Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • WWDC Dates Announced

    Apple has announced the dates for the this year’s “Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC)”:http://developer.apple.com/wwdc: June 7th through 11th at San Francisco’s Moscone West convention center.

    The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is the premier technical conference for developers innovating with Apple technologies. Over 1,000 Apple engineers will be at Moscone West to present advanced coding and development techniques that will show you how to enhance the capabilities of your applications with the revolutionary technologies in iPhone OS and Mac OS X.

    The conference includes technical sessions and hands-on labs for attendees, as well as other special events. Registration costs $1599, and tickets tend to sell out very fast.

    Among other demos, previews, and features, Apple is expected to unveil the latest version of iPhone hardware during a keynote at the event. New iPhone hardware is highly anticipated, especially after a test model was “discovered” in at the Gourmet Haus Staudt in California.

    “Click here to read more about the “Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC).”:http://developer.apple.com/wwdc

  • Adobe CS5: Now Shipping and Demo-Ready

    So many big things seem to be converging at the end of the month… iPad with 3G pre-orders are shipping, and now CS5 is ready to go.

    On April 12, I watched “Adobe’s CS5 webinar,”:http://cs5launch.adobe.com/?sdid=FDSEN which outlined some of the top new features of Creative Suite 5. Nothing was available for download yet, but Adobe announced that it was coming by April 30.

    Well, it’s here, and I’m currently taking a first look. We’ll report back on the newest features in a future issue. Don, Ed and I will be in DC next week at ASMC 7.0, an Apple Specialist conference, so we’ll be reporting from the road!

    In the meantime, “download the CS5 Trial here.”:http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/26294&vid=11376487&mode=info

    P.S. Check out the Content-Aware feature… absolutely amazing!

  • MAC TREAT #123: Using MobileMe's Remote Wipe and Find Features

    I’ve been using Apple’s MobileMe service for years–even way back when it was called .Mac.* I remember when it was free a free service; it’s now a $99 annual subscription (though we often have coupons, rebates, and other offers for up to $30 off MobileMe).

    I continue to pay for MobileMe because, for the money, it’s a very useful service. It offers synchronization of email, contacts, Safari bookmarks, and calendars between Macs, PCs, iPods, and iPhone. It also offers a very attractive online photo gallery, 20GB of online data storage, and my favorite feature, *Find My iPhone*.

    The Find My iPhone feature helps you locate your iPhone (or iPod touch or iPad) if has been lost or misplaced. It also allows you to display a message on your iPhone to help someone return it to you.The Remote Passcode Lock feature lets you remotely lock your iPhone and create a new or replacement 4-digit passcode. Finally, the Find My iPhone features *Remote Wipe*, which lets you erase all your information on iPhone/iPad/iPod touch in case you don’t recover it.

    Apple famously used Remote Wipe to “brick” the prototype iPhone that was “found” in a bar in California a couple of weeks ago. Just today I watched Don use MobileMe to remotely reset his iPad in advance of selling it to upgrade to iPad 3G. All he had to do was log in to his MobileMe account, click the “Find My iPhone” button, enter his password, select his iPad from the list of his registered devices, and select “Remote Wipe.” Within a minute, his iPad had automatically erased all data and reset to the factory settings.

    To enable this feature, you have to turn on Find My iPhone in your MobileMe account settings. iPhone OS 3.0 or later is required to use Find My iPhone and the Remote Wipe feature; iPhone OS 3.1 is required for the Remote Passcode Lock feature.

    You can learn more about Remote Wipe “by clicking here.”:http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/find-my-iphone.html See “MobileMe on Smalldog.com by clicking here.”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/74171/apple-mobileme-individual-retail-package-1yr-subscription-renewal

    Here’s Apple Support article to help you troubleshoot Remote Wipe: “MobileMe Troubleshooting Find My iPhone and Remote Wipe”:http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2734

    __*Editor’s Note: Actually, I think both of us have been users since it was called iTools in 2002!__

  • _Dear Friends,_

    This was a week of weather swings here in the Green Mountains. I was motorcycle riding on Sunday in warm sunny weather with Tony and Grace and we went over to Conway, NH to the Lobster Pound, our favorite destination over the White Mountains. Tuesday, I received a foot of snow at my house and was slipping and sliding on the way to work since I had removed my winter tires on the weekend. Today it is warm and sunny again with the forecast for the weekend in the 70s and 80s. Truly proves the cliche “if you don’t like the weather, wait a moment.”

    The iPad with 3G and Wi-Fi is being released tonight at 5PM and I will be upgrading to the 3G model for those inevitable times that Wi-Fi is not available. I have found the iPad to be the ideal meeting computer. I can access all the word processing and spreadsheet documents, my email and have Safari to quickly look things up. It is less obtrusive than having a laptop in front of you, and as companies and organizations adopt this technology, we will save some trees, too.

    Despite the snow, it is the official Green Up Day in Vermont and hundreds of volunteers will be scouring the roadsides and picking up a winter’s trash to make the Green Mountains truly green. One of the things I really enjoy about Vermont is that billboards are illegal here, so our roads just look cleaner even without greening up!

  • WWDC Dates Announced!

    Apple has announced the dates for the this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference: June 7th through 11th at San Francisco’s Moscone West convention center….

  • April 27th in Vermont: SNOWING!

    Last night I heard on the news that there was a “Winter Storm Warning” and laughed to myself thinking “Yeah right!”. When I…

  • Contest Reminder

    *Random Facebook, Twitter and newsletter winners!*
    For the next two weeks, we are going to be giving away an iPod gift pack to a random winner (three total) from our “Facebook fans,”:http://www.facebook.com/pages/Small-Dog-Electronics/18904017006 “Twitter followers”:http://twitter.com/hellosmalldog and our “newsletter subscribers.”:http://www.smalldog.com/newsletters#subscriptions

    If you’re not already in our Facebook group, you can join here:
    “Small Dog Electronics on Facebook.”:http://www.facebook.com/pages/Small-Dog-Electronics/18904017006

    Do you use Twitter? We post Mac tips, tricks, news, contests and more on our Twitter feed. “Click here to follow us on Twitter.”:http://twitter.com/hellosmalldog

    Of course, many thanks to all of you who read our newsletters every week. We haven’t forgotten you–we’re pulling a random subscriber from Kibbles & Bytes to win as well.

    We’ll be announcing the winners in our 4/30 issue of Kibbles & Bytes (next week.) Good luck!

  • Tip of the Week: Sharing Huge Files

    We all need to send enormous files now and again, and email is not the best way to go. Most all email providers cap the size of files sent and received messages to conserve bandwidth and to help manage the sizes of users’ mailboxes.

    iChat is a great way to get around that. If you know the recipient’s screen name, simply initiate a session in iChat and select Send File from the Buddies menu on the top of your screen. In the box that opens up, simply navigate to the file in question, and click the Send button. Your recipient will be asked to approve the transfer and select a destination on his or her hard drive, and the transfer will begin.

    This is very fast if you and your peer are on the same network and you’re both using a wired ethernet connection. Wi-Fi gained a significant speed boost in the transition from 802.11g to 802.11n, but these speeds don’t even approach those offered by a wired connection. If the file must travel across the Internet, speeds will be completely dependent on yours and your peer’s connections.

    It always makes sense to compress files before sending, no matter the method. You can do this by right-clicking on the file or folder in question in the Finder and selecting Compress from the contextual menu.