>optical channelколи под наеммебелиally want to like MobileMe. The Apple revolution is supposed to be about slick, easy-to-use software that helps you spend less time troubleshooting and more time creating. MobileMe was to extend this concept to the not-so-new generation of web-based services. While it’s a nice facelift from their older .Mac service, it still has a long way to go.
Take their Gallery service. While it integrates easily with Apple’s iPhoto software, the web-based galleries are a mess. There’s too much interface and not enough… wait, what are we here for?
Pictures. Visitors to your gallery get fancy resize sliders, color pickers, and animated layouts to play with, which is great fun for the first few minutes. These fancy gadgets, however, soon get in the way of what we’re really trying to do - view pictures. When you click a thumbnail, it never just pops up. It always slides, zooms, or fades in. There’s no way to search within an album or sort pictures into a particular order.
But the most serious affront to my photographer sensibilities? The pictures don’t even display properly. Clicking a thumbnail should bring up a large version of the image. In MobileMe Gallery, it first brings up a fuzzy low-resolution version of the image at full size. A second or two later, the full-resolution version pops in. This is an odd behavior, and one I’ve never seen on any other website.
The net effect is that a visitor’s first impression of your pictures are that you’re a talentless hack that doesn’t know how to focus a camera. When you spend hours trying to get that perfect shot, you don’t want anyone’s first thought when viewing it to be, “Whoa, that’s blurry. Oh, there it goes. Yeah, that’s a pretty good shot.”
April 9, 2008 at 7:58 pm
· Filed under Apple, WiFi, iPod
Problem: Some public WiFi activation pages can’t be completed on the iPhone or iPod Touch, preventing internet access.
Solution: Register the device’s MAC address with the system by spoofing it on a computer.
Notes: I occasionally find myself with some downtime on the campus of a large college for which my company does work. The activation page for their public WiFi network doesn’t render correctly in Mobile Safari, the web browser used in the iPhone and iPod Touch. The buttons you must press to page through the process are covered up by text, making them untouchable.
The workaround is to temporarily change a computer’s MAC address, the unique serial number of the computer’s WiFi card, to match that of the iPhone or iPod Touch. Completing the activation process on the computer then registers the mobile device’s MAC address with the activation system, allowing the device itself to bypass the activation process.
The workaround below will help get any device that doesn’t have a full web browser onto a public WiFi system with problematic activation pages. This process does require a computer with WiFi. The directions are based on ChangeMAC for Macs. Technitium is an equivalent for Windows computers, though I have not tested it.
Turn off WiFi on both your laptop and mobile device.
Find your mobile device’s MAC address. On the iPhone or iPod Touch, go to Settings > General > About. The MAC address is in the “WiFi Address” field.
On your laptop, load up ChangeMAC.
On the “Airport (wireless)” tab, enter the MAC address from your mobile device into the “New MAC Address” field and click “Set New Address.”
Turn your laptop’s WiFi on, connect to the WiFi network, and complete the activation process.
Turn your laptop’s WiFi off.
Turn your mobile device’s WiFi on and connect to the WiFi network. It should now be able to access the internet without activation.
Change your laptop’s MAC address back to the original. This is shown as “Hardware MAC Address” in ChangeMAC. You must complete this step before trying to rejoin the WiFi network on the laptop; otherwise it will conflict with the mobile device’s identical MAC address.
June 7, 2007 at 8:49 pm
· Filed under Apple, Fixes
Problem: Quicktime Broadcaster gets stuck on “Prerolling” and never starts Broadcasting.
Solution:
Add “:554″ to the end of the “Host Name” field.
Notes:
This was a puzzler. I tested on multiple machines under multiple conditions and got mixed results before I found the fix.
- MacBook behind firewall - failed
- MacBook direct to router - failed
- Mac Mini G4 1.4Ghz behind firewall & DMZ’d - failed
- Mac Pro behind firewall - successful
- eMac behind firewall - successful, but too slow
- PowerBook G4 1.4 Ghz behind firewall - successful
I took the PowerBook G4 to the broadcast site (behind uncontrolled firewall) and started the broadcast successfully. I stopped the broadcast to change audio settings, and then got the “Prerolling” issue again. Tried all combinations of settings and still no luck.
Finally called Akamai (our CDN provider), and they suggested adding “:554″ to the end of our entry point IP address, so the host name looks like:
72.246.3.2:554
Worked fine. Went back and tried it on two MacBooks behind firewalls, also worked. Strange, since the default port is 554 if you check “Broadcast over TCP” (which I had), but I guess this forces past a QuickTime bug related to firewalls.
