I posted about my iPhone experience in April, 2008. I just picked up a 3gs, and I have to say that I am incredibly pleased. Just about every complaint that I had in that original article has been addressed. In addition, the speed increase really is significant. It really is that noticeable. Add in the cool camera upgrades (better pixels, video, and cool touch to focus), and this is absolutely a winner.

The current complaints deal with lack of MMS and tethering, but that's hardly Apple's fault. (Nice workaround for tethering posted here.) The experience ordering business phones through AT&T sucked as bad as anything I've ever dealt with, so it's not shocking they don't care about their users enough to enable simple features such as these.

Now I just need to find an iPhone app to follow the Tour de France. Allez!

Ages ago, I wrote about my search for a file sharing application. I eventually went with BeInSync, and used it quite a bit over the past 18 months or so. However, they haven't updated it recently, and there are problems when editing Excel spreadsheets inside the shared folder (I told BeInSync about this problem, they fixed it, and then broke it in the last release). All in all, it was just showing it's age.

Armed with a new set of fairly light requirements (Mac/Windows support, permissions, auto-sync that doesn't fail), I evaluated the space again and came out with a very positive experience of DropBox. It works very well between Mac and Windows, has an awesome web interface, and hasn't exhibited any lags or slowness. In addition, it has the ability to revert to previous versions of documents, which is a nice feature that all developers have come to appreciate.

I'd like to see a couple features in the near future (native iPhone app with support for iWork documents, ability to set your own private key), but this thing was dead simple to install and use, and has worked brilliantly for the past month with a small group of people.

At the risk of having my Apple fanboy status revoked, I have to say that I find the iPhone lacking. It seems that Apple has released a half-finished product upon the masses, and the masses have spoken in hypnotized unison that they think Apple can do no wrong. Oh, sure, I was seduced at first. Visual voicemail is pretty cool. The flicking and gesturing for the UI is even wicked hot. In short, the attention to detail on the things that are implemented are first-class.

So why the negative finding? Sure, most, if not all, of these things are fairly well-known, but they do impact my day to day life.

• I have a Motorola S9 headset that doesn't work with the iPhone. Sure, phone calls can come through, but not music. Requiring an AD2P Bluetooth adapter is just plain stupid, given that the iPhone is supposed to be the pinnacle of form and function. Sorry, no. It gets a miserable failing grade.
• How is it that a device manufactured in 2007/2008 could come without cut/copy/paste?
• No speed-dial. I might be safe in saying that every phone on this planet, with the possible exception of 1950s rotary dial phones, has the capability to speed dial by pressing one button. Not so for the iPhone!
• Ok, maybe speed-dialing is so 1999, and we don't need it because the iPhone is a full-fledged multimedia experience. Fine theory, but the reality is you can't even do voice dialing! Let me take my Bluetooth headset (but not my Motorola S9!!), and - wait, I can't actually do anything with it. I need
  to take my iPhone out of my pocket, press like 4 things, and THEN I can start a conversation. I wonder if that will comply with all of those laws requiring hands-free cell phone use popping up all over the nation.
• The fact that I need to buy extra accessories to get my iPhone to work. The headphone jack was recessed for that full-flush feeling. My existing mini-RCA jack doesn't let me keep continuous playback, my Griffin FM transmitter turns my phone off, and my headphone Y-splitter isn't deep enough. At least my USB charger works.
• The World Clock doesn't allow you to add cities. It wouldn't be a big deal to add the exact city you want if we could actually access the underlying OS files.
• I'd like a much better user experience to sort, filter, and search my contacts. Using the Categories I've already assigned would be a good start. Maybe I'm just missing something here.
• No ToDo list, nor integration to any GTD system, or any system for that matter. Which brings us to...
• The Missing SDK. It's late. I don't know what to expect here, and I think Apple prefers it that way. I'll leave out the glaringly obvious fact that the SDK should have been released on Day 1. Oops. I guess I won't.

I'll be working hard over the next couple of weeks to try to remedy the list above, and if I make any significant progress, I'll be sure to post here. Feel free to comment if you have any suggestions.

This is a pretty nice summary about what to do to be able to share files between two mortal enemies.

Chalk this up to yet another "I should have read the man page first" incidents. I kept noticing that my PATH was not set properly in new Terminal sessions, even though I was 100% positive I set it correctly in my ~/.bash_login. It turns out that the man page clearly states that during login, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile are checked, in that order, and executes the first one that it finds. That prompted me to look around to find the ~/.bash_profile file that I had created when following directions to install an application several weeks ago. Merging the files together, everything went back to working as it should. Live and learn.

After reading David Glassborow's blog on CoRD (a Macintosh application to access Remote Desktop sessions), I decided I needed to document how to use SSH and VNC on a Mac client to access a Windows server. The basic steps are: Create a connection to your server via SSH, Create a tunnel to use over the SSH connection, and use your VNC Viewer over the SSH tunnel.

SSH

I already have SSH set up on the Windows box, using SSH Secure Shell, so I'll just focus on how to get the Mac connected to it. The application I like best right now is Fugu, a freeware, open-source application from the University of Michigan. You need to create a tunnel in Fugu by selecting the SSH | New SSH Tunnel menu item. Once selected, you fill in:

• The remote server's IP address in "Create Tunnel to" (e.g. 192.168.1.76)
• The remote port number for the VNC Server (by default: 5900)
• The local port number that you will use to detect when TCP/IP traffic should be forwarded to the remote server over this tunnel
• The external IP address of your home PC in "Tunnel Host"
• The Username that you will use to login to the Windows server
• The default port for SSH communication, i.e. 22

Once you have all of this set up, and press Start Tunnel, you will have an SSH connection and tunnel running to the Windows box on the other end.

VNC

Now that SSH is setup, we need to connect VNC to the host machine. I'm using the RealVNC viewer for Mac OSX, and it seems to work alright. All you need to do is connect to 127.0.0.1:1 in your VNC Viewer. The 1 tells VNC viewer to run on port 5901, which was the port we wanted to forward to the host PC. I do get a warning message about needing to enable Protocol 3.3 option, so I'll look into setting that on the server since I'm running UltraVNC there. I've also noticed a very significant slow-down when running over SSH compared to running a direct VNC connection to the host PC.

Another option is to run the Java version of VNC Viewer from TightVNC. My limited testing showed that it was an acceptable alternative. Unfortunately, the VNC application on the Mac that everyone talks about, Chicken of the VNC, doesn't work in my setup. I get a rectangle encoding error when connecting to my remote host.

Copying files

One reason I chose to use Fugu is that you can also use it to copy files between the remote host and your local machine. File copying over SSH is done by using the standard SFTP and SCP applications, which Fugu supports. If you absolutely do not need file copying capabilities, then JellyFiSSH) seems to be the SSH application that people talk about a lot.

Another promising way to copy files is by using MacFusion. MacFusion lets you mount a virtual disk on your OSX system and interact with the volume like any other disk. You need to install MacFUSE first, in order to use MacFusion. In the future, I'd probably go with MacFusion and JellyFiSSH, but I was never able to get MacFusion to successfully mount the volume (Error message: "The folder "xyz" could not be opened because you do not have sufficient access privileges.". The credential information I entered was the same as for Fugu and other SSH connections that I have used in the past, so that doesn't make a lot of sense. The log files were less than helpful on the Mac and Windows side, too. On the Mac side, it simply reports "failed to detect remote user ID", and the Windows side didn't show anything in the Event Viewer, despite numerous setting changes in the Local Policy application).

Other Information

This is a good screen cast on how to set your Macintosh up as a VNC server, and walks you through several other general topics. JellyFiSSH and Chicken of the VNC are highlighted in this video.

When connecting via Airport to an existing Linksys wireless router, and that router is using WEP, you will need to prefix the key with a dollar sign ($) when asked for the password. This makes the password be treated as a hex number and will get you connected.