop virtualization software, has introduced a new server product; Parallels Server 4.0 Bare Metal Edition.

In case you’re not aware, most virtualization solutions require an operating system to already be in place before you can actually virtualize another guest operating system. The Mac’s virtualization options include Parallels Desktop 5, VMware Fusion 3, and Sun’s Virtualbox. Each of these requires you to have a copy of Mac OS X already running and installed.

This setup means that your base operating system will require at least a gigabyte of RAM just for it to run. This does not include the additional memory needed for the guest operating systems. On a Mac, you can only virtualize Windows or Linux operating systems. If you want to virtualize OS X, it must be Mac OS X Server.

The Bare Metal hypervisor removes a layer. Instead of needing an existing operating system you install the Parallels Bare Metal hypervisor as the very slimmed down operating system, and then install your virtual machines on top of that.

The idea of using a hypervisor is not new to the Windows and Linux world, but this is a new concept on the Mac Side. Windows has had products like Citrix Xen Server, VMWare’s ESX line, and Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

According to the Parallels brochure, this can be deployed on any Apple with VT-x support and is an Xserve or Mac Pro.

Some of the features include: Live Migration (I’m assuming between two Xserves running Bare Metal Edition), Full and Incremental backups, Migration from Physical to Virtual, Physical to Cloud, and Cloud to Virtual servers.

The Guest operating systems include Mac OS X, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, Windows Server 2000, 2003, and 2008, Red Hat Enterprise 4 and 5, CentOS 4 and 5, SUSE Enterprise Server 10, Debian Linux 4 or 5,, Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04, FreeBSD 6 and 7.

This is a definite plus for those Mac only shops who wish to be able to run windows virtual machines with some backup capabilities as well as snapshots. The pricing has yet to be announced, but the current cost for the Parallels Server is $1250 per server; but the PC version of the Bare Metal Server is only $999. If you are interested in the trial, you can obtain a copy along with all of the documentation from parallels.com.

MacHeist is currently giving away free copies of LateNiteSoft’s Squeeze. All you have to do is register, and then get to downloading. You only have a few days to get it for free, though.

Squeeze uses Snow Leopard’s built-in file compression to transparently compress your data without you noticing it. Once you’ve compressed a file, it doesn’t appear any different at all. It just takes up less space on your harddisk. When you go to access it, OS X decompresses it on the fly without you ever knowing. Pretty great, huh? If you’re interested in finding out more about how this works, check out Squeeze’s FAQ.

So far, I have run Squeeze on my Applications, Desktop, Documents, Movies, Music, and Pictures folders. It has saved me over 2.5 GB of harddrive space. I am absolutely loving this application. In fact, I am considering buying a license to show my appreciation. If you want to buy the app, you can head over to their site to buy it for only $9.95. A very good deal!

Photo Credit: Dano

It’s 2010, and for some reason we’re still relying on paper trails and paper bills instead of taking advantage of the digital age. Part of the reason is our skepticism about a computers ability securely store your valuable information, and part of the reason is a complete lack of tools or organizing these digital documents. Most are aware of YEP by now, so we thought we’d offer up an alternative. iDocument, a document management app from IcyBlaze, is an option that’s worth exploring.

Getting Started

The first launching of the application pretty much goes off like you’d expect — a prompt to scan your drive. A quick tip: Do Not let iDocument scan your drive for you. It found over 2500 documents on my system, and took quite a bit of time to load all the documents into the application. If you have any type of filing system set up for your documents you can easily choose what directories to scan for your files. The automated system scan turned up some interesting files that were buried deep in Apple’s OS, but if you do end up going this route, don’t say I didn’t warn you. You’ll be waiting for a while.

Getting your documents is as easy as checking some boxes, and setting up some search folders, and clicking okay. The application finds the files, and moves them into your library.

Features & Functionality

Any good organizational tool needs to have a fairly good handle on letting you organize, distribute, and find your information as quickly as possible. Missing one of these three things can severely limit an applications effectiveness. For instance, if you have the ability to share your documents across a network, while not being able to retrieve your important information through a search, there’s no reason to organize your files. If you’re digging manually, you might as well be filing them manually as well. Luckily, iDocument addresses these three key areas.

Organize your Documents

Folders, Smart Folders, and Collections

If you’re digging manually, you might as well be filing them manually as well. Luckily, iDocument addresses organizational concerns by giving you access three tools: folders, smart folders, and collections. Both the folder and smart folders are exactly what you think they are, and act in the exact same was as you’d expect. A collection is pretty much a folder that lets you have both a smart folder, normal folder, and files within it.

Searching Documents

iDocument gives you multiple avenues to find the documents you’re looking for. A couple of the options require some leg work, but you do have access to the typical content and keyword search. Just like you’d expect, iDocument brings up the relevant documents that meet the criteria that you’ve entered into the search field. It does not seem to do boolean type searches. If I wanted to search my documents for a particular file that referenced both “Chechen” and “Badgering,” it doesn’t seem to be able to do that, or at least, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Other search types include Dates, Tags, and Ratings, of which the later two obviously require some user input before you can use them.

Supported Formats?

What would a document management system be if it didn’t support a host of files types. It certainly took care of all my files, and they list support for the Microsoft Office Suite, Apple iWork bundle, as well as PDFs and RTFs.

Sharing Documents

iDocument really feels like a native Apple application. The sharing feature is set up just like iTunes. You can share your library, or a particular collection. They even give you the ability to set a password for your shared documents. One thing it doesn’t do is user management. So if you’re looking for a program that will let you give certain users permission to one group of files, and another group of users access to another different group of files, this application isn’t for you. The sharing is really all or nothing. People can either see your shared documents, or they can’t.

One really cool feature of iDocument is the integration with SlideShare. If you have an account on SlideShare you’re able to upload documents directly to the webservice. It’s pretty forward thinking of the iDocument team. It would also be pretty cool if they managed to integrate their application with Google Docs in the future. There’s a nice spotlight plugin called precipitate, which lets you search your Google Docs from Spotlight, so there’s probably some kind of API for the iDocument team to use.

?Interesting Tip: Sync Library with Dropbox

In the preferences for iDocument, you have the ability to change the location of the applications library. Do you know what that means? You can “theoretically” sync your library across multiple Macs with a service such as DropBox. All you would have to do is set a new library location to your DropBox folder, and restart the application. Rinse and repeat on your second, third, and fourth machines, and you should be looking at a pretty powerful document management tool.

Note: DropBox, while giving you the ability to sync some application, is not a syncing tool. You won’t be able to have the library in two different locations, at the exact same moment. DropBox won’t compare the changes. But, if you’re using two computers interchangeably throughout the course of a day you should be able to get away with syncing between them, so long as only one computer has iDocument running at a time.

Conclusion

IcyBlaze’s iDocument really shocked me. I was expecting a mediocre solution, but I’ve come away pretty impressed with the power of the application. The feature set is pretty comparable to an application like Yep, but keep in mind that iDocument hasn’t been around as long, so some of the features that you’re seeing in Yep that you’re not seeing in iDocument might be a direct result of the applications infancy. You can purchase either a single user serial license for iDocument for $34.95, or you can purchase a multi-user version for $79.95