Mobile Meandering — News and Opinions on Mobile Devices and Gadgets

How to use native Screen Sharing in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

July 30, 2011 By Jon Henshaw

Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) has an excellent screen sharing app built right into the operating system. The screen sharing app enable you to access and control the screen of another computer on your network. I like using in on my MacBook Air when I want to quickly access our family iMac. It’s perfect for troubleshooting the computer outside of the room or doing a function that’s not available on my notebook computer.

Enabling Screen Sharing

The first step in setting up screen sharing is to enable it on the Mac you want to connect to. Go to System Preference and then click on the Sharing icon. Then check Screen Sharing to turn it on.

Sharing in System Preferences

Sharing a Screen

Change to the computer you want to use to access the other computer. Go to the Finder and look for the computer you just turned screen sharing on for. Click on the computer and then click on the Share Screen button.

If it’s the first time you’ve connected to the computer, it will request that you authenticate with an active account on the target computer. Once you successfully authenticate, it will start sharing the screens.

Activating Full Screen Sharing

One of the key features in Lion is its ability to display apps in full screen. This of course is perfect for sharing the screen of another computer. To activate full screen mode, click on the full screen icon/button on the upper-right side of the shared screen app.

Full Screen Button

Filed Under: Applications

Backblaze Review

June 20, 2011 By Jon Henshaw

I’ve tested several mobile backup services, and Backblaze is easily my favorite. There are three key elements to a cloud backup service that I require. They include ease-of-use, functionality and affordability. Backblaze excels at all of these.

Easiest Online Backup

Unlike the other online backup services I’ve tried, Backblaze was not only easy to set up, but also stayed out of my way. When I originally tested and used Mozy, it suffered from what I call the Windows effect. It would display unwanted messages and there was no way for me to turn them off in the preferences.

Backblaze runs silently on my computer, and I can easily check the status by clicking on its menu icon. The menu icon also provides a shortcut to its preferences if I need more details or need to change a setting.

Online Backup Features

One of my favorite features in Backblaze is the Throttle setting. The Throttle allows you to control the speed at which files are uploaded to their backup server. You can pull the throttle down to prioritize network and Internet speed, or push the throttle all the way up to maximize the outgoing upload limit of your Internet connection.

Backblaze Throttle

Backblaze comes with the ability to schedule your backups, and makes it easy to exclude unwanted folders and file types.

They provide an excellent web application if you ever need to view or restore your files. You have the option to download a zip file for free, or you can pay them to ship you a DVD or USB Hard Drive with all of your files.

Backblaze File Restore

Backblaze also includes a feature you wouldn’t expect from an online backup service, the ability to locate your computer. If you computer is ever lost or stolen, you may be able to recover it using their Locate My Computer feature.

Backblaze Locate Computer

Perfect Cloud Backup Price

The Backblaze service includes the ability to backup your entire hard drive, no matter what the size is, for only $5/mo. It’s an incredible value and well worth the money. I’ve been using Backblaze to automatically backup my computer and my wife’s computer for well over a year now, and we only pay $10/mo. It’s a small price to pay for piece of mind and an incredible automated service.

Learn more at http://backblaze.com

Filed Under: Cloud Computing

How to fix rentals that won’t delete on your iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone

May 30, 2011 By Jon Henshaw

I’ve had this very annoying problem where rentals won’t delete from my iPad, even well after the expiration date. They just sit there taking up precious space, and there’s no way to remove it. Luckily I found a way to remove it, and without having to jailbreak it.

The solution for removing rented movies on your iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone is actually very simple. Plug in your iOS device, go to iTunes, and then view the Summary page. Under Options check the box next to “Manually Manage music and videos”.

Summary options for iOS device

Apply the changes, and then expand the list view for your iOS device. Click on Rentals and then delete the movies.

Filed Under: Apple iPad

Thunderbolt

March 5, 2011 By Jon Henshaw

Thunderbolt on Mac

A little over a year ago I wrote about the speed of USB 3.0. Since then, I’ve seen several peripherals and computers equipped with USB 3.0, but none from Apple. Apple is famous for being a company that adopts new technologies before anyone else, but in the case of USB 3.0, there’s been nothing but silence from them.

Why Thunderbolt?

In true Apple-fashion, they didn’t adopt it because they were actually focused on the next next best thing. While USB 3.0 was just starting to gain momentum, Apple was working with Intel on an even better solution called Light Peak. Light Peak can transfer data at speeds up to 20Gbps (4-times faster than USB 3.0), and can also be dasiy-chained (doing away with the need for hubs).

The final version of Light Peak was announced a few weeks ago by Apple, and they chose to name it Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is slightly different from the initial promises of Light Peak, in that it only supports up to 10Gbps. The reason for this is because Apple reserves half of the bandwidth for monitors. That’s correct, you heard me right, Thunderbolt also supports monitors! The other main difference is that Thunderbolt uses copper instead of fiber. Other than that, it’s the same technology.

Thunderbolt Features

The performance enhancements that Thunderbolt brings to the Mac are actually quite exciting. Its features include:

The DisplayPort form factor (currently used for Apple displays).
Works with other connection standards, including USB, FireWire and ethernet (requires adapters).
Works with Apple Cinema Displays.
Provides 10 watts to power connected peripherals.
Can be daisy-chained, removing the need for hubs and switches.
Supports TargetDisk mode for Macs.

The only complaint for Thunderbolt is its lack of supporting peripherals. However, I expect for that to change dramatically before the end of 2011. With Thunderbolt, Apple has truly chosen the next next best thing. And with its introduction, they may have just killed off USB 3.0 before it even had a chance to be widely adopted.

Filed Under: Mobile Technology

The perfect iPad workstation

February 13, 2011 By Jon Henshaw

My simple, portable iPad workstation

I’ve tried almost every iPad workstation configuration, including the keyboard dock for iPad, but I’ve never been satisfied with the ergonomics. Fortunately, I discovered the perfect iPad workstation setup, which uses a tiny stand and a wireless keyboard.

Compass Stand

The first component is the portable compass stand. It folds up into a tiny sliver, but opens into a perfectly versatile iPad stand. It has two different angles, including vertical (as shown in the image) and horizontal, where it lays flat at a slight angle. It’s very well made and I enjoy taking it wherever I take my iPad.

Apple Bluetooth Keyboard

The other essential element to the perfect portable iPad workstation is the Apple Bluetooth keyboard. Coupled with the compass stand, you can place the stand and keyword any way you want, and be able to easily type and work on the iPad.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Why “The Daily” will FAIL

February 6, 2011 By Jon Henshaw

The Daily FAIL

The best products and services are ones that try to solve problems. In particular, problems that the consumer has, not the producer.

The new iPad-only news source, The Daily, is concerned with solving one problem — how to make more money for News Corp.

At its core, The Daily is a giant leap backwards for online and mobile news. Its major drawbacks include:

an app centric model
a complete lack of diversity
too little content
no control over content
inefficient user interface
subscription cost

The future of the Internet is not Apps

One of the more absurd predictions that has been permeating in the technium social discourse — especially from ignorant blowhards that are trying to bring attention to themselves — is the demise of the website, and the rise of the mobile app.

I can only imagine the discussions that were held in News Corp meetings about the future of news, and how they think it will be consumed in the future. The technology-ignorant suits probably discussed how they’ll be left behind, that is, unless they sink their resources into a fully mobile app version of their content. All of this, while at the same time, already having multiple websites that could easily drive the content of their new panacea app. Instead, they chose to spend $30 million to reinvent themselves, resulting in more of the same, and completely missing the point of how people want to consume content via mobile devices.

A mobile app does one thing, and one thing only. It provides a device friendly interface for an Internet based service. 37signals recently provided a good example of this, when they launched mobile friendly versions of their Web apps. There’s nothing about The Daily that requires it to be made just for the iPad, and that’s one of the reasons why The Daily is pure gimmick.

My guess is that Apple – especially Steve Jobs – knew this from the beginning. However, they would be idiots to deter a major media company from spending millions of dollars to build and promote an app built exclusively for their hardware. Maybe Apple’s announcement about Jobs’ leave of absence was timed so he didn’t have to associate himself with this doomed to fail app launch. (yes, I’m kidding, mostly)

Taking away diversity is not forward thinking

The diversity of opinion and news available on the Internet is unprecedented, and that’s a good thing. That means we not only have choice, we also have more information to consider, enabling us to make more informed opinions.

By design, The Daily homogenizes and reduces the content you have access to. It places you into a news bubble, only occasionally reminding you that websites still exist. It also doesn’t solve the problem of needing easily digestible content. That’s because it’s already predigested. There’s no variety of sources, and the problem is not too much content, but too little.

People want control of their content sources

The demise of the newspaper isn’t simply because the medium is outdated and the content becomes quickly stale, it’s because people want choice. The Internet has allowed the role of editor to be shared with the reader.

Services like Google News have played a key role in providing these choices, but its RSS that has provided the foundation of choice. RSS allows the reader to control where they get their content from. For example, sports, political opinion, world news, and other other topics can all come from different news sources.

The Daily does away with that control, and reinforces the USA Today model, but only on an iPad. Lame.

Style shouldn’t hinder the user experience

Using The Daily on the iPad is only slightly less painful than using ABC News’ rotating globe interface. The main interface uses a CoverFlow-like model to swipe through news topics. It’s as if the designers said, “this is an interactive format, and you’re going to interact with it whether you like it or not!” The result is an inefficient series of swiping and navigation to sparse content.

When people consume information, they’re not concerned about the aesthetics and experience of getting to the content. People simply want to consume news and then get on with their life. If they could consume more information within a shorter amount of time, they would. So the problem that needs to be solved is not how experiential the consumption of news can be, it’s how can we make the consumption of information more efficient.

There are websites and apps that are already making progress with that problem. Flipboard provides an equally fancy iPad app, but is much more useful and efficient than The Daily. It acts as an aggregator of multiple news and social media sources, and then provides a simplified and condensed interface for quickly browsing and reading the content.

Screenshots from the Flipboard iPad app

However, the ultimate experience for efficiently aggregating and consuming news content already exists. For the iPad it’s Reeder, and for the PC (including Mac) it’s Feedly. They provide the ultimate experience for news by providing a stylish and efficient UI, and the ability to have full control over the content you retrieve and read. Feedly actually takes it one step further by using an algorithm to provide the news stories it thinks you’ll find most interesting.

Screenshots of Feedly and Reeder for iPad

Feedly on left, Reeder for iPad on right

Premium content shouldn’t be tied to the app

The Daily wants its app to be the one source for your news. However, it wants to severely limit the news you get, and charge you for it.

If the content is good enough, people will pay for it. There are already news outlets that have been successful with this model. Salon, an independent news company, has been very successful charging $30/year for access to premium ad-free content.

Screenshot of Salon.com's home page

That fact reinforces what I think is the perfect model for consuming news on the iPad — RSS feeds coupled with Reeder for iPad.

The future of news on the iPad is as simple as making Reeder better, or someone making a better alternative. In every way imaginable, The Daily is a step backwards and was doomed to FAIL from the beginning.

Filed Under: Apple iPad Tagged With: news

How the “Starbucks Card Mobile” Payment System Works

January 19, 2011 By Jon Henshaw

Up until today, I’ve used the Starbucks Card Mobile app for iOS to check the balance and reload my Gold Reward card. The only other functionality that I’ve found useful was the ability to easily find Starbucks stores, especially while travelling. However, today the app gained an entirely new feature, payments.

Today – Wednesday, January 19, 2011 – Starbucks launched their mobile payment option across the entire US. You can now use the Starbucks Card Mobile app in lieu of your physical card. While using the screen of my mobile device – versus a secure, wireless device-to-device communication – isn’t the ideal method for mobile payments, it still works quite well. The images below show you how the app is used for payments.

Touch to Pay

Click on the "Touch to Pay" to bring up the barcode

Scan Barcode

The POS scanner scans the barcode for purchase

Filed Under: Applications Tagged With: payments

Remote Controlled Helicopter that’s Controlled by an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad

October 16, 2010 By Jon Henshaw

This remote controlled helicopter has four blades, onboard cameras, is controlled by an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, and let’s you fly it like you’re in a real-life video game. It’s kind of amazing, and I must have it!

The quadicopter includes:

A quadricopter made in carbon fiber and high resistance PA66 plastic
MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) and video processing to ensure a very
intuitive piloting of a radio controlled object
Wi-Fi and video streaming for a modern interface with an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad
Images processing software for augmented reality

The helicopter can be flown indoors, and has several games to choose from. They also appear to keep the firmware up-to-date, so you can expect bugs to fixed, and for the device to get even better over time.

Filed Under: Apple iPad

The Best Way to Backup Your Mac and MacBook Pro

August 13, 2010 By Jon Henshaw

I’m no stranger to data loss. Over the past several years I’ve experienced catastrophic data loss in servers, and about five years ago my home computer’s hard drive crashed. I didn’t have a backup of the disk, which forced me to use DriveSavers to recover most of my data. They’re not cheap, but they’re certainly the best.

Quick Tip: If you ever need to use their hard drive recovery service, use this code to get 10% off their service: DS25038 – just tell them the code on the phone (800-440-1904) or enter it in their online estimate form. The code should still work.

Like most people, I’m lazy about backing up my data. If it’s remotely inconvenient, I won’t do it. Fortunately, there’s now several things you can do to back up your data, all without having to lift a finger. Smart WiFi access points, and clouded computing services, have changed the backup playing field. I’m going to share with you a full proof plan for automatically backing up your data, so you can rest easy.

Automated Backups for Mac

When Apple released Time Machine, they introduced a dead simple way to backup your Mac. Just plug in an external hard drive, and let it do the rest. While it’s a great solution, I still have to remember to get my hard drive out on a regular basis, hook it up, and let it do its thing. I’m too lazy for that, or at least too lazy to do it frequently enough.

My solution was to get a Time Capsule from Apple. It’s an Airport Extreme Base Station coupled with a server grade hard drive. I use it at home, and it backs up my MacBook Pro on a regular basis, without me doing one thing. Time Machine automatically detects when I’m on my home network, and then determines when it’s time to backup my computer. All of it is done in the background. It’s beautiful!

Time Capsule Time Machine Backup

Automated “Cloud” Computing Backups

Unfortunately, relying on one backup is not the best backup plan. Especially if you lose your computer in a house fire, which happens to be the same location as your Time Capsule. For that reason (and others), I use a couple cloud computing services as backups.

Just like Time Capsule and Time Machine, these services can be set up to run automatically in the background. The two cloud computing services I use are Backblaze and Dropbox.

Backblaze

I’ve tried several cloud computing backup services on OS X, including Mozy, but Backblaze was the service that worked the best, and was also the most unobtrusive. Like Time Machine, Backblaze automates the backup of your hard drive, or the folders you specify, and saves them securely in the cloud.

The price is incredibly cheap. It only cost $5/mo for unlimited storage. One of the things I like the most about Backblaze, is that it allows me to specify the backup speed. I can either choose better network performance (slower backup speeds) or faster backups (full throttle backup speeds).

Backblaze Speed Throttle Preference

Dropbox

Another cloud computing service I use is Dropbox. While Dropbox’s conventional use is storing documents in the cloud, it can also be used as an excellent automated backup system. The way I use Dropbox on my MacBook Pro, is that I save all of my documents in my Dropbox folders.

I decided to mimic the default folders that appear in the Home folder on OS X, including Music, Photos, and Documents. I then made shortcuts to those folders, and I make sure I save everything in them. Dropbox then automatically syncs those documents in the cloud.

My documents are not only synced (backed up) in the cloud automatically, they’re also accessible via their iOS app. That means I can easily access all of my documents on my iPhone or iPad using Dropbox’s free iOS app. Just like Backblaze, their service is incredibly affordable. They have a free account that comes with 2GB, a $10/mo account that comes with 50GB, and a $20/mo account that comes with 100GB.

Automated Social Network Backups

Lastly, I also have a lot of activity on social networks. My activity is obviously not on my computer, but what happens if a social network loses my data, or gasp, deletes my account or goes out of business? That’s where Backupify comes in.

I use Backupify to backup my Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter accounts. I also use it to backup my WordPress blogs. You can even use it to backup your Gmail account! The data can be backed up on your own Amazon Web Services‘ S3 storage account, which is what I do. They have a Free account, a Plus account for $40/year, and Premium account for $60/year. Most people will be able to get by with their Free or Plus account.

Filed Under: Portable Computers Tagged With: apple, backup, macbook