WordPress’s back-end site works great with the iPad. The only time I had a problem was typing in the Visual editor. When I tried to tap the text edit area, Safari would try and highlight a block of text which didn’t yet exist, and not allow me to edit there at all, not even place the cursor where it belonged. I tried the Opera browser and had similar results. If you click on the HTML tab, Safari works perfectly. Not having the visual editor made writing a bit of a hassle since using the links tool is the easiest way to add links. Typing them by hand is entirely possible, but I found that working with the < and > keys alone aren’t a problem, but when you’re constantly using <, >, =, and ” so much, typing on the virtual keyboard tends to be troublesome since you’re always looking for keys that don’t correspond to locations on a regular keyboard. Typing on the keyboard itself is a breeze, so long as you don’t have to mess with some of the non-alphabet characters.

After typing the blog post using the HTML editor, I switched back to the Visual tab, and tried to highlight text to see if I could add a URL to highlighted text. As before, trying to highlight text or set a cursor position didn’t work, Safari tried highlighting the entire paragraph. This made the whole Visual tab useless.

The only saving grace I had was using the free WordPress app for the iPad. It’s a decent editor, it grabs your posts from your WordPress blog, create new ones, edit ones that already exist, and send them to your blog. You can even insert images. However, it’s not a WYSIWYG editor which is surprising and disappointing since I would have expected a blog editor to have that feature. Alas, I’m stuck with HTML editing which is OK, but I might as well stay in the web application so long as I have an internet connection. In fact, I don’t know what would happen if I lost my internet connection while using this app. Thinking back, I probably should have tried that to see if WordPress would save the document locally. It has some photo capabilities which are rudimentary at best. This app needs a major upgrade, but it’s good if you need to edit something, don’t have Pages, and don’t want to use the Notes editor.

I’m sure some of you are wondering if I used an external Bluetooth keyboard for this. No, I did not. The point of this exercise was to try to edit a blog post on the go, when you don’t have a keyboard, or using one is cumbersome. I would like to see what the people that create MarsEdit do with the iPad, if anything. Someone needs to step up and create a powerful WordPress blog editor, and soon. The problems with Safari may not be updated in a timely manner, and although I can type HTML with my eyes closed, I’d rather not because it slows me down just a bit, especially when not using a standard keyboard.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, delomni, how-to, html, iPad, marsedit, Social Media, visual editor, WordPress, wysiwyg

Apple sold us all on the ability to read books on the iPad, and it’s a great eBook reader, and they also announced the ability to use their Pages app for word processing. I thought that maybe they had fixed the documents problem with a shared space and gave us the ability to read PDFs somehow, but unfortunately that hasn’t been fixed. Out of the box, the only way to read PDFs on the iPad is to mail it to yourself. That’s not a very practical solution since you sometimes delete mail off a central server if you’re using a main computer for it which means you’ll lose your PDF at some point. Also, some mail servers have a size limit. If you use IMAP, you’ll have to download the PDF every time you want to read it. You can’t save the PDF on your iPad which is especially troubling if you want to use different apps to access a single PDF for different reasons such as mailing it to someone, reading it, or simply extracting data from it. The only way you can access a single PDF from multiple apps is to use an app such as Dropbox to access it, but apps would need to incorporate Dropbox support to read those files. Dropbox does read PDFs but it has to read the file from its server every time you want to access it. What that means is, if you have a 31MB PDF file like I do, Dropbox goes out and grabs it which can be slow. Dropbox does not yet have a native iPad app so even if you did manage to load it using the Dropbox app, reading it on the iPad is almost impossible.

Even though Apple didn’t explicitly say it, I was under the impression that their Pages app would read PDFs. I was wrong, it only reads .doc files, and exports PDFs. When you export a PDF using Pages, it’s saved in a “File Sharing” area on the iPad for that app only, and when you sync your iPad, the file is then saved on your Mac or PC. I find this a crude way of doing things, I would think that if we had a central “Documents” space, we’d then have the ability to allow all apps to access document files, not just the apps that are working with the document directly.

The best solution I found was an app called GoodReader. It’s only $0.99 and has a fantastic system for dealing with documents. What it does is allow you to access files from multiple sources: FTP, WebDAV, MobileMe, DropBox, Google Docs, mail servers, box.net, filesanywhere, or MyDisk.se. You an also type in a direct URL for downloading. If you need a document badly enough, there isn’t some way that GoodReader can’t get it. I put a 31MB file on Dropbox, and GoodReader grabbed it fast, and put it in its document list. From there, I was able to see the PDF almost perfectly. It had some minor rendering errors, but they weren’t serious. After the file is read into GoodReader, you can compress it, or send it back out via email. I haven’t found an obvious way to put the file on a different server, such as copying from MobileMe and putting it on a DropBox file system.

Despite how much I love GoodReader, it’s still not the solution I’d like, but it’s inexpensive and works very well. I’m hoping that at some point in the near future, Apple gives us some kind of native file system with folders so that we can manage the files on our iPads a little better.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: delomni, document, dropbox, featured, how-to, iPad, iPhone, ipod touch, MobileMe, reading pdf

You can add a folder to your “Places” sidebar in Mac OS X very easily. Simply drag the folder to the sidebar and you’re done! Now you can drag files into that folder at anytime you’re using the Finder without having to open another window to drag the file into.

Note: This also works very well for network drives. You may need to log into the network every time you log into your account on your Mac, depending on whether or not you store your credentials in your keychain.

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Post tags: delomni, how-to, mac, Mac OS X, places, sidebar, starman

There were two solutions to this problem: rerun the patcher, or get her back on the internet temporarily until I can physically look at the system since screen sharing wasn’t working either.

Mac OS X and Windows both have ftp capabilities built into their operating systems. That means you don’t need a third party application to access an ftp site. What users may not know is how to get to these sites to download a browser when they need it.

For this example, we’re going to download Firefox, but I’ll add the URI for Opera at the end of the article. The path names will be different on both, though. This is more of an exercise in understanding how FTP works than getting the latest copy of Firefox.

To date, there’s no way to download Google Chrome from Google’s own site via ftp. Even though there are third party sites that allow you to do that, I won’t be posting URIs for software that doesn’t come directly from the company itself.

Mac OS X

In the Finder, on the menu bar, select the “Go” menu, and then “Connect to server…”. You will see a window asking where you want to connect to.

If you like, you can open the Terminal application, located in Applications->Utilities, and use ftp from there.

Windows

Did you know that you can open a URL from any Windows Explorer window? Simply type the URL into the text edit window and Windows will open that location for you.

Alternatively, you can open the Command Prompt application, located in the Accessories menu, and use from from there.

Once you’ve decided which way you want to connect to the ftp server, you need to know the URL of the location you’re connecting to.

For the Mac’s “Connect to Server” window, and the Windows Explorer window, type in:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

If you’re using the command line option, type in:

ftp ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

Unfortunately, Mozilla doesn’t have a “latest” folder, so you’ll have to find the folder of the latest current release. As of this writing, the latest version is 3.6, so you would navigate to that folder (for command line, type “cd 3.6″).

Inside this folder you’ll find the releases for the different operating systems. Windows users can cd to “win32″, Mac users can cd to “mac”.

Windows command line users would want to type “dir” for a directory listing, Mac users would type in “ls -l”.

Inside this folder are the localized folders for all the supported languages. You can cd to the language you prefer. For English U.S., cd to en-US.

You made it! You found the location of the installer. If you’re using the UI ftp interface on Mac or Windows, you can simply drag the installer to where you want it to be copied to. For command-line users, type “get <filename>”.

Once the installer is copied to your hard drive, you can run the installer and Firefox should launch. If you were only missing your browser binary application, and if Firefox wasn’t already your default browser, Firefox should be able to import your bookmarks from whatever was your default browser.

If you have a thumb drive or a CD burner, it may be a good idea to back up the Firefox installer onto that so if you lose your browser again, you can reinstall Firefox.

Opera:

ftp.opera.com/pub/opera

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Post tags: Apple, browser, corrupted, delomni, Firefox, ftp, how-to, install, Internet, starman, Windows

If you go to the Twitter web site and log in, click on “Settings”. There you’ll see “Connections”.

There you’ll see all the connections you’ve allowed third party sites to have to your account. If you want to delete one, simply click on “Revoke Access”.

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Post tags: connections, delomni, how-to, sites, Social Media, starman, Twitter

If you’ve used folders as long as I have, not having a hierarchical mail setup may seem daunting. For anyone that might not know what using folders means, it means physically moving an email into a subfolder which has been organized by a mail rule, such as “put all email from Aunt Martha in the folder marked ‘Fruitcake’”. This way, any time you want to find emails from Aunt Martha, that’s where they’ll be. You can do the same for incoming mails from friends, mailing lists, etc.

Labels work differently in the sense that instead of physically moving the email into a different folder, you mark it with one or more labels. Yes, you can label an email with more than one label. Typical mail rules generally force you to put the mail in only one folder since it’s being physically moved there. If you want to put one email into two folders (eg: Apple and Development), you can’t without duplicating the email. With labels, one email can be referenced by two or more labels, so you can find it in multiple different places.

When email comes into your Gmail account, it’s automatically given an “Inbox” label. I wasn’t originally aware of this since your inbox doesn’t show any labels except ones that are marked with labels other than “Inbox”; it’s not until you look at other labels, or notice the “Inbox” label on your email, that you notice the label exists. If you remove the “Inbox” labels on your emails, they will disappear from your Inbox section since they no longer have the “Inbox” label. All mail, whether they have labels or not, reside in the “All Mail” section.

If you want to automatically put labels on incoming mail so that they’re placed in a particular section, click on “Settings” and then the “Filters” link. There, you’ll see any filters that exists for your Gmail account. Click on “Create new filter” to begin creating a new filter. For this example, I wanted to put all the emails I get for new Twitter followers into one section so that they’re separated from the rest of my mail, and easier to search through. Note: these rules may change in the future if Twitter changes anything that affects the rules of the Filter, such as a different email address.

Create a label called “Twitter followers”.

In the “From” text field, I put in “@postmaster.twitter.com”

In the “Has the words” field, I put in “is now following you on Twitter!”

Now click on “Next step”.

There’s a checkbox named “Skip inbox”. This is important because as I stated above, all incoming mail is given an “Inbox” label. If you don’t check the “Skip inbox” box, you’ll see these incoming mails in your inbox along with the new label we’re going to tell the rule to give the email. I checked it so that I don’t see these emails cluttering up my inbox.

Make sure the “Apply the label” checkbox is checked, and set the label to the label we created called “Twitter followers”. If there are any emails in your inbox that match the filter you created, they’ll show up in a window below with a checkbox that says “Also apply filter to <number> conversations below”. I would suggest clicking that to clear out your inbox. Click “Update Filter” and you’re done. You should now have all your emails from Twitter announcing who’s following you in their own section, and if you told the filter to, your inbox should now be free of those emails.

Since the Filter tool only allows you to assign one label at a time, you’ll have to set up a second filter for the other label, the differences being the name of the filter you’re assigning, and the need to check the “Skip inbox” checkbox based on the original filter. Also, if you assign one or more labels to a filter type and a rule needs to be changed (such as the subject text changing), you’ll have to change all of them.

So filters aren’t as hideous as they may sound to those of you that are used to folders. Some email apps like Entourage, Outlook, and Mail on both Mac OS X and the iPhone treat these label sections as folders so that you can feel more comfortable with them.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: delomni, Gmail, how-to, labels, starman

The iPhone’s screen is 320×480 and has two tall banners on its home screen, one on the top and one on the bottom. What annoys me about slapped-together wallpapers is how they just resize images to fit the screen and don’t take the banners into account. If images are blindly resized, the result is cutting off heads or logos that look amateurish.

In these examples, the images are resized in such a way that Master Chief’s head is obscured by the top banner, as is the Ferrari logo. I’m betting these were desktop wallpapers that were resized without thought to what would be obscured.

When the iPhone was first released, one of the first things I did was put together an iPhone wallpaper Photoshop template so that people would have a guide to what their wallpapers would look like when set.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, Art, delomni, how-to, iPhone, starman