After four months of lugging a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse along with the MacBook Pro — which, at 5.5lb, isn’t exactly light to begin with — I decided enough was enough. Since I’ve been wanting to ease some load off of my shoulder, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to buy the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, the time was right for me to consider a smaller and lighter alternative.

To be more specific, it was time to consider a “MacBook Nano.”

Opening Pandora’s Box

Four years ago, Apple announced a transition from powering its Macs with PowerPC processors to Intel processors instead. The biggest ramification of such an architecture change was an obvious one: Mac OS X, previously written for the PowerPC platform, could then theoretically run on any Intel x86-based computer.

In the years after, enthusiasts have made much effort in making OS X run on generic PCs by hacking the various drivers — kernel extension, or kext files — so that the operating system can recognize hardware components beyond those used in Apple’s Macs. This has been achieved to varying degrees of success; due to the extremely wide range of configurations PCs ship in, some brands and models sporting certain hardware components run OS X better than others.

Do Your Homework First

To ensure you get the smoothest ‘Hackintosh’ experience possible, you have to first know which netbooks are the best ‘hackable’ candidates before you make a purchase. Currently, the netbooks most compatible for running OS X — when every component, from Wi-Fi to built-in audio, will be recognized by an OS X installation — are the following four:

• Dell Mini 9 (everything works)
• Vostro A90 (the OEM version of the Dell Mini 9)
• HP Mini 1000 (everything works)
• ASUS EeePC 1000H (everything works)

Close behind those four are the following models, of which OS X does not have the necessary kext for one particular component in each model. However, each of them can still be considered a suitable candidate for running OS X, depending on what you consider to be non-critical:

• ASUS EeePC 901 (everything except sleep)
• MSI Wind U100 (everything except audio input, though there’s been recent development in this area which may have solved this)
• Lenovo IdeaPad S10 (everything except Ethernet)

You may have noticed that these are all older models. That’s the bad news. These models have already been superseded by newer models, and are therefore increasingly harder to find. But the good news is that most retailers are likely to have slashed prices in their bid to clear out existing stock precisely because they are older models.

Picking the Candidate

Last week, I marched into a local computer mall and found both a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 and a HP Mini 1000 sitting side-by-side in one store, going for $385 and $415, respectively. Talk about luck! Design-wise, I had eyes only for the IdeaPad S10 and the Mini 1000.

Its lower price aside, I picked the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 in the end, even though I knew the Ethernet port would not work (I don’t recall having used an Ethernet port in the past year). Not only was it cheaper, the IdeaPad S10 was better-spec’ed than the Mini 1000 in almost every aspect:

• Memory: 2GB versus 1GB
• Storage: 160GB versus 60GB
• Battery: 6-cell (5.5 hours, 56 watt-hour) versus 3-cell (3 hours, 24.4 watt-hour)
• Memory card reader: 4-in-1 (MMC/SD/Memory Stick/Memory Stick PRO) versus SD only

The clincher, for me, is that the IdeaPad S10 has an ExpressCard/34 slot, with which I can use my 3G ExpressCard modem, and also a trackpad of which its buttons are positioned beneath it rather than to the left and right as it is on that of the Mini 1000.

(Note to Apple: If Lenovo can squeeze a 4-in-1 memory card reader and an ExpressCard/34 slot into a tiny sub-notebook, you can certainly do the same for the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros. Just admit already you simply don’t want to.)

I should note that the one very good thing going for the HP Mini 1000 is that it has a 92 percent keyboard (versus the 85 percent keyboard of the IdeaPad S10), an impressive feat of engineering considering the fact that the Mini 1000 is of about the same width as the Lenovo IdeaPad S10.

Installation is an Outpatient Day Op

Installation is a breeze. Enough effort by enthusiasts have been made that installing OS X on a PC is a quick weekend exercise.

While I will not detail how to ‘Hackintosh’ a netbook, there are essentially two ways to do so: by obtaining an installation disk image already hacked with the appropriate drivers (the easiest way to go), or by installing from the retail DVD and subsequently hacking the drivers (messier and not for the novice).

Since most netbooks do not have optical drives, I had to use an external DVD drive. After making sure the BIOS of the netbook has been set to boot first from an optical drive, I popped the OS X 10.5.4 Install DVD in, booted the S10 up and off went the installation.

Upon first boot, I had to replace a kext file for the Wi-Fi in the IdeaPad S10 to work. Once that was up and running, all that was left to do was to replace a couple more kext files for functions such as system sleep, two-finger scrolling, internal audio input, ExpressCard, and display hot keys to work.

Once I was sure I had all the components working, I did a Software Update to 10.5.8. Doing so killed the Wi-Fi, keyboard and trackpad, but a repeat of replacing kext files restored them to a working state.

Overall Impressions

How does it fare? The ‘Hackintosh’ is more than capable of handling basic functionality well on a daily basis. Overall speed and performance of OS X on the IdeaPad S10, which is powered by the Intel Atom N270 1.66Ghz processor, is akin to that of an iBook PowerPC G4.

There is Always a “But”

The one glaring caveat to running OS X on a netbook is the lack of screen real estate. Most netbooks are equipped with either a 9- or 10-inch screen typically running a resolution of 1024 by 600. But the overall UI design of OS X is seemingly based on a minimum screen resolution of 1280 by 800, which is what the lowest-spec’ed Macs run at. This poses some usability issues when it comes to the window size of certain applications.

System Preferences, for example, opens a window longer than the screen resolution of the IdeaPad S10 can display.

As you can see in the screenshot above, anything beyond the first row of Preference Panes in the ‘Others’ section are obscured. The workaround to this is to click on any Preference Pane, and then click the ‘Reveal All’ buttons to go back. Doing that invokes a scroll bar within System Preferences, which you can then drag to reach the previously-obscured Panes.

The other two issues I have with the IdeaPad S10 are the right-handside Shift key and the tiny trackpad.

But these are all small annoyances, really, not show-stoppers. While a 1024 by 600 screen resolution means I’d mostly be running one application fullscreen at a time, once I think of this limitation as a way to force me to focus on one task at a time, it’s not so bad. Plus, there’s always Megazoomer; fullscreen is just a Command+Enter keystroke away. And LazyMouse helps mitigate the problem of the tiny trackpad.

The Mac Netbook as the Middle Ground

I had, from the get-go, meant to use this ‘MacBook Nano’ of mine for only web browsing, email, simple image manipulation and writing.

Prior to getting the IdeaPad S10, there were days when I’d go out with only my iPhone 3G, knowing I can do all of the above with it. But there are times when I need to download, review, annotate and then resend certain types of documents neither iPhone OS nor a third-party iPhone app recognizes. Without a notebook with which to do that, I am pretty much stuck.

So, until Apple reinvents the sub-notebook with its fabled tablet, this ‘Hackintosh’ fills the gap between the times when I don’t need to lug around a workhorse like my MacBook Pro and when I need to do more than what my iPhone 3G lets me do.

“Mac or No Mac, There is No Try”

I’m sure I speak for many die-hard Mac users by saying that, being someone who cannot fathom using anything other than Mac OS X, and faced with a pressing need to have a lightweight portable, I’d rather use OS X on a netbook with all of the compromises it entails than to have to use Windows on the same netbook. To me, the Mac experience has always been more about software than hardware.

Small, Light, and It Runs OS X. What’s Not To Like?

Having used the S10 every day for a week now, taking it instead of my 15-inch MacBook Pro everywhere, I can say with certainly that my MacBook Pro will be relegated to my desk on most days, and that my preferred portable computer from hereon will be this ‘MacBook Nano’ of mine.

I can fish it out in places where opening a 15-inch notebook would be a clumsy thing to do; my tired shoulder has never felt better; I have desktop-class computing power everywhere I go, and can do far more than what I can with the iPhone. It is inexpensive, small, light, and it runs OS X.

What’s not to like, really?

Having iPhone 3GS envy? Well, if you already have iPhone OS 3.0 jailbroken, here’s how to make your last-year gadget feel just a tad more like the new iPhone 3GS.

Battery Percentage

Many users were disappointed to learn that Battery Percentage is exclusive to the iPhone 3GS, and not a general feature in iPhone OS 3.0.

There are two ways to turn on the battery percentage in the jailbroken iPhone OS 3.0.
1. Through SBSettings
If you have SBSettings installed, simply tap on “More,” then “Extras.” There you will find Enable/Disable Numeric Battery.

2. Through AsBattery
If you prefer to have the stock Battery Percentage toggle found only in the iPhone 3GS, you’ll need AsBattery. To install AsBattery:

1. Fire up Cydia.
2. In its “Search” section, type in iPhone-notes. What you are doing is looking for the repository that AsBattery is hosted in. Install this repository.
3. In Cydia’s “Changes” section, look for “AsBattery” and install that.
4. Reboot your iPhone.

Once you’re back in, the battery percentage toggle will be present in Settings → General → Usage.

The magic that AsBattery does is it adds the string gas-gauge-battery to a file called M68AP.plist (if you have an iPhone), N82AP.plist (if you have an iPhone 3G), N45AP.plist (if you have an iPod touch 1st-generation), or N72AP.plist (if you have an iPod touch 2nd-generation).

Video Recording

Jailbreakers have long enjoyed Cycorder, a free app that records video in MPEG 384 x 288 at 6—15 fps, depending on lighting conditions. Sure, it’s far from the 640-by-480-pixel at 30 fps capability of the iPhone 3GS, but, hey, I’ll take some video over no video any day. It’s better than nothing.

Voice Control… somewhat

If you’re so inclined towards voice dialing, there’s always Vlingo and Melodis Voice Dialer. Both apps work pretty well, though you can’t do neat stuff like ask your iPhone what song it’s currently playing (and have it reply!). One other notable voice-related app is, of course, the Google Mobile App, though it should be noted that this app does not do voice dialing.

Vlingo has one neat feature. You can dictate a status update for your Twitter or Facebook account.

Isn’t North Always Up?

Sorry, it’s a hardware limitation. But it’s not that bad. Do a search for “compass” in the iTunes App Store and you’ll find a plethora of apps purporting to show you the way to The Great North. Most, if not all, of these apps require you to be outdoors and to be actually moving, since they employ GPS to find out your bearing.

If you are in a built-up area, there is an easy way to find our which way north is. Fire up Maps and let it find your current location. Since all maps are drawn with north pointing up, all you have to do is do a visual survey and orientate your iPhone so that any roads around you line up with their counterpart on the map.

But if you’re out in the middle of nowhere with no distinguishable landmarks, you’ll have to settle for sticking a compass on the back of your iPhone.

In my previous Jailbreak: The Lock Screen Is A Barren Land, I wrote about IntelliScreen and Lock Calendar, two apps for enhancing the Lock Screen of your iPhone and iPod touch. Today, in part two, I’ll be exploring a handful of other tweaks you can make to the Lock screen.

HomeScreen and MultiBarLockscreen

HomeScreen 2.0 (aldwin, Free) looks and feels like Windows Mobile’s Today Screen. Instead of filling up the Lock screen with a list of current events, HomeScreen shows you only a total count of various system events such as appointments, missed calls, new mail, new messages and new RSS feeds. You can also have it display a calendar of the current month and a one-week weather forecast.

Visually, it’s lighter than IntelliScreen, which may appeal to those of you who prefer a minimalist look for your Lock screens. Note that, after installing HomeScreen, you will have to go into WinterBoard to activate it. Also, the first thing you’ll want to do is to change the weather location. Read this tutorial on how to do that.

MultiBarLockscreen (DouweM, Free) is another app that is similar to HomeScreen.

RemindYou

You can consider RemindYou (Make Your Day Media, $9.95) an “IntelliScreen Lite,” of sorts. Its sole function is to populate the Lock screen of your iPhone or iPod touch with a list of current and upcoming appointments. If you ask me, I’d rather spend the $9.95 on IntellScreen instead; the same price buys you a whole lot more features.

20 Second Lock Screen

If you are using any one of these Lock screen enhancement apps, 20 Second Lock Screen (Optimo, Free) is a Mobile Substrate plugin that extends the auto shut-off time of the Lock screen from five seconds to 20.

Twidget

Twidget (Plizzo, Free) puts Twitter right on the Lock screen. But chalk this one up for strictly the fun department, because it only lets you view and not reply to tweets. Requires WinterBoard.

NoAA

NoAA (Yanik Magnan, Free), or “No Album Artwork,” is a Mobile Substrate that hides album artwork on the Lock screen, and displays your wallpaper instead. This tweak doesn’t come with any configurable settings. To disable it, simply uninstall it from within Cydia.

Important note: Some of these Lock screen mods require either StatusNotifier or Notifier—Mobile Substrate plugins that provide system-wide notifications to work their magic, but neither of them are fully compatible with iPhone OS 3.0 at the time of writing. You are well-advised to check their respective changelogs before proceeding.

All the goodness of iPhone OS 3.0 aside, the one thing you’ve probably noticed after updating your iPhone or iPod touch is how quickly its battery is draining.

I certainly did, along with many other users. The battery life of my iPhone 3G is now barely six hours, a huge departure from the 12+ hours or so I would get with 2.2.1. And even though I’d experienced a decrease in battery life with the beta builds of 3.0 back in May, the battery never drained at a rate as alarming as this. Now, it depletes 10 percent every hour even while the phone is left doing absolutely nothing.

My first thought was that push notification must be the cause of this. But even after turning off push notification, the battery continued to drain at an alarming rate. After some investigation, it would seem that the culprit is, instead, iPhone’s push mail setting.

To turn off push for all mail accounts, follow these steps:

1. On the Home screen, tap the “Settings” icon.
   
2. Tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars.”
   
3. Tap “Fetch New Data.”
   
4. Turn off “Push.” This turns off push, in one step, for all email accounts that are enabled for it, while preserving the “Fetch” settings you may have already set for every account.
   
5. Reboot your iPhone. To do that, hold down the Sleep/Wake button (the one at the top) until you see the red slider appear, then drag the slider.
   

After your iPhone has restarted, you should see an improvement in its battery life. Leave a comment, and tell us if this works for you!

In iPhone OS Beta 3, there was a hint of a new feature that would presumably let a user change settings of the built-in App Store. With iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 4, seeded to developers earlier today, it has turned out to be a useful new feature: users can finally switch between multiple iTunes accounts within iPhone.

If you are someone who has multiple iTunes accounts, you’ve probably noticed how the App Store often gets confused about the number of updates available for download when it comes to over-the-air app updates; it may display an erroneous number of updates available, may fail to find any updates even when they are available, or may only display the number of updates for one or the other account. The only way to juggle multiple iTunes accounts is via iTunes on the desktop; you have to sign in to a particular account, get the updates for all the apps purchased with that account, sync your device, sign out, and repeat the steps for any other accounts.

With Beta 4, you’ll be able to easily switch between accounts from within the App Store or the iTunes Store on your device.

There is now a new “Sign In” button at the bottom of the Featured page in App Store. Apparently, you’ll be able to create a new iTunes account, though this does not seem to be working at the moment.

In Settings, the “Store” entry that was a placeholder in Beta 3, and which did nothing, has gained an icon and is now working. Tapping on it brings you to a page where you can sign in and out of an account or view account information.

If you choose “View Account”, you’ll be prompted to sign in once more, just like how it is when viewing account information in iTunes on the desktop.

Once you’ve done so, you’ll be presented with information such as your contact details and the balance remaining in your account. You will also be able to redeem gift codes from within this page, instead of having to find the “Redeem” button in the Downloads section of the built-in iTunes app, a step I have always felt to be rather counterintuitive.

Apple blessed the iPhone 3G with a gorgeous, large screen. There is plenty of screen real estate, so why waste it with just a wallpaper, album cover artwork, or the date and time?

Having been a Windows Mobile user for six years, the Today Screen in Windows Mobile was the one feature I sorely missed in the iPhone OS. With the Today Screen, I could, at a quick glance, see upcoming appointments and know I have new mail, new messages, or missed calls.

It is possible to replicate that experience on a jailbroken iPhone. Today, in the first of two articles, I’ll talk about two third-party apps that’ll turn the barren land that is the Lock screen into a golden field of usefulness.

IntelliScreen

The undisputed king of the hill app for enhancing the Lock screen, IntelliScreen (Intelliborn, $9.99), boasts a long list of features. To simply say it enhances the Lock screen is an understatement. It’s really a productivity suite. To understand what IntelliScreen does, think of it as being comprised of two distinct parts.

The first part puts information such as appointments, mail, messages, weather forecast and RSS feeds on the Lock screen.

This part of IntelliScreen is highly configurable. You choose what goes onto the Lock screen of your iPhone, and you can arrange the order in which each information type is displayed.

What’s more, you can launch the native app associated with each kind of item. For example, sliding across an appointment brings up a button to launch Calendar.

For items such as mail and text messages, you can invoke a QuickView pop-up and read them without having to leave the Lock screen.

The second part completely overhauls the way iPhone OS presents you with system alerts such as missed calls and scheduled reminders. This part of IntelliScreen, called IntelliAlert, is not visible unless your iPhone needs to notify you of a system event, which it does by curling up its usual view and revealing the alert beneath it. Alerts can be by sound, vibration, or a screen flash, and can be set to repeat in intervals.

In addition, IntelliAlert displays in the Status bar notification icons for each type of alert. There are icons for new mail, new messages, new voicemail, missed calls, call forwarding, and due appointments. Small as this may seem, having notification icons in the Status bar goes a long way toward enhancing user experience. More on this in Part Two.

A Rogue App

There is something that should be said about IntelliScreen. Newcomers to IntelliScreen should know that it’s an app with a somewhat bad rep. Many users have reported IntelliScreen to be the culprit in software conflicts with other apps, or that IntelliScreen was the cause of fatal crashes.

These problems are almost always attributable to the fact that IntelliScreen does not hook into Mobile Substrate, the framework that provides third-party apps and mods to inject their code into iPhone OS. Mobile Substrate is designed to boot into a safe mode in the event of a crash, so that your iPhone does not become completely unbootable. Since IntelliScreen does its thing its own way — “rogue,” if you will — the chances of incompatibility with other apps are real and potentially high.

To date I’ve had to restart my iPhone only occasionally, after IntelliScreen becomes unresponsive, but nothing as serious as having my iPhone stuck at the Apple logo has taken place.

Lock Calendar

For those of you looking for a free solution, Lock Calendar (Thomas Moore, free) is a worthy alternative.

Lock Calendar does one thing and does it very well, which is to display upcoming Calendar appointments in the Lock screen. While functionality in its first release was very basic, Lock Calendar 0.3 is a huge improvement, with some features that even IntelliScreen lacks. These include the ability to display some or all of your calendars, and to change font type, size and color. What I personally like about Lock Calendar is that it doesn’t require WinterBoard to run.

Lock Calendar has a lot of potential for becoming a replacement for IntelliScreen on my iPhone. Its developer, Thomas Moore¹, is looking into adding new features such as themes, customizable view layout, weather information, and notification alerts for text messages and mail. This is an app I am definitely keeping a close eye on.

Which is the App for You?

IntelliScreen is a must-have app for my iPhone. It’s the kind of app you only need to spend a day using to appreciate how well-rounded it is. Telephony-specific enhancements, such as QuickView and IntelliAlert, are the kind of bells and whistles that power users crave but cannot get with the stock iPhone OS.

On the other hand, Lock Calendar is an app that should be sufficient for many users. Its simplicity will appeal to those who simply want to put the Lock screen to better use. Lock Calendar should appeal to iPod touch users, too. In fact, I chose to install Lock Calendar for my iPod touch rather than IntelliScreen; without messaging, telephony or vibrating abilities, there is little else in the iPod touch for IntelliScreen to do.

IntelliScreen and Lock Calendar are by no means the only Lock screen apps available in the jailbreak world. In Part Two, we’ll look at a handful of other apps ranging from clever to plain weird. Stay tuned.

¹ Disclaimer: While I do not personally know Mr. Moore, I was involved in the internationalization work for Lock Calendar 0.3.

iPhone OS, from its very first version to the current 2.2.1, lacks certain features that many users typically expect in a smartphone. Jailbreaking arose largely to address those shortcomings. With iPhone OS 3.0, Apple has made the first of what will surely be many waves to come that will rock the jailbreak boat.

Having used beta developer builds of iPhone OS 3.0 for a few weeks now, I believe that the release of iPhone OS 3.0 will eliminate a large number of reasons for which users have jailbroken their iPhones.

Of the hundreds of enhancements jailbreaking can bring, the popular ones are, arguably, unlocking the iPhone to accept SIM cards worldwide, SMS management, MMS, Internet tethering, the built-in camera, the Lock Screen, UI theming, and cut, copy and paste. So how do the new features in iPhone OS 3.0 stack up against their jailbreak counterparts? Let’s take a look.

Unlocking the iPhone

For those of you whose iPhones are locked to your respective carrier, sorry, you’ll still have to jailbreak 3.0 in order to unlock your device.

SMS

With iPhone OS 3.0, you can finally forward text messages, delete individual text messages, and read and compose text messages in landscape mode, functionality that would otherwise require third-party apps such as BiteSMS, iRealSMS or MySMS. But there is one feature, available in both BiteSMS and MySMS, that I miss in 3.0: Quick Reply.

When a text message comes in, BiteSMS pops up a floating alert dialog box that lets you send a reply to that message without quitting whichever application is currently running. It’s a huge convenience, and elegant, to boot.

MMS

Some swear by it, while others think its absence is a non-issue. Personally, I stand somewhere in the middle. If I am on a shoot somewhere out on location, and I need to get a photo across to someone quickly, MMS can be really useful. While some might argue that emailing would serve the same purpose, many recipients would much prefer receiving an MMS for the simple fact that not all cell phones have e-mail clients as capable as that of the iPhone. And you’d be surprised at how many cell phone users still do not have a data plan for push e-email and the such.

Internet Tethering

Remember the days when you would tether your cell phone to your laptop via a data cable, Bluetooth, or, horror of horrors, infrared? My old 2G Nokia cell phone did it, even if it was a measly 14.4K connection, so it was quite an inconvenience not being able to use my iPhone as a modem.

Internet tethering via USB or Bluetooth is built into 3.0. I’m happy to report that it just works (for now). I no longer require apps such as PdaNet or iPhoneModem, some of which cost quite a fair bit to purchase. But, as built-in HSPDA connectivity becomes increasingly ubiquitous in laptops, Internet tethering in the iPhone will eventually become irrelevant.

Camera

This is the one area that has not been improved upon in 3.0. The native Camera app still does not offer manual controls such as burst mode, slow shutter, or EV override, things that I, as a photographer, would like to have. On the hardware side, I would love to have auto-focus, something my other cell phone, an old Sony Ericsson, does very well. A full-featured camera app such as Snapture is, hence, still a very attractive incentive for jailbreaking.

Then, there is video recording. Cycorder is what I miss in my now-stock iPhone 3G. I do believe it is inevitable that video recording will make its way into the iPhone. Rumors floating around the Internet seem to strongly indicate that it could be as soon as the next hardware revision of the iPhone we’ll see this June. When that happens, the last of what I feel are the three key ‘jailbreak-worthy’ aspects of iPhone OS — video, Bluetooth file transfers, and cut/copy/paste — will be solved, as far as I’m concerned.

Lock Screen

All that screen real estate and nothing to show for it. Being a convert from Windows Mobile, which has a Today Screen that displays upcoming appointments and system notifications, the Lock Screen of iPhone OS is one area I really wish Apple would devote some attention to next. Of all the goodness I can get with jailbreaking, apps that enhance the Lock Screen are what I treasure most.

When I take a quick glance at the Lock Screen, I want to see information and not just album cover artwork or wallpaper. There is so much potential in what can go onto the Lock Screen. Calendar events, quick-dial for favorite contacts, detailed notifications for missed calls or incoming text messages, or even a preview of new mail — all of these are possible today on the jailbroken iPhone, courtesy of apps such as IntelliScreen and LockCalendar.

And, speaking of what I should see on the Lock Screen at a glance, I sorely miss Notifier, a Mobile Substrate hack that displays in the Date Bar notification icons for new mail, new messages, new IM messages, missed calls, and, especially useful, one for ringer mute.

UI Theming

The user interface plays such an important role in user experience that it is an area Apple will never relinquish control of. This is not a big deal for me, especially more so if it is at the expense of system responsiveness. But the sheer number of ugly themes created by users for WinterBoard, let alone those for other mobile platforms that freely allow theming, should be proof enough that it matters to some. On the iPhone, though, changing the wallpaper is still about as far as it goes…or Snow Leopard’s rumored ‘Marble’ interface at some point in 3.x. But full theming? Don’t hold your breath.

Cut, Copy and Paste

This is a big one. I still do not understand how some users can claim that the lack of cut, copy and paste is not a big deal to them. As someone who likes to write while commuting, the anemic ways in which iPhone OS 2.x lets me move bits of text around drove me to near insanity. Move a paragraph? Sorry, can’t do that. OK, how about something really simple, such as copying the name of a location from one Calendar event to another? Nope, no dice.

As I had stated in a previous post, cut, copy and paste in iPhone OS 3.0 addresses one of the biggest reasons I jailbroke my iPhone (and later, my iPod touch). Despite the best intentions behind jailbreak solutions such as hClipboard and Clippy, cut, copy and paste is really a low-level problem that only Apple can address satisfactorily, which it has in iPhone OS 3.0.

Conclusion

Going forward, I would love to see even more of what can be achieved only by jailbreaking in future versions of iPhone OS, namely enhancements to the Camera app and the Lockscreen. Even if there are no unannounced features hidden up Apple’s sleeve, and what we are seeing in the beta builds now is all there is, 3.x is clearly shaping up to be the first version of iPhone OS feature-rich enough that many users may no longer have a reason to continue jailbreaking their devices.

Will I jailbreak 3.0? I’m still on the fence. But, in using iPhone OS 3.0, the thought of sticking with a stock iPhone crossed my mind for the very first time, a thought that was simply unfathomable in the days of 2.x.

Cut, copy and paste has finally come to iPhone OS and I could not be happier. The lack of copy-and-paste in iPhone OS was one of the biggest reasons why I jailbroke my iPhone. If you need copy-and-paste today, but do not have access to the beta builds of iPhone OS 3.0, there are a handful of jailbreak solutions out there.

Did it really have to take two years? Security issues arising from sharing data between apps aside, my money is on the guess that Apple had agonized and deliberated on the most elegant way of implementing cut, copy and paste. Which should come as no surprise. Apple is known to either do it the best way there is, or to not do at all (you can thank Steve Jobs for inculcating that belief at Apple).

Now that we have seen Apple’s implementation of cut, copy and paste, it is all the more interesting to see the many vastly different methods independent developers had come up with to get copy-and-paste working. How well do these solutions work? In testing all of them, I have narrowed down four methods they use to copy-and-paste text. Let’s weigh the pros and cons of each.

The Relay Method

CopierciN, one of the first solutions to come to market, is a standalone app billed as a basic text editor with some copy-and-paste functionality. Essentially what CopierciN does is relay text selections by importing and exporting them between certain apps. Once a text selection has been made, you choose from a limited list of destination apps to which CopierciN can launch and paste it.

Pastebud and Pastie take a completely different route. Rather than being apps in the OS, Pastebud and Pastie are web services that relay text selections between Mail and Safari. The upside of these two solutions is that you don’t need to jailbreak your phone to use them; all you need are a couple of bookmarklets in Safari. The downside is that it is not system-wide copy-and-paste, and the notion of sending chunks of text this way puts me off.

The Swipe-to-Select Method

In December 2008, Clippy was released. It was a breakthrough at that time, in that it took a different approach than all the other solutions out there. Instead of being a standalone app, CIippy is a system hack that hooks itself into iPhone OS as a background service.

Of all the jailbreak copy-and-paste solutions, Clippy bears the most resemblance to Apple’s implementation of cut, copy and paste in iPhone OS 3.0. Both are system-wide, and Clippy employs a swipe-to-select method similar to Apple’s.

In Clippy, you tap and hold your finger to mark the start of a selection. Then, with your finger still pressed to the touchscreen, you drag your finger to highlight a selection. Upon lifting your finger, Clippy’s HUD pops up for you to cut or copy the selection.

This is where Clippy’s similarity to 3.0’s cut, copy and paste ends. A highlighted selection in Clippy does not have handles you can grab to finesse where it starts and ends. Getting a selection right the first time requires much precision. You have to get it right the first time or you’ll have to do it all over again. Also, when you select a passage that extends beyond the page view, you have to hold your finger at the edge of the view to get the page to scroll, if it scrolls at all. Even when it does scroll, oftentimes the selection will break. Text editor apps such as TextGuru and MagicPad also employ this method with equally mixed results.

On the upside, Clippy does have a very nice feature that is missing in iPhone OS 3.0. Called “Stack,” it stores multiple snippets of selections. In iPhone OS 3.0, you can only copy text one selection at a time.

The Mark-In/Mark-Out Method

Finally, in 2009, hClipboard was unleashed upon the jailbreaking world. hClipboard is a system mod in the form of a keyboard extension, so copy-and-paste is available only when the virtual keyboard is invoked.

In hClipboard, you highlight a selection by marking its in and out points. You mark a start point, tap a button in hClipboard, flick the page to quickly scroll to an end point, and tap the button again. Compared to swiping and dragging, this is simply the fastest and most accurate way to select a passage of text.

If you aren’t looking to only select a specific passage, there is a Copy All button. Another convenient feature, obviously well-thought out by the developer, are the ‘Move to beginning’ and ‘Move to end’ buttons that jump the cursor to the start and end, respectively, of a document.

hClipboard stores up to 10 clippings at a time. I’ve tested this with 500-word clippings and it works fine, so there doesn’t seem to exist a limit to how many words per clipping you can store in hClipboard.

A companion feature is Templates. Unlike normal clippings in the Clipboard, where older clippings will be deleted upon the 10-clipping limit to make way for newer ones, clippings in Templates are permanently stored. I like to keep HTML tags that I often use in drafting blog entries and frequently-used addresses for quick entry into Calendar.

The Best of Both Worlds

In the four months I’ve been testing all of these solutions, hClipboard stands out as the fastest and the most effortless way to copy and paste text in iPhone OS, while Clippy extends more seamless copying and pasting into areas of the OS such as Safari and Mail¹.

I’m glad that Apple’s implementation of cut, copy and paste is a combination of both swipe-to-select and mark-in/mark-out methods, one that offers the best of both worlds.

Now that Apple has finally caught up and has given us cut, copy and paste, all of these solutions may become largely irrelevant once 3.0 is released in the summer. But for now, Clippy and hClipboard are as good as it gets for copy-and-paste goodness in iPhone OS 2.x.

¹ hClipboard can copy text on a web page through two Javascript bookmarklets that convert non-editable text into editable text fields.

About three weeks ago, the keyboard and trackpad on my MacBook Pro (from mid-2007) began failing randomly for no apparent reason. I would turn it on only to find its keyboard and trackpad unresponsive to any input. Rebooting sometimes helped, but many times it did not. Without a reproducible pattern I could determine, it was impossible to know if the problem was caused by failing hardware, a software conflict, or both.

Imagine if this happened to you while you were out at a cafe or are about to give a presentation, and you’ll understand why I was near the brink of insanity. After some investigation,¹ it became clear there was a fundamental design flaw present in the MacBook Pro that was causing the problem. If your MacBook Pro does not have the new unibody design, this design flaw could give you grief sooner or later.

The Symptoms

Your MacBook Pro may exhibit any or all of the following symptoms:

• Upon waking from sleep, the keyboard and trackpad become unresponsive; log entries in OS X’s Console say “IOUSBFamily failed to enumerate a device.”
• Booting up the MacBook Pro and into the login screen with neither keyboard nor trackpad input. The only way to do anything further is to force shutdown of the system by pressing and holding the power button.
• The keyboard is sometimes present at boot, and sometimes isn’t. You can verify this by hitting the Caps Lock key and seeing if its corresponding light lights up or not while you are at the white boot-up screen with the gray Apple logo.
• Plugging in an external keyboard and mouse works, thereby eliminating the possibility that software is at fault.
• While OS X is running, the keyboard and trackpad may become intermittently unresponsive.

The Problem

Prior to going the way of the unibody enclosure, the MacBook Pro sported a design largely carried over from the PowerBook G4. A design trait common to all such MacBook Pro models is that of the battery bay. In this design, the battery bay of the MacBook Pro is located beneath the trackpad, in roughly the middle of the wrist-rest area in front of its keyboard. MacBook Pro models that share this design are:

• 15-inch Early 2006, Intel Core Duo (MA463LL/A, MA464LL/A, MA600LL, or MA601LL)
• 17-inch Early 2006, Intel Core Duo (MA0922LL/A)
• 15-inch Late 2006, Intel Core 2 Duo (MA609LL, or MA610LL)
• 17-inch Late 2006, Intel Core 2 Duo (MA611LL/A)
• 15-inch Mid 2007, Intel Core 2 Duo (MA895LL, MA896LL, MA895LL/A, or MA896LL/A)
• 17-inch Mid 2007, Intel Core 2 Duo (MA897LL/A)
• 15-inch Early 2008, Intel Core 2 Duo (MB133LL/A, or MB134LL/A)
• 17-inch Early 2008, Intel Core 2 Duo (MB166LL/A)

Removing the battery

Remove the battery and you will see the partially exposed circuitry of the trackpad. Notably, you will see a orange ribbon cable that ends in two connections to the trackpad.

Take a closer look at this ribbon cable and you will see that it does not lie completely flat against the floor of the battery bay.

I have my MacBook Pro in a sling bag whenever I’m on the move, placed in such a way that the battery side of the notebook is always against my hip. I suspect that the jostling of the MacBook Pro, specifically its battery, against my body over time has weakened the connection of the ribbon cable to the trackpad.

Replicating the Problem

If your MacBook Pro is exhibiting the symptoms I’ve described above, here’s how to replicate the problem.

Before you proceed, install HardwareGrowler. HardwareGrowler is a subset of Growl that notifies you whenever hardware is disconnected and connected from your Mac. This is extremely useful, as it lets you see, in real time, the keyboard and trackpad disconnect and connect while you troubleshoot.

Once you have HardwareGrowler installed, perform the following steps:

1. Your MacBook Pro should be running. If the keyboard and trackpad are still dead, use an external keyboard and mouse to login. Once you’re in OS X, unplug the external keyboard and mouse.
2. Make sure your MacBook Pro is plugged into AC power.
3. Flip your MacBook Pro over and remove its battery.
4. Then arrange your MacBook Pro so that its screen is flat on a surface and its lower assembly is vertical, 90 degrees to the surface.
5. Arrange yourself so that you can see both the battery bay and the screen of your MacBook Pro.
6. With one finger, press the ribbon cable in the spot just before where it bulges. You may need a couple of tries before you find the exact spot.
7. If you’re pressing the right spot, you should see two HardwareGrowler notifications appear on-screen. The first notification will say ‘USB Disconnection: Apple Internal Keyboard/Trackpad,’ while the second will say ‘USB Connection: Apple Internal Keyboard/Trackpad’.
8. Remove your finger from the ribbon cable. At this point, the keyboard and trackpad may or not remain working.

If this troubleshooting procedure yields the results in Steps #7 and #8, congratulations — you can now be certain that it is a hardware problem, that you are not going insane, and that you have a high-tech problem to which there is, fortunately, a low-tech solution.

The Solution

If the warranty on your MacBook Pro is no longer valid, like mine, don’t worry. Simply take a small piece of paper, such as a Post-It, and fold it in half. Stick it over the spot on the ribbon cable. Then reinstall the removable battery. The battery should exert enough pressure on the piece of paper to keep the ribbon cable working.

If your MacBook Pro is still under warranty, take it to an Apple service center. While Apple has not officially acknowledged that this is a widespread problem, it’s afflicted the machines of many owners, so surely it’s not unknown to them. Demonstrate the steps described above to whomever is helping you as letting him or her see the problem as it happens eliminates the guesswork and may help expedite the time needed for repairs.

The long-term solution is, of course, to have the ribbon cable replaced, because the last thing you want is to have the keyboard and trackpad fail on you when you need to use your MacBook Pro most. In the meantime, you have a temporary fix should you need one.

¹ _{I wish to credit Steve Eugene of Dallas for discovering the cause of the problem as detailed in his post on Apple’s discussion forum.}

So you’ve just jailbroken your iPhone. Congratulations! Your iPhone life is about to improve in so many ways. Be sure to follow our Jailbreak series to get the most out of jailbreaking your iPhone. Going forward, here are some tips to bear in mind.

1. Never upgrade firmware directly via iTunes

In the process of jailbreaking the iPhone OS, a partition inside the iPhone OS is created specially to store the files and data necessary for jailbreaking to work. This partition is typically 500MB. If you look at the storage bar of your device in its iTunes page, you’ll see this 500MB partition marked as “Others”, since, naturally, iTunes does not recognize this third-party addition.

When a user attempts to upgrade the iPhone firmware by clicking on the ‘Upgrade’ button in iTunes, it will not count the 500MB into the storage space available to install new firmware. The result is that these 500MBs are effectively “lost.” For example, if you directly upgrade your jailbroken iPhone — running, say, 2.2 — to 2.2.1, you’ll find that you now have 1GB of used space in “Others”.

If you wish to upgrade the firmware of your iPhone, always restore to the default firmware first. After you’ve done so, you can safely click that ‘Upgrade’ button in iTunes.

2. You can be a law-abiding customer

Jailbreaking and unlocking are, to the uninitiated, one and the same thing. Do know, they’re not. Jailbreaking frees your iPhone to run applications and code that are not signed by Apple, while unlocking frees the device from the carrier that it is bound to as part of the service contract you’ve signed with your carrier of choice.

So, the fact is, yes, you have to jailbreak before you can unlock your iPhone, but unlocking is not a necessary step in jailbreaking. While tools such as QuickPwn and Pwnage include unlocking as part of their procedure, it is equally easy to skip that step. You are certainly not obligated to unlock if you choose to not violate the terms of service set by your carrier.

3. There is more than meets the eye in Cydia

Cydia, the jailbreak equivalent of Apple’s App Store, is, on the whole, well-designed and easy to navigate. But, being a community, pro bono effort, it is ad-supported. If you are new to jailbreaking, here is how you separate the wheat from the chaff.

This is what you’d immediately see when you click on an item listed in Cydia. Of most interest to you is perhaps the ‘More Information’ link. But before you tap on it, wait a couple of seconds (or more, if your data connection is slow).

What just happened? Ads have loaded and the ‘More Information’ link has been pushed down, out of sight. If you’d tapped before the ads could load, you’d have most likely tapped on the ad instead of the link you intended to visit. So, when browsing in Cydia, patience will go a long way in making your shopping experience a more pleasant one.

While we’re still on the subject, the only page links in Cydia that matter to the typical user are listed below.

More Information — Tapping on this takes you to a sub page where you can usually find a detailed write-up of what you are about to install. But sometimes, a More Information link can take you to an external site. This varies from developer to developer.

Changelog — Some developers offer a list of the changes the latest version of his or her application contains. Reading the changelog gives you a better idea of what to expect, and whether the app is worth upgrading.

Screenshots — Most of the hacks available in Cydia are visual ones. This is especially true of custom themes. Most developers will include screenshots — “Screenies” as they are commonly called in the jailbreak community — accessible thru the ‘Screenshots’ link.

But remember that every page in Cydia contains ads. So wait a while and let those screenshots load.

4. Secure your iPhone

Being an operating system with UNIX components, iPhone OS has a root account. The default root password has already been made widely-known on the Internet, so any one with some knowledge in SSH can easily access the contents of your iPhone wirelessly. Be sure to change the password after you jailbreak your phone.

1. Fire up Cydia on your iPhone.
2. Browse or search for an application called MobileTerminal and install that.
3. Open MobileTerminal and type ‘passwd’ (without the quotes).
4. You will be prompted for the old password; for iPhone OS 2.2.x, the password is ‘alpine’.
5. Hit the Return key. You’ll be asked to input a new password.

As an extra security measure, you can install utilities such as BossPrefs or SBSettings and turn off SSH.

5. If your device is getting sluggish, uninstall WinterBoard

“Jailbreaking slows down your iPhone.”

“Your device will become unstable.”

I often hear these two comments about jailbreaking. To be fair, there is some truth in them. If you think the performance of your iPhone is beginning to feel really sluggish, chances are you have installed too many WinterBoard themes and hacks.

WinterBoard is a well-known feature of the jailbroken iPhone. The most visible part of WinterBoard that you see is as an application that lets you apply themes to the user interface of iPhone OS.

The invisible part of WinterBoard is a platform for system hacks to run, injecting code into iPhone OS while it is running on your device. In an over-simplification, it does this via a system process called the Mobile Substrate. Mobile Substrate runs beneath SpringBoard, Apple’s name for the home screen of your iPhone. You can think of SpringBoard to the iPhone what the Desktop is to Mac OS. Some system hacks are dependent on WinterBoard, ‘piggy-backing’ on it and running in the background.

An iPhone freshly rebooted typically has about 30—50MB of free memory out of the total 128MB available to iPhone OS. Running in the background, WinterBoard typically takes up 11MB or so. Add a theme and some hacks, and it adds up quickly. Remove WinterBoard, and you will see a dramatic improvement in the responsiveness of your iPhone. But you’d lose what many users consider as the most compelling reason to jailbreak the iPhone, so it’s really your call.

If you really must keep WinterBoard, go easy on the number of themes and WinterBoard-dependent hacks you install. Also, uninstall the themes and hacks that aren’t in use; you can certainly claim some speed and memory back this way.

There are many aspects of the iPhone that I wish were more developed. Better usability. Time-saver shortcuts. Visual enhancements. Missing functionality. We each have our own list of what is missing, what we would love to have, and what we would love to see in a future iPhone OS update. While I am confident Apple will meet expectations eventually, I, along with thousands of other like-minded individuals, am not going to sit around and wait.

So I have a confession to make: I jailbroke my iPhone 3G the day I got my hands on it, and I’m liking it so much I’m never going back.

The thing is this, I form a bond with every gadget I own. For a device such as a cell phone, something you have on you almost 24/7, it seems only natural that you will grow into both the way it works and its various quirks. For the latter, you either learn to live with it or find a workaround for it. The casual user will most likely live with what is offered out of the box, while the power user and the adventurous will pursue new and novel ways to suit their devices to their ever-increasing needs.

On the Mac, it is very easy to go out and look for the right application that will do exactly what the OS does not. On the iPhone, where the platform is fragile and hence rightfully closed, the hard part is waiting for Apple to figure things out. In the meantime, there are the hundreds of clever workarounds that independent developers — iPhone owners and enthusiasts themselves — have devised. The catch is that you will have to jailbreak, which Apple certainly does not endorse.

I was inspired to write about jailbreaking after having several casual conversations I had with other iPhone owners. I was surprised at the amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt some of them had regarding jailbreaking. Some didn’t know what it was, while others had heard of it, but had dismissed it due to what they perceived as black art, complex and mysterious. But really, just as it has always been, is, and will be on any other computing platform, with enhancements and new functionality come certain caveats. Just do your homework, follow the instructions and you’ll be fine.

This post is an introduction to a regular iPhone jailbreaking column I will be penning, one that will include everything from reviews of applications to tips and techniques. Regardless of whether you are an iPhone owner who has yet — but is looking to — jailbreak your iPhone, or an enthusiast who’s already hacked your iPhone, I hope there will be something for everyone. And if there is anything you would like to see in a future post, do drop me a line.

Coming up next: Five Things You Need to Know About Jailbreaking. Stay tuned!

One of the perplexing limitations about MobileMe is its inability to sync birthdays in iCal to the iPhone and iPod touch. As you may already know, iCal can take birthdays from Address Book and add them into a special “Birthdays” calendar, which is really a subscription calendar.

But while the latest updates to MobileMe now allow for the syncing of subscription calendars from your Mac to MobileMe, their events are not pushed to iPhone and iPod touch. Apple’s explanation is this:

When syncing subscribed calendars to MobileMe, the calendar information and settings for the calendar is synced, but all of the downloaded events are not. This is done to help streamline the syncing process with MobileMe, as it prevents syncing redundant information to other computers with an Internet connection.

Duh.

To get around this limitation, you can disable over-the-air syncing, and sync Calendar events via iTunes instead. But that defeats the purpose of paying for MobileMe’s push abilities. The other way is to export the Birthdays calendar that iCal has created and re-import it back into iCal as local calendar events. These birthdays and anniversary events will then be synced with MobileMe and, subsequently, pushed to the iPhone Calendar app. The problem is, you will have to do that every time you add a birthday to a contact in the Address Book.

Well, I’m happy to tell you that there is finally a solution that requires little to no effort on your part.

Dates to iCal 2 is a small application for OS X Leopard that reads birthdays and anniversaries from Address Book and writes them as regular calendar events into iCal. It does this automatically in the background; set it once and forget about it.

In setting up Dates to iCal 2, you can customize in various ways how it should create events.

You can choose to add either birthdays or anniversaries, or both, and specify only a certain group of contacts.

You can customize the way event titles will be written, such as adding the age of a contact to his or her birthday event. To me, this feature alone is worth the price of the application.

And one very powerful aspect of Dates to iCal 2 is the many ways it can remind you of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries. You can set up to five alarms for an event, useful if you want, say, to be reminded each of the five days leading up to a birthday or anniversary. It can even send a reminder email to any of the email addresses in the Me card in your Mac.

Dates to iCal 2 costs £3 (approximately USD $4.50) for a single license. Until Apple improves MobileMe, I highly recommend this well-designed and useful gem.

You own an iPhone. You probably own a Mac as well. We all know that there are startup keyboard shortcuts for every troubleshooting procedure a user can follow when his or her Mac misbehaves. Some are easier to remember than others. Some are truly arcane. If you remember only some but not others, developer Eric Barbosa has an iPhone app that you might want to keep on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Startup Shortcuts is an app that lists just about every procedure for troubleshooting a Mac and its accompanying keyboard shortcuts. The main screen of Startup Shortcuts shows a list of troubleshooting scenarios.

Tap on any one of them and you will be brought to a second screen that shows both the keystrokes for that procedure and a short description of the symptoms typically associated with that particular problem.

Startup Shortcuts probably has nothing much to offer to the power user, as the troubleshooting scenarios it lists are what should by now be common knowledge to such users. But I confess that, even as a power user, I found myself hit by a mental blackout on the morning my MacBook Pro suddenly died, and I had to Google for the keystrokes for resetting the SMC (speaking of which, resetting the SMC is a procedure absent in this version of Startup Shortcuts).

If you are a recent switcher or a novice Mac user, give Startup Shortcuts a place in your iPhone or iPod touch. It just might come in handy for the power user as well.

Startup Shortcuts (direct App Store link, developer’s product page) costs 99 cents. For a dollar, this is an app worth keeping.

Unlike most hard protective cases that typically consist of separate front and back parts, the Power Support Air Jacket for iPhone 3G is a single plastic case for only the back of an iPhone 3G.

Available in either black or clear, the black version is notable for its rubberized finish. Two screen protection films — “Crystal” (glossy) and “Anti Glare” (matte) — are provided with the Air Jacket.

With a thickness of only 0.7 mm, the Air Jacket appeals to iPhone 3G owners who seek some protection for their phones without the bulk. To that end, the Air Jacket is a sexy piece of accessory designed to show off the iPhone. Once attached, the Air Jacket is almost indiscernible unless one looks hard enough, and its rubberized finish adds a lot more grip to the otherwise slippery plastic back of the iPhone.

But, in the one week I had the Air Jacket on my iPhone, I quickly discovered a couple of major design flaws about the product.

Five days in, I detached it from my iPhone and saw, to my displeasure, that the Air Jacket had left numerous scratches along the sides of the chrome bezel. The scratches were located at the left and right sides of the chrome bezel where one’s fingers would be while holding the phone. It would seem that handling the phone has shifted the Air Jacket enough for its inner edges to scratch the bezel. And they were not light nicks; the scratches were deep and numerous enough that only a thorough buffing with Brasso could remove.

Also, the rubberized finish proved to be quite susceptible to be scratched off, and is simply a coating over what is really a clear Air Jacket. After only five days, the rubberized finish had chipped off at all four corners of the Air Jacket.

For a $34.95 product, the build quality of the Air Jacket is simply disappointing, which is unusual considering how Power Support can, and do, produce innovative and excellent products; its Anti Glare Film, with its silky smooth texture, is the best screen protector I have ever used on any device. Having used PDAs for a decade, and having tried just about every brand of screen protectors, this is high praise from me.

I really wanted to like the Air Jacket. But it is absurd that an accessory designed to protect your device ends up marring it cosmetically after merely a week of use. Power Support should have lined the inner surface of the Air Jacket with some kind of soft material. The shortcomings of this product reflects poor product design and, more glaringly, inadequate product testing. Surely this would have been caught during the testing cycle (if one was even done). Power Support should consider going back to the drawing board; the idea behind this product is great, but is marred in execution.

Until it does so, steer clear of the Air Jacket and get just the Crystal Film or Anti Glare Film Set instead, available separately for $14.95.

Each set contains two pieces, so you can share a set with a loved one or friend. If you constantly find yourself wiping fingerprints off the screen of your iPhone, I strongly recommend the Anti Glare Film; its matte finish masks smears and fingerprints better than its glossy counterpart.

For goodness’s sake, will the people at Apple responsible for iLife go talk to the Pro Apps folks so that iDVD and Final Cut Pro actually works together? You’d think that Apple would ensure both their video applications work seamlessly together, especially when such interoperability is touted in the Help section of both applications. Well, you’d be surprised at how broken it is.

I learnt that the hard way earlier this week, when I had to master a DVD for a client. My intention was to export five segments from the timeline, each of which would have chapter markers, while the segment would itself become a ‘Play All’ clip. 

Having finished the edit in Final Cut Pro, I placed the necessary chapter markers in the timeline and exported each segment of the timeline as DV PAL 16:9 Anamorphic QuickTime clips. I chose this format since it was what the acquired footage was shot in. 

Once I’d imported the clips into iDVD, two problems surfaced: the 16:9 clips remained anamorphically squashed in the 4:3 ratio, and iDVD could not see the chapter markers in any of the clips. After some Googling, it turned out that the problems I was facing are known issues, according to two Apple support articles. 

In the first, Article TS2179, titled “iDVD: DV widescreen 16:9 workflow from Final Cut Pro”, warned that “if you export an anamorphic 16:9 DV sequence from Final Cut Pro with the intention of burning a DVD-Video of that sequence in iDVD…. Final Cut Pro does not include the widescreen aspect ratio information that iDVD looks for.” 

Great. Prior to discovering the support article, I had figured iDVD would be smart enough to unsqueeze 16:9 clips back into their original anamorphic aspect ratio since QuickTime Player did exactly that. 

The second problem is acknowledged in Article TS1233, titled “Final Cut Studio: “All Markers” option does not include DVD Chapter Markers”. The symptoms described in it goes: “When you export a QuickTime movie from Final Cut Pro, choosing the “All Markers” option does not include chapter markers that will function in DVD Stidio Pro or iDVD.” 

Right. 

Look at the screenshot of Final Cut Pro’s export dialog box above. You can see various types of markers listed. Any user would naturally assume that choosing “All Markers” would include all the types of markers. Why this is not the case for DV clips is a mystery only the FCP or iDVD folks at Apple would know, since the support article offers no explaination. 

If your editing workflow comprises exporting 16:9 clips from Final Cut Pro for DVD mastering in iDVD, you’ll have to avoid using the DV Widescreen format until this is fixed in a future release of iDVD or Final Cut Pro. In the meanwhile, if your workflow involves DV Widescreen, I recommend that you export your clips as ProRes 4:2:2.

In mid 2008, amid growing evidence, NVIDIA acknowledged that a significant number of its previous-generation GPUs (graphics processing unit) and MCPs (media and communications processors) for notebooks are failing at higher-than-normal rates. For readers who are not aware of this story, TheAppleBlog covered this piece of news back in October.

Three weeks back, I was personally afflicted by this problem. One fine morning, after arriving at the office of a client, I took my mid-2007 MacBook Pro out of my bag and proceeded to fire it up. The MBP never got past the startup chime; there was only a blank, black screen. I took the usual troubleshooting steps: resetting the PRAM and the SMC, booting from the OS X installation disc and from an external hard drive, and finally, plugging in an external display…all to no avail. It was then that my suspicions turned to the NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT graphics card in the MBP, even though I had not ruled out a misbehaving hard drive.

Without a working display, there was no way to salvage my data unless I took apart the MBP and extricated the internal hard drive. Upon trying to boot the MBP’s system disk on an iMac, and diagnosing with DiskWarrior, it became clear that I was facing not one but two problems.

The system disk of the MBP was not booting up right. In addition to a dead graphics card, I was also facing an impending hard disk failure. Fortunately I was able to make a perfect clone with CarbonCopyCloner.

The next day, I took the MBP in to an Apple reseller for repairs. I told them that the most probable diagnosis was a failed graphics card, but, as a regular procedure, I had to pay a diagnostic fee of $58.

As I waited to hear from Apple, I braced myself for the possible cost of repair should the problem have turned out to not be the graphics card. No, I did not purchase AppleCare for this notebook, a decision I have come to regret after the Super Drive on the MBP began misbehaving and refusing to burn. ^[1]

A week later, I received a call from the reseller. Apple has confirmed that the NVIDIA graphics card has died, that they would be replacing the entire logic board, and that Apple will, true to its advisory article on this matter, honor the cost of repair on my out-of-warranty MacBook Pro. A couple of days later, I had my MBP back in my hands, back from the dead. I was even refunded the diagnostic fee I had paid.

If you own a mid-2007, late-2007, or early-2008 MacBook Pro of either the 15- or 17-inch model, you should brace yourself for the possibility that the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card in your notebook may suddenly fail. While you can rest assured that you will not have to pay for repairs if it fails within two years after purchase, you should prepare a fallback plan if your only machine does go down. When it does, my advice is to bring along a print-out of Apple’s support article when you send your notebook in for repairs, as the reseller I went to was, incredulously, not aware of the advisory.

And the final word I have in the wake of this affair? If you own one of these MacBook Pros, expect it to fail. Oh, and also: Buy AppleCare; it will pay for itself and then some, quite possibly when you least expect it.

_{1. Strangely, after updating to OS X Leopard 10.5.6, the SuperDrive on my MBP could burn again, without the dreaded “The device failed to calibrate the laser power level for this media” error dialog box showing up even once.}

Not to be confused with Apple’s Remote app for iTunes, iPhone Remote is an application for Mac OS X that puts the contents of your Mac within easy reach of your iPhone or iPod touch. With iPhone Remote, your Mac is in your iPhone.

Developed by Telekinesis, the folks behind the ubiquitous Quicksilver, iPhone Remote brings VNC-like funtionalities to the iPhone and iPod touch.

The front-end of iPhone Remote is the web browser. Simply type the IP address provided by the iPhone Remote service running on your Mac into Safari on your device and you will be greeted with a page of icons. You can bookmark this page and add it to the Home Screen.

From here, you can…

Browse folders

Open just about any document you need

Launch applications

Play movies and music

Perform basic mouse and text input

Do a Spotlight search

Run a remote desktop session

You can even remotely activate iSight on your Mac and see what it is seeing right in Safari on your iPhone or iPod touch!

And if you are proficient in scripting, you can easily add your own custom apps. Two user-written apps you might want to check out are Running Application and Uniremote.

iPhone Remote definitely has a place in my daily computing workflow. Recently, I was in a meeting, at the other end of the office, when I had to find out if I had a particular file in my MacBook Pro. I ran iPhone Remote, dug thru the folders on my Mac and confirmed I had the file without having to excuse myself from the meeting.

It would be fantastic if iPhone Remote allowed me to download files on my Mac into my device. But I highly doubt that would happen. Development on iPhone Remote seem to have ceased; the most recent build is dated July 2007. It is quite a pity, considering how iPhone Remote is an application of some pedigree. But, even so, it certainly still has much value in its current form.

Do note that iPhone Remote is considered by its developers to be more of a technological demo rather than an end product. Also, you are well advised to not leave iPhone Remote running if you are not using it, because the application has the same access privileges as your user account on your Mac.

The lack of the ability to cut, copy, and paste and to select portions of text makes text editing on the iPhone/iPod touch an exercise in patience. So, for all you writers who are masochistic enough to use your mobile device to write, this one is for you.

Consider this scenario: You start a draft in the Notes app or in the WordPress app and write a paragraph or two. Some time later, you re-read what you’d written and think, “Well, that sentence doesn’t really belong there.” What now? You’ll have to set the cursor to a new insert point and, while referring to that sentence in its existing location, retype it in its new location. Moving just one sentence? Fine. A whole paragraph? Forget it; it’ll be easier to edit the article on your Mac later.

Sounds painfully familiar?

Today I discovered not one but two solutions: TextGuru and MagicPad. Both are text editors for the iPhone and iPod touch with one very important feature.

Cut, copy and paste.

I can cut text! I can copy text! I can paste text!

(If you haven’t already guessed, the three sentences above were copied and pasted while I was drafting this article…just because I can.)

Ten minutes into trying out both apps, I could only exclaim — and I will steal Steve Jobs’s own words — that both TextGuru and MagicPad are like “giving a glass of water to somebody in hell,” for any one who has ever cursed and swore while editing text on the iPhone and iPod touch.

Cut, copy and paste in TextGuru goes like this: first, in magnified view, you move the cursor to the start of what you want to highlight. Tapping once, then immediately again and still keeping your finger down, you drag to highlight the passage. Finally, you tap on the cut, copy or paste icon on a toolbar that appears automatically.

It is less complicated than it reads, but it is also not the most fluid of gestures. More often than not, double-tapping on a cursor point while in magnified view causes the cursor to jump to another place, or worse, causes the page to scroll. And it gets more difficult when the cursor is at the edge of the screen. Perhaps this is why the folks at Apple have yet to agree on a copy-and-paste gesture that is foolproof and to their complete satisfaction.

MagicPad’s implementation of cut, copy and paste, which is called ‘Precise Selection’, works exactly like TextGuru’s. But it has one advantage: ‘Quick Selection’. You can double-tap any word and it will be highlighted. You can then immediately drag and extend the selection. With a larger target area to tap — a word instead of a miniscular cursor — it is easier to make the right text selection.

Of the two, TextGuru is the more full-featured app. Besides cut, copy and paste, TextGuru also offers landscape mode editing and a Statistics feature that shows you character, word, and paragraph count in a pop-up window.

Another unique feature is file sharing; with TextGuru File Server, a free companion application on your host Mac or Windows, you can send documents over to TextGuru via Wi-Fi for editing and/or viewing. To access documents saved in your iPhone or iPod touch, you type the IP address of your device (as provided by TextGuru) into a web browser. This way, you can even access documents in one iPhone from another. Useful as this may sound, this feature is broken at the moment. I can get files into my iPod touch but not out.

Plain text, HTML, PHP, and JS files are editable in TextGuru, while Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pages, Numbers and PDF files are viewable but not editable. Also unique to TextGuru is a Web Preview feature, convenient when you are editing web-specific files. TextGuru also saves internal documents as files in .TXT, .HTML, .PHP, .BIN, .JS, .C, .H, and .M formats.

MagicPad is more of a rich-text replacement for the Notes app in iPhone OS. While it can email an entry in either rich or plain text, it does not have the ability to export it as a file. Also, you cannot edit or view entries in landscape mode. Neither app offers an Undo feature, though TextGuru can revert a document to its last auto-saved version; it’s not exactly step undo, but it’s better than nothing.

Both TextGuru (Brancipater, US$4.99) and MagicPad (Proximi, Inc., US$3.99) are available from the iTunes App Store. If you do heavy text editing on your iPhone or iPod touch, I’d recommend TextGuru. That it has cut, copy and paste and landscape mode for editing alone makes it an essential app for any writer.

Apple had it so close…

That was the first thought I had when Apple unveiled the new aluminum MacBook and MacBook Pro on October 14.

Many Mac owners out there are still longing for a successor to the PowerBook G4 12″. I am one of them. Someone needs the features and performance of Apple’s Pro notebooks in a 12″ or 13″ form factor that, to me, is just right. In the days leading up to the unveiling, I had hoped that the new MacBook, already rumored to sport blazing fast graphics performance, would essentially be a MacBook Pro. As it turns out, the new aluminum MacBook is really The 13″ MacBook Pro That Could Have Been.

Size vs. Features

As part of my daily work, I often have to use devices ranging from HDV camcorders to RAID arrays that connect by FireWire 400, 800 or eSATA (via ExpressCard). For this, my Mid 2007 MacBook Pro 15″ is the perfect workhorse. But having lugged the five-pound MacBook Pro around almost daily for over a year, I am yearning so badly for something lighter to relieve these aching shoulders of mine.

My first notebook, a Sony VAIO ultraportable, had everything I could ask for in a small, lightweight package and was a pleasure to use. This ultraportable has had me convinced that the size of a notebook does not have to be inversely proportionate to the richness of its features.

So what are my options? The new aluminum MacBook comes closest to being the candidate of choice. The leap in graphics performance alone sets it as a worthy MacBook Pro replacement, and is why it is a contender now when I never took a second look at its predecessor before. But the lack of either FireWire or ExpressCard, both exclusive to the MacBook Pro, is the one deal-breaker.

The FireWire Fiasco

Since the announcement, it is almost impossible to talk about the new aluminum models without mentioning FireWire. A lively debate regarding Apple’s decision to drop FireWire from the MacBook has risen among users; proponents favoring the move cite the fact that FireWire has a smaller marketshare than USB, while opponents see the omission as a blatant maneuver by Apple to protect its Pro product line.

So who’s right and who’s wrong? The answer is a sum of many parts.

The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics chipset in the new portable Macs has been getting all the attention. But little has been said of another internal change: the I/O controller chipset. In the previous-generation MacBook, it is the Intel “Santa Rosa” chipset which governs SATA, USB, Audio, Wi-Fi, and networking. This has been replaced with an NVIDIA integrated controller. What is interesting is that, in the course of designing the GeForce 9400M and its accompanying integrated controller, NVDIA left FireWire out of the list of I/O interfaces supported by its integrated controller.

The Trend Is Bucking

Digging deeper, Apple’s only response so far (in the form of an email ostensibly from Steve Jobs) is that consumer camcorders released in the past two years use only USB 2.0 for connectivity. Specifically, such camcorders record footage into AVCHD files instead of onto tapes. FireWire, for which its high sustained transfer speed is crucial to capturing footage from tape in real-time, is now irrelevant; getting the footage in your solid-state or HDD camcorder into your Mac is now a simple file transfer operation.

Personally, I am of the opinion that the increasing irrelevance of FireWire in those consumer products is conveniently a coup for Apple to leverage FireWire as a differentiator between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. Marketing has won this round.

The good news? There is a FireWire specification called FireWire S800T (IEEE 1394c), which provides the speed of FireWire 800 over a Cat 5 cable. Yes, that’s Gigabit Ethernet. The standard was proposed a year ago; to date, no products have shown for its adoption. I suspect something is brewing at Apple.

The Search Continues

Going back to my search for the imaginary successor to the PowerBook 12″, I do believe a 13″ MacBook Pro would be a huge hit with consumers and professionals alike. Now that both classes share the same unibody form factor, I would think that introducing a 13″ MacBook Pro is more of whether Apple wants to rather than if Apple can. Naturally, if that does happen, Apple would want to protect the sales of the MacBook. Even if it prices this 13″ MacBook Pro close or equal to that of the 15″, I am confident it would still fly off the shelves.

Apple nailed the psyche of Mac users when it stated, in its recent Q4 2008 financial results conference call, that Mac owners are more likely to “postpone purchases… to delay than switch”. And it is true: I love OS X and I will never go back to Windows. I am a professional user whose needs are beyond what the MacBook can give me, but I could really do with a smaller and lighter notebook. For now, I’ll just have to hang on to my Mid 2007 MacBook Pro 15″ for as long as my suffering shoulders can bear.

Am I the only one who gets more misses than hits with the on-screen keyboard of the iPhone and iPod touch? Typing accuracy is OK when my iPod touch is resting on a flat surface, but it is another story altogether when I’m walking or while I’m on a bumpy car ride. So I thought, “Why not try a stylus?”

The screen of the iPhone and iPod touch is capacitive, which means I cannot recycle any of the styli I have in my graveyard of PDAs.

I took a trip down to my local store today, and discovered two styli made for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Ray-Out Touch Pen

The Ray-Out Touch Pen (Ray-Out Japan, approximately US$14) is about the length of the iPod touch. It has a conductive tip made of rubber that is angled (not such a great idea; more on that later). The tip of the Touch Pen is the width of a key on the on-screen keyboard. The other end of the Touch Pen conveniently sports a pen clip.

I’ve been using the Touch Pen for a couple of days. My typing accuracy has improved a lot, since I can now see more of what my fingers would normally block. Using the stylus also meant a smudge-free screen. But this product is not without its shortcomings.

First, more pressure is required to tap the screen with the Touch Pen than when doing the same with a finger. I literally have to tap the screen such that each tapping action is audible, versus the complete silence of touch-typing with fingers.

Second, because the tip of the Touch Pen is chamfered at an angle (approximately 60 degrees), I need to hold it a certain way so that the screen registers every tap. Scrolling becomes more challenging. The traction caused by the rubber material of the tip is palpable, and impedes the smoothness of the gesture. This angled tip takes some time to get used to, especially when manipulating the cursor around in magnified view. I recommend you twist the tip while pressing it to the screen to move the cursor in any direction. I’d much rather the tip be rounded, and that its material was felt instead of rubber.

Pogo Stylus

The Pogo Stylus (Ten One Design, US$19.95) improves on the shortcomings of the Ray-Out Touch Pen. Made of aluminum, The Pogo Stylus features a rounded tip that is made of a felt-like material.

Thanks to this material, gestures made with the Pogo feel much smoother. I didn’t feel the traction that I did with the Ray-Out Touch Pen. Available in four colors, the Pogo Stylus also comes with a clip that snaps onto the back of an iPhone or iPod touch, onto which the Pogo Stylus clips alongside the device. The clip fits only on an uncased iPhone or iPod touch, and those encased in select silicone skins, so I can’t say it is all that useful for most.

If you type a lot with your iPhone or iPod touch, and you simply cannot improve typing accuracy, consider using a stylus. For that, I’d recommend the Pogo Stylus over the Ray-Out Touch Pen.