I was pleasantly surprised to find out that upgrading to iPhone OS 3.0 enabled previously hidden Bluetooth functionality on my second generation iPod Touch. After upgrading (the iTunes servers were jammed so I did it after midnight) I noticed a small Bluetooth icon in the upper right hand corner of the home screen. So I went straight into Settings->General and … what do you know, Bluetooth.

The only Bluetooth device I have is a headset for my Motorola KRZR cellphone (no iPhone yet) so I resorted to trying to connect from the kids iMac. While I can’t do anything useful with it (yet) I expect we will see a host of new accessories for the iPhone 3G(S) and iPod Touch 2G. I for one would like a Bluetooth car kit to wirelessly stream music from my iPod Touch. Perhaps maybe sync my iPod without docking.

I noticed that one of the services available on the iPod Touch via Bluetooth is something called AVRCP. According to the official Bluetooth web site AVRCP:

AVRCP is designed to provide a standard interface to control TVs, hi-fi equipment, or others to allow a single remote control (or other device) to control all the A/V equipment to which a user has access. It may be used in concert with A2DP or VDP.

I can’t wait!!

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Being able to get a robust wireless network signal around my house was something that I struggled with for some time. My Comcast cable broadband connection came in through my garage and basement so that is where I had placed my wireless access point (WAP). The cable coax connected to my broadband bridge which was then connected to my 802.11n Apple Time Capsule (TC) WAP. The problem was that the wireless signal was not strong enough to reach throughout my 1700 square foot home.

I could sit in my kitchen (right above the WAPs location in the basement) and get a very strong signal but I barely got a signal in my family room or bedroom. If I wanted to use the computer from the backyard, I couldn’t; unless I piggy backed on my neighbor’s signal.

At fist I tried to solve this problem by moving the position of the WAP.  It originally on a shelf in the basement but then I moved it up into the rafters in my unfinished basement. That yield only a slight improvement. I then tried using Powerline Ethernet devices but I never successfully got those working.

Some coworkers suggested using a Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge to extend the network. These devices were very difficult to setup and never worked reliably. I though maybe the Linksys equipment did not work well with the TC so I went searching on the Apple web site discussion board for a solution. That’s when I found out about Wireless Distribution System (WDS).

Appple’s online documentation mentioned that I could use WDS to “set up two to five base stations as a unified network that shares one Internet connection.” In other words, I could setup multiple Apple WAP to create a single large wireless network that I could access from multiple locations in the home. I could put a WAP in the basement, one in the family room, and one in the living room (near the back of the house) basically saturating my home with wireless. This is exactly what I did.

WDS does not yet have a standard implementation. There is no guarantee that WDS implementations from different vendors will interoperate. I used only Apple branded products to setup my WDS network. I did this because I wanted everything to work and because Apple has excellent documentation on how to do it. Your mileage may vary.

Below is a list of the equipment I used.

• Apple Time Capsule (802.11n)
• Apple Airport Extreme Base Station (802.11g)
• Apple AirPort Express (802.11g)

I bought the AirPort Express (AX) on eBay as the lowest cost method to acquiring an Apple wireless base station. The AirPort Express is a small portable WAP and Internet gateway with one 10/100BASE-T Ethernet port for connecting a DSL modem, cable modem, or Ethernet network, a USB port for connecting a USB printer, and a 3.5-mm audio minijack for analog or optical digital sound to a stereo or powered speakers. The AX also support AirTunes. AirTunes transmits music from my iTunes library on any of my Macs and sends it wirelessly to the AX attached to my stereo.  How cool is that!?

I also bought an unopened flying saucer style AirPort Extreme Base (AE) station from a colleague. He had picked it up at a yard sale and was willing to let me have it for $50. With the existing TC and the new AX and AE I now had enough to create a WDS network to blanket every part of my home.

The first thing I did was setup my main base station, the Time Capsule,  in WDS mode.  I had already setup all the other parameters including the SSID, channel number, password, wireless security etc. The SSID and channel number must be the same for each base station for WDS to work. These settings are found in the Wireless and WDS tabs in the Apple AirPort Utility.

Once I was done setting up the WDS information for the main base station I clicked “Update” and waited for the base station to reboot. I made sure to note the AirPort ID of the TC and used this information later to setup the other two base stations.

I selected “Participate in a WDS network” from the drop down box in Wireless tab and from the WDS tab drop down I selected “WDS main” to set the WDS Mode and checked the “Allow wireless clients” check box.

Next, I setup the the AirPort Express (AX) base station as a remote base station. A remote base station connects wirelessly to the main station and retransmits the signal from the main base station for wireless clients that are too far from the main base station. I used the AirPort Utility to connect to the AX and set it up with the same network specific information (channel number, SSID etc) I used for the TC.  I selected “Participate in a WDS network” from the drop down box in Wireless tab and from the WDS tab drop down I selected “WDS remote” to set the WDS Mode and checked the “Allow wireless clients” check box. I entered the AirPort ID of the WDS Main base station and clicked update.

After the AX base station rebooted I moved on to setup the AirPort Extreme Base (AE) station. Setup was similar to the AE. I used the AirPort Utility to setup the network parameters (SSID, channel number, etc) including information for the WDS Main.

Once the AirPort Extreme Base station rebooted I used the AirPort Utility to confirm that the AirPort Express and AirPort Extreme were bound to my home network and relaying traffic.

The solution is not perfect. The WDS network uses a small amount of the network bandwidth for network management so wireless throughput is slightly less than it would be with just one base station. However, this is a small price to pay for being able to use my laptop or iPod Touch from anywhere inside or outside my home.  Now I can sit in bed and catch up on show in Hulu or work in my backyard streaming music to my iPod Touch from my iTunes library.

References:

Using the AirPort Admin Utility to create a WDS network with multiple base stations

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Both Yahoo and Google provide a method for importing and exporting email addresses to and from OS X AddressBook but I wanted an easier way to keep things synchronized. Fortunately, if you are running OS X 10.5 (Leopard), the AddressBook application provides a straight forward way to do so.

Google is special

Like most people I use a web based email service like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. And like most people I have been using one of these services for quite a long time and I have quite a large number of email addresses that I have saved in the contact list of each of those services, especially Gmail. The ability to sync with Google is not present as an option unless you have synced your computer with an iPhone or iPod Touch at least once. There is a work around for non-iPhone/iPod Touch users on Lifehacker web site. Go ahead and do that. We’ll wait until you return.

Setup

Setup is quick and easy. Go into the Preferences for AddressBook. On the General tab you will see three check boxes for each of the following services: MobileMe, Exchange, Yahoo and Google. You can select all (or none) of these check boxes to enable syncing with each of those services. Google is my preferred service for email so tha’s the service I setup. Once you select the checkbox, AddressBook will prompt you for your Gmail username and password. Enter that information and click OK to complete setup. If you have a large AddressBook it could take a while for the sync to complete.

Finish Up

You may already have some contacts in AddressBook that are also in Yahoo or Google and you may find duplicates in your AddressBook once the sync is complete. These are easy to remove. From the AddressBook menu select Card->Look for duplicates. AddressBook will find and merge duplicates entries into just one entry. Any changes or additions to your AddressBook contacts will update your online Google or Yahoo contacts and vice versa.

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Some time last year Google updated their online Calendar service to support the CalDAV protocol. CalDAV is a standard protocol that allows access to web based calendars from desktop clients like iCal. Now from within iCal I can schedule create calendar entries that appear in my Google web calendar and vice versa. Google provides instructions on how to setup iCal to access Google Calendar but … a screen shot is worth a thousand lines of text.

Setup is fairly easy. Google provides a set-up tool to make the process quick and painless. Download the setup tool here. After downloading, unzip the file, and run the Calaboration application. Be sure to exit iCal before running the Calaboration tool.

Enter your Google email address and password and click the Sign In button.

After a few seconds the application will display your Google Calendars. Select the calendars you want to add to iCal and click the “Add to iCal” button. If your email address is not in your Leopard Address Book you will be prompted to do so.

Your Google Calendar will now appear in the list of calendars in iCal. Any changes you make to your Google Calendar in iCal will show up in your Google web Calendar.

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In a previous post I mentioned that I had already configured my Mac to use some of Google’s free services and how I felt that this was a cheap way to get some of the same features offered in MobileMe. Namely, I configured Mail.app for use with Gmail, synced my Address Book to my Gmail Contacts, and connected iCal to my Google Calendar. In this post, I explain how to setup Leopard Mail.app for reading Gmail.

IMAP vs POP3

Google provides three ways to access Gmail, their free email service; via the browser, POP3, or IMAP. The Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) is a standard protocol used by local e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a remote server and download it to the client. IMAP is also a standard protocol for accessing email but unlike POP3 the email stays on the remote server. With POP3 you are limited to reading your email from one location. With IMAP the email stays on the server and you can read it from any computer. IMAP is the method I use to access my Gmail in Mail.app. If I read an email in a web browser then it is marked as read on the server and in Mail.app.

Configuration

Configuring Mail.app to use Gmail is relatively easy. Google has provided excellent instructions on their Gmail Help web site. I have provided my own version here. I think screen shots help in understanding. Launch Mail.app and click Mail->Preferences from the menu bar. Click on the Accounts tab and then click the “+” symbol on the lower left to start the account creation wizard.

Enter your name, your Gmail address and password. Be sure to deselect the “Automatically set up account” check box. This check box is enabled by default and automatically creates an entry for POP3 access. We want to setup for IMAP. Now click continue.

Click the Account Type drop down and select IMAP. Be sure to change the Incoming Mail Server address to imap.gmail.com. Leave the other fields as they are and click Continue.

The next screen is for setting up the Outgoing Mail server information. Other than entering a description, e.g Gmail, you can go ahead and click continue. This will take you to a confirmation summary page. If it all looks correct go ahead and click create. The new account should now appear in the Account column on the left.

Tweaks

There are a few small details that will make reading Gmail in Mail.app easier. We will need to change a few things to make Mail.app play nice with Gmail. Google has a number of DO’s and DON’Ts that will ensure a smooth experience using Mail.app. Google wants all deleted or sent mail to use the local trash and sent folders. While still in the Accounts tab make sure to deselect all the checkboxes except for “Store draft messages on the server“.

Summary

One of the benefits of using Mail.app with Gmail is that you can now take advantage of all of Mail.app goodness. You can set fonts, colors, backgrounds, and signatures, or one of those interesting templates and pick addresses right from your Address Book. Next post, I’ll tell you how to sync your Gmail contact straight with Leopard Address Book.

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With the addition of a 20″ iMac for the kids (and an Ikea VIKA Amon desk to display it) we are now completely a Windows free house. This was an important goal for me. I am an anal retentive obsessive compulsive type who likes everything “just so”. It’s bad. I buy all my clothes from the same retailer/brand: shirts, undershirts, pants, underpants, undershirts, shoes, coats. My last three cars were all made by Honda. My TV, DVD player, stereo, and alarm clock are all made by Sony.

What started as new found love for a Mac mini and an iPod shuffle in 2005 wound up being an obsession to do everything the Apple way. We are a family of four; I have an iPod Touch (and maybe an iPhone this summer), my wife has a Red iPod Nano, my son has an iPod nano, and my daughter has the original shuffle (she’s the youngest). An Apple Time Capsule, AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express provide regular backups, ubiquitous wireless access, and music streaming around the house.

Where my kids used to argue over who crashed the Dell, now they argue who spent more time with “MackieMac”. Parental Controls was one of the first features I enabled. My kids are addicted to the Pokemon, Webkinz, American Girl crack. They get to spend one hour each per day; 3 hours on the weekend. Enough to keep them out of the Disney clinic for recovering screen addicts. Being kids, their favorite application is Photo Booth. This might be worse than letting them catch another Chimchar. They have also taken relieved me of the Bluetooth Mighty Mouse I used on my MacBook.

Dell Inspiron 2600 - Circa 2001

My wife is enjoying computing iLife without duct tape. She was previously addicted to iTunes Bollywood edition but the lack of Windows crashes now allows her to up her habit slightly. Hits by Lata and A.R Rahman are helping fill the 120GB hard drive on her new White MacBook. She has also upgraded to scolding me via iChat Video.

G4 Mac mini

Meanwhile, the Mac mini that started the obsession serves the most important role; as a media server and repository for all our family photos and videos. Mac mini has been upgraded from Tiger to Leopard; from iLife 06 to iLife 09; from 512MB of RAM to 1 GB. He’s the one that paved the path for the others to follow. Apple turned a $500 customers into a life long addict.

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I think maybe I have a little too much storage space. Between Amazon S3, the two 500GB G-Drive Q external drives and the 500GB Apple Time Capsule, I have over 2TB of storage. I don’t think I have that many photo and family videos and my iTunes library isn’t that large either.  The Amazon S3 is used to backup photos from our iPhoto library stored on the G-Drive Q Media and documents stored on the G-Drive Q.  The Time Capsule is for backing up the three Macs via Time Machine.

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I bought my wife (and myself) a white MacBook last week. Her birthday is next month and with Apple’s newly updated aluminium notebooks the previous model white notebook was put on sale. Her previous laptop, an 8 year old Dell Inspiron, was a joke and a pain in my neck. It was held together with duct tape. The battery held no charge so it had to be plugged in all the time. It could only connect to the Wi-Fi from one or two spots in the house. I spent a lot of time trouble shooting one problem after another. So this laptop was two gifts in one; an expensive birthday gift for my wife and lots of free time for me.

I spent about 30 minutes setting things up. I created an admin account, created her non-admin account, connected the laptop to the network, setup Mail.app to read her Gmail, linked her Gmail contacts to OS X’s AddressBook, installed one software patch, linked her iTunes to the Mac mini’s media library, and finally, setup iChat to use Google Talk.

iChat Video and Google Talk

Google Talk uses Jabber, an open instant messaging protocol. Apple built support for Jabber into the Leopard version of iChat. I added the account via the Accounts tab in the Preferences pane and was given a pleasant surprise once I logged in. A little camera style icon appeared next to my wife’s name in the contact list. I excited clicked it to find that I could initiate and conducts video chats via my Gtalk account. Audio and video quality were excellent with very little of that delay I’ve seen when using Skype. I can not find any official documentation on Google site about this but others have been doing this for some time. I take my MacBook to work each day and it would be nice to video chat with my wife during the day.

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When Apple released MobileMe as a replacement for .Mac I decided it was time to give it a try. Mind you, I already have a free Gmail account with 8GB (and growing), and a free Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Contact. I had already configured Leopard’s Mail, iCal and Address Book for use with these services and for just $20/year Google sold me 10GB of space on Picasweb to store and share my photos with friends and family. All these services were well integrated enough though the web interfaces were rudimentary, lacking pizzazz, and the Picasa software was not available for the Mac.

I decided that $99 was not too much to pay to try MobileMe for one year.

During MacWorld 2009 Google finally released a Picasa for the Mac (it’s beta of course) and it has a lot of features (facial recognition and geo-location) to be found in the iPhoto ’09. Recently there have been rumors that Google is preparing to offer an online storage service called G-Drive similar to iDisk. That got me thinking about the Dropbox service that I have been using for a few months that provides similar features to iDisk.

iDisk does not like work.

Dropbox is a service that synchronizes a specific folder and its contents to an online account and across multiple computers – Mac, Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora) or Windows. That is one definite advantage over iDisk which is available only on a Mac. Although iDisk does work on Windows, Apple doesn’t want you to use it at work.  Unless it’s two guys working in a garage, most companies today have some sort of Web proxy server.  A Web proxy server is a server that acts as a go-between for requests from computer seeking resources from Internet web servers.  MobileMe does not have any support for proxy servers on Windows so forget about using it at work.  How hard would it be for Apple to program in the use of the Windows default?

After downloading and installing the Dropbox client software, you will have a folder called “Dropbox” on a user selected location on your computer. I put the folder on the desktop on both Windows and Mac. From there I can open it and use it just like any other Windows or OS X folder. In the background, the installed Dropbox client is synchronizing any changes to the “cloud” and across any computer logged in with the same account. A free account provides 2GB of online storage and you upgrade to 50GB for $99/year or $9.99 per month.

Dropbox has your back(up)

Any file you delete from the Dropbox folder is deleted across all computers. However, Dropbox keeps a version history, so you can undelete or restore the Dropbox to a previous state quite easily using the very well laid out web interface. You can rollback to a version of a file from just a few hours ago to a few weeks ago.

It’s nice to share

Just like iDisk, Dropbox allows you to share your files (photos, documents, music etc) and folder with whomever you chose; and they don’t have to be Dropbox users to do so. Just add the files you want to share and your friends and colleagues can access them from any web browser (and I do mean ANY). iDisk thumbs its nose at Internet Explorer users. Not useful for sharing with my Windows XP family.

Dropbox is free … sort of.

I have been using Dropbox for about three months and the only complaint I have is that the 2GB free account might not be big enough for users who need to share larger files. I could upgrade to the $99 option but that is a lot to pay for 50GB of storage when 500GB hard drives now go for as little as $99. Google offers 10GB of online photo store for $20/year and I expect that the rumored G-Drive will offer something reasonably priced.

Conclusion

The free version of Dropbox does not provide as much storage space as iDisk and can be pricey compared to other online storage solutions (take a look at Mozy.com Unlimited).  However if 2GB is enough for you, and you need to share files with Windows and Mac users and you want the ability to restore files, then goto https://www.getdropbox.com and download the client now.

(UPDATE):  I made an error in stating that iDisk is not cross platform.  Clearly it is.

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The weeks and days leading up to MacWorld ‘09 were full of speculation about new Apple product and Steve Jobs health. There were rumors of new Mac MacBooks, a revamped Mac mini, and Apple TV. The fact the Phill Schiller would be leading the keynote at MacWorld fueled the rumors that Steve was dying. Of course, Steve let us know that all was well and many were disappointed in that there expectations were met.
I did not attend MacWorld so this posting is no more than a write up on other news reports from around the web.

So what did Apple announced at MacWorld ‘09? As some predicted (expected) there was a new 17″ MacBook Pro. As with the newer MacBook line, this notebook has LED backlighting and all aluminum case. Unlike the other MacBooks this one has a FireWire 800 port and some very interesting battery technology. The battery is not removable but Apple promises that with their sophisticated power management software and new technology that the battery will last about 8 hours and 1000 recharge cycles. Yes, 8 hours! I don’t know of any current laptop that gets that kind of battery life. This is a first in the industry and a definitely a win for Apple. I know I want one already.

Before Phil got to the hardware he announced updates to the iLife and iWork suites. Available sometime in January, iLife ‘09 features enhancements to iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb and GarageBand. GarageBand now has a feature to help Mac users learn to play a musical instrument,such as the guitar or the piano. Users will be able to purchase and download lesson packs from music stars such as Sting, Norah Jones and John Fogerty. I think this feature bring real value ( and entertainment ) to GarageBand for most Mac users. I know my kids love poking around with GarageBand but this provides a inexpensive way to teach.

iPhoto now support two major new features called “Faces” and “Places“. One trend in photo technology is face detection. Some of the newer consumer digital cameras are able to detect the faces of people and change their settings accordingly. iPhoto uses face detection to identify faces of people in your photos and tag them. Once you teach iPhoto how to detect Grandma’s faces then newer photos of Grandma can be automatically recognized and tagged. I am really looking forward to applying this feature to my family photos.

The Places feature adds geo-tagging using Google Maps and photos can be organized around location. Apple’s web site claims that “This feature uses data from GPS-enabled cameras or the camera on iPhone to categorize photos by location and convert GPS location tags to common, user-friendly names.”

I don’t use iMovie much so I don’t quite understand the newer features from the old but here is list:

• replace or insert clips using a single pop-up menu
• Edit audio separately from vieo
• additional options such as cutaways, picture-in-picture, and green-screen effects
• displays a magnified filmstrip that shows exactly where one clip ends and the next begins so you can precisely edit your video.
• new dynamic themes
• animated travel maps

Apple has added some social network features to iLife ‘09. Users of Facebook and Flickr can submit their geo tagged and face tagged photos directly from iPhoto. Edits in Facebook can then be synchronized back to iPhoto. Users if iWeb can link to a Facebook account and automatically notify friends when they update their web site. I’m a big Facebook user and these new features are going to help me stay in touch with distant friends and family.

Apple also announced an updated iWork with the significant new features being a distraction free full screen edit mode, mail merge, integration with MathType, opening and saving Microsoft Office files directly, and the linking and embedding of content between each application.

You can pre-order iLife and iWork now for $79 each, or wait until the release of Snow Leopard and buy them as a bundle for $160. You can download a 30 day trial copy of iWork from the Apple web site.

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