maniacal rage

One of the nice features of the iPhone is that it can be pulled from its cradle at any point. You don't have to disconnect it via software or cancel the sync or anything. Just pull it out and use it.

Well, today I needed to use my iPhone and it was halfway through a sync but I figured, hey, what the hell. But, not being totally trusting, however, I cancelled the sync before pulling it out of the cradle.

The phone snapped into action right away but my computer started acting really sluggish. I checked Activity Viewer and lo and behold, iTunes, iChat, Mail and SystemUIServer had crashed. I decided to restart.

After logging in I started iChat up and it presented me with the "Welcome to iChat" panel. I got a little nervous. I gave it info again and when it logged in, all my contacts were missing their nice names. Shit. I checked Address Book—blank. All totally blank.

I tried the trick Kevin mentioned on the Blue Flavor blog and found that my AddressBook.data.previous file was also blank. All gone. The crash erased my contacts entirely, and the backup file. Now I have to go restore them from my offline backups.

Just be careful when removing your iPhone mid-sync, even after canceling. Bad things can apparently happen.

Update: Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, my contacts reappear! I have Address Book open and it's blank and I'm writing this and then, poof, it just fills itself in. What in the name of holy fuck is happening here?

I've been playing Bioshock a lot. It's a really fun game. Too bad my XBOX 360 just died. Again. Well, not again, since this one was a replacement. That's two dead XBOXes in three months. What. The. Fuck.

What sucks is that the games are so good, and the software is so good, but the main system hardware is total crap. It's loud, it breaks easily, it overheats, it's FUCKING LOUD, it's just frustrating. I was right in the middle of Bioshock, really enjoying myself and now I have to wait four to six weeks again. Sons of bitches.

I have three email accounts I check regularly: My Maniacal Rage account, my Gmail account and my Blue Flavor work account. My Rage account uses Gmail for Domains, so it's basically another Gmail account. Gmail doesn't support IMAP. So using the iPhone the last two months for email has been a suck-fest: Mark an email read on my Mac, mark it again on my iPhone. Spam gets through on my Mac, spam gets through on my iPhone. Ugh. There has to be a better way. Turns out, there is.

Gmail doesn't have IMAP support, but that doesn't mean we can't use IMAP with a few extra steps. It's pretty easy to do, but it has one requirement: You have to have a hosting account with a large amount of space (say, at least 2.5GB). That sounds like a lot, but these days hosts are overselling so much that it's not hard to find for cheap. For instance, I have an account at Dreamhost that I use for non-critical stuff and I have 520GB of space. Yeah, that's not a typo. That's how insanely oversold Dreamhost accounts are. All that for less than $15/month. Ridiculous.

So get yourself some hosting or use one of your current large accounts. All you need is IMAP support and space. This short tutorial assumes you're using Apple Mail, but you can probably figure out how to do this in another client. Follow these easy steps to setup IMAP for Gmail:

1. If you haven't already done so, set up Gmail POP and download all your email to your Mac. For help on that, read the Gmail FAQ. Basically, you need all your Gmail email on your machine for later.

2. Create an IMAP account on your server. This address is going to be private, you'll never give it out and most people will never know it exists. So make it whatever you want, although I would recommend something you wouldn't mind someone figuring out (i.e., don't make it douchebag@yourcom.com).

3. Disable POP at Gmail.

4. Set up your IMAP account on your Mac (separate from your earlier POP account). When configuring this IMAP account, configure it with your Gmail address as the email address, then set up incoming servers correctly for your IMAP account, but set up outgoing servers correctly for your Gmail account. For instance:

   Email address: dude@gmail.com
   Incoming mail server: mail.mydomain.com
   Username: my_imap_user
   Password: my_imap_password

   Outgoing mail server: smtp.gmail.com
   Username: dude@gmail.com
   Password: my_gmail_password

   Note how it's configured IMAP on the way in, Gmail on the way out.

   You'll also need to change a few outgoing settings that Gmail requires, like the port (from 25 to 587). These details can be found on the POP configuration page on the Gmail FAQ.

5. Enable forwarding for your Gmail account. Tell Gmail to forward all your mail to the IMAP account you created, and to archive Gmail's copy when its done (that way you don't have an inbox with thousands of messages).

6. Configure special folders. In Mail, in your new IMAP account, create three new mailboxes. Call them Draft, Sent and Trash. Then select each, one at a time, and go to Mailbox → Use This Mailbox For → [The mailbox of the same name]. This will configure Mail to save these kinds of messages to the server. You'll see the mailboxes disappear and reappear in the right places (under Draft, et cetera).

7. Copy all your email to the IMAP account (and, thus, the server). Do this by dragging mail and folders from the POP account you have (where all your email was downloaded) to the IMAP account. This may take some time depending on how much mail you have. Note that you can even copy your sent/drafts/trash to the server. Tip: the Activity Viewer window (⌘0) will show you the progress of the copy.

8. Disable the POP account in Mail and restart the app.

9. Send some test messages. You should be able to send email to another account and it will show up looking like it's from your Gmail account. Reply to it and you'll receive the email through your IMAP account.

Wahoo! IMAP access to your Gmail account! Now all you need to do is sync this account to your iPhone if you've got one. This should make managing your email a lot easier.

I'm involved in five submitted panels for SXSW 2008, and I need you help to get some of them in. It's quick and free—all you have to do is register on the panel picker and then vote high for these five panels:

• Creating a Professional Podcast
• Perfect Product Launches: Releasing with Style
• Interface Design & Development Behind the Scenes
• Design is Not a Restaurant
• Embracing the Prototype: Moving Your Project Forward

If you're planning on going to SXSW and have a panel you think I should vote for, feel free to send it my way. It's a little overwhelming to look through 683 panels so I'm open to some help finding the other good ones.

From the FAQ at the Jing Project (which looks pretty neat), the answer for "Did you say this runs on a Mac?":

You bet. It would be rather silly of us to think we could conduct a public test on improving digital conversations and only invite one platform to participate. We realize for this to be successful, we have to be as platform-independent as possible. Sorry, no Linux support.

Emphasis mine. I love the idea of writing a paragraph in which you talk about something and then completely disregard it in the final sentence. "Do you like me?" "Of course! I like you a lot! Oh, but I sort of hate you."

Shawn and I are the latest guests on the Moldawer in the Morning Podcast, which we had a blast doing. Dave is a really fun host and we talked about "hot moms, drunk teens, and smart monkeys." Doesn't get much better than that.

Check it out.

I was just updating some of my prefpanes when I realized I've got quite a few installed. I also thought, I wonder what other people have installed? Here's your chance to show me.

Upload a shot of your panes to Flickr and tag it "prefpane meme" and join in on the pointlessness. Update: I also created a group for the meme, since more and more people are joining in on the useless fun.

We just released a new episode of the podcast—over 35 minutes full of things like my Nova Scotia wilderness adventures, the history of Philadelphia and the series finale of the hit drama Dickens.

Listen to the new episode now with the built-in player and if you haven't already, subscribe.

So you're a baseball fan. And you have an iPhone. And you're tired of how slow it is to check ESPN for up-to-the-minute baseball scores and news. Well, today's your lucky day because we just released a new Leaflet for baseball and it's awesome. Read all about it.

I was making a few wallpapers for my iPhone the other day and I realized that if I was going to do the work, I might as well release them to you guys. So I did.

Grab some iPhone wallpapers and make with the pretty.

The wallpapers are all made from photos I've taken over the past few years, optimized for the iPhone. Enjoy!

Today UPS delivered an XBOX 360 to my door. I say "an" XBOX, not "my" XBOX, because Microsoft didn't repair my busted box, they just sent me a replacement. In a letter enclosed, they wrote:

So that you can get back to playing and enjoying your Xbox quicker, we have replaced your Xbox console with a replacement unit.

Now, poor language aside, a translation for this would be: Every XBOX we've ever made is busted, we've got too many repairs, it's cheaper just to give you a new one. So we did.

Don't get me wrong—I'm happy. It cut the repair time from an estimated four to six weeks to three weeks and that's good for me. Now it's time to get back to Guitar Hero II!

When I went to the Apple Store today, I planned to pick up the new versions of iLife and iWork, as well as a new keyboard. For the past year I have been using (and loving) the Macally iceKey—with its laptop-depth keys it reduces strain on my fingers and I've never been more comfortable typing in years, but its non-Apple-standard key sizes and one blank key¹ drive me nuts on a regular basis. So when I heard Apple was releasing a laptop-depth keyboard I was thrilled.

Turns out they didn't have them in stock today in stores. But I did get to play with one, and I found some very strange things.

First, Apple has decided that the wired version of the keyboard should be full size, but the Bluetooth version isn't. It's missing the delete, insert, home, et cetera island, and the number pad. In fact, the Bluetooth version looks exactly like the MacBook keyboard, but with aluminum backing. The wired version has the whole keyboard layout. I'm not sure why they decided on this, and I don't think I agree with it. Sure, making the BT version smaller makes it more portable, but I don't think people are moving them around quite enough that it's worth shorting them the ability to input numbers conveniently.

Second, and far stranger, is the new layout of function (or F) keys. The wired keyboard now has up to F19, and no dedicated volume controls. Instead, it moves the volume controls to special functions on F10, F11 and F12. You might remember those as two Expose keys and the Dashboard key. Well, not anymore. In fact, F9, the other default Expose key, is now fast-forward/next track. And the eject key, which has nearly always been the last key in the upper right of the keyboard is next to F12. Not on the end in the wired version. But it gets even stranger:

The F3 key's special function is Expose: All windows. F3? Are they serious? F4 is Dashboard. Since when are F3 and F4 easy to hit keys? They're in no-man's land up there. And are we just supposed to stop using any other Expose functionality? There are no keys with the other two functions. And, while we're at it, I should mention that the volume controls have been changed, order-wise, from the usual desktop keyboard layout. It used to be volume down, volume up, mute. Now it matches the laptop arrangement, which swaps mute to the left instead of the right.

And here's where it gets fun: you can, much like on a laptop, disable the special functionality of the keys and switch to regular function key use using System Preferences, after which you can assign things to the keys you wish. That is, except the volume keys. Because when you turn off the special functions, there is no way to bind the volume keys to, say, the F16-18 keys which are useless on the keyboard otherwise. So if you want to use the keyboard the way you're used to, you won't be able to control volume without holding the "fn" key, which allows you to use the special functions temporarily when they're disabled.

So why did Apple make all of these random changes? Truthfully, I'm not sure. The new keyboard looks like it was meant to be a laptop keyboard (it functions nearly identically to the current MB and MBP boards), which doesn't make much sense. How frequently are people adjusting brightness (dedicated special function keys F1 and F2) on a desktop? I'd guess very rarely.

All this aside, the keys are really quite nice to type on and I still plan to order one for the sake of my fingers. But I'm going to have to figure out a way to bind the keys the way I want them—that is, to have them work the way the desktop keyboards have worked for years.

If you're an ADC member, you can now download and view my presentation from WWDC. Simply visit the ADC on iTunes section of the store (this will ask you to log in), and then navigate to: WWDC 2007 Sessions → Content and Media → Session 604 - Iterative Cocoa and Web Application Design.

You'll be able to download a video which has the audio of the presentation played along with the slides in real-time. You can also download a PDF version of the slides.

Update: Boooo. You have to have a non-free pass or have gone to WWDC. That sucks. Sorry.

After 16 hours of travel yesterday, we finally arrived home in Brooklyn at 3:30AM. We're tired but glad to be home. I've got to get the photos organized and I've just caught up on my email.

While we were gone, the first piece in a new series Katia is writing for mediabistro.com went live: J-School Confidential: Off the Fence. She's going to be writing about her experiences with grad school (which she starts in just two weeks) throughout the next year. I've always tried to convince her to start a weblog about this kind of stuff, so this is the closest thing to that. The only difference is she already has thousands of readers. Not fair.