Category: iPhone

A few rough spots in iCloud

iCloud looks great on paper, but the effects of choices you must make to enable it are not obvious, so, as a busy person with more than enough troubleshooting to do, I am shutting it off for now.

No replacement for iDisk yet.

I’m probably one of the few people that use iDisk, but I do use it. I store my Papers library on it, and a variety of assets I use at work and at home. It was a great little server, without any hassle. According to this technote, I have to save my files and get ready for it to disappear.

I never used the iWeb or MobileMe Gallery features, but it looks like all of that is disappearing also. iCloud is neither a hosting service, nor an unstructured file-server. Documents can be stored by apps, but probably not dragged there by you, as far as I can tell.

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Installing .mobileconfig files on iPad (Setting up MWireless and U-M VPN)

Secure wifi networks often require installation of a certificate on mobile devices trying to connect. Apple provides a utility to allow companies to create configuration (“.mobilconfig”) files for iPhone and iPad that install the appropriate settings and certificates for their wifi network.

These .mobileconfig files can be put on the web for download to the device through Safari, but sometimes this doesn’t work. If the web server is not configured with the correct MIME type (application/x-apple-aspen-config for .mobileconfig files), the device’s Safari browser may not allow it to be downloaded. The link may not even function at all – it is not clickable in some cases.

If this happens, you can still install the .mobilconfig file by downloading it on a laptop or desktop computer and emailing it to your i-device. When you click on the attachment, it should start the installation process. However, you may have to change the extension to “.der” before emailing it to have it recognized as a certificate.

The University of Michigan has .mobilconfig files available for connection to the MWireless network and U-M VPN, and I found that emailing them to my iPad as described above was the only way I could install them.

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Troubleshooting iPhone “No-Service” messages, part 3

I’ve written in the past about some of the solutions people have come up with to deal with the dreaded “No-Service” message on an iPhone. But yesterday I realized I’d forgotten one of the easiest to try: make sure your hand is not covering the antenna. Covering the antenna accidentally may not cause you to see “No Service” but the effect will be the same – no bars at all.

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