IPhone charging from a laptop - changes for the better?

I first blogged about charging my cellphone from a laptop back in 2004 (Palm too). Later I charged my iPod as well. It's worked reasonably well over the years, but recently things have changed for the better.

I used to plug my iPods and iPhones into my corporate XP laptop when they needed a charge at the office. Back in the day I had to install iTunes associated device drivers to get the laptop to power the USB port, and that meant iTunes was prone to try to seize control of the iPod.

That's bad enough, but now our corporate XP boxes are so fragile I'm grateful to get through the day without a new IT disaster. I don't dare add something as potentially disruptive as iTunes to the witches brew of antivirus, configuration management, surveillance, encryption, firewall and antimatter that infests our laptops. (It takes two cores just to run the security layers.)

So when my iPhone faded on a plane flight, I didn't have much hope. Still, I connected it.

Yes, it charged. Not only did it charge, but it charged faster than with a conventional USB charger -- even before I put it in airplane mode. I've read that modern laptops deliver much more current than the USB spec suggests, so maybe I wasn't imaging things.

I don't really know what's changed. Maybe the iPhone was always able to register as a camera and thus engage the USB port's power. Maybe iPhone OS 3 makes the difference. Maybe it's the new laptop, perhaps USB ports now provide power even without a device driver request.

Whatever, it works. So it you haven't tried charging your iPhone from your corporate laptop, give it a try. It might just get you through a day of heavy iPhone use.

Apple is again messing with Apple IDs – pay attention!

I have a .mac Apple ID. That’s what all my DRMd iPhone apps and my music is tied to. It’s no longer a valid email address, I got it back when that’s how Apple IDs worked.

Apple has messed up their Apple ID system multiple times over the past two years. Looks like they’re about to make changes again ….

iTunes Store: About Apple ID and Password

Your Apple ID and password are two key parts of your Apple Account. You can use your Apple ID and password in iTunes to sign in to the iTunes Store, buy content, and authorize items you've purchased. If you already have an Apple Account, you can use your existing Apple ID and password to sign in and buy and authorize items you've purchased from the iTunes Store. Your Apple ID must be a valid email address, for example "steve@me.com." Your password must be at least six letters or numbers, and is case sensitive.

You can change your Apple ID, password, or personal information at any time by signing in and clicking View Account at the My Info page (http://myinfo.apple.com).

Changes you make to your Apple Account while you're in iTunes are also recognized by other applications where you use the same Apple Account (for example, the online Apple Store, MobileMe, or iPhoto). You may be asked to verify your information the next time you use your Apple Account to purchase something in another application…

What’s new here is they’re documenting what happens when you change you Apple ID. In theory you can now revise your Apple ID “while you’re in iTunes”. But wait, the My Info page is viewed from a web browser, not iTunes. They’re not really saying that you can change your Apple ID and it will all work nicely with iTunes and the App Store.

Be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Credential transitions are the sort of thing people screw up routinely, and Apple has a record of botching it.

AIM on iPhone: push notification – and a big bug (bonus Gmail bug too)

AIM, AOL’s iPhone instant messaging client now now has Push notification services. So I bought a copy to play with it ($3).

I logged in with my old AIM username – it still worked. Then in Google Gmail Chat I liked my Gmail chat to the AIM account. That’s supposed to link chat buddies and the like.

I sent a few IMs back and forth from Gmail chat to my iPhone. That worked. I updated the status message on AIM/iPhone – that didn’t seem to propagate to the status message in Gmail Chat.

Then I clicked on the “Contacts” icon within AIM/iPhone and ….

It blew up.

Ok, so it just crashed. One time it actually launched GV Mobile, my iPhone Google Voice client, and it tried to open GV Mobile contacts. Mostly it just exited.

So that’s interesting.

Of course, being me, there are several kinds of bugs that could be in play

• GV Mobile and AIM could be truly interacting. I didn’t think that was possible on an iPhone!
• AIM/iPhone could be retching on the combination of linking my Gmail account to AIM and my synchronizing my iPhone with both Address Book and Gmail Contacts via Gmail ActiveSync Exchange services. The one time GV Mobile launch was an accident of an errant pointer.

I’m not a Gerserker on the desktop any more, but I guess on my iPhone I’m still on the edge.

I reported the bug via the iPhone App Store client ‘bug report’ button.

Update: There's a special bonus Gmail bug as well! You can sign into AIM from your chat settings, but you can't sign out from there. You have to find the sign out button hidden in your Chat drop down. I tried signing out of AIM on Gmail but that didn't fix the 'crash on touch' bug with AIM Contacts.

Update 2: Beejive 3.0 with push is now available. WTH, I spent $10 on that. I don't want to use my AIM credentials anyway; Beejive works with GoogleTalk credentials. I should have tried the ad-supported version of AIM first though! I'll give AIM a few days to fix things then I'll try requesting a refund through iTunes support.

OS X parental controls still broken in 10.5.7

I checked after the 10.5.7 update. The Parental Controls log is still broken,

if you set the range to anything more than 1 month you get no results:

Alas, it doesn't end there.

In theory you can use parental controls to configure managed accounts so that a managed user can change their password.

In practice, when I do that, the managed user cannot click on the Accounts PreferencePane (it's grayed out). So the setting to enable password change does nothing.

Lastly, if you switch a user from managed to standard so you can change their login password and keychain password together, OS X loses all the allowed and disallowed websites configured in Parental Controls. If you switch back to Managed User you start over.

Apple's Parental Controls have been broken in every version of OS X I've used. I think they last worked in Mac Classic version 8 or so.

Why, oh why, can't we customers be more demanding?

Google's Exchange services now support 25 calendars on iPhone OS 3

In the odd parallel universe I live in, most of the hyped iPhone OS 3 features have been pretty unimpressive.

On the other hand, the features nobody is talking about are pretty nice. I now have my Google, Work and Personal iMac contacts all living together on my iPhone. The Work/Personal are coming in from my desktop (iTunes) sync, and my Google Contacts through Google's version of Microsoft's Exchange (ActiveSync for Mobile) Service.

I currently sync my iPhone Calendar (grrr) only to Google's Calendar, that hasn't changed since last March or so. What's new is that until today there was a 5 calendar limit on what you could sync:

Gordon's Tech: Google saves my iPhone

.... I chose my sync calendars (config site is http://m.google.com/sync [1], you must visit it from an iPhone). I actually ran up against the 5 calendar limit (my work, emily calendar, my personal, MN Special Hockey and US Holidays), but that's good for now. The 5 calendar limit appears to be related to an iPhone bug....

I actually need to sync about 7-8 calendars, so I've been waiting for a fix. Today I looked and the new limit is 25 calendars. Much nicer.

[1] Google documents this feature, but it's not easy to find. If you don't go to this mobile-only page you'd think you can only sync your primary Google account calendar to your iPhone. In fact anything that you can display on your Google Calendar can go to the iPhone. I think you can even turn off sync to your primary (default) Google Account (Gmail) calendar.

Project Contacts: iPhone 3.0 means I hack away at Google Contacts, and discover another rough spot

In my last installment of Project Contacts (Launched 2/14/09) I discovered that copying my Corporate (Exchange server/Outlook) contacts to a PST file converted email addresses from EX (x.500) to standard SMTP. I brought the PST to my home Outlook (on XP box) and then used MobileMe Sync to get the work contacts nicely integrated with my iPhone and my iMac.

That took me 70% of the way to getting my Contacts mega-mess sorted out. The cost was a subscription to MobileMe (later canceled within 30 day limit) and some modest manual updating [1].

I figured I’d wait a bit before tackling the last bit of the Contacts mess – my Gmail Contacts. I need to merge them in to my OS X Address Book repository [2]. Google is supposed to migrate to a more sync friendly format (structured names), but it’s going slowly. I figured I’d wait.

Then I got iPhone OS 3. The one good feature so far is that I can sync my Google Contacts to my iPhone via Google’s exchange server support while ALSO synching my OS X Address Book (with work and home) to my iPhone.

I did that and ended up with thousands of duplicates, but this isn’t as bad as it sounds. They were segregated by account. Still, it made phone searching pretty slow.

So I spent an hour slogging away at Gmail cleanup. I removed a large redundant group of about 800 contacts, then hand deleted another 200 or so. The 30-40 minute process reminded me that I’ve lived a fairly long time already; some of those names had pretty old memories with them (they still exist in my main contacts – I was just deleting unwanted redundancies).

The good news is that Google’s Contact Merge feature works quite nicely. The bad news is that every time you delete a contact, the screen redraws and you start over again at the top of the Contacts List. Sigh. More evidence nobody at Google uses the Gmail we use.

So now I’d say I’m 77% of the way to completing Project Contacts. I’m waiting now for Google to compete their structured name transition and for Spanning Sync to be suitably updated. Then I’ll start working on the last step. On my iPhone, at least, I do have every Contact at hand at all times. That’s progress.

[1] Turns out my work Contacts don’t change all that quickly, so for various reasons I won’t go into I don’t actually need MobileMe to manually copy changed Outlook Contacts to my iMac. I am probably going to get MobileMe for other reasons however.

[2] Address Book is the least weak of Apple’s astoundingly unimpressive desktop PIM suite, but it’s still not an ideal repository.

Update: I was so pleased with Google's Contact Merge feature I decided to try the same feature in OS X Address Book. Oops! Address Book's Merge is completely automatic. In Gmail Contacts you can review the merged record and revise it or reject it. In almost every merge I did make some corrections. OS X Address Book just executes the merge, it doesn't even identify the merged records. Damn, but Apple sucks so abysmally at everything Palm was good at.

Update 12/23/10: I've been using Spanning Sync, MobileMe, Address Book OS X, iPhone Contacts and Google Contacts all more or less in sync for about a year.

Converting Eudora email

I have a large archive of email on my XP machine, all of it Eudora 7, an application that was last supported in 2006. You can still download the XP version, but the Mac download appears to be broken.

I need to migrate it to my Mac, but it's a tricky process. I don't like the odd ways OS X Mail.app handles an email database (mostly to support Spotlight search) and I fear crushing Mail.app with the archives.

So I'm researching conversion options, not for the first time. This Thunderbird kb article outlines several options. I'll be doing more research and updating this thread. I'm not particularly concerned about conserving the address book.

Once I get it converted and tested I'll look at dumping the IMAP setup I currently use with Mail.app to get my email from Gmail and possibly regress to a simple POP configuration that's less messed up by Google's peculiar folder emulation.

I'll do my test conversions with a special purpose user account I can delete after I'm done testing.

See also:

• Migrating Outlook Express email using Eudora
• Eudora mailbox cleaner (Probably the top choice)