On The Radio

So not quite two weeks after Apple launched its new App Store, I finally found some time this week to kick the tires on it a bit… and now find myself stoked as to the possibilities.

For those unfamiliar with the App Store, it was launched as a marketplace for applications that run on iPhone and iPod Touch. Access to the App Store comes with the latest version of both iTunes (7.7) and the iPhone software (2.0)… and although there is definitely still ghosts in the machine (i.e. Apps that don’t work as described… I also had a couple crash my phone), they’re definitely worth the annoyance for the exponential increase to functionality the App Store brings to both the original iPhones (with updated software) as well as the new iPhone 3G.

Not having a whole lot of time to write currently… here’s just a couple of the highlights I’ve found so far… And remember, these will only work for you if you’ve updated either your original or 3G iPhone to version 2.0 of the software, and you’re running the latest version 7.7 of iTunes…

WordPress App

On July 22 Apple approved and released the WordPress application into the App Store. The WordPress app allows blog publishers to update their site(s) through a native iPhone application.

Although I wasn’t ambitious enough to write this particular post on my iPhone, I’ve tested it on a couple smaller posts to another site I’m involved with and so far so good… it’s actually an incredibly handy tool if you need to post from the road…

The initial version of this app supports the following;

• Support for WordPress.com blogs as well as self-installed WordPress blogs (version 2.5.1 and higher)
• Full support for tags and categories
• Photo support for both camera pics and library photos
• Support for multiple blogs
• Auto-recovery feature recovers posts interrupted by phone calls

WordPress is a free download from the iTunes App Store… click here if you have iTunes 7.7 installed.

Remote App

If you’re using an iPhone/iPod Touch and you also use iTunes on your home computer as a jukebox, then Remote is a free iPhone app that you absolutely have to check out… I’ve tested it and it works perfectly…

From anywhere in your home over your wireless network, you can use the iPhone or iPod Touch as a remote control for the iTunes software running on your desktop computer. Play, pause, skip, shuffle. See your songs, playlists and album art as if you were right in front of the computer.

You’ll need to download the app, then with your phone selected in iTunes go to the “Application” tab and sync the app to your iPhone or iPod Touch. After that the iPhone/Touch will display a 4-digit code that you need to enter into the fields provided in iTunes to sync the devices… and BAM… it works… the process took me about 4 minutes.

Enjoy!

And a Quick Unrelated Link of Interest

For those of you that have already seen the Dark Knight once or preferably multiple times… this pretty cool article on the gadgetry from the movie ran in Wired (online) the other day. Don’t miss the image of the Dodge concept vehicle that the Bat cycle was based on… how cool was that?

And then in Alt Text, Lore Sjoberg adds a little more on the topic of grading Batman’s gear.

Looking into a question from Martha regarding the initial set-up time when configuring Apple’s Time Capsule for the first time, I ran into the following info.

That’s the general info… but Martha mentioned that a power surge/outtage during her initial back up which led me to this relevent information.

So the good news is that what Martha is experiencing is normal behaviour. If your initial backup, which even under ideal conditions is going to take awhile, is interupted for any reason… when it restarts, the process will take even longer than it would have as the computer first has to check the integrity of the backup already completed…

So my advice would be to initialize the backup process and let it ride…

So many people in the world… some using their talents for good, some for evil… meanwhile the vast majority of us just end up unwilling participants much of the time… like the new subscribers to Time Warner Cable’s internet services in Beaumont, Texas. These folks are the guinea pigs for Time Warner’s latest experiments in metering internet usage.

The company claims that 5% of their users are responsible for using 50% of the available bandwidth. The idea is that charging these users more once they exceed a CAP (measured in gigabytes) is the fairest way to finance infrastructure updates… to me it feels like another baby step towards the end of Net Neutrality, designed to begin weening the consumer from the idea that they can pay a flat monthly rate in exchange for unhindered internet access.

Check this link to Yahoo! Finance for the whole story.

The Internet is such an extraordinary machine in terms of the spread of ideas and the viral nature with which oppositions can coalesce, but sometimes even the Net vets need to pause and consider whether they’re being duped or not…

For the longest time the notion of Net Neutrality was one such issue for me. The problem being, as it is with many of these believability conflicts… is with those whom exude that kooky paranoid bent that no matter how reasonable what they’re saying appears to sound… you just don’t know.

Although now that I’ve come across SaveTheInternet.com I’ve been given some more substantial food for thought… Their FAQ page does a great job of offering a primer to the uninitiated, educating on the issue and describing the nature of the threat.

I care about net neutrality because I’ve grown up with the Internet. I was the right age when the World Wide Web emerged to have taken the entire ride thus far. My livelihood and many of my interests are fueled or at least supported by the Internet… and I’d cry over having to abandon its dead carcass on the roadside if it ended up succumbing to the fate of yet another proprietary delivery system for the corporations feeding the consumer culture. I’m starting to think this is a real issue that its time to pay attention to…

You might also find checking Google’s take offers some credibility as well as the site for the Open Internet Coalition. If you have thoughts on the subject or sources of more information… please comment to this post. I’d love to turn this into a conversation

And finally, briefly… this story at Rolling Stone (it was in the last issue on the newsstand) paints an ominous picture of where the world seems to be heading on many fronts. A countries internal security is now a 200 billion dollar a year industry, bigger then Hollywood and music combined… new enemies must constantly be created to fuel the growth… and like I said at the top… some use their powers for good, but an increasing number seem to be focusing on evil.

The following is a solution for anyone with AT&T Internet Services that recently started receiving (553) errors when attempting to send email, which prevents any outgoing messages. The following remedy should work regardless of what platform your on or what email client you’re using.

It appears that this problem boils down to AT&T re-branding their web experience (and improving it actually), including the link to Yahoo Mail which they inherited when they took over the shop from SBC. In pursuit of better spam filtering most likely, AT&T is now requiring the “validation” of the email addresses from which you send email. The validation process isn’t that difficult… step-by-step instructions can be found here (you may need your AT&T login email address and password here).

Now there’s also the question of what “port” you set your outgoing mail server to, and this is only for the Mac users. The following came in via email from Jeff in Homewood;

I spoke with you just after midnight regarding a problem with Mac Mail. Just spent about 45 minutes in a chat session with AT&T. End result, the ports for outgoing mail had to be changed back to the old settings. Go figure. Apparently their recent upgrades, which require port 465 with SSL don’t work with the Mac, so change back to port 25 without SSL and the system works.

The first part is right on… for whatever reason, the proper configuration of Port 465 with Use SSL checked… doesn’t work on a Mac… The proper port though, should be 110 as opposed to 25, with Use SSL unchecked. I’m not sure if Jeff just mistyped the number, but I did tests on my machine and setting the port to both 465 and 25 caused authentication problems. That’s on a Mac running Leopard 10.5.2 with Mail version 3.2 (919).

One great improvement with the new AT&T Yahoo mail system is that with this verification of email addresses comes the ability to consolidate all your incoming email (from multiple accounts) to the AT&T Yahoo Online mail interface. If you’re someone who would benefit from this… just enter your incoming mail server with login name and password into your account settings on AT&T Yahoo.

This question came in after the show via email from Ken…

I went to play some iTunes from my computer and discovered that EVERYTHING I had there is missing! My library is empty as well as every other window. Can anyone tell me WHAT HAPPENED??? and how can I possibly get all my music back?

The one thing I don’t know is if your music still exists on disc? You say that your library is missing, but I’m guessing you’re referring to the library of music that you see from within iTunes.

I need you to check whether your music collection is still sitting on the hard drive somewhere (the default would be your Music folder if you’re on a Mac). If it isn’t, chances are something has gone wrong outside of iTunes as I’ve never heard of iTunes actually deleting song files.

But if your music is still there, iTunes catalogs your music in a database which apparently sometimes gets corrupted, and that can be remedied… probably not how you’re hoping in that you have to start over… but once we get things straightened out… I’ll show you how to make it much easier to recover from this if it were to ever happen again.

The first step should restore your ability to see all your music in iTunes again.

Assuming your music exists in a folder named “Music”, simply choose ‘Add to Library‘ from the FILE menu in iTunes and navigate to and choose your Music folder. All the songs within it should be added once again to your iTunes library.

From there is any playlists you may have created. Unfortunately the news here isn’t as good. You’re going to have to manually recreate your playlists. There’s a way to back them up, which I’ll get to next, but without that backup, you’ll need to recreate them manually this time.

Once you get your playlists recreated, here’s how you back them up;

To save a copy of all your playlists, choose File > Export Library. The exported information is saved in XML format.

And here’s how you restore your playlists from that back up;

Choose File > Import. The imported playlist includes only songs and videos already in your iTunes library. Unavailable items are removed from the list.

I lost my extensive collection of playlists once to this particular ghost in the machine… I still don’t have my playlists back to their former glory but I can promise you that I back up my library once a week. If you have a .MAC account, your iDisc is a great place to store those back up .XML files, that way if anything happens to your hard drive or computer, your playlists are safe.

Hope that helped. Anyone who has alternative techniques is welcome to post them by clicking ‘comments’ below.

On the air last week we were talking with Juan who was looking to create a photo slideshow that he could play back on his living room DVD player.

Initially I guessed it would be a combination of iPhoto and iMovie that would handle this task… but after a little research, it turned out that iDVD was the tool for the job.

I was all prepared to offer up the complete ‘how-to’ here on the blog… but why bother when the process is described so well right here on the Apple site.

I will say that I fired up iDVD and gave it a try and turned out a pretty slick looking 30 image slideshow in about a half hour.

Could it be any easier? All praise to the giant Apple. Happy editing…