Category: I-phone

Yale School of Medicine will supply all of its students with an iPad 2. The program is meant to reduce paper use and make course materials more accessible. The school’s assistant dean for curriculum Michael Schwartz says the students will be able to keep the iPads until they graduate, and use them to download the full curriculum and patient information.

The program will distribute 520 iPads. If that sounds expensive, consider this: Dean Schwartz notes that the school spends about US$100,000 per year to copy, collate and distribute course materials. So far, he’s spent about $600,000 on the iPad program. Within a few years, Schwartz notes, money saved on printing costs will pay for the initiative.

After a successful pilot program last year, the school decided on some apps to include (GoodReader among them) as well as Bluetooth keyboards. Good luck to Yale’s med students, faculty and staff. May the program be a success.

Yale Med School students get iPads originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to Ask TUAW, our weekly (mostly) question-and-answer column. First off, we’re back! Our intrepid question-and-answerer has spent the last month moving across the country and getting settled into a new place. Now, finally, it’s time to answer some questions! A lot has happened since our last column: Lion has been released, a number of new versions of the iOS 5 beta have been released, iCloud is nearing completion, and now iTunes Match is out in beta. Exciting stuff!

I’m sure everyone has lots of questions about all these things, so please ask them! We can’t have this awesome Q&A column without the Q, so go to the comments of this post and ask away. If you’d prefer, instead of asking questions in the comments, you can email your questions directly to [email protected], or simply ping us on Twitter.

For our first question, David asks:

I was wondering why Apple has killed support for WinXP for iCloud. Does this mean iTunes will no longer support it either? Is there a programming API that is only supported in Vista/Win7? Many people have older machines such as myself that love Apple products. What is the reason for dropped support (please don’t say only that XP is old). I’m sure there is a better answer than that. Until I can save some more money to buy a Mac I’m stuck with this older machine.

Continue reading Ask TUAW: Disk Permissions, Wireless Syncing in iOS 5, Attachments on the iPhone, and More!

Ask TUAW: Disk Permissions, Wireless Syncing in iOS 5, Attachments on the iPhone, and More! originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The iTunes Match beta opened up to developers yesterday, and in case you were somehow under the impression that it actually offered streaming of music to your iOS device, you’re mistaken. Apple has confirmed, because apparently there was confusion, that iTunes Match doesn’t stream music. Instead, the $24.99 a year that you will pay for the service means that any music you download from anywhere will get “activated” as purchased in iTunes, and then you can download that music to any iOS device or Mac that you happen to have. That’s still an actual file that will need actual space on the hard drive.

Apple says that purchased music can be listened to while it’s being downloaded, but it’s not like you can have your iPhone full of apps and then still listen to streaming music. In that sense, iTunes Match is more of a sync-ing service than an actual streaming setup.

It’s too bad — I’d much rather have Pandora-like access to my music library from anywhere without having to haul all of those files around on my app-filled iPhone. And while you think that distinction might be the issue of some record company’s legal text, it’s actually an Apple decision, according to the record companies. Apple apparently wants this music to be tied to iTunes, and thus to actual files on your devices. A streaming service could too easily be brought out to other mediums like browsers (which is where Pandora started, incidentally), and thus separated from Apple devices in general.

That seems sort of selfish on Apple’s part — I would hope the ideal is that I have access to my music on iTunes all the time, not just when I’m on Apple devices. But for now, this is the way it’s done. If you pay up for iTunes Match, you still get all of the service’s benefits, but you don’t get streaming of your files to or from anywhere.

Update: There’s some confusion over the word “streaming” here. Streaming, as we’re using it, means listening to music without actually downloading it on to your device. This is possible on a Mac with iTunes using the new iTunes Match service (just like it is while sharing a library on Wi-Fi). But it is not possible on an iOS device, even with iTunes Match — you must download the song to listen to it. You can listen to it while it’s downloading, but there will be a file that will take up space on your iOS device.

Apple confirms iCloud won’t offer iTunes streaming to iOS originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Elgato, makers of the EyeTV line of accessories, has announced EyeTV Mobile for the iPad 2. Consisting of a dock connector dongle with a built-in TV antenna, the accessory will allow iPad 2 owners to watch live TV anywhere via a forthcoming EyeTV Mobile app on the App Store.

The accessory and app replicate a great deal of the functionality of the EyeTV lineup for the Mac, including the ability to pause/rewind/record live TV and receive certain kinds of radio transmissions. The best part is this setup will not consume any mobile data whatsoever; the TV signals come in directly through the antenna accessory, so you don’t even need to be connected to the internet to watch live TV on your iPad 2.

There are some caveats to the EyeTV Mobile rig. First is the price: €99.95 / ?99.95 (US price unavailable) may be a bit steep for many people’s wallets. According to the product’s tech specs, it only supports standard definition channels, and its lack of support for Freeview HD suggests it will be of limited utility where I live. The product is also only compatible with the iPad 2; owners of the iPhone, iPod touch, and original iPad are out of luck.

That having been said, if you’ve been looking for a no-fuss way to watch TV on your iPad that doesn’t involve hooking up a bunch of different devices and streaming over Wi-Fi or 3G, EyeTV Mobile might work for you if your terrestrial TV channels broadcast a compatible signal. There’s no word on a release date yet (Engadget says late September), but when it’s released we’ll see if we can get hold of a review unit.

Elgato EyeTV Mobile streams live TV to iPads originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ll miss a lot of things about Steve Jobs being at Apple in the CEO position, but one loss will be his tendency to answer all kinds of customer emails in person, no matter what the topic (or time of day). There’s hope, though: MacRumors has our first reported “TimMail,” in which new CEO Tim Cook has taken the time out to personally answer a customer emailing him congrats about his new promotion.

You can see it in the image above — like Steve, Tim seems to be a man of few words who uses them well. The “War Eagle” cry is a reference to Cook’s alma mater, Auburn University, where apparently he remains a fan. Good to see that Cook is apparently continuing the tradition of answering emails as CEO — we’ll have to see how he reacts when the messages go from simple congratulations to issues that might be a little tougher to deal with.

Tim Cook reportedly responding to customer emails originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A week ago we reported on the rumors that CNN reportedly purchased iPad magazine app Zite, a magazine aggregater which collects news based on your personal preferences and presents it to you in a magazine-like format. Today, CNN confirmed those rumors.

In a post on CNNTech, the company says it bought Zite and plans to operate it as an independent business. And yes, that means that Zite will continue to pull information from several sources — not just CNN.

The app will remain free and will launch without ads, though though you may expect that to change. While CNN does plan to make an Android version of Zite the company says the iPad will remain its “primary platform.”

While Zite will run as an independent business out of San Fransisco (CNN in headquartered in Atlanta) the cable company does plan to integrate Zite technology into its existing iOS apps. It was rumored that CNN paid up to US$25 million for magazine aggregater app, but the company declined to comment on the purchase price.

Zite is a free download from the App Store. You can also read our review of the app here.

CNN acquires Zite, plans to operate as independent business originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Back in the pre-ubiquitous internet days, services like AvantGo allowed you to cache and store websites for offline viewing. These days there’s little need for that kind of thing, simply because we’re very rarely offline.

Having said that, there are times when a solid internet connection just isn’t available and it would be nice to keep on working, reading or browsing sites. That’s where a program like SiteSucker comes in.

SiteSucker, as the name suggests, sucks down a localized version of site of your choice to your Mac’s hard drive for viewing offline. Simply type in the URL of the site you want and press “Download,” SiteSucker will do the rest, scanning, downloading and processing the site into an offline viewable form for when you haven’t got an internet connection on hand.

The number of levels deep SiteSucker will scan and download can be user defined, so if you’re looking for a small skim of the site, a one or two level archive will do. If you want a more in depth, browsable localised site something more like a four to six level download will probably be best. You can also set limits on the number of files downloaded, the minimum and maximum file size as well as a minimum image size to download. File type limits can also be imposed as can paths to include or exclude, and whether or not to limit it to the original site’s server.

Once you’ve got your site downloaded, it’s just a case of opening it up in Safari or any other browser of your choice from your disk.

If you’ve ever wanted to keep an offline version of a site for tinkering, browsing or analysis, SiteSucker gets the job done fast, efficiently and automatically, all for the great price of free from the Mac App Store.

Daily Mac App: SiteSucker originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A bug has been discovered in OS X Lion Server that appears when a user tries to share a file with extended attributes with a Windows XP or Windows 7 system. The bug was first discovered by Steve Maser, a senior systems administrator at the University of Michigan’s Office of Technology Transfer. In a message posted to the OS X Server list, Maser details the bug:

“If a file/folder on your 10.7.x Mac (and this includes Mac OS X Server) has some specific (?) extended attributes on it and you do Windows Sharing for Windows users to access the file/folders — you won’t be able to pull the file down to your Windows desktop. I verified this with Windows 7.” The bug has also been verified with Windows XP.

According to Steve, the copy process appears to begin, before halting with an error message like, “the file name you specified is not valid or too long,” or less frequently, an “Invalid MS-DOS Function” message.

Maser also notes a workaround he devised. It’s not a fix but it will allow for a file to be copied by removing the attributes from the file’s metadata. Apple hasn’t acknowledged the bug yet, but per Masers posting, they now know about it and and fix should be added to OS X Lion server in the future.

OS X Lion bug may affect Windows file sharing originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I am trying to find a way to keep my address book in sync across my:

• iPad
• MacBook Air
• MacBook Pro
• iMac
• Google Apps account
• Gmail account

as well as my wife’s

• iPhone
• MacBook
• Google Apps account
• Gmail account

(Aside: by “Gmail account” I mean a regular Google account, as opposed to a “Google Apps” account. Most people interact with it through their Gmail so I’ll use “Gmail account” to differentiate between “Google Apps” and “Regular Google” contacts.)

Would you believe that the hardest part is syncing between Google Apps and Gmail accounts? Even if the accounts are linked via multiple sign-in, I can’t find any way to keep their address books in sync. You might think Google would make this easy, considering that I am trying to sync between their own products.

First up: Plaxo

My first concerted effort to keep these in sync was to try the most expensive solution: Plaxo. Plaxo started several years ago as an online address book. They went through a dark period where they were best known for auto-spamming everyone in your address book, and then they tried to become a social network. Recently they have renewed their focus on address book syncing, and have amended their previously “overzealous” notification system.

For $60/year, Plaxo offers a Platinum Sync option which is supposed to be able to keep just about anything in sync: Outlook, Gmail (including multiple accounts), Google Apps (including multiple accounts), iPhones, BlackBerry, Mac Address Book, and Windows Mobile.

Platinum sync is described as:

True, real-time sync means your address book is always consistent and current at any sync endpoint. Full read & write access from any supported service or device…

Although Plaxo is expensive, I decided to use the free trial period. If it worked and saved me the time that I would have spent hunting down another solution, perhaps it would be worth the price.

I set it last week, starting with the Google Apps and Gmail accounts with the premise that those were “always on” and the part of my previous sync setup that I had not been able to solve otherwise. I added 4 accounts (two Google Apps and two Gmail) accounts, and just one Mac. I let everything sync, and then went through and fixed problems, merged duplicate contacts, and so forth.

Then I just let it run for a couple of days to see how it would work.

I checked this morning and it showed that my Google and Gmail accounts all sync’d several hours ago (I had been asleep all night, so nothing had changed). It had been more than seven hours since the last change. So how did Plaxo do?

The good news is that my Gmail account and my wife’s Gmail account appear to be in perfect sync, both showing 1,851 people listed in “My Contacts.” Unfortunately that is the end of the good news.

Her Google Apps account has 1,853 people listed in “My Contacts.” My Google Apps account has 2,759 people listed in “My Contacts.” And my MacBook Air has 2,110 contacts.

My Plaxo account shows I have 1,853 contacts.

That means that Plaxo has only kept one out of five accounts in sync with itself. That is a drastic failure.

If you think that it’s not that bad because two of the other accounts were only off by two (1,851 vs 1,853) let me ask you this: which two contacts are missing? The answer is: I don’t have any idea. But if it can’t manage to keep 4 Google/Gmail accounts in sync and failed to even raise an alarm that something went drastically wrong with one of them (2,759 vs 1,853?!?!) how am I supposed to trust it?

If Plaxo had sent me a message saying “We noticed that your accounts [X] and [Y] were not in sync, even though no errors were reported during sync” I would have at least trusted that if something went wrong in the future I could count on Plaxo letting me know. Failing to sync is bad, but failing quietly is much worse.

No solution, still looking.

I haven’t found a solution yet, and am hoping that perhaps one of TUAW’s readers might have an idea.

The crux of the problem is being able to sync one Mac to two Google accounts (one “Google Apps” and one “Gmail”). If I can find a reliable way to do that I will replicate the setup on all of my Macs, and sync my iPad and my wife’s iPhone using Google’s implementation of ActiveSync.

Has anyone else cracked this nut? If so, let me know in the comments! Meanwhile, I’m already trying out another solution. I’ll let you know how that one goes.

Contact sync between Google Apps, Gmail, and Mac originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You’ll get all the top stories of the day in three to five minutes, which is perfect for a quick review of what’s happening in the Apple world.

You can listen to today’s Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for listening through iTunes, click here.

Daily Update for August 30, 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 13:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chain Store Age Magazine publishes an annual list of the 100 largest U.S. retail chains. As you’d expect in the rather stodgy retail biz, there were few changes in this year’s list except for one company — Apple. Apple’s retail business jumped from 57th place on the list last year to 34th place in 2011. The results are based on 2010 revenues of US$9.82 billion.

The top 20 companies on the list are almost exactly the same as they were last year, with a few position swaps here and there. Apple, not unexpectedly considering the rate of new Apple Store openings, was a lone exception.

Like Apple, many retailers are looking internationally for opportunities to grow revenues. Some retailers are downsizing or reducing the number of stores; once again, Apple appears to be bucking this trend by upsizing and adding stores.

The full survey from Chain Store Age Magazine can be downloaded here for further study.

Apple Store climbs in annual retail ranking originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dear Aunt TUAW,

I’m happily running Lion on my computer now, but I’ve noticed an issue with the mouse tracking speed that is driving me batty.

I use a dual-screen setup with my 13″ Macbook Air and a 23″ Apple Cinema Display (with a Magic Mouse), and the tracking speed doesn’t remain constant across the two screens.

Adjusting for a normal tracking speed on the Cinema Display results in painfully slow mouse movement on the MBA — almost as if the proportional movement (relative to the screen size) is calibrated to remain the same.

Is this an early Lion bug, or is this a new “feature” that I can somehow unwind?

Please help!

Your loving, but annoyed, nephew,
Nate

Dear Nate,

Auntie doesn’t have good news for you. And that’s because the mouse speed option cannot be set on a per-monitor basis. Mouse tracking is controlled as part of system defaults, in the Universal Access preferences pane.

The actual preference is called mouseDriverMaxSpeed and can range as an integer between 1 (lethargic) and 32 (zippy). Here’s how you’d read the current setting from the command line.

defaults read com.apple.universalaccess mouseDriverMaxSpeed

Whatever number you set to feel right on one monitor will either feel draggy or hyper on the other.

Unfortunately, the problem with auto-scaling the mouse lies in detecting when the cursor has changed between screens. There’s no system notification generated so nothing for Auntie to build a tool on, to update the defaults as you move the cursor around.

So, Auntie thought she’d throw this one out to all her other nephews and nieces. Have any of you found a solution for Nate that doesn’t hinge on system notifications?

Hugs,

Auntie T.

Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me adjust my mouse tracking on the fly originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just about every Internet and print news outlet has paid tribute to Steve Jobs over the past few days, but PaidContent.org — a website dedicated to discussion of the sale of digital content — had one of the more interesting plaudits. In a post by Media Guardian’s Charles Arthur, Jobs was rightly given his place in history as the “man who got the Internet to pay for content.”

Arthur reflected on the sad state of affairs in the media biz just ten years ago. He notes that “if you wanted to download some music, your best bet was Napster or one of the filesharing systems such as LimeWire or KaZaA.” For the services that were actually considered legal, there were services like PressPlay and MusicNet requiring US$15 monthly subscriptions for low-quality streams that couldn’t be burned to CD.

Jobs came along with the iPod, and then followed up with the iTunes Music Store. If it hadn’t been for Jobs persuading the music companies in 2003 to license their songs to Apple, the store wouldn’t have happened. As Arthur notes, the music companies figured that Apple was just a tiny company with a minimal market share in the computer business, so they went along for the ride.

And a huge ride it was — Apple sold a million songs in the first week of the iTunes Music Store, which at that time was only available in the U.S. The iTunes Store now sells TV shows, movies, apps, and books in addition to songs, with sales of both songs and apps in the tens of billions.

As Arthur comments towards the end of his post, “Jobs was a champion of getting customers who would pay you for your stuff.” By focusing on “getting something great to the customer with as few obstacles as possible,” Jobs was able to insist that customers pay for that value and the content. While he is largely known as the man who brought the world some “insanely great” hardware, Jobs should also be remembered for his lasting impact on sales of digital content.

How Steve Jobs got the Internet to pay for content originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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GeekTool is a system preferences module that lets you display information like specialized calendars on your desktop via plugins. GeekTool also has a shell mode that lets you launch custom scripts or commands and an image mode to watch common system parameters such as CPU load and memory availability. The app is targeted towards advanced users with knowledge of unix and shell commands. If you don’t want to write your own script, there’s a variety of scripts (geeklets) available here.

GeekTool landed in the App Store a little over a week ago and is available here for free. If your desktop is boring and empty, check out GeekTool and put that unused screen real estate to good use.

GeekTool available on the Mac App Store originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Shrine of Apple website is worth a look for the diehard Apple fan who wants to reminisce about Apple’s product history. The site provides photos and video for many products that Apple has made. Each section has a description of the hardware or software, specifications, and a poll that lets you say whether you wanted the product, owned one in the past or own one now. There are a few gaps here and there that need to be filled in (the iPad section is blank) but it’s a nice effort that, once completed, will chronicle Apple’s long history as an innovator in the computing and mobile phone marketplace.

[Hat Tip to The Loop]

Shrine of Apple offers visual history of Apple’s hardware originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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