Sorry We’re So Quiet

If you’ve been watching this space, or our Twitter feed, or get our articles by email, you’ve probably noticed that we haven’t had much to say lately. Plenty of excuses: it’s summer time, we’re playing with iOS4, a lot of projects for clients, vacations… Oh, and my big Secret Project. All I can say is this:

Watch this space on August 16th. We’ll have plenty to talk about then.

In the meantime, here’s some random Apple thoughts from the past few weeks:

• iOS 4 is an excellent upgrade.  Apple just nailed multi-tasking: they did it in such a way that you get all the functionality but also prevents background apps from killing your battery and crashing the OS.
• The iPhone 4 antenna is way better than its predecessor, provided you don’t hold that spot.
• Even then, “antennagate” is way overblown.
• At least I got a free case out of the deal.
• Apple’s phone testing lab makes me think they know where all the mutants are.
• The new Mac Mini is a great update of the design. Installing a RAM upgrade went from royal pain to stupid simple.
• It was brilliant to release the new Mini on the same day they started taking pre-orders for the iPhone 4.  Talk about candy at the checkout lane.
• The HDMI port on the new Mini is great on my HDTV, but watching all of our shows on the computer isn’t quite as good as a standard DVR yet.  Buffering stinks.
• The Facetime ads make me a little weepy.
• Facetime video calling is really easy and slick.  If this tech takes hold on the computer and/or over the air without Wi-Fi, look out.
• Yes, I called 866-FACETIME.
• We finally have Address Book Server working on the iPhone, thanks to iOS4.  Very nice to have a secure, shared contact list among my team and I on the phone.
• I sold my iPad.  It just wasn’t right for me – I’d rather have my MacBook Air, and when I can’t use it, I usually can’t use my iPad either.
• I promptly got a lot of grief from wife and son.  Wife, who approved the sale but didn’t know what she had until it was gone.  Son, who asks for “iPad” – yes, he actually says it – and has to be handed my old first-model iPhone instead.
• There are a ton of people who really love the iPad, and I still think it is a great device.  I’m not its target audience.  Given the above, I sense there will be another one in my home before year end.
• Snow Leopard Server’s mail service is soooooo much better than Leopard or previous.  This isn’t really news but we did an upgrade and a couple of failover tests recently, and if you’re running Mail service on Leopard Server, I’ll be talking to you about an upgrade.
• The Mac Mini Server got 4.5 out of 5 stars and an Editor’s Choice designation from PC Magazine.  Yes, you read that right.
• Forget iDevices; Apple sold 3.47 million Macs last quarter – the most ever in a single quarter.
• I love it that Apple’s market capitalization is now greater than Microsoft.  For someone who was in this business, rooting for the underdog when it wasn’t even close, that is pretty cool to see.

Thanks for hanging in there with us.  We’ll still be a little quiet between now and August 16, but watch this space.

I’ll be talking to you very soon.

Review: iMovie for iPhone 4

This won’t be a comprehensive review, because those exist elsewhere (best of breed here), but I have put this app through its paces and have a few points to make about it for those on the fence about whether to buy or not.

Things that annoy me:

• Location services must be on to use the app. Why? You can geotag clips, but I don’t want to be FORCED to do so.
• Only video clips shot with an iPhone can be used.
• Added text lasts the entire length of the clip and takes up a big portion of the frame.
• Audio can’t be moved at all, and when it ends, it ends.
• You can trim video from both ends by using handles, but it’s difficult to see what you’re trimming (easier to trim and then import).

Things that I like:

• It’s relatively easy to cute-ify video clips.
• You don’t have to have a desktop computer to join clips on the fly.
• You can pick what size to export, and it includes HD, which looks good (way to make use of the new iPhone 4 video-recording capabilities!).
• You can add video and photos, and you can do the Ken Burns thing with photos. Result: quick-and-dirty video that looks pretty polished.

I spent a half hour messing with this software and slapped together a project of my trip to Italy (see on YouTube). Keep in mind this video was shot with a 3GS—not in HD).

Screenshots:

Ken Burns effect

Choosing image transitions

For $5 this is a fairly sophisticated app. For people who shoot a lot of video clips and like to share them, it’s probably a should-have (eg, people with kids or active blogs). For people who shoot longer videos or videos with multiple devices, it’s probably best to stick with a desktop video-editing software. Beyond a few minutes of editing, iMovie on the iPhone’s limitations just get too frustrating.

BestMacs takes the No Phone Zone Pledge

The "accessory" is your car. It causes a lot of "interference." Just tap YES.

(If you’re expecting some info on the new iPhone 4 and the stuff going on at WWDC, don’t worry, it’s on the way.)

Have you ever been aggravated at being stuck behind someone who was clearly more interested in talking on their phone than driving their car? Yeah, that may have been me.  I took it to a whole new level.  Phone calls, sure.  Texting, yeah.  Emails, you know it. I’ve even repaired clients’ computers from my iPhone while in the car.

Since about 2007, I’ve done all of the above with the iPhone cradled in a heads-up dash-mounted holder from ProClip along with a device that plugs it directly into the car audio for music and charging. You can see from the picture below that the holder puts the iPhone within reach of the fingers on my right hand while I’m holding the wheel. That, in tandem with my Bluetooth speaker phone mounted on the visor, always made me feel like I was safer than the average driver who talks and texts. The fact that I never had an “incident” just bolstered my confidence.

My iPhone dash mount

For better part of the past year, my loving wife has been trying to convince me that my perceived safety was in fact a false sense of invincibility that was going to vanish the first time something really bad happened. I saw the videos on TV and the Internet: like the bus driver who rammed the back of a car on the interstate because he was texting – “but he was looking down at his phone; I have heads-up!” – and the countless studies and PSAs that showed that drivers talking on the phone in the car are as dangerous as drunk drivers – “but they’re holding the phone with one hand; I have a speakerphone” and Dr. Phil talking about how in just one second a car going 30mph moves from one side of his stage to the other – “but even when I’m looking at an email I can see the road!“

Right about the time that Kansas passed its “no texting while driving” law, our DVR snagged an episode of the Oprah show about the perils of texting and driving. And the Queen B said “you are sitting down and watching this whole thing.” I made it through about 15 minutes. Hearing a mother who lost her 9-year old daughter because a distracted driver ran her down with an SUV… and then hearing the grief of a father who lost his 18-year-old son because said son dropped his phone and slammed into a tree while bending over to pick it back up…  Well, that lead to firing up the iPad and doing some more research to completely defeat my illusions.

My biggest fallacy in this whole thing was that “talking on a speakerphone is no more dangerous than talking to a passenger in the car.” Research isn’t quite as strong here, but a study at the University of Utah showed that actual passengers are safer because they assist the driver by acting as another set of eyes. In other words, the driving becomes part of the conversation, like “blah blah – oh, there’s your exit.” or “yada yada – stop, stop!“

The next day, I talked with the BestMacs team about it and we all agreed that this was the right decision. I went up and signed the Pledge on O’s website. As of now, no BestMacs employee will send texts, emails, or make phone calls while driving. If we must, we will pull the car over on to a safe shoulder or parking lot.

For many of you who know my phone habits, you know that this will be especially difficult for me.  Almost every time I have talked to someone on the phone in the past 3 years, it has been during a long drive between Lawrence and KC and/or between client visits. So, yes, this will be a hindrance to our productivity. We MUST put safety (our own and of others) above our business. If we don’t do that, we’re no better than a certain Big Polluting oil company.

So, I’m going to ask you for two things:

1) Please forgive me and the team if we are a little slower to respond to phone calls or texts than we have been before now. Our average drive time is around 30 minutes so it should only be a short while.  Jamie is rarely working from the road, so please call her first at 866-BESTMAC.  If it’s urgent, she can get a tech to pull over and call.

2) Please evaluate your own situation. Are you subject to the same false invincibility that I was?  It’s real and it’s a very insidious problem.  You don’t have to take my word for it; do some research and make your own decision.  And if you come to same conclusion that I did, make yourself stop.

OpinionSpy

Late yesterday the makers of a Mac security and anti-virus products, Intego, announced that they have seen a new piece of Mac malware in the wild.

They call it OS X OpinionSpy because it bills itself as an add-on program that comes with a free screensaver app that will gather your opinion, like a customer survey. Well, it does waaaay more than that, and once you have it, you’re not getting rid of it very easily.

Fortunately, while the list of what it does looks really frightening, it’s highly unlikely you have this and more unlikely you’ll get it now. You’ll have to have been using a free screensaver by “7art”, or a Flash Video to MP3 converter by “MishInc”. If this sounds even remotely familiar, give us a call. We can remotely scan for the spyware and kill it.

Much like every other piece of Mac malware I’ve seen since the start of Mac OS X (all three or four of them):

1. It’s rare.
2. It requires you to download it and install it with your password.
3. It doesn’t spread itself around.

That’s the good news in all of this; the sky is not falling. This is nothing new that we haven’t seen before. I’ve often told clients that I could write a program in 5 minutes that if you downloaded it and ran it, it could delete all your files.

If you don’t download random bits of software off the web without reading reviews or testimonials from reputable sources, and if you always think twice when your Mac asks you for your password, you’ll be fine.

Mac app review: PhoneView for iPhone

iTunes backs up your iPhone and iPad, but mere mortals usually can’t figure out where it puts stuff or how to get it back out of the backups. Additionally, sometimes you just want a way to get stuff from an iPhone to your Mac (eg, you lost all your photos and didn’t have a hard drive backup, but they’re on your phone; you’d like to see all your text messages to the person you’re arguing with over whether she REALLY said she’d buy you lunch next week; you want to copy music off a phone….). PhoneView [link; ecamm software; US$19.95, with free trial period] is a handy Mac app that does all that, by which I mean it provides a usable backup, plus helps out with other housekeeping tasks, such as mass-deleting texts and keeping call logs. It automatically logs and archives everything when you launch it and have an iPhone or iPad attached, and you can set a preference so that it launches each time the iPhone/iPad is plugged in. See the screenshot, left, for all the stuff it gives you access to on an iPhone (obviously the iPad doesn’t have Voicemail, Call Log, or Messages).

For folks like me who don’t want to open Apple Mail to dink with notes, PhoneView lets you do the dinking in its interface. Just click on Notes, add or modify what you need to, and click “Apply Changes.” PhoneView syncs the changes. If you’ve got an iPad, PhoneView syncs all notes among your Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad. For those of you who tried earlier versions of PhoneView, have good cheer: it no longer requires a reboot to sync notes. You can also drag and drop text or PDF files onto PhoneView and the resulting note will be synced to your device. Most happily for me, you can format notes in PhoneView. I used Palm devices for years and relied on the easy text-editing capabilities that synced easily. Now I’ve got that on the iPhone. Yes, I use Evernote, but you gotta have Internet, and I don’t like everything to be in the cloud.

Disk mode gives you storage, but I’m not too excited about this feature because you can’t see the stuff you drop there from your phone—only from PhoneView. A thumb drive is a better way.

You can play music from an iPhone through PhoneView, the usefulness of which is not obvious at first because if you’re at your computer you can play it from iTunes anyway. But you can hook up someone else’s iPhone to your computer (after disabling autosync) and listen to that music through PhoneView; you can also copy non–copyright-protected music to your computer via this method.

I haven’t needed to use it to restore photos (which would be the smaller iPhone resolution anyway) or other media, but I’ve been glad on several occasions to have access to every text message I’ve ever sent and received on both of my iPhones (it also backs up MMS messages). I text more than I e-mail, so I really need those messages sometimes. I can’t overemphasize the handiness of mass-deleting texts, either. For those of us who text a lot, it’s a major pain in the rear to go through manually and remove them from the iPhone. (“Delete all,” Apple? Pretty please?) Text messages can be exported in a variety of formats. I export mine every few months and e-mail them to my Gmail account for true searchability nirvana.

PhoneView automatically archives voicemail messages and plays them within the app; it will also send them to iTunes, although I can’t get too excited about that. Perhaps others receive more interesting voicemails than I do. The call log has come in handy a few times, though.

At first blush $19.95 sounds expensive. I got this app through a MacHeist bundle, but I would pay the $19.95 regardless. Usable backups and the data-handling mechanisms make it extremely useful.

Is Apple the next Microsoft?

In a word, no.

A client today asked me this question in regards to the recent news that the FTC and Justice Department are digging into Apple’s recent activities.

I’m admittedly biased but I read the courts findings against Microsoft and was paying attention to a lot of what they did when they did it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft and Adobe Weigh in on HTML5 vs Flash

Here is what Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen had to say about Steve Jobs’s open letter issued yesterday: Read Link

Microsoft weighs in as well here: Read Link

You may be asking yourself why this is important. Why would BestMacs want me to know about HTML5 v Flash? The answer is really bigger than the HTML5 vs Flash. Here we have all of the tech industries heavy hitters weighing in on how they feel the future of the web looks. Apple clearly wants HTML5 for their mobile devices. Microsoft now also says that HTML5 is the future. Leaving Google’s Android platform the loan supporter of flash products (unless you count the drowning webOS)

The future of the web is far from certain. Stay tuned as the drama unfolds in nerd blogs around the country.

Apple’s Stance on Flash

Unless you have been living under a rock or in Redmond, WA then you likely have heard a bit of the grumblings between Adobe and Apple. To sum up: Adobe is mad at Apple for not allowing their flash standard onto Apple’s mobile devices. Apple is equally peeved that Adobe is whining all of the web about how Apple is blocking their Flash standard in favor of the open standard HTML5 and refuses to cooperate.

This article is an open Letter from Steve Jobs relaying Apple’s official position on flash and how it interacts with their mobile devices:

Thoughts on Flash

While it can be a bit annoying at times not having flash on your iPhone or iPad the mobile web space has shifted away from flash and moved toward the HTML5 standard using open codecs such as H.264. Since most of the major players are on board with the move Adobe’s flash standard appears to have been relegated to the full fledged PCs and Macs of the world.

qStatus for iPhone

Those of us who use several social media sites can find ourselves doubling or tripling our status updates from time to time. I hate doing anything extra, so I have tried a lot of methods for getting the job done in one fell swoop. There are several ways [link to Mashable article] to update your status across multiple networks at once; this review covers qStatus for iPhone [$0.99; iTunes link]. I—like most people who update more than one status at once—focus on Facebook and Twitter, and qStatus updates both or either.

qStatus doesn’t stop with status updates. It allows inclusion of media (images, video, and  and geotagging), thus saving that precious 2 seconds otherwise spent waiting for a Twitter client to load for a status update. The media services qStatus will post to include TwitPic, TwitVid, yFrog, and Posterous. I was excited to see Posterous on the list, but unfortunately updates sent there are autoposted to all Posterous services, and that probably makes it useless to most folks. However, the other three work as you would think, and you can set photos and videos to different services if desired. Cross-posting photos to Twitter and Facebook creates a Facebook album called qStatus photos.

You can also tweet the current song playing on your iPod app. This tweets the artist, song, and a link to an Amazon MP3 download page with a “Your friend is sharing their music with qStatus for the iPhone and iPod Touch” banner link.

In the bells-and-whistles department, qStatus allows a custom background and “sent” sound. However, it lacks a landscape mode, which I’d rather have. It does allow longer status updates (>140 characters). As shown in the screenshot, a long tweet lets you choose between using the qStatus service or TweetShrink. The tweet contains as many characters as possible followed by a link.

Other handy features include draft and multiple-account support. In addition, tapping the @ button and typing the first few characters of a Twitter username quickly brings up a directory and allows autofill.

I keep qStatus in my dock and find it extremely handy, particularly with the draft support. With just a few taps it’s fast and simple to choose which accounts and/or networks to update, geotag the update, and include or take a photo.

Please Help The March of Dimes

More than half a million babies are born premature each year in the United States; almost 1,400 per day.  That’s why I’m asking you to support my fund raising efforts for the March of Dimes with a tax-deductible donation.

The March of Dimes is an organization whose importance my family has experienced first-hand.   My son Jack was born at 31 weeks gestation; that’s over two months early.  Imagine if the hardest day of your life…was your first.

Since 2000, the March of Dimes has awarded $1.8 million to the greater Kansas City region for scientific research at Children’s Mercy Hospital, Stowers Institute, SIDS Resources, and several other critical research efforts to help save babies’ lives.  But they can’t do it without our help.

We honor our former preemie and support an organization that supported us in our time of need by walking in the yearly March For Babies event.

Please click this link to visit our personal page and add your support.

Your gift will fund March of Dimes research and programs that help moms have full-term pregnancies and babies begin healthy lives. And it will be used to bring comfort and information to families with a baby in newborn intensive care.

Any amount, great or small, makes a difference in the lives of premature babies and their families.

Need proof that the March of Dimes makes a difference?  Just take a look at my son now.  If you didn’t know the backstory, you’d think he’s just a healthy, happy, little kid – and you’d be right: thanks to the March of Dimes.  Please be a part of an organization that really does make a difference every day.

Please click here to join us; you can help the March of Dimes find the causes of premature birth and birth defects.