Tuesday, September 15, 2009

double-dipping again

I had a weak internet connection (Sprint Aircard in a concrete building). As a result, Microsoft Entourage got confused again and doubled all of my emails and calendar appointments. Nice.

How many times can I get dipped before I get out of the water?

Friday, September 4, 2009

iPhone conference call problem revisited

Just a quick update on this topic for anyone who may stumble on this page with the same problem.

ALL AT&T cell phones are supposed to be able to initiate 5-way conference calls. Even though AT&T and other providers commonly refer to this feature as "3-way calling" (a throw back to the 1980's when the feature was first introduced for home phones), all AT&T plans support multi-party calling with up to 5 lines. If your iPhone is not able to do this, and if your battery begins to run down too quickly, it's the SIM card. Go to the AT&T store and get a new one.

If they try to charge you for it, prove to them it's defective by having them try a new one in your phone, or by taking your SIM card and putting it into another phone. Feel free to direct them to my previous post about this, or to print it off and take it with you. It's here: http://macshine.blogspot.com/2009/08/conference-call-problem.html

Now that I got a new SIM card I am happily hosting 4-way conference calls again, and only recharging my phone at night (instead of 3-4 times a day).

snow leopard's footprint

One of the coolest things about Snow Leopard is that it's lighter on its feet than Leopard. This is quite unusual. It's unusual for an UPGRADE that performs better, has an enhanced User Interface, and has more features to be HALF the size on disk. According to Apple I think it's 15 GB for Leopard and 7 for Snow Leopard. The pickup is apparently because they've re-engineered the OS and it's components to take full advantage of Cocoa and the other OS X standard API's.

I put it to the test last night by upgrading to Snow Leopard. I made sure I was backed up, and then ran WhatSize (a cool little utility you can get pretty cheap here). Here are the results (before then after):

Before installing Snow Leopard: 186 GB used, 46 GB free

After installing Snow Leopard: 178 GB used, 53 GB free

So, all I did was put the Snow Leopard install disk in, double click the icon to start the upgrade, supply my admin password, and then sit back and wait about 50 minutes while it removed Leopard and added Snow Leopard - all automatically. I logged in and voilĂ . It's a new world. With more room.

The other thing I noticed is the Developer tools are smaller, too. Apparently they get the same lift. For example, the iphone 3.0 SDK for Leopard is 2,000 MB, while the same package for Snow Leopard is 450 MB. Nice.