MacMAD Blog

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

Apple’s been taking some heat recently because the iPhone and the new iPad don’t have Flash. I on the other hand, would like to congratulate Apple on this move. If you don’t know, Adobe’s Flash is a popular way to put things in motion on the web. It is behind many of the dynamic effects you see on the web.

However, Flash is an aging, proprietary, non-standard, cycle-stealing, insecure piece of bloatware whose primary function seems to be to push irritating ads at web surfers. I generally surf the web with Flash entirely blocked. The only time I miss it is on certain sites which use flash for video, such as YouTube, which is probably the best application of flash on the web. Since the iPhone already has a dedicated YouTube App, the primary thing you are missing is a bunch of very annoying ads. This doesn’t seem like a problem to me.

Apple has frequently been innovative in what it includes and does not include in its computer systems. Apple was first to introduce the 3.5″ floppy disk, and the first to leave it out when its time had passed. Apple was also the first to drop the parallel port and RS-232 serial port. These were superseded by ADB and now by USB. Apple was quick to drop built-in modems as the technology was eclipsed by Ethernet and WiFi.

In the same way, Flash’s time has come and gone. It’s going to be a little tougher with Flash, because Apple can’t do it alone. Flash has become entrenched as a de-facto standard. Apple is leading the way, but others need to follow.

A true open standard for video and animation on the web is possible. HTML 5 eliminates the need for Flash. YouTube already is allowing users to beta-test HTML 5 delivery of videos. People are seeing noticeably lower CPU load while playing HTML 5 videos compared to Flash.

-Jamie

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