Things to do when selling or retiring an old iPhone

Among other issues, Apple has longstanding problems with their customer identity infrastructure and how it intersects with their device registration, DRM rules, and messaging systems. Under iOS 8, for example, there appear to be 4-5 different authentication channels for Apple products even when a user has only one AppleID.

Which is why, in the course of moving the kid’s iPhones around, I made a list of the steps I take when deactivating an old iPhone (for sale, disposal, or migration to the backup stack):

• log out of FaceTime (remove credentials)
• deregister iMessage: iMessage turn off, FaceTime logout and turn off
• remove iTunes Store AppleID account information (which can differ from iCloud AppleID)
• from Settings:Mail,Contacts, Calendars:iCloud:Advanced:Share My Location: From: (Your device) remove unwanted devices
• log out of iCloud/Find Phone
• log out of FindFriends
• if you can figure out which apps or content apps use DRM to limit installs, then sign out from those (Example, Inkling books.) Good luck.
• wipe phone
• power off
• Manage your associated devices in iTunes - remove the device
• Manage devices associated with your Apple ID (not same as iTunes devices) - remove the device
• Remove device from Apple support/Apple ID device profile? (this is an ugly business)
• In Find iPhone on another device you can remove the device from the list. You’ll need iCloud credentials associated with each device. I believe this updates Apple’s record for device owner.

Note that you can change the iTunes Store Apple ID associated with an iPhone only every 90 days.

Did I miss anything?

By the way, even after doing all this, I found lots of old devices when I use iOS 8 FindPhone...

Update 9/26/2015

While browsing Google Account Security I found this ..

Google keeps track of devices (unclear how it identifies a device) in addition to credentials. If it gets valid logins from an unknown device it sends out a warning email. 

So if you want to be very careful when you retire an old iPhone, you should review the Google Account Security Device activity & notifications page for every Google account you use and remove the old device.

I haven’t bothered to do this methodically, but it’s a reminder of how hard it is to throughly remove all connections between one’s identity and one’s devices.

Appigo ToDo task management suite: Archiving and Export of completed tasks and projects is non-negotiable requirement

Appigo has deferred work on archive and export of tasks and projects for at least two years and possibly longer. When I paid Toodledo to provide back end services I could live with ToDo.app’s missing features, but when I switched full time to ToDo for iOS and ToDo for Mac with ToDo Cloud support it became a real concern. I gradually realized Appigo wan’t showing any inclination to change.

I’ve tried one last ticket request:

[#85787] Archiving and Export of completed tasks and projects : Appigo Inc.

There are two closed discussions related to archiving of completed tasks and related request to export tasks and project data.

I know about setting sync to 1 year, I know ToDo web version will paginate completed tasks (up to 1 year?) and I know I can access tasks via SQLite (but dates are proprietary format).

I know I can sponge off Toodeldo and use them as an archive format without sending them any money (unethical).

I need more than that. I signed up for ToDo Cloud and I use both the iOS and Mac version intensively, including all Project features. I can't continue using ToDo Cloud if I can't have long term storage of project/task information as well as archive export.

It's just an essential requirement. If you can't tell us you're going to do this I need to find another product."

I have a feeling I know where this goes. So I’m looking again at Things an Omni, and it may be that I’ll reverse my shift and return to Toodledo.

Weirdness with Yosemite Google accounts and email configuration: "This message may not have been sent... Report phishing"

I noticed my daughter was receiving email sent from my iPhone with my email address but the sender name of “Gmail personal”.

It took a while to figure out that this sender name was coming from how I named one of the user accounts for Mail.app … on OS X.

I really don’t understand this, but a Google search somehow sent me to this seemingly unrelated conversation ...

Fortunately, I know better than to ignore the nsAI of our time (non-sentient AI) - so I started poking around the configuration of my “Internet Accounts” (Yosemite, click Details after choose account name) and my OS Mail.app Account settings (which are sort of like the “Internet accounts” and sort of not like them).

There I found some oddball settings for Outgoing Mail Server — on a freshly configured machine (I didn’t migrate from prior machine):

I deleted the odd outgoing mail server .. .and Mail.app stopped sending email.

There’s a problem with Yosemite and multiple Google accounts on one OS X user account. i’m still figuring this out. I suspect the keychain is involved...

Update: It seems to be working at the moment. I had to create a unique SMTP server for each account and entering my Google credentials (2F bypass password for one of ‘em). I don’t think it’s supposed to work this way. I think in theory there’s a typical Apple hack whereby one does Google authentication in OS X System Preferences and OS X is supposed to create keychain entries Mail.app uses. In practice this appears to fail when a user has more than one Google account...

An AskDifferent thread also implications the keychain, and since the keychain is iCloud synced its configuration can poison multiple clients. i suspect Apple (engineer? product?) simply decided to ignore people with multiple Google accounts.

Update 9/26/2015: 

In much the same thread I ran into a similar configuration problem on a different Yosemite Mac. This time a correspondent reported Google was warning him my email was suspicious:

I figured that Google was seeing a mismatch between the stated sender domain and the SMTP sending service domain. When I looked in Mail.app account configuration (not to be confused with OS X account configuration) I found this:

I have two Google accounts configured, one a Google Apps account (single factor) and another a Gmail account (2FA). The “Home” (2FA) account was using the SMTP server I’d labeled “Gmail Work”. Wrong one.

I switched the the Gmail Home (my definition) SMTP server, which was setup this way by OS X. NOTE the lack of password. Despite the UI displayed here OS X doesn’t actually use the account password. It does some other form of authentication for this 2FA account, possibly via some OAUTH token magic stored in the OS X keychain (which is synchronized between devices, and since Google looks for matches between device and credentials I suspect that causes issues):

After switching the SMTP service to this one (“Gmail Home”) my next email did not generate a phishing warning.

AT&T Mobile Share - Reviewing our options

Emily and I switched to AT&T’s no-contract shared data plan over a year ago and saved about $25/month. With the iPhone’s (crappy compared to Android) cellular data use controls we were doing pretty well with 2GB a month. Unfortunately over the past year Google Maps started using a lot more data (no idea why). Between Google Maps and adware bloat we started to hit 2.5GB/month — but then an AT&T special (we had to request) gave us 3GB/month for the same rate. There’s no contract to change by the way, so it’s much less worrisome to make changes now.

During this time the kids were on H2O wireless prepaid. H2O wireless worked well for years as a $40/year voice only service, but things got more strained when #1 needed reliable data services (find friends in particular) and #3’s social necessities required high volume SMS. Then we ran into the flip-side of MVNO’s low cost — truly lousy customer service. We’ve since ported two of the kids numbers to the AT&T mobile shared data plan, one remains on H2O (he almost never uses his phone).

So now we have 4 devices on AT&T mobile share. Time to examine plan options.

That’s almost impossible to do except by requesting a plan summary handout from an AT&T store. Almost … except that using phrases from the handout I located the equivalent very well hidden readable online mobile share plan summary (of course it doesn’t include corporate discounts many of us have).

We currently have 4 devices ($25*4=$100) and 3GB — except that AT&T did something weird the other day. Our official plan is “3GB” for $40, (this is what a store account rep sees), but we actually have “3GB and 3GB Bonus” or 6GB for $40. A Reddit poster interrogated an AT&T phone rep about this mystery bonus:

In an effort to recognize our customer’s loyalty [tenure], we want to show you our appreciation and thank you for being our customer by giving you more data for the same monthly MRC. You don't have to do a thing to get more data – we automatically added it to your plan at the start of your current bill cycle! If you decide to change your plan, including a change in your data bucket size, you will be allowed to select any current plans offered at that time; however, this promotion will no longer be available

So our total cost, pre-discount and not including significant hidden fees and taxes, is $140 for 4 devices and more data than we need (6GB plus rollover).

Looking at the current plan summary we could do 3GB for $45 (2GB for $30 plus $15 for extra GB) - but that’s less data for more money and same device cost, $145. Or we could do 20GB (much more than we need) for $140 plus ($15*4=$60) for devices, or $200. That plan includes free Canada calls, but we do that for free using Google Voice. That would be a terrible waste of money.

More interestingly we could drop to 2GB for $30/month, total cost $130 for $10/month reduction (over the past year AT&T has dropped cost of 2GB plan by 25%). I think, with rollover, we’d vary between 1.8 to 2.9 GB/month for an average cost of about $135/month. Slightly less than our current plan, but not a big difference and the data hassle would be much larger.

So we’ll stay where we are. Your numbers will vary; we get a typical corporate discount as well and those are certainly worth pursuing. We will continue to track Ting and its growing GSM use and, of course, T-Mobile.

PS. Incidentally, AT&T has a new SIM Unlock procedure, saw this while reviewing my account:

Apple iPhone 4S
PUK: ##########
Follow these steps to unlock your SIM card:

Enter the eight-digit PUK above, then select OK/Yes. Note: Some Motorola phone users will need to enter **05* if "Enter PUK" isn't displayed. Then enter the eight-digit PUK and select OK/Yes
Choose a new PUK and select OK/Yes
Re-enter the new PUK and select OK/Yes
If the codes were entered correctly, you can now use your phone

Have an iPhone?
If you enter the wrong PUK 10 times in a row, your SIM card will be permanently deactivated. You might see a message like "PUK blocked. Call operator." You'll have to start over. You can:

Buy a new SIM card from an AT&T retail store
Use our technical support chat (full site) or call us at 800.331.0500.
Have a different type of phone?
If you enter the wrong PUK 10 times in a row, the SIM card will be permanently locked. If you see a message like "PUK 2," you'll need to:Buy a new SIM card from an AT&T retail store

Yosemite Mac Calendar.app travel time feature isn't compatible with Google Calendar

Travel Time for Appointments in Apple Calendar (Yosemite) is a nice feature, but it’s not compatible with Google Calendar. I suspect travel time is an attribute of the appointment, not a separate appointment, and it’s not a standard CalDAV feature.

So if you’re using iOS or OS X Calendar.app with a Google Calendar back end don’t bother with this feature. 

Is kind of nifty I admit.

Parental Controls? Home VPN? Turn abandoned PC into Sophos firewall for free home use.

Via app.net@remus I’ve learned that Sophos has a free for non-commercial (max 50 IP) home edition product:

Free Firewall: Home Edition for the Sophos UTM Firewall

Our Free Home Use Firewall is a fully equipped software version of the Sophos UTM firewall, available at no cost for home users – no strings attached. It features full Network, Web, Mail and Web Application Security with VPN functionality and protects up to 50 IP addresses.

The Sophos UTM Free Home Use firewall contains its own operating system and will overwrite all data on the computer during the installation process. Therefore, a separate, dedicated computer is needed, which will change into a fully functional security appliance. Just right for the spare PC you have sitting in the corner!

… Use Web Filtering to stop sites from infecting you with viruses and spyware, keep your kids from surfing to bad sites, and get full reporting on the activity in your home…

… Dial in using Roadwarrior VPN access to securely use Remote Desktop, transfer files, and even print, from anywhere in the world, even from your iPhone...

The usual installation is on an old PC, but it can be used "within a virtual machine … Virtual appliance can be run directly in any VMware vSphere Edition”. From a quick read however an old PC with two network cards is more practical.

One should proceed with caution however - the download page has a bad link to a “Sophos Community” support forum; the real forum is hidden away at an astaro.org url. I assume this product was acquired from astaro. There is activity on the forum, but you need to be prepared for some pain to make this work.

Other VPN alternatives mentioned in that app.net thread: OpenVPN (easier to setup than OS X Server VPN) and, of course, Synology NAS. I think you’d only want to try this product for the web filtering and monitoring features.

Mac web authoring for non-experts: My choices 2015.

In the beginning we wrote web pages in BBEdit and we FTPd them to a NeXT box.

Things progressed quickly. Almost two decades ago, when Microsoft FrontPage 97 was released and Macromedia created Dreamweaver, there were many powerful Windows applications for creating largely static web pages - with dynamic reflow based on HTML tables [1]. Operating systems, like Windows 95, shipped with a native web server. Netscape added Composer, fulfilling TBL’s original vision of the web as authoring environment. Non-technical users worked with server based systems, ultimately producing millions of web pages on sites like GeoCities [3].

Technology has moved in odd ways. There’s nothing quite like mass market FrontPage today, though Sharepoint Designer/Wiki came close and SeaMonkey survives. Dreamweaver is the strongest survivor of the original era, but it has evolved into a high end tool leased for $20 a month. I don’t think there’s a practical way to move Dreamweaver content to another platform, so adopting Dreamweaver is a deep commitment to the Adobe platform.

At one point I thought the Wiki would fill the vanishing mid-market niche [2], but Wiki solutions seem to have stalled out - much like WebDAV technologies. iWeb/MobileMe came and went quickly - an early sign of Apple’s decade (so far) of dysfunctional application development and fondness for destroying customer data.

Today developers hand code web sites in Coda, a programmer’s tool not so different from the BBEdit we started with. Other experts use Adobe's deep lock-in solutions, from Dreamweaver to Muse ($15/month) or open-source server-based WordPress (Less technical users some might use Blogger in a similar way).

For non-experts Weebly’s small business oriented server side authoring platform is an option, but it’s another deep data lock commitment to one vendor. Google Sites, amazingly, is still around, but focused on intranet solutions.

There are two longlived Mac desktop products both sold for $80 on the Mac App Store: RapidWeaver (presumably inspired by DreamWeaver) and Sandvox. I’ve tried both in the past, Sandvox more frequently than RapidWeaver. Neither product supports wysiwyg table authoring. RapidWeaver was last updated in January of 2014 and has three stars in the Mac App Store; it may be in maintenance mode. SandVox was last updated in April 2015 and has recently added a hosting service (revenue stream!), it has 4-5 star ratings. It’s App Store page still references iPhoto and Aperture however. Of these two I think Sandbox is more likely to make it to 2017.

It’s rarely mentioned anywhere, but TextEdit will export to well formatted HTML, and it even has table support (since 2006 at least). You can embed images and export — but only in single file “webarchive” format. As a simple page editor it’s not too bad, and it’s as standard as anything is these days, but the image limitations are a killer. (I suppose one could similarly author in Pages then view in Pages/web and export the code.)

Similarly one could author in Blogger or WordPress (example: free wordpress.com blog) wysiwyg mode, switch to HTML mode, and paste the HTML into a text editor (Coda?) for FTP upload. Or I could author in MarsEdit (as in this post) and similar export the HTML view as a file. Nisus Express and Pro both include HTML import and export; I don’t know how well their table export works and if embedded images are exported. When I last tried them years ago they weren’t a practical HTML authoring solution.

Google Docs work quite well for sharing and editing online, but they’re not useful for a root (www) web document. Very proprietary of course, but in some ways Google Docs are the closest thing we have today to the original view/edit vision of the www. I haven’t tried sharing iCloud Pages web sharing, but it seems like it would work similarly; it also can’t serve as root page of a web site.

Of the options today, what makes the most sense for me? There aren’t a lot of options on the table, so things should filter quickly with a few constraints:

• I’d like to avoid dying products.
• I want to be able to produce a reasonably pretty looking site without a lot of effort (iWeb pretty at least).
• I’d like a solution that works with Dreamhost and it’s (typical) constraints on www/domain mapping [4]. 
• I don’t want to sell my soul to Adobe. 
• I’m not a developer and web authoring isn’t my profession. 
• I really miss wysiwyg HTML tables and table based layout, but they are clearly gone. Still, I’d love basic table support.
• I’d prefer to avoid hard data lock.
• I’d like something that managed a site and updated links when I rearranged web page relationships or renamed pages.
• I’d like to avoid major malware and security issues. Static sites are very nice that way.
• Mac (or course) or Safari if server based.

Based on my review of the options, and applying my constraints, it’s easy to see that my best choice is ….  is …. Ok. Nothing survived the constraints. It’s easy to see why I’ve been struggling with this for about 15 years.

If I relax a few constraints I think my least bad options are WordPress (free) and Karelia Sandvox ($80). So I’m going to try both of those — and maybe, if only to close the long loop, Coda too.

Am I missing anything?

See also

• Vermeer/FrontPage lives in Sharepoint Wiki 6/2008
• Wiki impressions: XWiki 2/2012
• Advanced Web Refs 1998. State of the web a very long time ago.
• nVu - more good news on this FrontPage replacement 4/2005. It died years ago.
• Site Studio: FrontPage LITE for OS X 2004. Didn’t go anywhere.
• The sad state of web site authoring on OS X -- and XP 11/2005. I should have clarified that my complaint was about the mid-market niche, very much like today.
• Sandvox and the return of end-user web site authoring 1/2006. I’ve tried and rejected SandVox several times over the past 9 years.
• Content Management Systems: A Macintouch report 12/2005. 
• Google launches an AJAX web authoring and hosting application 9/2006. Google Page Creator came and went quickly, followed by Google Sites (2008) which, amazingly, is still around.
• Drupal reminds me of Google Page Creator 3/2009.  It’s still around, but the Dreamhost wiki page captures my sense of it: “WordPress … is less confusing and more stable..”. It’s not available as a “one-click install” on Dreamhost.
• iWeb doesn't do tables - and OS X HTML Editor alternatives 11/2009. 
• Components of a knowledge share solution 10/2011. Not much change since then.
• WordPress doesn't have a built-in table editor 1/2012. Still doesn’t.

- fn -

[1] I think we took the wrong road when we entirely substituted CSS for dynamic tables; no modern tool approaches the table management power of FrontPage 98. Perhaps this happened because it was insanely difficult to manage table authoring by hand, it was really a job computers did better than humans.

[2] Speaking of vanishing mid-market, remember when personal finance software was big? Intuit is trying to find a buyer for Quicken and its future looks quite bleak.

[3] The immolation of GeoCities, echoed on a smaller scale with the 2012 death of MobileMe’s iWeb based web pages, should not be forgotten.

[4] The odd handling of the www domain is, I think, a legacy of early net development. It is a pain in the butt.

Update 4/29/2016

Sandbox can be used free for up to 5 pages. I gave it a good try with a book site I’m working on. The lack of both drag-and-drop placement and tables made me give up on Sandbox. 

Of course RapidWeaver doesn’t do tables either, but I’m going to try it anyway.

It’s obvious that tables are insanely hard to implement; I wonder if CSS support made the challenge even greater. I wouldn’t mind an editor that handled CSS tables, but no tables at all reminds me of all the software functionality and value we have lost over the past 15 years (yeah, Apple Aperture, I miss you.)

Oh, and vendors, please stop trying to tell us we don’t really want tables or that HTML tables are fine. You are just insulting our intelligence. Just say something like “tables are extremely hard to do …”