• iPhone

    Automating iPhone & iPad Deployment

    The iPhone Configuration Utility is used to “image” iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The reason I quoted image was because you aren’t laying bits down as you would in a traditional imaging scenario. Instead, you are sending a profile and possibly some applications to the device. This is done through a configuration profile, which is a property list, prefixed with a .mobileconfig extension. The iPhone Configuration Utility stores its data in the ~/Library/MobileDevice directory. Here, you will find two directories: Devices – Contains the Device data for each device that has been docked to the iPhone Configuration Utility. Configuration Profiles – Contains the profiles that you will assign to devices…

  • Active Directory,  iPhone

    Managing Active Directory from iPhone

    AD HelpDesk is a tool that can be used to manage certain aspects of Active Directory user accounts. Using AD HelpDesk, you can configure an iOS based device to connect to Active Directory using an administrative account (or an account that has been delegated administrative access). Using the tool, you can then find a user. Using the user pane, you can unlock accounts, reset their passwords, force the resetting of the password on the next authentication event and optionally send a user their new password via SMS (a really cool little feature, IMO). There are a lot of useful ways to fit this tool into your service desk or network…

  • iPhone

    iTunes and Mass Activation

    In order to use an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, you need to activate the devices. If you are setting up a large number of mobile devices, this can be a tedious process. When you start talking about thousands of them, it can be down-right overwhelming. However, you can reduce the number of clicks, taps and touches by telling iTunes not to synchronize devices with the iTunes Library following activation. This is done using what is called iTunes Activation Mode. Activation-mode will instruct iTunes to eject a device once it’s been activated rather than trying to synchronize music, photos and other media that may be on your system. By setting…

  • iPhone

    ePub and iPad

    As an author, I’m pretty interested in the changing face of the publishing industry. Tim O’Reilly was on the cover of Inc magazine this month and I’ve been following his musings about publishing for some time. But this whole digital publishing thing has to make an author think about what it means for us. But as a geek, I’m stuck in the technical, wondering if I were to self-publish something straight to the iPad, what would it look like? Not the content, but the files. ePub seems to be the main focus of e-book devices and where the industry is going to go. ePub is a format ratified by the…

  • iPhone

    The iPad's A4 processor

    The iPad is leveraging the new A4 chip from Apple, the first time Apple has released their own chip. Running at 1GhZ, the A4 is an ARM-based chip. The A4 is similar, if not the the ARM Coretex-A9 MPCore processor with graphics brought to you by the ARM Mali 50, capable of 720p hi-def video. These chips are what are referred to as System on a Chip, which stands for SOC. An SOC has a processor, graphics and memory together on the chip. If this sounds similar to an Atom chip, such as Moorestown from Intel then you’re not crazy, it is. This is similar to the Snapdragon chips from…

  • iPhone

    iPhone 3gs Encryption?

    Following an argument I recently had over iPhone security I thought I would post easy to access links that any fanboy can get to regarding the full disk encryption of the iPhone 3gs. En garde, I’ll let you try my Wu-Tang style.

  • iPhone,  Mac OS X

    Apple Finally Finds YouTube

    Apple has been interfacing with YouTube for some time. They have provided YouTube integration into a number of their consumer applications and clearly understand how to aggregate content from YouTube and interface with the YouTube API. Apple also has some of the best marketing of the past 10 or more years. But until now, Apple has been quiet on the YouTube front. Now, with the introduction of the iPad, Apple has quietly started a YouTube presence. I can’t help but wonder what Apple has in store for the field of interactive marketing!