The Syncing Apple

We are gearing up for some iPhone development, so these look marvelous.

Photoshop UI Elements


OmniGraffle UI Elements

I was fortunate enough to pick up an EEE 901 for a work project and have spent some time with this machine. I chose the Linux version with 20G, which comes broken down into 2 different ‘drives’ (they aren’t really SSD drives, just chips that plug into the ePCI sockets, but they emulate real PATA drives). The first drive is 4G, the 2nd is 16G. The 16G is replaceable and some people can even remove it and replace it with 1.8 hard-drives (the type used in iPod and MacAir) if their 901 comes with a ZIF socket. Asus carved out the space to hold a 1.8 drive, so they must have been planning for something like this.

The Xandros distro that comes on it is really boring, so I replaced it with Ubuntu Hard Heron. There is a site with good information an a tweaked distro to adapt to the short screen and limited real-esate. People have hacked together a nice replacement kernel that gets back most of the functionality (multi-threading, networking (need to build drivers), soft-keys etc.).

AFter I had Ubuntu working I took the extra step and loaded on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix which is just a series of packages that change the UI. Canonical put this out to address the growing netbook market. The UI works much easier with the 901 (which has tiny, tiny keys and bad trackpad) and selecting and launching apps is easier. There is no reason for the traditional menu-bar UI used on traditional desktop computers.

As for the EEE 901 itself, it’s a mixed love on my end. The size and raw speed are nice. The slow SSD disk is bad, the tiny keys are much too small to use for typing anything but URLs or simple commands, even then, you are prone to typos unless you have the hands of a 10 year old. The trackpad is sloppy and the pad’s buttons require to much force. I’m using the device for work that won’t require much input on the keypad, so I’m not so worried. I’m getting the MSI Wind soon and I’ll compare that to the 901 when I’ve had it while.

It looks like on Friday hermitworks released a video showing a patched version ioquake for the iTouch/iPhone. No word is this is built on the opensource toolchain or the Official SDK, but I bet its jailbroken.

Upgrading to Leopard 10.5.2 fixed many sync issues with iDisk, however, is stopped syncing all together on my ibook. This ars article has some good tips on fixing sync issues w/ iDisk.

How-To: Truly reset your .Mac sync data

I’ve never been happier with a device than I have been my my iPhone. However, there is one huge problem. You can’t write your own software for it (this doesn’t count) , or even hack some existing software that someone else wrote. OK, at least you can’t do those things without using a process called jailbreak, and then you can’t even update your iPhone without worrying that you’ll lose everything you’ve installed on your it. Recently Android was announced by Google as a device platform, not a device implementation. They got other people on board. But the killer piece is that you can go out right now and download a full SDK for OSX, Linux or Windows. It includes a full emulator to test your code and even a plugin for eclipse. And you can code in Java. Why did Apple skimp on the SDK for the iPhone? February is a long way away. There is probably a legion of people out coding for Android tonight that would have been working on iPhone apps had Apple released a SDK. Some are already wondering if the iPhone can be put to better use….

Can it crush the iPhone? Maybe. In 2008, when there are HTC devices running Android for $99 (or even free) at Sprint, who is going to pay $400 for an iPhone? When they build a dozen different form-factors of Android devices how can the iPhone compete? I suppose there will always be a market for iPhone as long as they function as video iPods, and as long as Apple keeps us locked into iTunes. But Android is using webkit! That’s half the reason I bought the iPhone. Here is a deeper look at the Android stack. Plus you can win some of the $10 million they are giving away for cool applications written from now till March 2008.

After getting my iPhone, I thought I finally wouldn’t need or want another device for long time. Too bad it only took two months for that sentiment to disappear.

A screen grab of the SDK running on my Mac….

I’ve been in search of a quick, simple and modern image editor for the Mac. For far too long I’ve been dragging around Photoshop 7, simply because I know I can use it to quickly do what I want. But what I need to do is limited. I want to resize and scale photos, add text (watermarks) to them and maybe overlay one or two. Maybe take a PDF and rasterize it to a thumbnail. I deal a lot with screenshots and adding hi-lights to them is about the most complicated task I ever need to do.

I’ve looked at the Gimp for OSX and recently Acorn (which seems totally alien to me- couldn’t get it to do the most basic things) and have been frustrated, till today. Banging away at google I hit upon Imagewell. The people at XtraLean put this app out, and it is exactly what I was looking for (and it works fine in Leopard). It has a crazy price (free for basic stuff- and what it does for free is amazing) and is only $20 bucks to unlock the more advanced features.

It easily passed my acid test- I was able to download it without a bunch of questions and i could use it right away. I pulled in a PDF and was able to quickly resize it to the size I needed and save it out as a png. Very easy and intutive. Intrigued, I went back to their site and looked around the Forums and stumbled across their concise and short screen casts, which quickly illustrate the cool things you can do with this app. I think I’ll buy this one and can leave Photoshop 7 to finally wither away.

Trying to get my mysql environment setup on 10.5 I ran head-long into the mysql python 1.22 drivers breaking with xcode 3.

from _mysql.c:40: /usr/include/sys/types.h:92: error: duplicate ‘unsigned’ /usr/include/sys/types.h:92: error: two or more data types in declaration specifiers error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

The fixed is coved over at the Ingels 3.0. fairly simple fix, but due to my complete lack of c programming skils, one that I couldn’t have come up with on my own. But edit a few lines and it complies fine. Thanks Ingles.

Browsing the net I came across a great site that answered some questions I had about the new firewall in Leopard. Using it now on the company macbook, and it’s nice. Having the 4 gigs of ram helps also. My poor macbook was pushed to the limit with just 2. The site is worth checking out- there are lots of good Mac tibits.

I’ve hit on a little TV obsession here in my idle hours between baby feedings. This one is cool because it involves way more than just watching something on the telly. This is unavailable-in-the-US show watching. The kind where you pull torrents of the show down from the net using semi-legit sites, then go about converting them so I can watch them on my Mac and put them into iTunes with the correct MPEG format for watching on my iPhone. Now I can watch these episodes on the go, or rather, seated with my one hand full of baby, the other clutching the Jesus Phone and keeping it away from baby vomit.

The show is The IT Crowd, [Fancast Link] and here is a little snippet on YouTube to give you a taste…

Here is a site with links to the 1st season episodes. I found my shows here.

Converting them to iPhone format– that was a another little battle in itself. Google should be ashamed of the link-spam mess that they have become, all in the name of profit. If you google iphone video convert you get pages of link-spam and junk sites pushing ads at you. After more careful digging around on some macintosh sites, I found what I was looking for. VisualHub did the converting perfectly, and gave me excelling quality videos on my iPhone. It cost $35, but is well worth the price for converting Windows format movies to the Mac compatible formats, as well as formatting for the screen size of the iPhone and all the iPods capable of playing video. It will even put them into iTunes for you after it has finished converting them.

I recommend VisualHub if you have a Mac and video-capable iPod and want to easily convert over some of the many free shows available on the net.

I’m planning on getting iLife ‘08 or an airport express.

Getting the $100 credit is the nice touch by Apple. I was happy paying $599 for my iPhone- the price drop will only mean more iPhones on the street, and more iPhone compatible websites.

Yes, this is all over, but it’s so funny.

Take that apple!

iTunes has the new iPhone 1.0.1 update- the first one from Apple. It says it just has some bug fixes.

I’ve been dreaming of having a USB keyboard that uses the keys in my Macbook. I’ve been in total love with the keyboard on the MacBook since it came out and I picked one up a few weeks later. The keyboards on MacBookPros feel like crap. The current Mac USB keyboards are also near useless- their gentle slope hurts my hands after a few days of use. Soon however, my dreams may be reality as pictures of the new Apple keyboards are leaking all over the net, and they are definitely MacBook-based. The MacBook keyboard looks like an old 1980’s chicklet keyboard, however, it has the best spacing and feedback of any keyboard I’ve ever used.

See Apple Keyboards Compared to Old Keyboards at circa1978.com.

I’ve complied OpenEinstein 2007-07 build 48. Current as of today. You can download it below. It’s about 1.8 megs, bzipped. It will expand into a 16 meg file.

Feel free to download the binary here. You’ll need this file also: Einstein.rex. The last thing you need of course is a real Newton ROM, so please have that handy. Directions are in the manual– it’s worth the read if you are going to try and run this.

I’m still trying to figure the best way to make this run on the 770. I like killing the maemo_af_desktop, so that the OpenE isn’t locked into it, but sometimes OpenE won’t start. If someone has it going full screen on the 770, please add a comment for your exact startup line. I still haven’t gotten it to go the full 800×480 on the 770.

We had another puzzle at work again. How to manage all the JMX controls that the devlopers had nicely written for us using little tiny MBeans.

Normally, the devs just ssh -X over to their tomcat instance and fire up the jmx console via X. This won’t scale out to 10’s of tomcat nodes. And we have to manage some custom controls on each node.

A great open-source app that handles this smartly is jManage. It’s a self-contained jetty container and app. It deploys quickly and is a snap to setup.

Their Tomcat directions were empty, but I figured out how to make it work with some googling. I’ve since updated their Tomcat Wiki page with the directions. It’s easy. If you need something like this to consolidate JMX management, jManage is just the lightweight tool you need.

[UPDATE 7/25] A good page from sun on JMX Management.

There is a lot of buzz regarding this article that was printed in the NYT this morning. ISE (Independent Security Evaluators) found that not only does every process run as root on the iPhone, the heap is executable. So they fuzzed mobileSafari till they found an overflow, which allowed them to execute any API call on the iPhone. More details are in their white-paper at their site (and direct link is below). They notified Apple back on the 17th of July.

THere white paper discussing their discover techniques and findings is here.

I suppose we’ll be getting our first iPhone update fairly soon now.

The first ever non-apple application has been allegedly run on the iPhone. The people over at the iPhone DevWiki report. Watch out Nokia 770, soon the iPhone will be as hackable as you are!

At least, some day it will. This user, Nightwatch is using his own arm toolchain, so this isn’t like we have a nice Scratchbox available to install onto debian. But as time moves on, our own apps on the iPhone draw closer and closer.