Advanced Dynamic Ramblings

…I don’t have one yet. I was at the U. Village Apple store on Saturday morning to check out the craziness and spend a little one on one time with an iPad. The interface is beautiful, and the hardware makes it quite responsive. Standard iPhone/iPod Touch apps are a joke, and look comical on the iPad’s larger screen, but apps designed for the iPad are amazing.

I’m not going to give a comprehensive review and rehash all the same stuff that all the other blogs and media outlets are covering. I’m going to comment on one, singular omission that tops the list of reasons that the iPad is not really ready yet.

User accounts.

Computers have user accounts, iPhones don’t. The iPad falls somewhere in between, so it’s arguable that it should remain simple and user account free. I beg to differ.

When I’m carrying my iPhone and someone asks me to see it or play with it for a bit, I usually hand it over and look over their shoulder. I’ll give them a minute or two, and then time is up. I’ve got a fair amount of personal information loaded into my iPhone. Email, saved passwords in Safari, and browser history are just a few to mention.

An iPad is not a “personal” device that you would pocket and carry with you around town, so the likelihood that you get hit up for some demo time is low, but it IS a coffee table computer. It’s something that you should feel comfortable to leave in the living room and allow guests to use for web surfing, iTunes music requests, etc…

Without the ability to log out, I would not be comfortable loading my personal credentials into the iPad lest I look like an asshole when a guest asks to use the thing and I say… “meh… I don’t think so, it’s my computer and I can’t log out…”

Apple? Is this on your list?

So, I was able to squeeze a $45/mo deal out of Comcast for about 2 years, including HD and a dual tuner DVR. When that came to an end, and my tab hit $95, I cancelled my service. What I’m left with now, is whatever I can pull down with an antenna.

As such, I’m very interested in receiving HDTV over the air with an antenna… for free. As we approach the the Feb 17th analog cutoff, I’ll post some in depth experiences with various setups as I search for the most effective and affordable solution.

Here’s a teaser… This is what I started with:

BTW, it’s 8 feet long!

Just in: For those of you who were waiting for some real updates at today’s keynote, there’s hope yet. It looks like Oct 14th will be what you’re waiting for…

We’re looking at potential updates to the entire notebook line, with likely updates to the materials and form factor, as well as performance improvements. New product introductions are unlikely, but who knows! Here’s a teaser image from Gizmodo to get your imagination going:

I could imagine some problems arising from this  - if you don’t like the way that the iPhone gives (anyone looking) a preview of the most recently received text message, then this tip’s for you… 

Head over to “Settings > General > Passcode Lock”. You’ll need to enter a new passcode twice if you don’t already have one set. Next, simply turn off “Show SMS Preview”.

If you like, you can set the “Require Passcode” delay to be as long as 4 hours so that it will rarely bother you.

Examples of aforementioned potential for problems:

My father was looking at pictures I had taken at a family barbecue when my boyfriend text me “You were so great last night, how about a repeat?” My father couldn’t look me in my eye for months!

Recently I was at a meeting and someone in my group had to reference a PDF file but had forgotten her laptop. Since iPhone supports PDF files, I offered up my phone. 

As she was scrolling through the page with the iPhone set on the table, in comes a private text message from my ex-girlfriend. Upon hearing the ring, I said “excuse me” and quickly grabbed my phone.

There’s been some reports of poor signal and dropped calls with the 3G iphone. Here’s a couple screenshots and a description of the problem from a friend of mine in Seattle:

Been dropping calls like crazy lately.  When holding my phone with my hand over the antenna, the signal drops way down. On a whim, I turned off 3g. Now coverage appears to be like on my old phone. Scope these two screenshots taken from inside an AT&T store holding my phone with my hand over the antenna.

As explained, the difference in reception bars results from switching OFF 3G. In both cases, a hand was placed over the back of the phone. There are many antennas in an iPhone 3G, and I’m assuming that the one being affected is located on the back of the phone towards the bottom. The original iPhone had a plastic cover over the antenna, and the location probably has not changed much for the iPhone 3G.

Here is a YouTube video showing how a hand on the back of the iPhone can interfere with the signal. In this example, the user has a 3G iPhone that’s only receiving EDGE coverage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN6265QQwhU

Not sure what can be done about this, as I can’t imagine that it will simply be fixed with software updates.

I should also clarify that this is not a clear cut issue, as many report that they do not experience the phenomenon described above. The issue could involve signal strength, frequencies used in the phone’s location, femtocells at ATT stores, etc…

Is this because of the preparation for me.com?

I’ve tried for 10 minutes and cannot login. I’ve reset my password 3 times.

Please try to log in to http://mail.mac.com and comment.

MONDAY CAN’T COME SOON ENOUGH!

UPDATE: Looks like it’s fixed

For those of you using mac.com email addresses, know that Apple is aware that .Mac has been down for pretty much the whole day. Frustrating, it is.

Check this page to see if things are back to normal:

http://mac.com

You’ll need to log in. Scroll down a bit and look to the left. If all the dots are green, that means that Apple has (theoretically) fixed the problem.

UPDATE: Looks like it’s fixed.

Quick update: It’s pretty much confirmed now that the next generation iPhone will be released at Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 9th.

Via: Gizmodo

Many people know that the .Mac service will let you create alias email addresses that deliver messages to the main email inbox. Apple integrates this feature into Mail.app very nicely by letting you choose one of these addresses from a drop down list while you’re composing a message. This way you can remain incognito and send messages from the alias address of your choice.

How do you replicate that functionality without a .Mac account you ask? Easy.

Simply open Mail Preferences – go to the “Mail” menu, choose “Preferences…”, and click on “Accounts”

In the “Email Address:” field, enter in additional email addresses that you would like to be able to send FROM. Each address should be separated by a comma and a space, such as “email@domain.com, email2@domain.com, email3@domain.com, etc…”

Now when you’re composing a message, simply choose the appropriate address from the drop down:

You may need to authorize the email address(es) with your email provider before the selection above will have any effect. With Gmail, you can enable any alias (or ANY address for that matter) with their authorization process.

Google Gmail: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=54656

Full service setup: Orchard Remote

Spam email can be a very inconvenient problem, especially for those that host their own mail server. The spam messages were coming in to our server at about 100 per day per user when we decided to implement a real solution.

After some research, we decided to implement Postini filtering. Postini’s filter works on the messages BEFORE they ever hit your mail server. This reduces bogus traffic to your mail server, and also protects it from bad things like Directory Harvest attacks. Directory Harvest attacks are an attempt to retrieve a list of all the valid email addresses at a domain.

The setup process can seem a bit daunting, but proves to be relatively easy and transparent. One big concern of mine was about making changes to the MX records in DNS. I’m quite familiar with this process, but I found it difficult to determine what would happen when mail was directed to Postini. Specifically, I was concerned that if I made the MX change before I created the users in Postini, messages would start bouncing.

It turns out that when users are created in Postini, it simply activates the filtering for that email address. Messages to email addresses not loaded into Postini simply pass through unaffected. Very nice.

Since Google has acquired Postini, you can get the service for a very affordable $3 per user per year.

Check it out here: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/compare.html