I did not know just how well Mac had created the new User Interface for MobileMe. (I hate the name, and the new username@me.com addresses, it just seems so “me-generation.”) Anyway, I have been impressed by the instantaneousness of the updates to my iPhone and how well it works. The Ajax controls are very like standard OS-type interface conventions. There are many things you can do, like cmd/ctrl+clicking and using the delete key that users of Outlook Web Access are probably familiar with. I have been using it to keep up with my appointments and time-specific tasks and reminders at work.
Archive for the 'Apple' Category
I was recently working on a business idea: a web design company that would serve small business, non-profits and local government. I would serve this niche market with skills that I learn in my day-to-day work as a county web designer and at home in my own learning in the field.
Wow! I will have to write more about blogging from Textmate later. This is amazing!
My iPhone ran out of film!
A friend invited us over recently for a barbecue, some company and a fireworks display. While enjoying it, I snapped photos with my handy-dandy but slightly shabby iPhone camera. (I say shabby, because, while it is very handy, and the resolution is high, the photos it produces tend to be grainy and it lacks a flash. I know, it’s just a camera phone. I am expecting too much. But it is an Apple, and being an admitted “fanboy” I have been trained to expect a lot. If I was doing my fanboy duty, I would make some excuse for the shortcoming and think longingly on its being bettered in the next iteration. Wow! I digress and shamefully!)
I took over 500 shots that night. A couple of days later, I noticed that the shots were all giving my white thumbnails and it was acting flakily. (You get the point.) I looked around and found quite a few “fixes” for it, but they sometimes went too far, were a little laborious (though insightful), sometimes snooty, incorrect or short of an answer (but that last one from Jeffrey Zeldman was particularly funny, and especially true). Apparently, when you get to 1024 images, the camera poops out. The following instructions I hope will help you to reset the phone’s camera.
In most cases, Acham’s Razor says assume it is the simplest thing possible. In line with that, if you have not already done it, restart your phone. If that does not work, power cycle your phone (hold the home button down and while depressing the sleep/wake button, until it reboots itself, after the slider displays). If that doesn’t work, try these steps. (I cannot warrant them, you already have bigger problems if Apple cannot warrant that your digital camera will not run out of film.) 
I finally found a concise, effective fix on iPhoneGuru.org. The link on the home page returned a 404 error, but the whole story (minus comments) was on the homepage at posting.
(Update: I found that the site may have changed to a different style of permalinks since initially posting the story. You should be able to find the story here.)
I hope those instructions help you like they helped me. Their instructions were simple, straightforward and quite helpful.
I have been a long-time fan of Safari, since I received my first Mac (PowerBook G4, early January 2006). I think the font and style rendering are superb. When I first got Windows XP running (late October 2001) I loved the font-smoothing (ClearType). However, that is not close to the excellence with which I saw it done on the Mac in Safari. I have long been an advocate of Safari for Mac and Firefox for Windows. However, when Safari came out on Windows, I was running Win2K and thought it would not work, so I glossed over it.
I have been very impressed for a long time with Safari, all the more when Safari 3 came out. The new DOM inspector in the Debug menu was very nice, and in a later release, it only got substantially better (DOM Inspector|Network Pane). And really, KHTML/Webkit is a very nice document-rendering engine.
That was then, this is now. It (in a small way) pains me to say that Firefox 3 knocks Safari’s socks off. This is problematic for me, because it proves that I am the fanboy that I never wanted to be. I should be happy to simply say, yeah it is vastly superior and move on, but I am pained by it. The truth is out. ACK!
Since Firefox 3 came out, I have been impressed three more times by Firefox:
- The font-rendering and over all appearance has been solidly improved.
- The awesome bar is…well…awesome.
- It no longer looks like a ported Windows application, it is solidly Mac, which is a nice
Those are certainly not the only things, but they strike me as the most important new features. It’s extensibility is also a very important feature, namely the plug-ins that I find myself (or forget that I am) using constantly or at least frequently:
- Firebug is an excellent, nimble, powerful HTML/JS/CSS debugger, and it does it all on-the-fly. It can bog page loads a bit at times, but the app itself is quite speedy.
- NoScript is an extension allows you to turn off JS for a site by default. It is also interesting to see how well implemented a site’s JS is and what features are reliant on it. It can, however, be as annoying as useful.
- Adblock Plus is another great application that blocks a lot of unsightly (or unseemly) advertisements, e.g. those depicting scantily-clad women, etc. It comes with a free subscription service that allows you to use the recommendations of others that have stumbled upon noxious content.
- Others include the Web Developer toolbar, 1Password for Mac, IETab and IE View Lite for Windows
- Another feature that is not new, though often overlooked, is the find-as-you-type text search. If you enable it in Tools>Options…>Advanced Tab>General Sub-tab>Accessibility box>“Search for text when I start typing” it will allow you to find text as you type it. Furthermore, using the apostrophe (single quote or “’”) first will look only in link text. That has been such a great productivity booster! It is not impressive to consider how useful it is until you consider the IE6/7 Crtl+F search, or a similar search.
- Greater use of non-modal dialogs that appear at top and bottom in banners or ribbons, like the password saving that you can approve after you have seen that it is was correct. NoScript also uses a banner at the bottom to notify that scripts remain unexecuted.
The only thing that I really miss of the features I expected is the lack of support for Mac’s Keychain Application. Firefox stores them in its own space.
I think one thing that Safari has always done well is a simple and inviting user interface which keeps their products from becoming bloated. Firefox has the poor distinction of often seeming bloated because we (yes, me included) often load on too many add-ons and become disgusted by how slow it becomes. That is not Firefox, it is my overburdening of it.
Safari’s lack of those features has made it increasingly unable to be the heavy-lifting browser I need in my daily work as a web developer, designer and administrator. (Of course that does not free me from my duty to test in IE 6&7, Firefox and Safari.)
This is my first blog entry on david.socklint.com using the iPhone. Technology is amazing. Now, really, good night.
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