Like the title says, Apple Music, iTunes, and iBooks are now available in China. This brings a whole new set of content to one of the worlds largest markets. This will also likely result in a lot of new content being added to the store. If you are an iTunes affiliate, you’ll also be pretty stoked to know that you are now able to provide affiliate links for Apps and content in China as well! And if you’re a Chinese site and don’t yet have an iTunes Affiliate account, I’d look to sign up for one now.
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MacTech Pro
MacTech just announced MacTech Pro: a new series of one day, regional events that are specifically designed for professional Apple techs, consultants, and support staff. MacTech Pro Events are single-track, hotel-based seminars that are specifically geared to serve the needs of professional consultants, IT Pros and techs who support others on OS X and iOS. The first MacTech Pro will take place on March 4th, 2015 in Seattle.MacTech Pro will take place in nine U.S. cities in 2015 including: • March 4, 2015 : MacTech Pro, Seattle • March 25, 2015 : MacTech Pro, San Francisco • April 15, 2015 : MacTech Pro, Boston • May 6, 2015 : MacTech Pro,…
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Use libimobiledevice To View iOS Logs
Xcode and other tools can be used to view logs on iOS devices. One of those other tools is libimobiledevice. I usually install libimobiledevice using homebrew, as there are a few dependencies that can be a little annoying. To install homebrew if you haven’t already, run the following command: ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" Once run, follow the prompts to complete the installation. Once homebrew is installed, run the following brew command to download the required components and then libimobiledevice: brew install -v --devel --fresh automake autoconf libtool wget libimobiledevice Then run ideviceinstaller: brew install -v --HEAD --fresh --build-from-source ideviceinstaller Once these are installed, you can plug in a paired…
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Network Port Testing With Netcat
You can do some pretty simple testing of ports and network communications using strategies I’ve outlined in the past with tcpdump, trace route, telnet, curl, stroke and of course ping. However, netcat has a few interesting things you can do with it; namely actually run a port super-quickly to test traffic between subnets, forcing scans of ipv6 traffic, debugging sockets, keeping connections alive, parodying through SOCKS 4 and 5 and just checking for daemons that are listening rather than actually sending data to them. In this first example, we’re going to just check that Apple’s web server is accessible (adding -v for verbose output): /usr/bin/nc -v www.apple.com 80 The result would be pretty verbose…
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iWork Public Beta Goes Bye-Bye Today :: Last Call
I’m sure you’ve heard by now. But just in case you hadn’t logged into iWork.com in awhile or let the to-do lapse, it’s just worth a reminder that iWork Public Beta, the site that you could upload Pages, Numbers and Keynotes to, is being deprecated. The end comes on today. In other words, if you have documents up on the site, you should download them immediately or you won’t be able to come August. Apple has even provided a document explaining how. The service that was being provided by the iWork public beta is replaced by iCloud. Using iCloud, you can sync your documents between all of your devices. When…
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Removing A Credit Card From An AppleID
Sometimes you deploy iOS based devices with iTunes. There are a number of factors that can still force you into iTunes based deployments, such as needing the icons to appear a certain way in iOS. It’s not optimal but it happens. And sometimes you need to give an iPad or iPhone to a user leveraging an existing AppleID that will have a password known by multiple users. Again, not the right way, but there are design requirements that cause you to do it from time to time. And if you’re using a shared account, one of the last things you want is for users to actually buy stuff with that…
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Apple + BYOD Doesn't Just Mean iPad
Whenever someone mentions Apple and BYOD devices, this is what immediately springs to mind as what will invariably walk through the door requiring support:
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SMIME in OS X Lion
In a previous article I showed how to get and install an SMIME certificate. Now let’s look at installing it into Mail. It’s really, really hard. First, open Mail. Then, click on the Mail menu and select Preferences. Then click on Accounts. Then click on the account you got an SMIME cert for. Then, in the TLS box, select the certificate you want to use. Next, go to compose a new message. You will see the little disclosure triangle to the left of the From dialog. Click on it and then check the box for the lock and the icon to the right of that, meant to look like a…
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iCloud, Lion and iOS5
As most people who are going to read anything I write will already know, Apple released their new cloud service today. The Apple pages are already up, with a splash page on the main site pointing to a dedicated iCloud page. Apple has also anticipated some of the questions that most of us using MobileMe were going to ask in a short Kbase article re: the transition from MobileMe to iCloud: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4597 Additionally, an email went out to MobileMe users today that read: We’d like to share some exciting news with you about iCloud — Apple’s upcoming cloud service, which stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to your devices.…
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Converting pst Files to mbox
Large scale mail migrations can be tricky. There is a shareware app that can be used to migrate pst files from the pst format into mbox, which can then be used with Mac OS X http://www.littlemachines.com. If the migration process needs to be automated (they all seem to at scale) then a script could be written to crawl users, finds the pst files and then convert them. Or it could be done on the client side using a self-destructing launchd item. Conversion syntax for libpst would be something like the following: readpst -o /output/folder /server/path/user.pst Before you can use readpst, it needs to be built via libpst on the system that…