I also had a difficult time getting my contacts and calendars to sync. If you are viewing this post with that same problem, I was able to remedy the problem by opening iSync, going to the iSync preferences, and under Advanced - click the "Reset Sync History" button.

The best part about the iPhone is its ability to connect to the internet via any available WiFi hotspot. I navigated all around SF last weekend using the maps functionality and 511.org and hopped around multiple hotspots in the city. Using Muni in this city has never been easier. I have to say, this more than makes up for the lack of speed on the Edge network (at least in a place like SF). AND, I say this with moderate excitement -- BART WiFi is available in some BART stations. I don't know if it is available in all stations, and I don't know why I would ever pull a laptop out of my bag at a station, but its pretty great if you have a WiFi enabled phone.

Of course, the first thing I had to do, mostly out of principal and secondly out of burning curiosity, was to jailbreak the phone. I kept reading posts about "bricking" one's phone that made me a bit timid, but I am 90% sure now that unless you do some serious mischief on your phone, everything is fixable with a restore.  I ended up using ZiPhone 2.6b for my jailbreak operation, which was super smooth. Note: I used only the "Jailbreak" option, the one that says "Best choice for 'official' carriers;"  that is all I know, and I can't help you past there. It did work for me, however, and worked very well. The next thing that was required was to install the community sources in the Installer application loaded onto the phone, which gives you access to the "official" list of 3rd party apps for the iPhone and iPhone Lonely Edition (iPod Touch).

I have to say though, with all the booing that enthusiasts did regarding the iPhone not yet enabling 3rd party apps other than web apps, the web app functionalities are rather nice.  More on that later, but just to say, my favorite web apps so far for Home bookmarking are the most simple, such as google, AA.com (kudos to American Airlines for getting that one right),  and although I don't use it, Twitter has a nice simple interface. Most of the third party native apps are still in their infancy and not terribly impressive. There are a couple that are pretty nice though.

BossPrefs and PocketTouch I think rank as my number 2 best third party apps. PocketTouch aptly allows for simple iPod functions for volume and next/previous functionality using swipe gestures on the touchscreen. It also features a silly but kind of cool function that allows you to play a random track by shaking the phone. (so the next time you see someone on the train shaking their hand in their pocket, don't be so quick to judge...) BossPrefs is great. It does what it is supposed to do, namely that it allows you to turn off and on various network services on your phone, including OpenSsh, if you have that installed.

My number 1 pick so far, however, is MobileScrobbler. If you participate in the whole LastFm thing, you already know what LastFm is and I don't need to explain it; if you don't check it out -- you may or may not like it, but anyway... MobileScrobbler is one of the the most mature apps I have seen so far, and allows you to stream radio via WiFi. Very nice. It probably kills your battery life, but hey...what are you going to do...

It seems that you can do a few nice little searches that aren't well publicized, so that you can, for instance, get an RSS stream featuring the union of two different Flickr tags in your stream (in other words, an OR search). The feed URL looks something like this (for the tags blue and green):

feed://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=74517463@N00&tags=blue,green&tagmode=any&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

Replace the "tagmode" parameter with all, and you get an AND style search (only photos featuring all the specified tags). The problem is that the RSS feed provided by Flickr only allows you to grab 20 photos. If you perform the same search, you get a large amount of paged data, if there is more than one page. So, basically, this means that if you want to see ALL the photos of your children in your own home-grown chumby, OSX, or other widget, you are sadly stuck at seeing only 20.

"What about using something like Pipes?", you say. Well, I checked out using Yahoo pipes to create a custom RSS feed. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, you are really limited to what you can get via the Flickr API. You can get more than 20 photos in 1 person's photostream this way using the flickr.people.getPublicPhotos method, but that method does not provide the capability of filtering by tag.

I'd just about given up (well I still have for now) until I realized that you can do just this in the media bar in Flock, so there must be a way to do it that I am missing. In Flock, you can view your photostream and *fliter* by tags, and even use AND and OR for multiple tags. Not sure how they are doing this, because you can see way more than 20. I sent them an email to see what they are doing today. Anyone else have any idea?

On a totally different note. VMware just released the Beta 3 Fusion player for Mac. This incorporates some improvements on the last release. My latest use for the player is for the "play now" option that is now supported at Netflix. At the moment, Netflix only supports windows XP SP2 and Vista, so I fired up Fusion to take a swag at watching films on my Mac from Netflix. I have to say, I was pretty impressed, the sound and video performed just fine. The only glitch was viewing the film with Fusion in full-screen mode and the Netflix player in full-screen mode. For some reason the Netflix player cut off the bottom part of the video (right at, say the second line of typical sub-titles and below). Switching Fusion to *not* full-screen and watching the video that way worked fine. I think maybe it has something to do with the way that Fusion is communicating screen size to the guest OS, but not sure. Other than that the performance was pretty solid.

I found out about Google bookmarks through the Firefox add-ons by doing a search for bookmarks. I installed both, and then proceeded to search Google for the bookmarks page, which didn't show up on the Google applications page. Apparently the Google bookmarks are someone's lost cause, and I'm not sure why they even exist. The interface is very sub-par given Google's normal standards, as is the functionality. They don't amount to much more than a bookmarks backup. In addition to the sad state of its functionality, the add-on for firefox does something peculiar that I never did figure out totally -- if there are any bookmarks for sites that require certificates, an alert pops up for every bookmark for such a site. Needless to say, that add-on is now gone from my system. I don't know if this would be something to keep an eye on or not...

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

One solution I've been playing around with today is Squidman, which is a simple OSX application that lets you run squid on your mac (there are other ways, but this was easiest). Basically, the idea here is that you can set up squid to run a local proxy, by default on localhost at port 3128. Then, create a new network settings configuration, and point your proxy connections to localhost:3128. This ostensibly allows you to leave your proxy settings the same everywhere you go, and if you need to hook into a new proxy server, just change it in the Squidman parent proxy preference.

I have yet to have luck with Transmit, unfortunately, which is by far my favorite FTP app for macs. I also had some trouble with my instant messenger accounts that I use through Adium. However, the trick for Adium is not too bad. First of all (though a bit tedious), change all your accounts in Adium to use a proxy and set it to the systemwide HTTP settings in the drop down menu. Then, in Squidman, go to the "Template" section of the preferences. Find the line in the prefs that starts with "acl SSL_ports port " and change the entire line to "acl SSL_ports port 443 563 1863 8443 5050 5190 5222". 5190 handles the AIM connection and ICQ, 1863 handles the MSN connection, 5222 handles gmail talk, and 5050 handles yahoo chat. Since Squidman is meant moreso for simple http proxy enabling, so I guess they decided to leave off the instant messenger ports by default.

The first and least consequential is the extra features; for the way that I work, there is really no need for such a wide variety of file types. If I want to create some of the default file types, I'll open the application that creates them. One benefit - the system prefs for NuFile allow you to add file types -- so, for a someone who develops a considerable amount of Flash work, it could possibly be nice for just creating a stub empty swf file for projects not requiring the Flash IDE (although there are other more project integrated ways of doing this).

The second drawback is the most important. Unlike Windows, Nufile creates a new file with a specific name, such as "NewTextDocument.txt" and allows you the option of having it open automatically. The best part of its Windows counterpart is that the name remains selected and allows you to type the new name right there, rather than having to select and rename the file. It's that simplicity that I would appreciate more. That being said, I don't know how long it will last on my system, but I thought that it was a pretty nice little addition for some and worth mentioning.

I'm guessing the solution created is to process every song file in your library and stick info about your silent bits either in every file or in the library information (haven't looked at it yet). Unfortunately, the problem with this is that if you are like me, you've lovingly set aside your old G4 machine and given it the new job of file serving, media serving, and also jukebox. Every time Apple introduces such a fix, my G4 has to struggle through our entire Mp3 library, rebuilding the iTunes library file. The result -- it's crashed twice so far while "Determining Gapless Playback Information". I'm glad there is a solution for gapless playback, but it seems like there would be a better way for updating the library than choking your computer for 30 minutes the first time you run iTunes after an update...

(Btw, what's with the missing alternating horizontal lines in the music list view - are my eyes supposed to be spreadsheet enabled now?)

However, I recently discovered that the Remote Desktop protocol, which you can turn on in your system sharing preferences, is roughly equivalent to VNC. OSX VNC is great, but has historically been problematic on my old G4, for whatever reason, so it was nice to be able to take it out of the equation. I can still connect using Chicken of the VNC, which can still discover my G4 via Bonjour, and in fact, the performance is a tad better.

However, for those of you out there in Mac OSX land, I wouldn't recommend downloading the current version listed on the site for OSX, entitled "as2api-allinone-osx-0.4.sit" in the downloads section. I think that it is missing files, or that it just doesn't work correctly at all. I would recommend instead downloading the first link for "as2api-0.4.tar". The downside of downloading this version is that there is no OSX command line executable in there, so you have to run the Ruby script "ruby as2api.rb packages --classpath classpath" which works just fine.

Honestly, I don't know enough about ANT scripts yet to know if you can run Ruby scripts from an ANT script target, so I used rubyscript2exe, another handy little application to convert the Ruby scripts into a mac command line executable. (Incidentally, and to add a little geek comedy to this post, you have to install the Pascal compiler and compile a piece of the rubyscript2exe library in order to run it...so I had to compile one application in order to create another one...).

Anyway, I have included below 2 downloadables in this post. The first is the command line version of as2api that is compiled from the package that you can download as Ruby code from the as2api site. The down side is that you cannot tweek the css and html templates that are part of that code; the up side is that you can actually use it as a command line executable, which is entitled "as2api_darwin". You can used it exactly as you would the as2api.rb Ruby script.

PlasticWare Downloadable ::
Darwin Executable of As2Api (JavaDoc for Actionscript) (Sep. 5, 2006)
Download (~4.5mB) :: as2api-0.4.zip

The second downloadable I have included here is the rubyscript2exe download, altered to include the eee_darwin file that I compiled from the pascal source on my mactel laptop in OSX 10.4.7, and repackaged using tar2rubyscript.rb, which was also necessary to get it running properly. I have also included the example hello world script "hello.rb" from the tutorial, which you can use to test the code and make a hello world exe.

PlasticWare Downloadable ::
RubyScript2Exe with eee_darwin for OSX environment (Sep. 5, 2006)
Download (~1.1mB) :: rubyscript2exe.zip.gz

Both of these pieces of software are released by their proper creators under the GNU License, and I have included the source and license for each as well, as posted on their sites. Please download judiciously, the executable for as2api package is 4.5 mb.