MacMAD Blog

My young niece has an iPod touch that has been working fine for her, but recently the headphone jack has become unreliable, and she can’t listen through headphones. One or both channels keep cutting out.

Apple appears to have done a good job with the headphone jack on the touch, even using gold plated contacts. However this unit has done very hard service with continuous use by kids and probably cats and dogs, too, and the jack is just worn out.

Typically, any repair of a modern electronic device like the iPod costs almost as much as a new one. So what to do?

One could buy and use a wireless Bluetooth stereo headset. It’s a neat idea, and her iPod is one of the models that supports it. But they are kind of expensive, and we’re on a kid’s budget here.

How about the dock connector? Is there some way to get audio out of that? Turns out there is.

I found an inexpensive product to do just that. However with the dock-connector solution, you don’t get volume control, so you need some way to adjust the volume. So here’s the complete solution, in two budget products.

This entire deal costs $12.50 before shipping and tax. The local Radio shack had the volume control cable, but the other connector had to be ordered. The dock connector is an especially great deal for $3.51, and could be useful for connecting iPods and iPhones to various components.

The volume control is even smaller than it looks, so the whole setup won’t be too unwieldy.

Update: The dock connector has been received, and all is working great! Note: the photos above are links to the sites selling the products.

-Jamie

In my search for a language-sensitive HTML editor, I have finally turned to Xcode. Xcode is Apple’s software development environment. It’s free, and usually comes with your Mac on the software install disk.

I’ve been looking for some sort of reasonable HTML editor that understood HTML, and colorized the elements. It turns out that the answer is Xcode.

Xcode does a lot more than edit HTML. It is intended to develop entire Macintosh (and iOS) applications. It is a very big and potentially scary application. However, using it to edit HTML is trivial. You don’t have to create a project or anything, just select open from the file menu, and away you go. Here’s what it looks like:

Update: Apple’s Dashcode is even more appropriate. It is intended for creating Dashboard widgets, and gives the same great editing features as Xcode in a lighter-weight application.

Enjoy,
-Jamie

The App store, as well as Android Marketplace, needs a systematic way to try an app on a trial basis. Right now, all risk is on the customer. If you buy an app and it doesn’t meet your needs, you are just out the price of the app, with apparently, no recourse. It’s really difficult to tell from comments and screen shots whether a given app is any good, or whether it will work for you. iTunes lets you hear a good part of a song before you buy. Apple should extend this idea to apps, by allowing a trial period.

Some publishers publish a trial or free version of their app, but what I’m looking for is a general scheme that works for all apps. I would be much more likely to buy a paid app, especially a more expensive one, if I could try it first.

Does anyone know of any existing way to do this?

-Jamie

Your browser uses utilities called plug-ins to handle special file types, play media and generally add functionality and fun to your web browsing experience. However these plug-ins can be a vector for your computer to be attacked by malware on the web. Your best defense is to update your software regularly, so that well-known vulnerabilities are fixed on your system before the bad guys get there. But most people don’t think about their plug-ins often, and many probably don’t remember that they have plug-ins.

The good folks at Mozilla have published a page to help check your plug-ins to see if they are out-of-date. It works for all browsers, not just Firefox. It works on Safari. However, it is still in development. They haven’t gotten all plug-in makers to cooperate in providing version data yet, so it can’t identify the latest version of all plug-ins yet, but it works okay for the major ones, and will at least remind you that you have the rest installed.

If you don’t know why you have a particular plug-in installed, maybe you should get rid of it.

Next, here’s a cool tip for Firefox users. Sorry, but this one doesn’t work on Safari, but it does work on Firefox on Mac OS and Windows. You probably know you have a “home page”, that automatically loads when you start Firefox. But, Firefox is a tabbed browser, and you can have multiple tabs open at once. How can you make Firefox start with several tabs, with a page of your choice in each tab? Say I always want to start Firefox with the Apple home page in one tab, and the MacMAD home page in another tab. In the General tab of Firefox Preferences, for the Home page, enter:

http://www.apple.com/ | http://www.macmad.org

That’s the vertical bar character between the two URLs. Now, Firefox will open these two tabs whenever it starts up. Or, you can navigate to the tabs and page you want, and then select Use Current Pages on the preferences pane, and Firefox will fill in the URLs for you.

-Jamie

For our May meeting, Dennis Crowley presented secrets of the MacOS.

We peeked into some seldom-seen corners of your favorite Mac applications. Everyone learned something at this meeting.

Resolving Duplicates in iTunes
In iTunes, you often end up with duplicate, or nearly duplicate songs, that you might want to eliminate. The menu option Find Duplicates ordinarily finds any two songs with the same title. If you hold down the option key, this menu item becomes Find Exact Duplicates.

Address Book
Most people don’t know that you can print envelopes and address labels directly from the humble Address Book application. Select File:Print, and explore the extensive print dialog box that appears. It contains many powerful options, including templates for printing on the commonly available Avery labels. You can even customize your return address with an icon. This is great for sending invitations or Christmas cards.

Show Birthdays in iCal
Add birthdays to your address book contacts with Card:Add Field:Birthday.
Birthdays from address book can show in iCal, but you must enable this in the preferences. In Address Book, you can customize the fields. You can change a field for one card, or add a specialized field to the template used for all your Address Book cards.

Tips for Mail
Did you know you can select multiple mail messages and then Save Attachments?

Also, you can select two or more mailboxes such as your inbox and outbox, and then select View:Organize by Thread. This view makes it easy to follow the conversations you were a part of.

Use the rules feature of Mail to help control spam, and to put mail in the desired folders.
Dennis uses the Previous Recipients list in a rule to help determine if a message is spam. Mail keeps this list of every email address you have ever used, whether they are in your address book or not. You should take a look at it occasionally to delete unwanted entries, and to add wanted ones to your address book. The previous recipients list is also used to make pop-up suggestions as you type email addresses, so your life will be easier if you delete incorrect entries.

Dennis likes the free plug-in Letterbox, which adds the option to moves the preview pane to right side of the window in Mail.

Smart Folders are a powerful tool in Mail. Smart folders show a kind of virtual view into your mail. For example, you could make a smart folder that shows any message containing “MacMAD”. Beware that if you delete a message from a smart folder, you are deleting the original message everywhere.

iPhoto Tips
iPhoto opens faster if you turn off sharing. If you’re not using photo sharing, you should turn it off.
If you hold Option-cmd while opening iPhoto, you will see several options, including the option to rebuild your iPhoto library. Make sure you have good backups before doing this.

iPhoto has its own trash. Deleted photos still take up space on your hard drive until you empty the trash from within iPhoto.

Preferences
Dennis went over some gems from the System Preferences. His best tip was to always explore the preferences pane of a new application to find out what it will do for you. You may find features that will pleasantly surprise you.

Other Apps
Dennis recommended the use of SuperDuper! as a backup utility. It makes a complete copy of your hard drive.

Use the free utility Monolingual to save space by removing unused foreign language support from your system and applications.

Apple’s Preview application can merge PDF files! If you have several separate PDF documents, you can drag and drop them to create a single merged PDF document.

Where did these tips come from? It should be no surprise, but Apple has some excellent tutorials on using the Mac. These videos tend to be short and to the point. See:
http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/ or for switchers from Windows, see http://www.apple.com/support/switch101/ .

Also, Macworld has some excellent tips. Visit http://www.macworld.com/howto.html .

Members are eligible for a 30% discount from Take Control Ebooks . Just ask one of the club officers. We are not allowed to put the discount code on the web. These books tend to cover their topic in great detail. If you are looking for in-depth discussion of a specific topic, try these.

See you next meeting.

-Jamie

Have you ever wondered whether the batteries in your remote control were okay?

Well, you can test any infrared remote control using your Mac’s built-in camera. Open an application, like Photo Booth, that uses that camera, and lets you monitor what the camera is seeing. Point your remote at the camera, and push a button on the remote control. You will see the emitter on the front of the remote light up if it is working. This is because most digital cameras are sensitive to infrared light. You can’t see it, but the camera sees it as white light.

This trick will work with most digital cameras, video cameras, cell phone cameras, etc. Try it with your iPhone. Most remote controls are infrared, so it should work with the majority of remote controls for TVs, stereos and similar gadgets. It definitely works with the Apple remote.

We now have a Flickr account for our MacMAD photos. Our Flickr user name is Mac_MAD.

-Jamie

The public WiFi at the Brevard County Library system works a lot like the system at some hotels. There is no password or access controls to access the WiFi network itself, but you do need to authenticate to access the internet.

Now at the library, “authentication” means you enter your library card #, or just click the guest button.

You get a popup window that says something like “Don’t close this window. You can minimize it, but don’t close it.” As long as that window stays active, you can browse the internet in another window or in other applications.

The iPad totally fails at this. Why? Because it Does Not Have Multitasking! Safari only has one active window at a time. If you open another Safari window, or switch to another app, your internet connection is dropped.

The iPad is totally unable to use the free public WiFi in this environment. By contrast, I was able to use the internet via the library’s WiFi on my Andorid phone. Why did this work better? Because it has multitasking.

This is the poster child for Why You Need Multitasking.

Even though I got an iPad the first day they were available, I’m certainly not the ultimate iPad fanatic. I didn’t have a pressing need for one, other than a gift certificate at an Apple Dealer that was burning a hole in my pocket.

My envisioned use for the iPad was to read the news at the breakfast table, and some light web browsing.

I’ve already commented in this blog on the announced lack of Adobe Flash support (that’s a good thing), and the lack of any memory expansion (that’s a bad thing).

Quick summary:

• It’s a giant iPod
• It’s fast
• The Safari browser is fast.
• The battery lasts a looong time.
• It feels heavy and clumsy as a book reader.
• If you put any video on it, it will fill up fast.

Initial Setup

If you have an iPod touch, or an iPhone, you already know exactly how to work this thing. The iPad needs to connect to a computer with iTunes to be able to do anything. When I first turned it on it had a blank screen with a plea to be connected to the mothership (iTunes). You sync it with media of your choice using iTunes. No surprises there. The only thing new is the ability to sync books with the device.

Use as a Book Reader

The iTunes store features both paid and free books. The selection of paid books isn’t too exciting yet, but expect it to grow. The iPad can display books in the EPUB format. I tested this out by going to Gutenberg.org and downloading some free books. I copied these into my iTunes library where they were synced to the iPad. I’m real please with how this worked, and this opens up a very large collection of books for use by iPad owners. These books displayed with very nice formatting, and images displayed well.

The iPad rapidly adjusts the format of books (and most other media) depending on the horizontal or vertical orientation of the device. It will even work upside down.

I found the weight of the iPad to be more than I expected. It weighs more than a paperback, but less than a large hardback. I found it difficult to grasp, hold and carry. There is nothing convenient to hold it by. It feels dense, thin and slippery. These are not extremely annoying observations for me, but I think there will be a good opportunity for aftermarket covers and carrying cases. Apple is proud of how thin the iPad is, but I feel it might actually be too thin to hold comfortably.

The screen is impeccably bright and clear. There is an automatic brightness feature in the menus, but I’m not sure how it works. There is no camera, so I don’t know if or how it senses ambient light.

Considerations for Outdoor Use

The screen is reasonably visible even outside in direct sunlight. It’s way brighter than most screens would be in such circumstances. However, the screen is very shiny, and direct reflection of the sun or other bright objects will obviously make the screen unreadable.

When the WiFi Model is available, people are going to want to use it in the car for navigation. The screen is bright enough for that, but watch out for the Polaroid effect. Like the iPhone and at least some other smartphones, the iPad screen is polarized. If you view it while wearing polarized sunglasses, the screen will become invisible in some orientations. On the iPhone and my HTC phone, the vertical orientation is viewable, but the horizontal orientation is not while wearing polarized sunglasses. On the iPad, the polarization is the other way — meaning if you hold the iPad in the horizontal orientation, you can see it fine, but if you hold it in the vertical orientation while wearing polarized sunglasses, you are likely to think it is broken, because the screen looks completely black.

Using the iPad for Video

I’ve used the iPad to watch some TV shows, some YouTube videos and some movies. The screen size is pretty near optimum for hand held viewing. Everything played from the iPad’s internal memory played speedily with no hiccups. I was having some trouble watching YouTube videos, which were stopping and seizing up part way through. The YouTube material looked great, but YouTube just can’t keep up. (I know my Internet connection is up to the task.)

The iPad hasn’t really decided how it’s going to store and organize video yet. There is a Video application, but videos can also be played from within iTunes. I couldn’t figure out why some videos that i synced went to one App, while others went to the other. In iTunes, the list of videos is available in text format. But, in the Video app, the only way to view the list of videos is apparently by an icon derived from the first frame of the first video of a given series. This works okay for video from iTunes, but is completely meaningless for home video, or for shows recorded with, say, eyeTV. There is no accompanying text to tell you anything at all about the video. YouTube is another separate app.

There is a free app in the app store from ABC that lets you watch most of their prime time offerings, with limited commercials. It looks okay, but only works in the vertical orientation, with medium quality video. I’d really rather watch video in the larger horizontal orientation. You can select any episode of any of the offered shows and start watching right away.

I also downloaded and tried the Netflix app. This worked perfectly, and allows you to stream movies from your Netflix account. Audio and video quality was very good.

About the Headphone Jack

When I tried to plug in my headphones with a standard 1/8 inch plug, the plug went in about 3/4 of the way and stopped dead. I was cursing Apple for using yet another weird non-standard connector. Later I tried my Apple iPod earbuds, and the same thing happened.
Both sets of phones were unusable. Or so I thought. I really expected the earbuds to work, so I just pushed really hard. With a mighty shove, they went in all the way. They work fine now, and so does the other set of headphones. The iPad headphone jack is just really tight, at least when it is new. It took a lot more force to plug in the headphones than I expected.

Other Features and Surprises

Heads up, if you are still considering the WiFi model. It does not have a GPS receiver. The 3G model will have one. If this matters to you, wait for, and pay for, the 3G model. It really makes sense, since the main reason to have GPS is to use Google Maps. If you’re on the move, such that you don’t know where you are, you probably won’t have WiFi, therefore, you can’t download maps from Google anyway, so having the GPS wouldn’t help much. However, I didn’t know this before getting my iPad.

Another thing I didn’t know is that the 3G model will not require a contract to use the 3G network. You have the option of paying by the month. That seems more attractive to me, as I already have one phone contract, and would not be interested in having another one.

The iPad has a physical switch to lock the screen orientation. My guess is that this is for reading or watching video in bed, and when the unit is lying on a table and the orientation is ambiguous, although it will also make the iPad more useful in microgravity. Thanks, Apple for thinking of this — I’ve been hoping for HTC to add that feature to my HTC phone in the next software release.

I got the iPad on the first day through a local Apple affiliate dealer, although it was only announced for the official Apple stores, online, and through Best Buy. I thought I would have to wait a week or so. I don’t know if that means sales were slower than expected, or more likely, they just pushed product out through some unannounced channels.

If you’re thinking about buying one, but still aren’t sure, you can take a look at the user guide here (PDF iPad User Guide).

Request for Features and Fixes
I have an AppleTV. It has WiFi. It syncs with iTunes over the network (WiFi or Ethernet). The iPad also has WiFi, and syncs with iTunes, but it doesn’t do it over WiFi. You have to plug it into a USB connection. Apple should make this work on the iPad just like it works with AppleTV. That would be awesome.

I am a Flickr user. Flickr is an online site that lets you store and share your photographs. There is a serious disconnect between the user interface of the iPad, and modern web sites like Flickr. If a Flickr user goes to the Organize tab, he sees the instruction “Drag Items Here to Edit Them as a Batch”. Oops. You can’t drag anything in Safari for the iPad. The drag action is interpreted as moving the web page around and doesn’t move anything within the web page.

This is an important use case for me, and it’s totally broken. Apple needs to add a feature to Safari to allow dragging of items within web pages. After all, this is Web 2.0, right?

You can use your iPhone, iPod Touch or any smart phone or similar device to look at 3D photos without any funny glasses or extra hardware. What we’re talking about here is free viewing, a simple technique of seeing 3D in a left-right pair of properly-prepared images.

You can free view 3D stereoscopic images on any type of display such as a computer monitor or on paper. However, using an iPhone or similar device makes it much easier. The combination of a flat display surface, back-lit display and small size in a hand-held device makes the process unusually easy.

Many attempts to free view fail because the image is published or presented too large. Unlike 2D photos, you can’t make a stereo pair an arbitrary size and still be able to view it properly.

While viewing 3D on your phone, you can easily hold it at the angle and distance that works best for you. So, even if you have had trouble free-viewing 3D before, give it a try. It doesn’t get any easier than this. The only problem is that the images end up being rather small.

Here are some more 3D photos for your viewing pleasure in a Flickr set, and as a Picassa album. Use whichever one your device browses most easily. These images are pre-sized to 480 x 320 pixels, which is the resolution of the iPhone, iPod Touch, the HTC Eris, and probably the same or close enough for other smart phones as well.

Hope you enjoyed turning your expensive electronic toy into a View-Master for a while.

-Jamie