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

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

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

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?

Everybody has been talking about the lack of Adobe Flash in the iPhone and iPod, but what about Flash memory, the unrelated non-volatile memory technology?

Everyone has looked at the price sheet by this point and knows that there are WiFi iPad models at $499, $599 and $699 with 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB storage respectively. Well, that non-volatile storage is Flash memory, the same stuff you can buy in any store in the form of Compact Flash (CF), or SD cards, etc.

Right now, the incremental price Apple is charging for the extra Flash storage is more or less in line with the prices of Flash memory on the open market. The problem is there is no upgrade path. The iPad is completely lacking a card slot for expanding its storage. So, if you buy, say, the 32 GB model, and decide later that you need more storage, the only way to get more is to buy another whole iPad! This is even though, by the time you need it, the extra 32 GB will probably be very inexpensive. Unacceptable.

In fact, the only digital connector on the iPad is Apple’s proprietary dock connector. This lack of expandability is not only a marketing ploy, but also part of the overall lock-down of the iPad as a platform. The iPad is burdened right out of the box with the curse of DRM. Users of the iPad will be stuck accessing only the content Apple wants them to access, using the applications Apple wants them to use. This is a totally closed platform, and users should beware of giving up their open, general purpose laptop for this closed environment. Here, Apple has either submitted to, or totally joined forces with the RIAA and other copyright holders to impose their will on the users of any device which may be used to view anything which might be copyrighted.

Apple has moved away from DRM under public pressure before. They removed DRM from songs on the iTunes music library. To help pressure Apple to remove DRM from the iPad, please see the Defective by Design web page.

-Jamie

Adobe has had some issues with security of their products lately. Because Flash and Acrobat are invoked from the user’s browser while browsing the web they are available to be exploited by malicious web pages. Because these products are widely installed, they are an attractive target for hackers. Adobe doesn’t seem to be taking these problems seriously enough, as you will see.

First of all, I urge you to make sure your copies of these products are up-to-date. Adobe has been releasing security updates to fix some exploits that are already being used by hackers. If you are using a Macintosh, there’s a good chance you don’t need or have Adobe Acrobat installed. That’s because Apple’s Preview comes with MacOS and does a fine job displaying PDF files.

If you don’t know why you need Acrobat reader instead of Preview, you should delete it from your Mac. Preview won’t handle some of the more esoteric features that can appear in PDF files, which is precisely why it is less likely to be hacked. If you do have Acrobat Reader installed on your Mac, this may be of interest to you.

One of the gee-whiz things Acrobat supports is embedded Java Script in PDF documents. Not only can it read the documents, it can execute them! That’s dangerous. That’s why security expert Steve Gibson (www.grc.com) has been recommending on the Security Now! podcast that users of Acrobat go into the preferences and turn off Java Script.

But what happens if you have Java Script turned off, and run into one of the rare PDF documents that actually uses that feature? Here’s what happened on the Windows version:

And sure enough, if you click Yes, it re-enables Java Script not just for that one document, but for all time, leaving the door wide open for the hackers.

This is very poor. Adobe is arrogantly assuming that they know better, and that you really should have that turned on from now on.

I have been seeing weird behavior in iPhoto and Aperture when editing photos. This is happening pretty much every time I try to use certain photo tools, such as crop or straighten. Here’s some examples. I took photos of the screen with a camera, because this is too weird for a screen capture, I think.

First, select an innocent photo of a bird in iPhoto, and select the straighten tool:

Now the slightest adjustment of the straighten tool:

Here’s another manifestation using the crop tool. That weird rectangle in the upper left shouldn’t be there. Also notice the appearance of the overview thumbnail (it looks like the same junk as the photo above).

The first time I saw this, I though my photo was probably ruined, and I would have to reboot. However, I have found that the problem is only on the screen. Fortunately, the photo is not permanently affected. Usually, as soon as you exit the edit mode and look at the picture, it looks normal again.

I called Apple Tech support about this once, but didn’t really get anywhere. The problem was present under Leopard and persisted after the Snow Leopard install. I am using a 20″ iMac 2GHz Core 2 Duo.

-Jamie Cox

We saw and discussed a video tutorial podcast from ScreenCastsOnline about iTunes 9. We were using iTunes to learn how to use iTunes. Humm.

Tutorial podcasts can be a great way to learn about your Mac. They are usually brief, and usually packed with a lot of information. There is something for everybody. I’ve been using a Mac since 1984, and still learn some useful tips from some of the basic tutorials.

Apple’s own video podcasts are a great way for beginners to learn about the Mac. All podcasts are free. Podcasts were originally audio, but many now have video.

We also took a look at iTunesU and the Free on iTunes page, both accessible from the front page of the iTunes music store.

Someone asked about importing a VHS tape into the Mac. To do that you need a hardware converter box, such as the EyeTV 250 from Elgato.

Several members are using the EyeTV software or hardware to record TV programs off the air. There is a TV tuner for the Mac from Hauppauge which is compatible with the EyeTV software.

For watching all that video on your TV, you might want to use an AppleTV, or a similar set-top box, such as the one from Western Digital mentioned at the meeting.

AT&T U-verse (TV/phone/internet service) is now rolling out in the Melbourne area. The service got some good reviews from those that have it. It’s not available everywhere, though.

-Jamie Cox

That new iMac has a seriously big screen. Do the math:

iMac 2,560 x 1,440 = 3,686,400 pixels
19″ Monitor 1,280 x 1,024 = 1,310,720
3,686,400 / 1,310,720 = 2.8 times as big

That’s nearly as many pixels as three (3) conventional 19″ monitors. I have two 19″ monitors at work, and that’s a nice amount of screen real estate, but to have way more than that all on a single screen, whoa!

It’s also the equivalent of exactly four HDTV pictures at 720×1280. So, it has the screen area to show four different 720p HD videos at once.

Many people have problems sending email reliably from their iPhone or other mobile devices. Receiving mail is usually not a problem, but sometimes, you can’t send mail. Mail accounts at the major players, such as gmail or me.com are usually not affected, but if you have an email account from a hosting provider, or small business, you likely have seen this problem. A common symptom would be that you can send email when you are at home, connected to your home WiFi network, but can’t always send when you are on the road.

There are two problems here. First, because of the spam problem, most mail servers will no longer accept mail from just any source. For example, the RoadRunner mail servers will accept mail only if you are connected via their network. You may be a customer, but if you are connecting via, say, AT&T’s network, they will not accept your attempt to send mail.

The other problem, also due to the curse of spam, is that some ISPs are blocking port 25 which is usually used to send mail. That stops spammers from originating spam from the ISP’s network. It also prevents legitimate users from sending mail via any but the ISP’s own email servers.

The usual advice offered is to use web-based mail clients. This does work, but is less intuitive and less convenient than using dedicated mail software. Some users may also resort to sending mail from another email address that is working, even though they would prefer to use a different account. There is a better way, so keep reading.

If AT&T set up your iPhone for you, they may have configured your account to send mail via their own mail server cwmx.com. AT&T does this to help overcome this problem and prevent customer complaints. The name cwmx is from AT&T’s alter ego, Cingular Wireless, thus stands for Cingular Wireless Mail eXchange. This will work fine as long as you are sending via AT&T’s own network. However, it may or may not work when you are connected via WiFi.

The solution to both problems is fully authenticated mail servers, where the client connects via a secure protocol, and authenticates using a username and password, or other mechanism. Then, the mail server knows that you are who you say you are, and are not some random spammer. If the provider of your email account allows authenticated connections, then great, you should configure your mail software to use them, and your problems should be over. Unfortunately, authenticated mail servers are still rare, and many providers do not offer them yet. Usually they will beat around the bush, but never come right out and say they don’t support authenticated mail connections.

This problem is common enough, and annoying enough that some companies offer services just to fix it. For $2 per month, you can get an account with AUTHSMTP.com, which will allow you to use their mail servers as a relay to send mail from your own preferred email account.

However, there is still another way. If you have a (free) Google mail account (gmail), you can use Google’s mail servers to relay your email to the server of your choice. Google is really leading the way in this area. Just today (14 Jan 2010), Google made all webmail sessions automatically fully secure, in that they always use the SSL protocol to authenticate and protect your session from snooping.

Google actually sanctions this mail relay arrangement, and even provides instructions on how to do it. Here are Google’s instructions:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22370

The only drawback to this is that it may also display your gmail address to the recipient as well as the 3rd part email address you are sending from in the form of

yourusername@gmail.com on behalf of customaddress@mydomain.com

I think most recipients will never see this, and if they do, they will get over it.

When setting this up in your mail client, it can be confusing. Remember that for your outgoing mail server, you must use the gmail server, and your gmail username and password to get you into that server, but your incoming mail server still uses the credentials of your original mail account.

Most of this discussion applies equally well to laptops and other mobile email readers. I have tried this on an iPhone though, and know it will work.

-Jamie Cox