The only thing I can think of that I would change about the iPhone is to have the ability to add a layer of full disk encryption. In lieu of that, Good, the makers of GoodLink, have reinvented themselves as the iPhone in the Enterprise front runner in my book. They did this by duplicating much of the functionality of the native iPhone applications, but did so in a manner that stores its data in an encrypted disk image. Communications to the iPhone from the Good servers are also encrypted with similar fervor. And if you have Domino instead of Exchange then you have equal functionality, great for a number…
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318 Open Sources mergeSafBookmarks
Originally Posted to the 318 TechJournal: 318 has open sourced our mergeSafBookmarks python script. This tool can read in a pair of property lists and merge them into a single resultant bookmarks file for Safari. This takes a lot of the work out of pushing bookmarks to existing users as part of your deployment. You can find it here: http://mergebookmarks.sourceforge.net Note: The script also looks at existing bookmarks and doesn’t merge in duplicates.
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Archives
There is a new archives page. This allows you to view the entire history of the site by date or quickly search through titles. Well, I guess I shouldn’t say quickly; given the number of posts the archives page takes a good bit of time to load… Oh and in case I forgot to mention this earlier, I totally changed the color scheme of the whole site, converted most of the graphics to png (so they should load faster) and disabled a few “features” that I had created that were bogging it down. Running faster and I think possibly looking less vampiric.
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Voice Commands on the iPhone
In case you hadn’t heard, it’s been cold in Minneapolis the last week or so. As such I have found myself wearing gloves when I go outside. And when you are wearing gloves, sometimes you do things you maybe didn’t mean to do. I had a moment like that with my iPhone this morning. While holding the phone I was pressing down the home button (the button on the front of the device). After a time I heard a tone. That tone meant that I had opened Voice Control. It doesn’t stay open long, so first I had to figure out what I did to get it back. Once I…
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iPhone: More Juice Please
One of the things that has plagued me since my first phone is that I seem to pretty much always be on it. Annoying as that is for those around me, it seems to take the most toll on the battery of every mobile device that I’ve ever owned. The iPhone is actually one of the better of the devices that I’ve had, but I could just use a little more juice. Which is why I got a Mophie Juice pack. The Mophie is an iPhone case, but it also has a battery in it. The battery can give it up to 4 and a half more hours of talk…
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Beyond Portable Homes
Portable Homes allow a user to disconnect their system from the network and continue working. But Mobility, Portable Home Directories and other network sync accounts have a major shortcoming: they have to communicate with a server. Mostly because they rely heavily on directory services and the data that moves with a user needs to synchronize between computers that the user moves to. In the event that users have large home directories or a lot of multi-media content, this can create a lot of network saturation. In large environments where there are no limits on how big these directories can get, this can also be cumbersome to storage. Apple recently released…
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Finder: I Just Can't Quit You
defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool YESYou You can get a Quit menu for the Finder by editing the com.apple.finder.plist, which we can do here using the defaults command: defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool YES Now you can run a command to kill the Finder: killall Finder Then when it comes back to life you should see the new menu item.
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Changing Screen Scaling
You can get a bit more real estate out of smaller screens in Mac OS X. The AppleDisplayScaleFactor can be used to scale down new windows that are opened. For example, they would be 70% of their original size using the following command: defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.7 You can tinker around with different scales and if you find one you like then you can set it permanently by adding it to the NSGlobalDomain: defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.7 The default screen scale factor is 1.0 (.7 just makes things smaller), so in order to get the screen scaling back to normal just run the command substituting a 1.0 for…
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Now A Social Network
Well, I have no clue why but I decided to setup the feeds and friends aspect of a social network on krypted.com. It turned out pretty good, although there’s still some CSS work to do. You can sign up by hovering over the Social icon in the toolbar and clicking on, ironically, Sign Up. You can then click on Edit Profile to upload a picture and create your own profile page. Then, Directory to see the other users of the network. The Friends button will show you your Friends and the Friend Requests button will show you pending requests from other friends. But most importantly, the Activity button will show…
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Click-Matrix Leads to Death of a Trackpad
While preparing an image for the latest MacBook Pro we were going through a click-matrix and I noticed a funny usability issue. Basically, when you fire up VMware and log into the virtual machine, the trackpad keeps getting hit by little hands, which doesn’t work very well in typing class. I don’t ask why a piece of software is used in a VM vs. Boot Camp, etc. I just see a design consideration and look for a way to make it better. And in this case, the way to make it better was to disable that trackpad while someone was typing. And to assist, we found this handy-dandy little tool…