Apple Newbie

Apple’s iPhone is a 2.5G quad band GSM phone that uses a touch screen interface. It performs the functions of a mobile phone, a camera, an da multimedia player, plus internet services such as e-mail, text messaging, web browsing, and Wi-Fi connectivity.

Many have expressed disappointment that the iPhone is not a 3G device, but Apple says it plans to make 3G phones in the future, and this first generation iPhone was designed to be 2.5G only because of battery consumption and 3G network maturity issues in the US.

In the US, the Apple iPhone is available from the Apple Store and from AT&T Mobility, formerly Cingular Wireless, with a price of US$499 for the 4 GB model and US$599 for the 8 GB model, based on a two-year service contract.

Despite most touch screen devices being designed for use with a stylus, the Apple iPhone’s touch screen has been specifically designed for use with fingers. Because of this, even if you want to use a normal stylus you would be unable to do so as the screen has been programmed to respond to touch by something with the physical properties of bare skin.

Keying in text is via a virtual keyboard on the touch screen which has automatic spell checking, word prediction and a dynamic dictionary which can learn new words. You control interface elements such as scrolling using special touch-drag-lift finger motions, like sliding a playing card across a table. Once you learn the various ways to touch the screen, using the Apple iPhone should be easy as Apple is known to be very good at user interface design.

The camera function uses a 2.0 megapixel camera at the back of the phone but this camera only takes photos with no video recording capability.

Being 2.5G, the fastest internet connectivity it can use is EDGE, supported on AT&T’s network. It uses a mobile version of Safari with special touch control features. The Apple iPhone’s email client supports HTML and can sync with Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Entourage. It also supports IMAP and POP3, as well as special PushIMAP email from Yahoo that works similiarly to a BlackBerry.

The Apple iPhone runs a special mobile version of Mac OS X that takes up 700MB of space on the device. It supports Widgets like Stock and Weather Widgets.

Some specs:
* Screen size: 8.9 cm (3.5 in)
* Screen resolution: 320×480 pixels at 160 ppi
* Input method: Multi-touch screen interface (the “Home” button is the iPhone’s only physical front panel button)
* Operating System: OS X
* Storage: 4 or 8 GB Flash memory
* Quad band GSM (GSM 850, GSM 900, GSM 1800, GSM 1900)
* Wi-Fi (802.11b/802.11g), EDGE and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR
* 2 megapixel camera
* Built-in rechargeable, non-removable battery with up to 8 hours of talk, 6 hours of internet use, 7 hours of video playback and up to 24 hours of audio playback, lasting over 250 hours on standby.[31]
* Size: 115×61×11.6 mm (4.5×2.4×0.46 in)
* Weight: 135 g (4.8 oz)
* Digital SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) of 0.974 watts per kilogram[1][2]

Apple’s iBook and iMac ranges do not support screen spanning by default although it comes with a graphics chipset (ATI Radeon Mobility) that supports the feature. What’s screen spanning? It’s something like an extended desktop where your desktop area stretches across two monitors instead of both monitors displaying the same thing. They say once you’re used to dual displays you won’t go back. iBook and iMac users can actually experience this, with a tool called the Screen Spanning Doctor.

It involves hacking the Open Firmware to enable screen spanning support, a feature available on PowerMacs and PowerBooks.

BTW please don’t try this on notebooks that run other chipsets like the older ATI Rage, as it will screw up your hardware! The list of officially supported machines and machines that are not supported are available here.

Download the Screen Spanning Doctor by Rute Moeller

Apple has a built in Firewall for Mac OS X, but it’s kind of catered to the newbie, very simplified like most Apple user interfaces are.

For something more advanced, try Flying Buttress, formerly known as BrickHouse. Flying Buttress has some funky features like filtering by host/network address, protocols other than TCP/UDP, the whole range of ipfw options, per-filter logging, graphical log viewer, NAT port forwarding, different filters for different network interfaces, and so on. It basically is a configuration tool for OS X’s built in firewalling system, instead of replacing the firewalling system altogether.

It won the Best System Utility Award at the 17th Annual MacWorld Editor’s Choice Awards and Gold Award, Firewall Protection for the MacFixit 2001 Toolbox Awards.

Technically, it’s not free - the shareware costs USD$25 per machine. But you can use the “unregistered” version for as long as you want, and pay someday when you feel it’s worth it and can afford it.

Check out Flying Buttress.

Apple has launched a new software called Aperture, aimed at photographers.

Aperture has a featureset that let’s you do everything you would want to do with your photographs after a shoot. It catalogs your images, and lets you do processing and touch-ups with it. It supports RAW formats from leading digital camera manufacturers. This means you can edit your RAWs directly without converting it to some other format first. RAW editing is non-destructive. You won’t lose any of your original data that you don’t touch.
Continue reading »

Neisha Erin Stadelhofer has managed to run Mac OS System 7.5 on her Sony PSP. Not much of a use though, it’s just for the cool factor

Continue reading »

Apple has confirmed the Mac Mini upgrade that I previously posted about, but there’s a catch to it. Because there’s alot of existing Mac Mini stock in the stores, the new Mac Mini boxes are labelled with the old specifications, with no hints as to which are the new ones and which are the old ones.

The way it is right now, getting an upgraded model or the previous specifications is a matter of luck.

Source: Yahoo

Apple’s filing for an integrated horizontal axis swiveling webcam gives us an insight into what Apple might add to their desktop and notebook lines.

AppleInsider says sources have reported sightings of iMac prototypes that feature a webcam. A built in webcam would be useful in this day where VOIP is getting hotter and hotter. With video talk getting more popular with 3G handphones, it’s only logical that with broadband connections, video phone calls using PC would be in demand. An iMac with a built-in iSight camera is logical and would definitely sell, since iChat AV 3.0 is one of the main features of Tiger.

With a little Photoshop magic, the camera equipped iMac might look like this…

The lense kind of spoils the clean look of the iMac so I don’t now how Apple’s designers (with far far more creative capability than me) would decide to integrate it. Also, I doubt the iMac’s webcam would have swivel capability as on a desktop there would not be much use for such a feature. But if they did… I wonder how they would implement it?

Wouldn’t it be great if it was true?

Macworld has posted an in-depth review which compares 4 free web browser products and 1 commercial web browser or Mac OS X.

Leading the pack in the results is Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6 with 4.5 out of 5. Omni Group’s US$30 OmbiWeb 5.1.1 ties in 2nd place with Apple’s own bundled browser Safari 2.0 at 4 out of 5. Opera 8.0.2 which has recently been re-licensed from a commercial product to free software gets 3.5 out of 5 and Camino (also based on Mozilla) gets 3 out of 5.

Read the review.

Been looking around the net for more Mac Mini information regarding the Mac Mini update rumour and found some interesting tidbits on the Mac Mini.
Continue reading »

I use SSH tunnels frequently as part of my system administration job to ‘forward ports on demand’ without punching forwarding ports into a firewall and get into internal PCs at remote sites.

Source
Continue reading »