Getting the iPhone user guide into the iBook application

The iPad user guide is available in the iBookstore, but the iPhone user guide is not.

It's available as a web page in the iPhone or as a PDF. I tried mailing a link it to myself per Apple's advice:

Apple - iPhone - Tips and Tricks

... From a Mail message or a web page, touch and hold the PDF icon or link, then select “Open in iBooks.”...

The email touch and hold didn't work -- so Apple's documentation is wrong for iOS 4.01. Instead I tapped the link and in Safari I saw an Open in iBooks button.

So now I have the PDF manual in my bookshelf. It's not bad, but not clear that there's an advantage over using the web version.

Escape from Outlook Notes - ResophNotes, SimpleNote for iPhone and Notational Velocity

I had despaired of rescuing my notes from Outlook 2007.

I'd written hundreds over time. In the old days I used Palm products that would sync with Outlook, so I could carry them with me. Now my iPhone, after years of struggle, gives me good Outlook sync with Contacts and Calendars. Notes and Tasks, however, have been orphaned. There's no real hope of an Outlook Notes to iPhone sync solution; although a few people use Outlook Tasks almost nobody uses Outlook Notes.

I've learned to live without corporate Outlook Tasks (I schedule my time on a 3 week plan basis), but I wanted those notes. I decided they needed to live within either ToodleDo Notes/Appigo Notebook, iPhone Notes (unlikely), or the Simplenote / NotationalVelocity universe (for various reasons I've given up on Evernote).

Today I discovered ResophNotes, a Windows app that syncs with the Simplenote cloud data store. The Simplenote cloud data store, of course, also syncs with Notational velocity (open source, OS X Spotlight indexed), OS X Tinderbox, OS X Yojimbe (3rd party sync), and there's a Chrome extension for editing notes.

I exported my Outlook 2007 notes to Outlook's odd CSV format (includes line feeds!), then I imported into ResophNotes and synchronized with Simplenote's cloud store. Then on my iPhone I viewed them in the Simplenote iPhone client.

It worked better than I'd expected.

Now I can move my old (originally Palm III Notes, now ToodleDo/Appigo Notebook) personal notes to the same cloud store. I'll sign up for the $10/year premium Simplenote service. (Currently I have free version.) If Simplenote belly up the rich ecosystem and open source Notational Velocity desktop solution provides the insurance I need.

A good day.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: The rise of software rental (aka software as service)
• Moving Palm notes to Toodledo via CSV file - what worked. (Hard!)
• Appigo Notebook is coming to the iPhone
• Kiss your Google Notebook good-bye
• Palm to iPhone migration - address book and notes (Aug 2008 - dated)
• Toodledo gets it
• Appigo and Toodledo – nasty emergent design flaw makes a mess of my iPhone Notes and Tasks
• Evernote's import/export test (updated)

Update 7/31/10: The author of ResophNotes tells me he's preparing a new version that will import CSV files -- like the ones ToodleDo Notes export creates. Incidentally, I discovered that FileMaker Pro 8 does a great job opening Outlook's CSV files with embedded line feeds. I never imagined ...

iPhone 4 bug with smart album sync

Apple - Support - Discussions - iPhone 4 Won't Sync Smart Photo Album.

I've confirmed this one. It's broken in iOS 4.01 with iPhone 4.

We'll have to wait for a fix.

AT&T will data block a phone - but this disables MMS messaging

In the process of picking up my new iPhone [1] I asked (again) about blocking a user's data services. Today the store AT&T rep more or less confirmed this anonymous comment on a June post:

Gordon's Notes: AT&T’s secret Nov 2009 mobile contract change – Elegant Evil

... you can have AT&T put a data block on any phone. I have one on one of my blackberries. And it's something they do routinely, in fact on my bill it's explicitly called out as a line item. Call them again, and tell them to put a data block on, and they should do it ....

The catch (you knew there was one?) is that the data service block also disables MMS messaging -- even if that is covered by an unlimited texting plan. It does not impact SMS messaging.

I also asked again about AT&T's policies on adding data plans to "smart phones" connected to AT&T's network. I've asked about this previously and gotten conflicting responses:

• AT&T’s secret Nov 2009 mobile contract change – Elegant Evil
• AT&T Contracts, Terms of Service and Plan Terms – observations of interest

This time I got yet another response - a very bad one.

I'm going to put up yet another post on this topic, including some AT&T policy language that's not publicly available. I'll update this post with a link when the new material is out.

[1] I can kill bars by touching any part of the antenna. I used to tune TVs by waving my hands; I think it's a sign of alien possession. I suspect a lot of the antenna problems are actually user-specific.

Apple accounts: never truly deleted, so keep your old password

My mother used to have one of our family MobileMe account, but I wasn't using it well. So I removed it.

When I gave her an iPad I realized I could create an account on one of my machines and use it to control her calendar and contacts via MobileMe. So I added her back using her old username.

When I did that I was asked for her old password. I still had it in my pw database, so I reinstated it. All of her old contact information was still online. Nothing had been deleted.

I had a similar experience with an old .mac account of mine. When I went to MobileMe I couldn't use my old discontinued .mac username -- because I'd misplaced the password. If I still had it I wonder if I'd have found my old .mac data still intact.

I don't know if, outside of a family account, terminating the account truly removes data. I do know that doesn't happen inside a family account. I also know that you never want to lose your MobileMe password even after you stop renewing. You'll need it if you ever want to resurrect an old user name. Apple doesn't reuse them.

Grandma's iPad - A user guide and review

I gave my 80 yo half-blind wheelchair bound arthritic mother her iPad.

She loves it. She's fascinated by it, her main complaint is that she loses track of time playing with it. She's using the Facebook.app (iPhone, double sized -- which is a feature, see below) to follow me and she composed her first email since her macular degeneration progressed.

She manages to drop it into conversations. The amazement and envy of a young supermarket employee is priceless.

As with her 2007 Mac Mini, which is increasingly hard for her to operate, I've written up a user guide for Grandma's Accessible iPad.

Very quickly (for time is short!) here are some related observations in bullet form:

• Games are a a good way to learn basic motions. She likes Solitaire, I paid a few dollars for an ad-free product.
• Ad-supported products are NOT elder-friendly. They're too unpredictable and confusing.
• Her devices are enrolled in MobileMe, one of our family accounts. I have a "GrandMa" user account on my laptop that syncs with that MobileMe account. That lets me remotely manager her contacts and calendar from my laptop. I'd use "Back to my Mac" from that laptop but I didn't have time to make it work with her ISP (currently blocks needed ports).
• Old-fashioned desktop-oriented web apps are the most accessible apps because they zoom very nicely. Mobile web apps are the least accessible low vision apps because they don't scale at all (pinch expand doesn't work) and they don't even have configurable fonts.
• Web apps that require authentication are a REAL problem. She absolutely cannot manage passwords. (Almost nobody can, really.)
• iPhone apps with retina-displays support set to double size are PERFECT for her. Very large UI, very simple UI.
• The more "features" in the OS the more troublesome. There's nothing in iOS 4 that is good for her -- it's just more complex (multitasking, "folders", etc). More features means more "traps" -- unexpected behaviors. (Like the "wiggles" if you rest a digit on an icon, but at least I could explain that.)
• It's really annoying that Apple made "zoom" (a very weak feature) incompatible with VoiceOver. They should at least use a rotor gesture for the VoiceOver screen blank feature so the triple finger tap could zoom.
• Apple's Mail.app is very hard to use with low vision. She has to pull out a magnifying glass (which is a feature of the iPad, they don't work well with desktop screens). Apple's font scaling only shows up in the message, nowhere else. It's really not a very user-friendly app.

See also these related posts (first 4 are iPad, 5th is OS X desktop):

• Accessible iPad - the best apps are web apps
• iPad user guide: accessibility and more
• iPad for low vision elderly
• Amazon Kindle for iPad - Accessibility fail
• OS X accessibility - radio shortcuts, shortcut cleanup, voice over and magnify
• OS X and Mac Mini tutorial and configuration guide - low vision elderly

What's wrong with Google Maps?

There's something weird going on with Google Maps. Twice on our family trip, once in Canada and once in the US, Google gave us very scenic but impractical directions. They were quite different from prior directions for identical routes. There were no road closures to explain the choices.

No, we weren't choosing the bicycle route.

It's as though Google's routing algorithms are mixing up bicycle and auto travel.

Weird. I assume it's transient, but it's very annoying.

PS. In a separate bug, Google has Sault Ste Marie Michigan and Sault Ste Marie Ontario merged as one location in their database. Any searches on Michigan locations get Ontario results.

Sync Hell: MobileMe contact sync bug - does Apple care?

Every few weeks, I run across an Apple bug so egregious that I can only conclude nobody there cares.

The MobileMe contact sync bug is one of those. As best I can tell only the first, last and perhaps company strings are used to match contacts when synchronizing. So if a contact has only an email address, then the match is on an empty string (null key). This produces many-to-many combinatorials, email addresses that grow with each sync until every empty name contact has every other empty name email.

This is an incompetent design. The responsible engineer and product managers should hand their head in shame.

iTunes 9.2 app update bug: The information on this page is outdated

There are a lot of suggested fixes on this page, but only one of them is good ...

Apple - Support - Discussions - Application update all Information ...

Does anyone know of a solution for the 'The information on this page is outdated. Click OK to refresh the page. If you have available updates after refreshing, click Download All Free Updates' message?

I open iTunes the go to the app store and click Download All Free Updates. It always gives me the message that the page is outdated, I have to click OK then it refreshes the page with the exact same app updates and I have to click Download All Free Updates again for it to continue.

This happens every time I have new app updates whether I launch iTunes or every time the iMac goes to sleep and I open iTunes when it was already running.

"Rangeshooter" had the simplest, safest tip. It worked for me. Quit iTunes, restart, try again to install. He suggests its related to iTunes running when a machine goes to sleep.

Other tips involved reinstalling iTunes, deleting apps, etc. They were much more invasive.

I've seen this error message in the past related to an old app, and deleting and reinstalling that app did the trick. This time it looks like a different problem.

Now we see how long it takes Apple to fix this. I've seen some of their bugs last for years.

Update 7/14/10: From Josh Bancroft via Comments, another fix:

After you get the "this page is outdated" error, click on your email address in the upper right corner, to access your iTunes account. It will prompt you for your password. Once you're on your account page, click Done, and you should be back at the "My App Updates" page. Now, updating all of your apps should work.

Thanks! This makes the bug sound like a DRM issue.

Update 7/25/10: Fixed in an iTunes update.

Retrospect Professional 8 backup of VMware VM corrupt on restore

I've been using Retrospect Professional 8 to backup a Windows 7 machine. That machine has VMware VM running.

There have been no backup errors.

Recently I had to do a restore of the VM. All seemed fine. The size was right. When I ran it, however, the VM was corrupt.

The VM is made up of many large files. I think Retrospect backed some up at different times, depending on metadata changes, file locked, etc. Normally that would be fine, but they all had to be the same version for the VM to work.

Fortunately I had a completely separate manual all-at-once backup done when VMWare was turned off. It was a few days old, but we didn't lose anything significant. Sometimes paranoia is a good strategy.

A cautionary tale! Virtual machine backup is tricky.

Curious OS X bug with audio CDs - missing track names on most machines

I have a CD-R containing music that, when inserted in a 10.5.8 machine shows track names. When I insert the same CD in a 10.6 and a different 10.5.8 machine I don't see the track names.

The machine that shows the track names is running iTunes 9.1 and is very old. The machines that don't show them are running 9.2.

It's 100% repeatable. I think it's either a bug with the new iTunes or something to do with old hardware.

Very strange.

Grandma's iPad stand

I wanted a stand so Grandma's iPad could show family photos while it charges.

I picked up the plastic frame shown here for $6 from a local hardware store. The iPad is in the $25 Griffin case (yes, it blocks the rotation lock, the power switch is beneath a tab so I just push on the tab) folded back on itself. The power cord plugs into the right side.



It works well. It's easy to add and remove the iPad without removing the case.

Accessible iPad - the best apps are web apps

I'm getting to the end of configuring Grandma's iPad, but I'll call out one finding early.

For someone with low vision, Safari is the killer app. It has full screen reader support, and you can expand many (but not all) web pages with a pinch expand (spread apart).

This isn't true of all standalone apps.  For example, the pretty but limited NYT Editors' Choice for iPad doesn't seem to work with the screen reader and you can't change the small font. The NYT web site though, is a pleasure to navigate using Safari.

Alas, not all web sites are Safari zoom friendly. The iPad optimized Gmail site can't be zoomed, so it ends up being relatively inaccessible.

As I configure her device I'm adding several web sites that are pinch-zoom friendly. Ironically, these have to be generic sites. iPad optimized sites are much less low vision friendly.

iPhone OS Calendar deletes Exchange server recurring appointments if you delete an instance

Mind blowing bug that's been around since 2008 ... Apple's Potemkin iOS exchange support - the problem with being a peripheral customer.

MarsEdit 3 - you're no Windows Live Writer

I bought MarsEdit 3. After a couple of months of use I'd give it a B+. It's much better than anything else on OS X for publishing to Blogger, but it's a weak shadow of Microsoft's (abandoned) Windows Live Writer (Win only).

The image handling is particularly weak. On the other hand the bugs aren't too awful and the customer support is superb. I'd love to see Red Sweater study WLW and emulate as many features as possible.

The real competitor on OS X is Google's own web based editor. If Google were to put their A team on blogger I think MarsEdit would get squashed. They're not going to do that though, and the current team can't even get paragraphs working. So there's an opening for MarsEdit. I hope they squeeze through ...

Update 8/7/10: I threw MarsEdit off my drive after it produced a complete hash of a post. It looked fine in MarsEdit's wysiwyg editor, but it was a mess in Blogger. I had to fire up an XP VN and use Windows Live Writer to repair the damage. Using a rich text editor as a proxy for a true HTML editor is a bad idea.