FileMaker Go for the iPhone

I'd given up on it, but FileMaker has now released a $20 FM Pro companion for the iPhone (and iPad!) -- FileMaker Go. It requires iOS 4. The available documentation is in a technical brief.

It does NOT support synchronization. You copy FM 7 (7!) or later files to the iPhone. It can be a client to a FM server database. From the tech brief it looks like it could be an application development environment (scripting).

It does NOT support encryption. Your data is only as protected as the phone itself; you can't assign a secure password to your password database, for example.

If it had encryption, I'd buy it.

Pairing an iPhone 4 with an Apple bluetooth keyboard

For the past two years I've been looking forward to using an external keyboard with my iPhone, much as we used to use an external kb with our Palm devices. I now have an iPhone 4, so I tried pairing it with my 27" iMac keyboard (already paired with the iMac).

I followed this user guide procedure, but it didn't work at first:

1. In Settings, choose General > Bluetooth.

2. If Bluetooth isn’t already turned on, tap the Bluetooth switch.

3. Press the power button on the Apple Wireless Keyboard to turn it on.

4. On iPhone, tap the entry for the keyboard under Devices.

Once the keyboard is paired with iPhone, it connects whenever the keyboard is within range (up to 30 feet). You can tell the keyboard is connected if the onscreen keyboard doesn’t appear when you tap in a text field.

The iPhone Bluetooth settings simply showed the spinning "wheel" next to "Devices" and the phrase "Now discoverable". I think the problem was that the keyboard was already paired to my iMac. My Bluetooth peripheral experience is limited, but this seems a sensible if inevitably confusing behavior.

It took a while to get things to work. At one point the iPhone said it found a "Wireless Keyboard" but not an "Apple Wireless Keyboard". I did the following (not all necessary I'm sure):

1. Went very far away from my iMac and down a flight of stairs. In my house Bluetooth really reaches.
2. Removed batteries from kb and reinserted.
3. Followed above procedures but pressed and held the power button until it went off.
4. Pressed the power button on the kb until it started blinking.

Then the iPhone found the keyboard. I tapped the entry and was asked to enter a code on the keyboard.

They then paired.

Once the two are paired the iPhone's keyboard no longer appears when the kb is in range. I turned off Bluetooth to get it back.

To repair the kb to my iMac I again held the power button until it powered down. Then I held it until it restarted and began blinking. It then reconnected.

This was trickier than I'd expected, but now I know it works. I'll be looking for an iPhone specific bluetooth keyboard that includes a cradle to hold the iphone, an iPhone-touch-screen compatible stylus to facilitate interaction with a mounted device, a form fact that is more compact than Apple's kb, and an optional charger.

Update: A bit more on unpairing from Apple's excellent iPhone iOS4 user guide (it's on my Reader.app bookshelf in my iPhone and it's a default shortcut in Safari on new installs):

Once the keyboard is paired with iPhone, it connects whenever the keyboard is within range (up to 30 feet). You can tell the keyboard is connected if the onscreen keyboard doesn’t appear when you tap in a text field.

Switch the language when using a hardware keyboard: Press and hold the Command key, then tap the space bar to display a list of available languages. Tap the space bar again to choose a different language.

Disconnect a wireless keyboard from iPhone: Press and hold the power button on the keyboard until the green light goes off.

iPhone disconnects the keyboard when it’s out of range.

Unpair a wireless keyboard from iPhone: In Settings, choose General > Bluetooth and tap the entry for the keyboard under Devices, then tap “Forget this Device.”

iOS 3 bug with recurring Exchange meetings changed in iOS 4.

Apple just can't manage to get this one right. I tested an old iOS Exchange Server calendaring bug with Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007.

In iOS 3 if you declined an instance of a recurring meeting you removed all the meetings from your calendar.

In iOS 4 if you decline an instance of a recurring meeting you remove it from your iPhone calendar (good) but not from your Outlook calendar (very bad).

Fail.

Deep sigh. Apple does not deserve its reputation for "quality". Design yes, quality no.

I'll retest with iOS 4.1 when it's out.

Annals of Adobe evil - writing into track 0

I found this occult discussion when searching about encyrption utilities (TrueCrypt in this case) and drive repair (Spinrite) ...

STEVE [GIBSON]:  It turns out that another Adobe utility - I don't know what it is with Adobe and track 0.  But it turns out that he's learned that their acrotray.exe utility, which is some sort of something that lives down in the tray of Windows, is also writing into track 0 and wiped out TrueCrypt.  He rebooted, and he typed in his password.  Nothing happened.  And he said he saw his life pass before his eyes.  Then he realized, wait a minute, I've got that CD.  So he booted from the CD.  It was able to, of course, restore that track and the boot track, and he was able to get back into Windows.  And again, by juggling back and forth a little bit, he figured out what it was that was causing the problem.  And so this is two different things now from Adobe relative to, I guess to Macromedia.  Or I think Macromedia was the other one.  And so it's something DRMish that Adobe is doing is really causing problems.  And he did do some browsing around and confirmed that lots of other people are having the same problem with Adobe's software and its collision with the TrueCrypt bootloader.

Writing to track 0 as part of a DRM process is really nasty.

This is the sort of thing that makes geeks want Adobe to go away.

Take Control of Permissions in Snow Leopard

I really wanted this book about six months ago, when I was fighting a losing battle with OS X permissions (they suck) - Take Control of Permissions in Snow Leopard by Brian Tanaka.

It has sentences like this (emphases mine) ...

When a new file or sub- folder is created, the ACL of the enclosing folder is inspected for rules (ACEs) that are marked to be inherited, and those rules are added to the ACL of the new file or folder. ACL inheritance is static—it happens only when the file or folder is created. If the ACL of the enclosing folder changes, the ACLs of items already in the folder will not reflect those changes: only new child items will inherit the new rules.

Permissions are the weakest aspect of OS X. The default framework was archaic in the 90s, and the only slightly less archaic "modern" ACL framework has no GUI tools. All Mac geeks need this book.

It's normally $10, but I got it for $5 since TidBITS is promoting their new customer management system. (Sale ends 8/3, sorry.)

If you're a former TidBITS user you need to do a password reset to get your new password.

The details are in an email you probably deleted. I had a devil of time figuring out how to Login, turns out the "Login" text in top right is not a description for the neighboring navigation drop down, it's an atypical button. Really, they needed to make it either a true button or a true link, not bold formatted text. I love TibBITS, but really guys ...

Anyway, you need the book.

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Meetup - A group administrator review

Meetup is ancient history in the world of the social net; it was founded in 2001. It's free to join, but running a group costs money.

I've administered a Meetup group on behalf of the Minnesota Inline Skate Club for the past six weeks or so, enough to share a bit about what I learned.

The first thing to note is that Meetup fails test #1 of Gordon's Laws for software and service use ...

1. Is it obvious how to delete your account and all services?

No, it's not obvious how to delete a group. It's not in the online help, and the Google references date to 2007. This is not a good sign. The miniscule wikipedia page is another not so good sighn

Except for this deletion Fail, the site has a reasonable set of services for running an organization including basic financial services. It's designed to be an outsourcing solution, not a complement to an existing club or organization web site. The communications focus is very email centric, but many list items do have feeds. I was able to subscribe to to the event calendar in Google Calendar, and to further share it from there. Updates propagated reasonably quickly to Google.

Our second biggest problem with the site was the location feature. We needed a simple Google Calendar style location description, but Meetup has an over-engineered location approach that's probably designed for a Meetup business case.

Our biggest problem with the site was that it didn't work. We got several inquiries, but no new attendees. Most of the inquiries we received were from people who'd skated long ago, and were half-heartedly considering resuming. It didn't feel like a very dynamic audience.

Although Meetup didn't work out as a way for our club to recruit new members, I could see it working well as an outsourced web solution for an active club that was recruiting elsewhere. Of course given the violation of a cardinal rule of Gordon's Laws for Software Services, I wouldn't spend my own money on Meetup.

Update 8/5/10:

Although I still don't see how to delete a group, this is what I did:

1. Went to my personal account page and canceled my subscription. Turns out when you pay for six months of service you're actually subscribing with regular renewal. Sneaky. This won't cancel the service though, it just stops the renewal.
2. I tried canceling a repeating meeting. This isn't easy, I ran into several issues then a server error. Turns out you cancel one instance, then you get the opportunity to cancel all following.
3. I closed the group to new members
4. I sent all members a notice that we'd closed the group and I changed the intro page to say that.

I assume it will go away when our next payment is due.

Update 1/27/11: This is interesting. A good reason, by itself, to avoid Meetup.

As noted previously Meetup doesn't provide any way to delete a group. I thought the group would go away. Instead it was assumed by a former member, who started a new group with a different name -- and acquired all the prior members. That's intriguing!

In this case the person who's running the new group is well intentioned; I'm not in a rush to leave the group. This must all come as a bit of a surprise to the former members however.

This policy is reason enough to avoid Meetup.

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Migrating Notes from ToodleDo to ResophNotes and the Simplenote ecosystem

[Shortly after I first wrote this, C.Y. released ResophNotes 1.0.5. Among other things, such as the ability to store notes as indexable .txt files, it has direct support for importing ToodleDo’s CSV file. He’d told me the release was coming soon, I did it my way just for geek fun. I’ve therefore moved the details of what I did to a footnote. BTW, turns out C.Y., like me, migrated to Simplenote from Toodledo/Appigo!]

Once I'd rescued my memory fragments from Outlook 2007 my next goal was to unify them from the former Palm Memos I'd (painfully) migrated to ToodleDo and thus Appigo's Notebook.app.

I've been reasonably happy with the combination of ToodleDo and Appigo, but notes are very much a 2nd class citizen on ToodleDo (they're all about tasks) and their search tools are pretty weak. I also wanted to be able to access and work with my notes from my desktop on Windows and the Mac, to be able to back them up, to have them be exposed to Spotlight search on OS X, to integrate my old corporate Outlook Notes with my old personal former Palm Memos and to have at least one open source repository in the mix. I needed the notes to live in a standard file format (UTF-8 text or RTF) free of all data lock.

Sounds like a lot, but the combination of ResophNotes (XP and higher - free but do donate), Simplenote (Cloud, ad-supported or $9/year - I paid - see documentation), Simplenote.app (iPhone and iPad app, free) and Notational Velocity (open source, OS X - documentation) gave me everything I wanted -- plus Chrome extensions for editing.

There was only one thing standing in my way. How could I get my ToodleDo notes into Simplenote?

I knew that ResophNotes (Win) would import Outlook's peculiar CSV files (embedded paragraphs!), but the developer, C.Y. I still days away from releasing a more general CSV import feature. I was impatient, so this is what I did. (see footnote [1])

During my early import experiments, because I used a Mac for part of the process, I ran into character encoding problems. Since ResophNotes doesn't yet have note multiselect and delete [2] I had to find its database and delete it.

ResophNotes exports and imports .RSN files (yay! backup!), but that's not how it works with notes. I found them in "C:\Documents and Settings\jfaughnan" in a .ResophNotes folder (hidden). To delete them and start over you have to quit ResophNotes, then find the instance in Task Manager Processes and kill it, then you can delete the files.

That let me start over again.

BTW, here's how the notes look in Notational Velocity's "Notational Notes" store:

Yes, each note a separate Rich Text file (I may convert to safer plain text) -- all Spotlight indexed.

Just in time for my birthday.

Nerdvana.

[1] Now that ResophNotes has direct ToodleDo import, I’ll include this as a reference for how one might support CSV variants other than ToodleDo or Outlook. My procedure was especially weird because I happened to have a Mac at hand…

1. Use ToodleDo's Notes CSV export to my Mac.
2. Import into FileMaker and use Calculation field to merge the ToodleDo Title and Notes into an Outlook style "Note Body". I next renamed the ToodleDo "Folder" column to Category.
3. Created FileMaker columns to match Outlook's names, and exported as CSV. I had to paste this string in as the first row: "Note Body","Categories","Note Color","Priority","Sensitivity". I left all values except Note Body and Category null. In retrospect I should have appended "Categories" as a string to the end of "Note Body" to facilitate search.
4. I used TextWrangler to clean up some character encoding CR/LF issues. This was only necessary because I got a Mac in the mix. Curse that ancient CR/LF screwup. It seems to have survived into the world of UTF-8 encoding.
5. I fired up my Fusion VM (way better than it first was on 10.6) and my old XP image and moved the file over. I opened it in Word and saved as UTF-8 to remove any residual character encoding issues.
6. I imported into ResophNotes. When I was sure all was well, I synchronized ResophNotes with Simplenotes and all my notes merged into one lovely repository. I fired up Notational Velocity in another window and confirmed all was fine there as well.

[2] Since the latest version can store as .txt files, I assume one could just delete all the .txt files! I haven’t tried this tough.