Blog: Apple

iMessage is a new feature allowing users to send messages over wireless across Apple devices beginning with iOS 5.  When I upgrade my iPad to iOS 5, I tried out the new iMessage feature & sent a message to a friend with an iOS 5 device.  He received the message and later replied, but his reply only went to my iPad, not my iPhone.  I found you can turn on the iMessage feature on your iOS 5 iPhone (to receive messages across multiple devices) by going to Settings, Messages, and turning on iMessage.  After you do this, messages (text) will be sent as follows:

• If is being sent to another iOS 5 device, it will try to send over wireless or 3G as an “iMessage” message and will show in a blue “bubble” (note: you will not be charged as a text for iMessages)
• If it is going to a non iOS 5 device, then it will go out as a “text” message in the traditional green “bubble”.

iMessage by default is linked to your Apple ID, so if you have multiple people using the same Apple ID (for example a family member), then when you turn on iMessage, all of the people using the Apple ID will begin to receive iMessage on all of the devices.  You can go into Settings, Messages, Receive At, and add additional emails (beyond the Apple ID) that you want to receive messages from.
Another cool feature of iMessage, if someone is responding to a message, a speech bubble with “…” will appear indicating they are in the middle of typing out a reply…

For several years I have used a single iTunes account for purchases for my entire family.  This has worked fine, but with the introduction of iCloud and iMessage it's now much "cloudier".  If you don't set up separate iCloud accounts for each user/device it can introduce unintended sharing of contacts, bookmarks etc.  Here are several links to sites that explain this in more detail: [more]

http://appadvice.com/appnn/2011/10/how-to-use-icloud-in-a-family-setting-share-apps-but-not-contacts

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1248112

Last week, one of our customers experienced a system wide outage due to a new MAC on the network. That’s right… it is typed correctly. During the setup of a MAC OS Lion 10.7 installation, one of the users had a home folder set in their Active Directory properties. When the MAC user logged in and the laptop attempted to map the user’s home folder, the EMC Celerra NS40 NAS that serves as the back-bone of the network serving CIFS shares and about a dozen iSCSI LUNs to Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and VMware hosts, experienced a kernel panic and crashed….very ungracefully I might add. The outage only lasted about 2-3 minutes while the datamover failed over to the standby. However, it took nearly two hours to clean up the carnage post-failure. Not to mention, two hours outside of business hours to fail the unit back to the primary datamover.

Specifics about the exact cause are not 100% clear, but two things are known. First of all, MAC OS 10.7 uses a different SAMBA client than previous versions. Formerly, MAC OS used a bundled open source SAMBA software for Windows file share and network directory services. With 10.7, they have rolled their own and replaced the open source code with their own flavor of SAMBA. According to EMC, the root cause of the issue is that MAC OS 10.7 passes a NULL value in one of the SAMBA message headers. Obviously, this is a problem for the Celerra. No word as to how gracefully Windows file server handle this issue.

When enabling whole disk encryption, be sure to save the recovery key externally from your laptop.  I recently upgraded to Mac OSX 10.7 (aka "Lion") and enabled the new whole disk encryption feature which is now part of FileVault.  Before encryption begins it provides the recovery key but it's up to you to save it offline (no USB flash drive option).  Thankfully I did this because when I rebooted it prompted me for local admin credentials which of course I changed and didn't remember.  Without the recovery key saved on my home network I would have been in big trouble.

There are some four and five finger gestures on the iPad (iOS 4.3) that can be enabled by downloading Apple’s development kit, Xcode. The gestures can be enabled on the iPhone, too, but they seem much less useful on the smaller screen. Xcode costs $5 to download and you have to install it on a Mac, but you do not have to purchase the developer license. This website explains how to download Xcode and enable the gestures. The gestures include:

• Pinching the screen with all five fingers to close an app and return to the home screen
• Quickly switching between apps by swiping four fingers across the screen
• Opening the multitasking bar by swiping four fingers up the screen

My iPhone was having many different problems, the main one of which was my GPS not functioning as it should. After doing some research I found that when you restore from an older model iPhone to a new one, it carries over some residual data that can cause issues.  I had moved from a 3G to a 3Gs to 4 and each time just restored my old settings. I decided to rebuild my iPhone, I backed it up and made sure all my purchases had been transferred. I then wiped my iPhone 4 and set it up as a new phone. I did not restore from backup. I proceeded to reinstall all my apps, data and email account info. I have yet to have a problem with my GPS and my phone actually hangs up at the end of a call, without me having to push the end call button 10x. [more]
 
During this process I also found that having multiple backups of iPhones can chew up a lot of drive space. Just by removing old backups I cleared over 12GB.
Just make sure you don’t delete one you may need.
 
In Mac OS X your iPhone files are backed up at the following location:

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/

Windows XP stores all of your iPhone backup files in this location:

C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

Windows Vista and Windows 7 backs up the iPhone files to here:

C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

Obviously if your main drive is not C: then you’ll have to change that, same goes for ‘user’

Note to Windows users: the Application Data and AppData directories and their contents (iPhone backups included) are considered ‘hidden’ so you will need to enable ‘Show hidden files’ within Windows Explorer before you will be able to see the files.

I was recently helping a friend who was having trouble getting online with her Mac laptop.  After over an hour of talking to Apple they told her that her computer was self assigning the IP address, but did not tell her how to fix it. 

A little bit of forum scouring provided me with more than a few people who are having the same issues and a few ideas of how to fix this issue.  The idea that seems to have fixed the problem was resetting the PRAM.  Parameter RAM, or PRAM, is a small amount of RAM that stores the basic setup information about the computer.  This includes settings for the mouse, keyboard, startup, etc.  Warning, you may lose some of your customized settings.  However, you can use the Control Panels to restore them.  Here are the steps to reset your PRAM:  [more]

1. Shut down the computer.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.

The multi-tasking feature released with iOS 4.0 is a great feature to allow you to run more than one application at one time; however, the implementation assumes you always want to keep each app running (in a minimized fashion) rather than closing them – so, with iOS 4.0 instead of closing the app when you click the home button, it simply allows the app to run in the background.  To see what apps you have running, press the home button twice.  This will bring up the multi-task bar which shows all the apps running in the background.

To close an application that is running in the background, follow these steps:

1. Push the home button twice.
2. Push and hold down one of the app icons showing in the multi-task bar - this will cause the app icons to jiggle (similar to when you re-arrange apps on the main screens) & have a red circle with a minus sign.
3. Push the minus sign to close the application.

You may want to close applications you don’t want running in the background for the following reasons: [more]

1. Memory – each application running is taking up memory
2. Security – applications may be running services in the background that you don’t want running
3. Battery – having multiple applications running in the background will drain your battery quicker
   

If you are having problems opening iPhoto (no photos are displayed, etc.), you might can fix it by rebuilding the iPhoto cache.  Just hold Command + Control when launching iPhoto, then select all rebuild options and click Rebuild.